Promising to myself that I would figure out “something else to do with my life” within the next five to ten years has yielded some unexpected side effects. Namely I have started to become more detached from the day-to-day drama of working in the industry. This makes sense because if I don’t plan on working in tech five to ten years down the road, what difference does it really make? While this proclamation was at odds with my tradition of positioning of myself as a concerned craftsman, it does yield several benefits: Namely I’m not nearly as pissed off as I once was.

Yes I know, at least some of you are disappointed with that proclamation and at least some of you are skeptical especially after last weeks raging flame fest of a tirade against SPACE. However let me assure you that it is 100% accurate. I used to get on my high horse at work about all kinds of piddly ass shit. I used to care about details that nobody else really cared about because I just knew that a few years down the road somebody tasked with maintaining the semi-broken pile of shit I created which they now have been tasked with fixing would appreciate that extra effort. I used to pontificate endlessly about how much our industry suffered because it lacked functioning implementations of concepts I was considered absolutely core to any kind of managed centralized effort, aka “the Meritocracy”. I used to question all kinds of little nagging things in code reviews. I used to spend entirely too much of my time concerned with the productivity levels of my co-workers. I used to show my ass in meetings at least once every few weeks because, why not? Something was always pissing me off and that was all that mattered.

Choosing to no longer give a shit has forced me to re-evaluate a lot of these positions. Thankfully I don’t have to write a blog post correcting and responding to my own past terrible takes because this blog hasn’t existed for long enough to actually contain any of those takes. Thank goodness for that. More accountability is the last thing I personally need and the course of my life has invariably shifted towards avoiding that as much as possible. In fact as of right now this blog is mostly about a tired and nearly aged out techie making the transition to professional stoner because thus far, I haven’t actually come up with a better plan than that for my second career. But hey that sounds like a problem that future ITF likely has well in hand. So all in all this transition worked out really well. To a casual observer it might even seem like that I planned for it.

Well the truth is, I’m not planning shit. This is chaos, plain and simple. I am literally figuring this out as I go along and there aren’t any manuals for how to reinvent ones self. Also let me be clear, while I do care less and lot of the piddly day-to-day shit has been unexpectedly easy to let go of, none of that changes the fact that this industry is a raging dumpster fire and I have helped to tend that fire for multiple decades now. Part of my soul will always feel stained, if only by mere association, with being part of such institutionalized mismanagement on such a grand scale. It’s hard not to.

So how do I deal with that? Will I attempt to atone and attempt to reclaim the lost bits of my soul while also risking a chance for an actual fresh start? Or will I simply run away and do something altogether different in an effort to live my life in such a way that I won’t be hopelessly anchoring myself to perceived shortcomings of the past? I don’t know the answer to that. My initial thought was that I would write and that the subject of my writing would be more or less tech centric. But then I started putting together an outline for a basically allegorical fictional tale, the purpose of which would be to try and explain what is “wrong” with tech as an industry by telling the story from multiple perspectives, but that hit a wall a month ago when I realized that I hadn’t come up with an idea for a project that ties all of these people together.

But that’s literally the easiest part, right? I’ve worked on so many projects over the last few decades that it boggles the mind to start listing them out. Yet I can’t bring myself to do it, at least not as of right now. But why is that? Well I think it’s because I let the zeal for it go. What seemed important and interesting to me a few short years ago, no longer merits real attention or consideration from me now. The base line truth is that most of it what I’ve created has basically been CRUD related functionality for some client or another. There have been a handful of exceptions, but outside of this insulated industry, making this stuff sound interesting is actually very very hard to do.

But deep down I think we all know that. This of course is why we went from developing web applications with a minimal level of client side code to developing monstrosities based on React / Redux and wide variety of other tech stack over-complications. I am forced to work with a a huge application that is written this way and I absolutely despise it. I refer to the style of coding in these applications as “passive aggressive” coding because I really really hate this approach (almost as much as I hate actually passive aggressive people). So why did we create this? Because we were bored. We are mostly building boring things. Those boring things are boring because the “idea” people we have surrounded ourselves with are generally intellectually bankrupt mental midgets fronting as actual custodians of an industry that has largely abdicated on its inherent mandate to responsibly produce and distribute anything.

Believe it or not, this is also an unexpected benefit of losing my zeal for this shit. I have begun the long and tumultuous process of removing my head from my own ass, where it has been stuck for quite awhile. This allows me to see that an allegorical tale about the software development process and where it all goes wrong, is not likely to be very well received because the subject matter is basically stale as shit. I mean come on, are you honestly going to actually pipe up and claim that anybody outside of a thin layer of uber nerds would actually care? We don’t even care. Which is why we keep inventing new and absurd bullshit to keep these jobs from seeming as boring on the surface as we clearly know they are deep down.

But taking advantage of this apathy is how the MBAs, who have systemically been destroying tech for decades on end, have been getting away with so much of their nonsense. They allow us to play these games, because in lieu of playing those games, we might actually start focusing more on the real world outcomes and effects of the things we are building and the technologies we choose to build those things with. Our core interests aren’t aligned but as we are all human and universally suffer from a malady known as “the human condition” so as it turns out we are all okay at finding new and fun ways to lie to ourselves. So that is what we as an industry have chosen to do. Every few years we find some way to “invalidate” the work from a years prior and label it as out of date crap so that we can start the cycle anew. It is needlessly destructive and after a few decades the pointlessness of the cycle will surely begin to weigh on your soul as well.

I believe at the very core this is a problem of our interests not being aligned properly. We deal with this by instead aligning with our shared interest to avoid taking actual coherent steps to deal with this very difficult problem. We do this because our current economic system has essentially placed Greed on a pedestal and made it secondary to every other desire, even the desire of finding one’s purpose or making an actual positive impact on the world around us. This is the most tragic part of all. We exist to build tools that should be empowering people… yet we’ve turned that notion inward on itself and instead transitioned to find ways to enslave people. We gotta keep those quarterly and yearly revenue numbers growing after all. Otherwise how would the greedy cunts on Wall Street be properly placated? Perhaps the mistake was made when we invited them into the tent to begin with. We don’t need these people. They are ghouls and they have created a world that they are able to largely gatekeep by wielding their wealth as a weapon against anybody who would claim otherwise.

To put it more succinctly: It is profitable for us to do things this way, so they allow us to do it. Our urge to invalidate our previous work by reinventing the proverbial wheel every few years gives them an opportunity to exploit our customers even further. By playing into this notion, we are only empowering the forces that are systemically destroying this industry in the name of profit. In any event, the more distance I put between myself and this industry, the happier I am to leave it all behind. I might adopt a different viewpoint on this further down the road, but for now that’s how it is. I still want to write a real novel of some sort but when and if I do it, it probably won’t have anything really to do with tech. I need to break free of this existence and not just for a little while… but maybe for the rest of my life.

As with all things, time will tell.