September 15, 2017 at 10:44A few words about the inevitable turn in the development of the IT industry
Due to the fact that the relatively large (and very loud) part of IT lives in the next bubble of dotcoms (now start-ups), some representatives of this tribe, and especially all evangelists and even HR, have the illusion of the following property.
Like, some kind of device, framework or way of working dramatically raises the success of the enterprise. For example, "we all use a MacBook, and we have the third round of investment." Or “we decided to open a travel agency, and we hire only those programmers who do not get out of travel; we want all employees to share our values, and we already have a turnover of $ 100 million. " Or "as soon as we implemented React + Vue + Angular, our business went uphill and Google bought us." Etc.
At first glance it seems absurd? - Yes, but we admit: hype and whine are undoubted accompanying elements of the modern IT world. Any phenomenon that is at the forefront of public attention, and IT, of course, from such, cannot but absorb the characteristic features of the society of its time. In particular, the tendency for form to prevail over content.
Often there is a typical wishful thinking. The market is literally going crazy to pour money into at least someone who can give a short-term result. Those who are lucky with gravy from investors can even program while standing on their heads: in order to achieve a quick result that needs to be presented to the speculative market, companies are not required, and sometimes even harmful, to build the right, verified business processes. The path to the first success is visible, and already a portfolio investor or a large IT giant, who will get a shot startup for billions, will seriously deal with the matter. While everyone is waiting for stock growth and the next record in the indicator "amount paid for the company / number of developers", you can, without hesitation, declare any of your whims. There are no problems in human vagaries, but there is
Since the flow of easy money is still very strong, and brooks diverge across the industry, various scribblers and explanations flock to the hot. Entire volumes appear with pictures on the topics “how to work cool standing up”, “how to increase conversion, if your chef is a penguin”, “aikido tabulation” and other nonsense. Trainings for effective pair programming, trainings for effective autistic programming, Python seminars on the new teaching technology, training seminars on the new Python version, etc. That is, people begin to poke around in secondary factors, which are almost always some fun, but insignificant features of a company that has become successful due to, as a rule, an infusion of funds from serious uncles. Even shorter, true market success (and failure) is alwayscombinations of big money, power and the ambitions of leaders , and not the result of following one or another smart strategy, which, as a rule, is already being written post factum.
Anyone who has been at work for at least 10-15 years will probably remember how he used to read books about “100 secrets of success”, “200 reasons to quit and do everything” and the like. The only reliable result that follows these Oster tips is that you hang out exactly in the middle. No, there is always an example of a washi who shot, but single outliers of statistics never refuted the general population. Therefore, the theory is not confirmed by practice, and therefore is nothing more than speculation.
Fending off obvious objections, the author of this pamphlet certainly shares the approach that a programmer learns one way or another throughout his career. New languages, frameworks, approaches to work appear. Nobody wants to make tables like 15 years ago, and SPA is easier and more efficient to write on special frameworks, and not on the old native jQuery. The development of tools is unstoppable, as is human progress in general.
However, the essence of the new tool is rarely directly dependent on marketing factors that contribute to its implementation. There is no direct connection between “new, stylish, cool” and “effective, reasonable, worthy”.
We venture to make some very obvious considerations about the secrets of long-term success in the IT industry. Sooner or later, when the bubble is blown away, and the interest of world capital moves to a new industry (space, biology, medicine?), IT is waiting for an inevitable conservative turn. Suddenly it turns out that a lover of travel and coding from under the palm trees simply works 20 hours a week instead of 30-40. Suddenly it turns out that from programming standing in 10 years, varicose veins will develop (ask any hairdresser), and sitting on ottomans, hiding over your favorite macbook, means considerable expenses for a neurologist and manual therapist in the future. People will be surprised to find that Agile is not a panacea for all ills, and generally should be used in a very limited range of tasks, and new-fangled gamification is, first of all, a way of self-entertainment of staff members who are bored without real work. It turns out that the beloved lecturer with horn-rimmed glasses was an ordinary fraudster and washed off abroad with the money collected through crowdfunding.
