Technologies don't work anymore

Who are we?

We are IT specialists. We are the blood of our time, where oxygen is information.

What are we?

Various. Cheerful and not very purposeful and lazy. We are united by the fact that we are talented and have found the use of their talent. And our talent is now very much in demand. Proof

Upon request, the “Scientific and Technical Intelligentsia” provides thousands of results with references to political and philosophical works, which emphasize the importance of this stratum of society, to which we undoubtedly belong.
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Do you have a trick feeling?

Personally, it seems to me that at a certain point, everything went wrong. Technology doesn't work anymore . No seriously.

Why is our activity important?

Many may say, “Yes, what depends on these IT people? Teachers teach children, doctors save lives. And the programmers are sitting, writing their own program lines. ”

No, it is not. Without us, everything will fall apart.

The economic sphere of society is directly dependent on IT. There is no bank without an internal information system. Instant transactions, bank cards, all this has already changed our lives, and the blockchain system is replacing traditional means of payment. Soon there will be no cash.

The social sphere of social life directly depends on IT. Social networks gave us the opportunity to interact with anyone without restriction. It is hard to imagine an attempt to gather a group of people in one place without the Internet. We get acquainted through the Internet, we joke through the Internet, we degrade and develop through the Internet.

The spiritual sphere of life now is more and more cultural content and cultural heritage, consumed more often from the network than in other ways. We can visit any museum - without leaving home. And even look at how Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain plays.

The political sphere of life depends on IT. This is cybercrime and the fight against it. This tracking technology. Palantir, as you know, is not far off. Any state has a state of IT specialists acting for the benefit of foreign and domestic policies, supporting sovereignty and law and order.

What happened before?

If you build a retrospective of computer science as a science, you can see a whole series of great and small discoveries made by geniuses, simple engineers and companies. Scientists from many fields have worked for many years for the benefit of progress, and now it is difficult to keep pace with it.


(Graph taken from here )

It is terrible to think how much human effort has been applied, how many smartest people made their small contribution to this great movement bit by bit, alone, within the framework of large scientific and technical departments, consciously and accidentally. Something new always arose, and it radically influenced the life of mankind, qualitatively changed the life of people. Many things were created by enthusiasts, in those days when the market was not yet so developed, and the demand for technology was formed by the needs of people, not by what they see in advertising. Research departments still lived without advanced sales departments, and advertising was not so ubiquitous and comprehensive.

What have we come to?

A young girl takes a photo of herself in the mirror right from the phone, easily and without a single delay, through wi-fi the photo is instantly sent to the server and it is seen by thousands and millions of people. All together takes no more than five seconds. Inside her phone there is a processor. In this article, you can see what a processor is, and how difficult and awesome it is.

A huge corporation orders a giant information system in order to use part of the state money that was not spent.

Microchip embedded in the discount card, which we will never use.

The computing powers that would greatly simplify the lives of those who send people into space 20 years ago are now being used to most realistically depict the bad guy's mimicry in a computer game.

Does all this make the world better? Does such computer science make someone happy? I think not.

If you give a monkey a Kalashnikov assault rifle, it will become dangerous, but the world will not get any better from this. Society does not keep up with progress. And progress becomes a slave to human needs, human greed and other vices. And we are helping him in this, building an automaton right in the hands of the monkey. The question of the lag of the spiritual development of a person before the technical was considered by Stanislav Lem in Solaris. I totally agree with him.

And what exactly is wrong?

Well…

1. Science doesn't work

   
   We’re joking about jokes about British scientists and giving prizes for the most useless research. The scientific approach, with all its limitations, already firmly rests on the complexity of the world. We have already studied all the simple things, and it is even difficult to approach difficult ones. Serious studies are conducted only by large corporations in their interests, for profit and the realization of long-term investments. Does it benefit the world? Sometimes yes, more often the opposite.
   
   

2. Startups don't work

   
   Previously, a startup meant a small study that was possible to carry out on its own or as a small team. It was a “small research genre” in which no economic issues were raised. Gradually, it turned into a “small form of IT business,” but still carried some value. The startups were enthusiastic people who tried to make useful products that they like and should like the public.
   
