So here you are. Back at the ITF blog, salivating at the mouth, hoping to read some more spicy confessionals bolstered by what I hope is a reasonably accurate sense of anonymity. Fair enough. Today’s confession is this: My advice is worthless.

There, I said it. Man it feels good to publish those words. Now don’t get me wrong, I have been asked for advice a good bit over the years, especially when it comes to tech related subjects. But the truth is: Almost nobody actually takes my advice. Now I can already hear you saying, “Well yeah but free advice typically isn’t worth that much”. Well sure, maybe not. But even when I’m getting paid to proffer it, my advice is generally not taken very often. In fact the cost of the advice seemingly has very little relationship to how seriously the recipient seems to take it.

Perhaps your experiences are different. If so, I hope they are less depressing than mine. Because as it stands right now, I’m really tired of giving out tech advice at all. In fact, I’m so tired of it that I go out of my way to avoid doing it.

This avoidance has taken on many forms. Personally it basically means that somebody has to twist my arm before I will give them any tech advice at all. The only exception to this is that if it happens to be about a subject that I feel particularly passionate about. Linux is a good example of this. If somebody shows any interest in that subject I will gladly fill their ears with a lifetimes worth of penguin propaganda crammed into a terribly overwhelming five minute verbal fountain of orgasmic glee.

Beyond that, my official stance is that I don’t give a shit. This also now extends to even when I’m paid to give a shit as well. For example my current employer is beset on all sides by the less-than-great consequences of past tech decisions made years, sometimes decades ago. We make it work though. Nevertheless I basically disagree with the entirety of the company’s tech stack. I loathe React and think its over-engineered garbage. Their insistence on continuing to utilize Windows as a server is not only ill-advised in terms of privacy and freedom but expensive in terms of licensing and maintenance costs. Their continued use of Crowdstrike even after the mega epic fail a few months back is just idiotic. Their growing dependence on a wide variety of embraced and extended cloud services is also something I strongly disagree with.

But as it turns out, they aren’t paying me for my advice. They are paying me to act as one of many caretakers of the mess (aka ye olde tender of yon dumpster fire) and years ago I wasn’t happy with that arrangement. Nowadays however, that’s fine. The realization that virtually nobody takes my advice has been depressing of course. I didn’t consciously realize it until earlier this week and only hours afterwards had a previously-scheduled session with my therapist during which I excitingly informed her of this revelation. She immediately countered by pointing out that she bought and actually sometimes uses a webcam that I personally recommended.

sigh

Okay fine, she’s the exception that proves the rule. If and when she reads this, I hope she’s happy to see my original response yet again codified in print. Yes my therapist knows all about my anonymous blog. If you aren’t telling your therapist everything, you are essentially wasting your money and both of y’alls time. This is not a radical position to take.

There are numerous examples of ignored advice on a personal level of course. I won’t bore you all with the pedantic details of individual instances of course as that wouldn’t make for a very exciting and enlightening reading session. However instead I will speculate on why I think this is the case. I think when people ask for advice in general, and tech advice specifically, they aren’t really interested in hearing about practical alternatives. Instead what they actually want are typically one of two things:

  1. Confirmation that the option they wish to pursue is the right choice.

  2. Revelation that some easy button option exists which resolves the issue with minimal effort.

As a believer in practical tech rooted in patterns of success I have experienced over the years, it is very unlikely that I will confirm whatever preferred opinion you came into the conversation with. After all, I’m the odd guy out in most groups (except the Linux events I go to) because I generally don’t care what everybody else is doing. In terms of revelation, let’s be clear: Answers like that are exceedingly rare from me as solutions like that tend to incur making tradeoffs that most people aren’t likely to consider. However I’m only more than happy to tell you all about them.

So yeah that leaves us at an impasse. But the upside of this has been that less people tend to ask me for advice on matters nowadays. This might sound like a downside but in my mind its not. If you aren’t going to take my advice seriously anyway, I’d prefer you just didn’t ask.

This of course brings me full circle back to what I said earlier:

I didn’t consciously realize it until earlier this week

That’s right, I didn’t. But it’s been happening for years and it has been a massive source of frustration for me. However looking back, I realize that in the last few years I have begun making adjustments to accommodate this despite my lack of conscious realization. In fact I believe that this shift has very much contributed to my newfound less-hardcore, less-stressful, more-successful approach to work.

In fact the only time I’ve ever been able to fully act on my own advice has been situations in which I can unilaterally make decisions because there is literally nobody else with the ability to contradict or push back. These situations are exceptionally rare and also exceptionally dangerous. When a practitioner like me is allowed to work exactly as they please you run risk that I will end up building solutions that other professionals find difficult to maintain.

Two years ago when I took the offer for my previous job I also decided that the time had come to cease doing contract IT / coding work on the side. I made every attempt to transition my clients off in a responsible manner but I’m sad to say it didn’t really work out with any of them. This is because they refused to take any of my parting advice. I told them both to hire an MSP for their IT needs as neither client was capable of managing IT on their own. I also told them to seek out more uniquely qualified professionals to handle their coding / reporting related needs.

Now, even with zero access from the outside, I can tell that neither one has obtained qualified IT help. From non-functional critical services to broken SSL configs there are symptoms abound of poor IT stewardship. I have at times heard directly from them as they have pushed hard for me to return in some shape or form, but the only way to exit these arrangements is to consistently say no. One slip and you are right back on the hook.

That part of my life is over. Especially now that I have realized that my status as a pariah in the advice giving realm basically guarantees that any solution I’m empowered to create will not be easily transitioned to other less practically minded practitioners. Leaving clients in that position is never something I intended to do, but sadly it turned into something that I had to do.

The acts of giving advice and asking for advice are traps. That’s because these acts all run the risk of usurping a previously known version of reality with inconvenient new corrections. Nobody seems to actually want that to happen. Least of all, me.

Yep so I’m going to enjoy my newfound status in a supporting role of an organization rather than a leading role as long as I’m doing this. Of course the truth is that I have always been in a supporting role, especially in the context of my full-time gigs, but I’m only just now becoming okay with that. For all intents and purposes I was in denial before this.

Denial is a hell of a drug.