Alexander Thurow@ufried „We Are Our Own Worst Enemies“
https://www.ufried.com/blog/worst_enemies/
#OnModernDev #AlexThuReading #AlexThuDisruption #AlexThuClassics
„My first observation in a nutshell: The world does not accelerate that fast. We decided to accelerate. Basically, everybody claims the world would accelerate all the time. Some say it to spread fear (“If you do not run faster, you will be left behind”). Some say it with a hint of exhaustion. Some say it to discourage closer examination of whatever they say next (“The world is moving faster, and therefore …”). And very often, it is used as a hollow opener for some kind of shallow marketing…“ 1/
„… message or sales pitch. You may know the situation: Someone starts with “The world is moving faster all the time”, and everyone in the room nods silently with approval. I took a step back and asked myself: If the world actually accelerates, what are the reasons for it? The surprising answer I found: Most of the acceleration is our own fault. Especially folks in IT are major culprits when it comes to acceleration, and the acceleration is not actually required. However, the acceleration…” 2/
“… is not necessarily the fault of a few individuals (even if some individuals have a bigger share in it than others) but rather a systemic effect. But before I dive deeper into it, let me first distinguish what I will call here essential acceleration and accidental acceleration. I use the two terms following the distinction between essential complexity and accidental…” 3/
“… complexity […] This means:
* Essential acceleration is the inevitable part of acceleration we experience.
* Accidental acceleration is everything else.” /4
“We have the collected memory of the past at our fingertips when we ponder our next steps. This – plus a few supporting factors – led to an overall exponential acceleration of progress. This is what I call essential acceleration. It is the acceleration of progress, primarily driven by the preservation and widespread availability of knowledge. Essential acceleration is already a lot, and it is not clear if we as humanity are set up to deal with our current speed of…” 1/
“… progress. Personally, I have the impression, we are not set up for it, but I leave an authoritative answer to people who are more qualified to answer this question than I am.” /2
“Let us move on to accidental acceleration, i.e., the acceleration we put on top of essential acceleration in IT – the “extra” that really exhausts us. (Especially) in IT, we created the habit to run all the time, for the sake of running, creating an artificial feeling of extreme acceleration.”
“A single “innovation” (whatever that actually means) ensured the growth valuation only for a limited period. Therefore, it was important for the big tech companies to come up with “innovations” regularly to retain their valuation. Thus, they regularly came up with “innovations”.”
“It is especially important for a tech company to convince analysts and investors that you are still “innovative”, i.e., you still promise above-average growth. This is done by sending appropriate messages over all available channels, advertising the “disruptiveness” of the latest “innovation”, and that everyone would be “left behind” who would not immediately adopt it. You know the messages. You have heard them often enough over the course of the last 20 or 30 years.”
“And so, most people ran after the topics, the decision makers as much as the people who must deal with the consequences, typically driven by FOMO (fear of missing out). The interesting part is that none of the players sent their messages because of the technology and its potential benefits for the IT world and beyond. Actually, they were all just interested in maximizing their profits. The technology itself did not matter. It was just a means to an end. It only needed to be hot and trend.”
“This does not mean that the respective technologies would be irrelevant or useless. But the potential intrinsic value of a technology is not the reason why the players start to send their messages how “disruptive” or “groundbreaking” the technology would be. The reasons for sending these messages are much more mundane.”
“More of everything. And everyone wanted their slice of the seemingly unlimited cake. A huge surplus of supply. But only a limited demand, only a limited number of customers who could buy all that stuff. Okay, the ongoing digital transformation increased the IT demand, i.e., companies invested more in IT than they did a few years ago. Nevertheless, the demand was not big enough for this disproportionately grown supply … unless we create artificial demand. All…” 1/
“… the parties involved needed the story of continuous, acceleration “innovation” in IT to keep their businesses running.” /2
“And so we accelerated and accelerated in IT – not because anyone outside IT needed it, but we needed it. We created a system that is fueled by increasingly fast “innovation”, i.e., new stuff that we can sell to our customers. We also perfected the FOMO and FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) messages over time. We perfected which messages we need to send, when, and how often to maximize our likelihood of success. We improved the system so much that it started to eat its creators. We are…” 1/
“… caught in a system of knee-jerk action and response patterns, and we have no idea anymore how to escape it – or at least slow it down to a sustainable pace.” /2
“To sum up: There is some level of essential acceleration. However, this perceived ever-increasing speed in IT that exhausts us increasingly is something we created and fuel ourselves. This is what I mean by:
We are our own worst enemies.