Those companies will remain who will earn on the product and its service, and not on the growth of the stock price or even just on the promise to do something at least. The unbridled need for community members to meet at meetings, conferences, hackathons and camps will disappear. The progressive shaft of new silver bullets and “C ++ killers” will fall. Suddenly, it turns out that without a person who has serious, time-tested development tools, it is difficult to maintain the existing, already quite rich industry infrastructure. It turns out that new approaches, solutions developed within the company, as a rule, give a greater real effect than fashionable solutions from the outside. Under the pressure of circumstances (read, in connection with the reduction of budgets for experiments), a person who came up with a solution to a particular problem himself will become more valuable than someone who was able to sell a solution from Google or Facebook to his management, just because it is from Google or Facebook.
Someone will say thatwill become more boring . Perhaps, for some, new times will seem bland. Where the quality of the company code does not depend on Friday pizza and table hockey in the office, just like on the trips of the best employees to the Valley, there is nothing much to do for fun cheerful guys. The new heroes of the articles around the IT industry will be business engineers digging their own topics, and striving for small, but fundamental improvements for everyone. It will be all the same to society anyway, this or that hero has achieved success at 19 or 50. The label on the laptop case and the ability to keep oneself presentations will become unimportant. Advanced developers will no longer call each other "gurus", and will become just engineers.
Strong IT Professionalswho really have experience in solving a wide variety of tasks, perhaps, like workers in other industries, will begin to ask their employers the right questions: about the processing, the necessary insolation and the organization of proper nutrition in the office. Perhaps the answer to crowding out workers to work at home and other reductions in the real benefits they receive will be the creation of unions.
The explosion of innovations and innovations will dialectically turn into its opposite, removing (in the Hegelian sense) all those real contradictions that had accumulated in the industry at the time of rapid growth. Perhaps the time will come to resolve long-overdue issuesbecause the next round of development of IT-technologies will really affect everyone and everyone: the Internet of things or cyber terrorism will not leave a choice in the question “to do quickly in the hope of future improvements” or “to do good right away”.
Like, some kind of device, framework or way of working dramatically raises the success of the enterprise. For example, "we all use a MacBook, and we have the third round of investment." Or “we decided to open a travel agency, and we hire only those programmers who do not get out of travel; we want all employees to share our values, and we already have a turnover of $ 100 million. " Or "as soon as we implemented React + Vue + Angular, our business went uphill and Google bought us." Etc.
At first glance it seems absurd? - Yes, but we admit: hype and whine are undoubted accompanying elements of the modern IT world. Any phenomenon that is at the forefront of public attention, and IT, of course, from such, cannot but absorb the characteristic features of the society of its time. In particular, the tendency for form to prevail over content.
Often there is a typical wishful thinking. The market is literally going crazy to pour money into at least someone who can give a short-term result. Those who are lucky with gravy from investors can even program while standing on their heads: in order to achieve a quick result that needs to be presented to the speculative market, companies are not required, and sometimes even harmful, to build the right, verified business processes. The path to the first success is visible, and already a portfolio investor or a large IT giant, who will get a shot startup for billions, will seriously deal with the matter. While everyone is waiting for stock growth and the next record in the indicator "amount paid for the company / number of developers", you can, without hesitation, declare any of your whims. There are no problems in human vagaries, but there is
Since the flow of easy money is still very strong, and brooks diverge across the industry, various scribblers and explanations flock to the hot. Entire volumes appear with pictures on the topics “how to work cool standing up”, “how to increase conversion, if your chef is a penguin”, “aikido tabulation” and other nonsense. Trainings for effective pair programming, trainings for effective autistic programming, Python seminars on the new teaching technology, training seminars on the new Python version, etc. That is, people begin to poke around in secondary factors, which are almost always some fun, but insignificant features of a company that has become successful due to, as a rule, an infusion of funds from serious uncles. Even shorter, true market success (and failure) is alwayscombinations of big money, power and the ambitions of leaders , and not the result of following one or another smart strategy, which, as a rule, is already being written post factum.
