I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

Consider the fact that most companies are unable to successfully develop and deploy the simplest of CRUD applications on time and under budget. This is a solved problem - with smart people who can collaborate and provide reasonable requirements, a competent team will knock this out of the park every single time, admittedly with some amount of frustration. The clients I work with now are all like this - even if they are totally non-technical, we have a mutual respect for the other party's intelligence, and then we do this crazy thing where we solve problems together. I may not know anything about the nuance of building analytics systems for drug rehabilitation research, but through the power of talking to each other like adults, we somehow solve problems.

But most companies can't do this, because they are operationally and culturally crippled. The median stay for an engineer will be something between one to two years, so the organization suffers from institutional retrograde amnesia. Every so often, some dickhead says something like "Maybe we should revoke the engineering team's remote work privile - whoa, wait, why did all the best engineers leave?". Whenever there is a ransomware attack, it is revealed with clockwork precision that no one has tested the backups for six months and half the legacy systems cannot be resuscitated - something that I have personally seen twice in four fucking years. Do you know how insane that is?

This whole article is a must read.

The main point: with any major leap in technology, there will be hucksters who purport to use the new hotness to solve all your problems.

The problem is that most organizations don't even take the time to solve the already solvable problems that exist within that organization.

New Javascript frameworks, database software, on-prem versus cloud-based server architecture, containerized systems, blockchain, mobile apps... unless you know how using these tools will solve a problem that your existing tech stack cannot solve, they're nothing more than distractions.

You don't need a garage full of tools to get a job done. Getting the fundamentals right is so much more important than making another trip down to Home Depot to buy your sixth version of a hammer.