So today while brainstorming new and exciting ways to conceal the fact that I’m a dinosaur and totally underqualified to hold my current position, I decided to take a quick break and catch up on one of my favorite tech blogs, Ludicity. For starters let me just say, if you are reading this blog and you aren’t reading that one, you should absolutely be reading that one too. If you only have time to read one of them, you should read his.
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He’s so talented. If I am able to hone my ability to write and relay my thoughts to even a quarter of his effectiveness, I will be proud.
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With that out of the way while reading his latest post “Get Me Out Of Data Hell” there was a particular bit that really resonated with me, more so than usual. It was this:
I’ve known for a long time that I can’t change things here. But in this moment, I realize that the organization values things that I don’t value, and it’s as simple as that. I could pretend to be neutral and say that my values aren’t better, but you know what, my values are better.
That string of sentences, more than anything I have ever written here thus far, perfectly explains why I am an IT Fossil. The values of this industry have changed. My values have not. I value simple, easy to maintain and practical solutions over flashy demos and buzzword compliance. I value stability and reliability over marketing potential. I started doing this in the late 90s and back then outside of dot com nonsense, line-of-business software development wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t hot. Nobody was going to get rich working on this stuff. But back then our customers valued practical things and thats what we naturally pivoted our efforts into providing for them. Sure the software was ugly and the user interfaces were dull (but notably perhaps far more consistent than most of the UIs we unleash on users nowadays) but mostly things worked.
Sure back then I bitched about my job because I’m a complainer at heart. But man looking back, those were the good times, before “Tech” got too high on its own supply of bullshit. Before we all decided to become grifters and resolve the resulting morality crisis by buying into the hype ourselves. After all if everybody is a fool, then nobody can be a grifter, right?
Okay now sit back and enjoy because I’m going to indulge myself and hope that my limited op-sec related skills are enough to preserve my anonymity. That is a roundabout way of saying that I am about to admit to some dalliances that I like to engage in. As a starter, I was sitting with one of my co-workers at the local cigar bar the other day during working hours. Sure we both had our work laptops open and I was occasionally working on a task while he was lamenting the terrible state of the company. Sure I’ve only been back for a few months, but he’s not wrong. The moron MBAs running the place think they are being slick by slowly whittling down our benefits and compensation adjustments. It hasn’t personally effected me yet as I’m too new to get any kind of reward, but it is effecting him and he’s not happy.
You’d have to be some kind of sucker to not see that layoffs are somewhere in our not-so-distant future. The company is obsessed with making acquisitions that they don’t understand and can’t possibly integrate effectively. I assume that engaging in such tom-foolery makes the investment class that the MBAs simp for happy and this is why they do it much like an Organ Grinder’s Monkey might. So of course that creates a lot of redundancies which somebody will eventually have to figure out how to resolve (translation: layoffs) and of course if any of the acquisitions fail to yield the expected benefits somebody will eventually have to figure out how to resolve that too (translation: layoffs).
Listen just because we work here, doesn’t mean we are stupid. It just means that we have either given up or are very close to deciding to do so. But hey believe me when I say that it’s not all bad. This gig is certainly miles better than the previous dumpster fire I worked at in which our software development process basically boiled down to shaking a bag full of bones, tossing them onto a conference room floor and then pretending to intelligently derive value from the resulting chaotic “patterns”.
My friend hasn’t quite given up yet. He’s not far from it though. It’s sad to watch him make his way down this path because he’s one of the brightest and most well-adjusted people I know. I on the other hand have basically given up and the truth is that I’m largely okay with that. If I got laid off tomorrow, there is a very real chance that I might not bother trying to find another job in this industry. That would necessitate a massive shift in lifestyle of course and I’m not at the point where I planned to just say fuck it. But the God’s honest truth is that I know I lack the requisite willpower to get back on the tech interview treadmill and duke it out with the rest of the desperate horde of unemployed techies just for the opportunity to eat shit at the next place.
So I basically said all that to say that I take advantage when I can nowadays. Sometimes I spend a couple of afternoons a week working at the cigar bar. Because why not? Sometimes I bring my work laptop with me when I actually need to look at stuff and sometimes I just turn work notifications on so my phone can let me know when my attention is required to respond what is undoubtedly a pointless slack message or even more pointless email. This trend started at my previous job because there were just unavoidable rifts of non-productivity that the bureaucracy manages to create. So why not enjoy myself instead of suffering alone in my home office or feeling guilty when I try to burn some of that time off by playing a video game?
Of course I would be remiss not to mention that I am totally aware of the irony around me engaging in an activity that basically amounts to a slow form or suicide to give myself a break from the activity that is basically financing my ability to stay alive. But as a human being with a sense of humor who has long fostered the morose outlook that one day I will die, I’m okay with this. It obviously isn’t a logical position, but it’s the only sensible position that is available to me, thus it is mine.
But hey let’s be clear: I’m doing the work that is assigned. Heck I might still be out-producing my co-workers. That of course is hard if not impossible to quantify and this is made worse by the fact that I’m no longer paying that much attention to what they are doing. Direct comparisons no longer suit me or serve to bolster my mental fortitude so I have largely discarded them. This reminds me of a famous Star Trek III quote (terribly underrated film as Christopher Lloyd is an amazing Klingon) that I used to reference in my younger years when I told clients the secret of how I came up with software estimates and always delivered ahead of time:
Kirk: How much refit time till we can take [the Enterprise] out again?
Scotty: Eight weeks, sir. (as Kirk opens his mouth) But you don’t have eight weeks, so I’ll do it for ya in two.
Kirk: (considers) Mr. Scott. Have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four?
Scotty: Certainly, sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?
Well now we don’t really do estimates nowadays (thank goodness). My team doesn’t even do story points (thank goodness). But I still basically follow this rule as I tend to pad my work by at least a factor of two nowadays. Sometimes I spend the extra time double checking and testing my work, sometimes I spend it doing chores, sometimes I spend it doing stretches because I’m getting old and have joint pain and sometimes I spend it at the cigar bar. It doesn’t really matter. If I worked at the breakneck pace that I am still sometimes mentally capable of working at, I would lose my fucking mind. Because the stream of shit to do would never end. Of course that’s just the start. Eventually if you go far enough down that road your co-workers will begin to resent you too.
Being hated is a terrible feeling. Been there done that. Don’t really want to do it anymore. Nevertheless I still can’t avoid stepping in it from time to time though as my natural predisposition towards obliviousness tends to get me into trouble. A quick rewind to last week when my real world persona got absolutely dog-piled online for pushing back on an “internet famous” creator for posting “If you use Brave as your browser, I think you are a stupid piece of shit”. I of course use that browser and made the mistake of admitting to it which created a great deal of negative feedback I had to sift through over the next day or two.
So I guess the only way to end this extended brain fart of a post is to state the obvious conclusion that I’m not just an IT fossil, but more of a fossil in general. It’s a little sad. I miss creating software the way we used to create it. I miss using software the way we used to use it. Maybe that’s why I prefer Linux? I cut my teeth on a DOS Prompt many many years ago and still consider that my first real computing experience. Because until that point I was just another user. Having to learn how to properly configure expanded memory with EMM386 in DOS so I could play some silly Origin game (probably Privateer or BioForge) or another forced to me take my interest and expertise to the next level. I’ll be forever thankful for that.
Final Confession: Using a secret key combo (CTRL-Tilde) to launch my kitty terminal with my configured pureline prompt gives me a perverse thrill every time I do it. It reminds me of the good ole days. If you’ve never tried it, I highly recommend it!