Anyone who has been at work for at least 10-15 years will probably remember how he used to read books about “100 secrets of success”, “200 reasons to quit and do everything” and the like. The only reliable result that follows these Oster tips is that you hang out exactly in the middle. No, there is always an example of a washi who shot, but single outliers of statistics never refuted the general population. Therefore, the theory is not confirmed by practice, and therefore is nothing more than speculation.
Fending off obvious objections, the author of this pamphlet certainly shares the approach that a programmer learns one way or another throughout his career. New languages, frameworks, approaches to work appear. Nobody wants to make tables like 15 years ago, and SPA is easier and more efficient to write on special frameworks, and not on the old native jQuery. The development of tools is unstoppable, as is human progress in general.
However, the essence of the new tool is rarely directly dependent on marketing factors that contribute to its implementation. There is no direct connection between “new, stylish, cool” and “effective, reasonable, worthy”.
We venture to make some very obvious considerations about the secrets of long-term success in the IT industry. Sooner or later, when the bubble is blown away, and the interest of world capital moves to a new industry (space, biology, medicine?), IT is waiting for an inevitable conservative turn. Suddenly it turns out that a lover of travel and coding from under the palm trees simply works 20 hours a week instead of 30-40. Suddenly it turns out that from programming standing in 10 years, varicose veins will develop (ask any hairdresser), and sitting on ottomans, hiding over your favorite macbook, means considerable expenses for a neurologist and manual therapist in the future. People will be surprised to find that Agile is not a panacea for all ills, and generally should be used in a very limited range of tasks, and new-fangled gamification is, first of all, a way of self-entertainment of staff members who are bored without real work. It turns out that the beloved lecturer with horn-rimmed glasses was an ordinary fraudster and washed off abroad with the money collected through crowdfunding.
Those companies will remain who will earn on the product and its service, and not on the growth of the stock price or even just on the promise to do something at least. The unbridled need for community members to meet at meetings, conferences, hackathons and camps will disappear. The progressive shaft of new silver bullets and “C ++ killers” will fall. Suddenly, it turns out that without a person who has serious, time-tested development tools, it is difficult to maintain the existing, already quite rich industry infrastructure. It turns out that new approaches, solutions developed within the company, as a rule, give a greater real effect than fashionable solutions from the outside. Under the pressure of circumstances (read, in connection with the reduction of budgets for experiments), a person who came up with a solution to a particular problem himself will become more valuable than someone who was able to sell a solution from Google or Facebook to his management, just because it is from Google or Facebook.
Someone will say thatwill become more boring . Perhaps, for some, new times will seem bland. Where the quality of the company code does not depend on Friday pizza and table hockey in the office, just like on the trips of the best employees to the Valley, there is nothing much to do for fun cheerful guys. The new heroes of the articles around the IT industry will be business engineers digging their own topics, and striving for small, but fundamental improvements for everyone. It will be all the same to society anyway, this or that hero has achieved success at 19 or 50. The label on the laptop case and the ability to keep oneself presentations will become unimportant. Advanced developers will no longer call each other "gurus", and will become just engineers.
Strong IT Professionalswho really have experience in solving a wide variety of tasks, perhaps, like workers in other industries, will begin to ask their employers the right questions: about the processing, the necessary insolation and the organization of proper nutrition in the office. Perhaps the answer to crowding out workers to work at home and other reductions in the real benefits they receive will be the creation of unions.
The explosion of innovations and innovations will dialectically turn into its opposite, removing (in the Hegelian sense) all those real contradictions that had accumulated in the industry at the time of rapid growth. Perhaps the time will come to resolve long-overdue issuesbecause the next round of development of IT-technologies will really affect everyone and everyone: the Internet of things or cyber terrorism will not leave a choice in the question “to do quickly in the hope of future improvements” or “to do good right away”.