   Now this is an eternal vicious circle with investing and earning money. Young IT specialists, playing by certain rules, create products that nobody needs, who must find an investor. Then investing is made and everything benefits. Startups get large sums, a large percentage of which goes to their pockets and a small amount - directly to the development. The investor pays off from the large number of investments 1-2 and pays for all the others. Once a year, as is known, the stick shoots. All this perfectly shows how money makes money and how modern business lives in general. What do they create? Small products that can attract a large number of users and chop cabbage. Something that brightly sits in the mind and brings a minimum of benefit. Everything.
   
   

3. Enterprise does not work

   
   Modern implementation of business systems is an act of product transfer by people who did not create a system, but know how to sell, to people who will not use this system, but believe in beautiful graphics on presentations.
   
   Most implementations are carried out without any assessments of IT departments and, God forbid, specific users. Huge money is spent on the useless, but qualitatively submitted technologies. And business is looking for efficiency gains, margins. And it does not come, because these systems need to be thrown into the dustbin a long time ago.
   
   Companies earn a lot of money by supporting systems that were initially poorly written in order to earn money on support. This is a vicious vicious circle of large business in IT, and it is not profitable for anyone to change anything. Common sense is the last thing that can somehow influence the situation.
   
   Business systems are as expensive as large and cumbersome, managing to complete their tasks with their enormous volume. A great example is the Liferay portal.
   

And how do we live in all this?

Well, we are all good. We have a favorite job, a hobby, we go in for sports, we go on trips, we have beloved wives, and we have our beloved ones. We choose what we do, for us create comfortable conditions for those who need it. We can choose for ourselves what is technologically interesting for us and immerse ourselves in it with our head.

And choosing technologically interesting tasks, we do not think about how the result of our activity affects the world around us. Business uses IT as a resource that supports the economy, and millions of people together with marketing and sales departments are looking for and finding ways to make money from our work.

We are used to it. We are pampered. We are not ready for stress. We have lost the habit of thinking outside the notebook. We are not ready to receive as much money as ordinary people receive for no less hard work.

We are just a cow that gives delicious milk. We are not ready to fight back, and are ready to do outright nonsense if we are adequately paid for it.

And there are those who willingly use it.

Large corporations see in us a part of their value. We are capital. We create large products that are sold to those who hate these products, to those who hate them. To be honest, it doesn't sound very much. This role seems offensive to me.

What are the ways?

Well, there is the first way, leave everything as is. According to the principle “after us - even the flood”. Immediately we are doing well, there are better places to watch how beautifully humanity is heading for the abyss and progress depreciates.

There is a second way. Try to change society. To raise the cultural level of all people so that, suddenly, everyone began to use technology with benefit and intelligence, by designation, to make others and themselves happy? It would be the perfect way, but it is utopia. I do not believe in this.

Third. You can try to halt progress. To occupy people's brains with religion again, or to redirect our resource to something else. But the process is already running and irreversible. Everything just breaks. Too late for such radical steps.

But here you can come to the fourth , neat way. We need the world as well as us. But our difference is that we have the will and intelligence. We are able to choose what to do. And it is worth thinking about it more often.
We can afford to abandon projects.
We can afford to leave work.
We can afford to send the fuck those who are just trying to make money on us.
We can become moderators of technological reality, decide what needs to be created and what is not. We are strange, but not stupid. We see what happens. Is not it so?..
Why do we need an activity that does not objectively make the world a better place?

If each of us thinks about it, and every moment will think, wasteful drops of the most precious talent, the world will become better every moment of time. You need only a little more balanced decisions. You just need not to do garbage, and continue to implement cool things that will fix the situation. You can try it all together.

Ps. Why did I write this at all?

It is important to understand that in the above I am averaging, not generalizing, that is, there are exceptions, and, frankly, they are complete. Obviously, the topic is very holivar, and the article contains many opinions, value judgments and few proofs. And I would be interested to hear the collective mind on this topic. If someone has any links to studies or analytics for or against what is described above - in the comment wilkomen!

I would like to see what happens in the end. Maybe something like a manifest?