Dear Tech Industry,
Just stop it!
Stop disrupting. There is barely an industry left that hasn’t been disrupted. You talk a big game about how you are opening up a market, democratizing, etc. But, in the end, everything you touch becomes crappier with less accountability.
Stop “maximizing shareholder value” and take care of your users. Build them good services that they actually want to use, not metric driven crap that doesn’t solve their problems. Heck, they might even pay you for such a service!
Stop focusing on growth. Practically everyone in the developed world has a computer, smartphone, and uses the internet. Those that don’t aren’t likely to make the switch. The undeveloped world doesn’t have any cash to give you and they are dealing with more fundamental problems. There is no more growth to be had!
Stop squandering the planet’s resources on futuristic AI machines that solve no apparent problem other than “too many people have jobs”. Your whizbang creations demo well, but they are wrong more than they are right. The people you will be replacing, even the ones that suck, can do this job much better than your token generator. Let that nuke plant power someone’s house, not your overgrown science fair project.
Engineers – stop dorking around with your deployment technologies and focus on your applications. The vast majority of the world’s apps don’t need Google scale – VMs and SQL databases work just fine. Stop spending months learning the hottest new cloud service from AWS/Azure/GCP etc that will further lock you into that platform and be abandoned in a year forcing you to migrate to something else. Spend your time making your apps work correctly and be easy to use.
Open Source Contributors – I don’t understand why you do all this for free, but if you are going to do something, do it right. Write some documentation for Pete’s sake. Fix your security issues. Test your code. Work on building consensus rather than “taking your ball and going home”. Focus on things that actually matter.
WordPress – I am looking in your direction. This “block” editor is preventing me from deleting paragraphs as I write this. Why don’t you quit causing controversy and go fix your broken new idea!
Language People – Stop inventing languages that are “just a little bit better” than the ones we already have. Did the world really need Kotlin, Ruby, Swift, Scala, Lua, and Groovy? Focus on things that are truly revolutionary.
Government – Get off your keister and demand some accountability from these outfits. For decades, software has been wrapped in “break-seal” agreements that absolve the manufacturer from any responsibility – the software doesn’t even have to work at all. Rather than software outfits upping their game, ordinary products have instead adopted software components and are trying to sell themselves under break-seals. Maybe it’s time to end this exemption and hold software and software-derived products to the same standard as everything else (Uniform Commercial Code).
And end this economy of espionage.
Fart fart fart. Flabt.
Users – Stop mindlessly consuming things just because they exist. Using a computer or phone for something doesn’t automatically make it better than whatever came before it. I still enjoy using an”dumb” watch, a real calculator rather than an app, and a paper grocery list. These things don’t download updates and cease to work, behave totally differently, or start showing me ads. They don’t spy on me. And beware of free stuff – if you aren’t paying then you are the product, not the customer.
I have been in the tech industry for 30+ years. This behavior has always been there, but it has gotten so, so much worse over the years. I am somewhat embarassed to even be associated with it. Thankfully my work has largely been in service to end users, but people like me don’t make headlines. I guess that’s just the way of the world.
I wonder how all of this will end? What happens when the last eyeball is acquired? When the last job is replaced?
asd