About

Who am I? Link to heading

I’m a soon to be displaced cog in the land of Corporate IT. I have spent most of my time over the last twenty years writing web applications. I have also spent some of that time administering systems, designing systems and handling end user support. In addition I have spent time creating integrations between disparate systems.

I have a lot of experience in IT.

Why are we here? Link to heading

None of the experience listed above is a meaningful metric in today’s environment. Tech used to be about knowing the basics and maintaining one’s connection to the basics. Because ultimately understanding how things actually worked made you a more effective worker than the others.

Nowadays that is not a valuable asset. The basic reason for this is that people who understand the basics of how things actually work don’t suck into scam-tech like Cryptocurrency and Artificial Intelligence. The industry is obsessed with pushing these kinds of things, because that is where the hype and by extension the money is.

But this isn’t just a tech problem, its turning into an everybody and everything kind of problem. You see people aren’t just interested in magic tech now, they want magic everything. Our human preoccupation and obsession with magic is effectively cancerous as it’s creating situations in which the well-oiled machinery keeping society functional is no longer being maintained and begins to break down.

That’s because once a system is purged of all the people who understand how it actually works, the countdown to the death of that system begins.

Ok, but why am I here? Link to heading

Well I am here because at this point of my career in IT, I do not feel that I can speak freely on my own blog which is indelibly tied to my professional identity. It’s gotten so bad that when I look for a job I created a “lockdown” mode feature on my site that automatically removes any content that might be considered offensive to potential employers.

Up until very recently, I worked at a place obsessed with magic. As one of the few who understood the basics of how things actually work, I became their miracle worker. As long as I produced their amusing cantrips on demand they loved me. If I tried to give them truth and caution them about any one of dozens of terrible choices they were making on a regular basis, I was more or less being ignored. Nobody there wanted to hear the downsides.

We, and by extension me, were building crappy tools there. The company was high on its own supply of bullshit. They don’t maintain their servers and existing software. They made terrible software and hardware purchasing decisions. They weren’t concerned with what the future of anything they do today looks like.

The real takeaway is that nobody there cared that I understood how things actually work. Nobody cared that Free and Open Source software solutions are the only approaches that have even the slightest hope of remaining viable over the long term. Nobody cared that sooner or later all of these cute and sometimes cheap proprietary cloud services will almost certainly get more expensive and more shitty as the economic realities of enshittification begin to exert their influence.

Thankfully I don’t work there anymore. It took over a year of searching for a new gig on and off for me to escape though. I basically ended up going back to a prior employer that I felt was basically as good as it had ever gotten for me in terms of my career. Thankfully they were willing to have me back.

Nevertheless, I’m basically still treading water and trying to exist in spite of the fact that I’m essentially an IT Fossil. All I have done is manage to delay the inevitable. However, I’m willing to cherish that as a win for now given what I’ve been through in the past year.

So whats the point of this? Link to heading

The point is to talk about these things. To muse over the future we are rushing towards and mourn the death of the future that we could’ve had. I don’t know what my next career is going to be, but I know for a fact that my time in IT is almost over.

Perhaps I’ll write. I don’t know.

The point of this blog is to give me a place to openly and publicly explore these possibilities while distancing such musings from the tattered remains of my professional reputation.