We are the ones who make our lives worse by reflexively running faster and faster, in directions that others set.”
#OnModernDev #AlexThuReading #AlexThuDisruption #AlexThuClassics
“When looking at the still ongoing AI hype, we cannot only observe the artificial speed that exhausts everyone. In the end, the artificial speed of “AI progress” only serves the big tech companies and major AI startups because if we would find the time to think things through, we might come to conclusions that would not serve their goals, like, e.g., not making ourselves completely dependent of their offerings. Hence, they do all they can to make us run the rat race we created ourselves as…” 1/
“… fast as possible, not finding any time to take a step back and think.” /2
“Additionally, we can observe a much darker pattern. The short version of it is:
We belittle, ridicule, and humiliate our peers. (Not everyone does it, but way too many do it)
If anybody says publicly that they did not get the results from using AI that are promised everywhere, by the companies, by the vendors, and especially by the free riders, they are immediately told: “You are doing it wrong!” […] The message sent is: “The technology is perfect. You are just too stupid to use it. Noob!””
“In the end, telling someone you do not know, “You are doing it wrong!” is the same kind of fifth-grade jerk behavior: trying to look better by belittling others in public. This is simply a**hole behavior.”
“If you strongly disagree, I am afraid you are one of the culprits.”
“They are attacked by their own peers – by other (wannabe) developers. Let that sink in for a moment. We sit here as a software developer community. The AI companies preach with billions of dollars marketing budgets that we will become obsolete in 6-12 months (since 2+ years, renewed aloud every 6 months). Our management and business departments fell for the promises that we would become 3x as productive with a $200/month Claude Code subscription and silently upped their throughput…” 1/
“… expectations. At the same time, we fight with immature tooling of bleeding-edge AI tools that change every day and stay behind their promises. We need to apply lots of “arcane magic,” like, e.g., extensive harness engineering and alike, to make the tools work halfway reliably. We do our best; we work our a**es off to integrate the new “magic of the day” into our work while trying to satisfy the increased output expectations.” /2
“And if we then dare to say that things do not seem to work as advertised? Then, our peers belittle, insult, and humiliate us in public. Not the “others”. Our peers. This is what I mean by:
We are our own worst enemies.
People close to burnout being insulted and ridiculed publicly by their peers, not caring a bit how they feel, what they did, or who they are. Instead of working together to get through this deeply inhumane game that others set up for their own profit, we fight…” 1/
“… each other and try to press them underwater, perfectly amplifying the perverted game others set up against us. It is so sad to watch this kind of behavior.” /2
“Simply taking a little step back, thinking for a moment instead of just running after someone else’s goal, and adding a tiny bit of empathy to the interaction with our peers would make things a lot better. Instead of running after every “groundbreaking innovation of the day”, we could ask ourselves what we actually need and then ponder how AI can support us best in achieving these goals. […] To be clear: If we want a future as software developers that is worthwhile, it is only we who can…” 1/
“… it. Neither the (few) profiteers of AI nor our employers or anyone else will shape a future worthwhile for us. They are either busy rigging the game or are caught in the rat race they set up themselves. It is we, and we only, who can shape a future worthwhile. Or as Steve Yegge phrased it in…” 2/
“… his blog post “The AI vampire”:
“I don’t think there’s a damn thing we can do to stop the train. But we can certainly control the culture, since the culture is us.”
Maybe let us start by stopping being our own worst enemies…” /3
I. Thank. You. @ufried
To the point. 👏
Last year I chewed on a single thought for quite a while:
„Software Development has been in crisis mode for so many years…“ [ in this sense: https://textbooks.cs.ksu.edu/cc410/i-oop/01-hello-real-world/03-software-crisis/ ] „… and now we are automating that state.“
What became clear to me after thinking it through: we have indeed a cultural problem at our hands. This is not about technology. And: AI in that picture only is a magnifying glass for everything that works and does not work in our business.
The Software Crisis :: CC 410 Textbook
Content Note The content on this page was adapted from Nathan Bean’s CIS 400 course at K-State, with the author’s permission. That content is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Video Materials At the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference held in Garmisch Germany, the term “Software Crisis” was coined to describe the current state of the software development industry, where common problems included:
Side note: As a business you are therefore better in very nice and non-troubled waters in order to start using AI… at the very least in the „all-in flavour“.