I enjoy technology, but it's hard for me to just focus on tech without a purpose for using it. All of the projects I'm proud of aren't because of the tools I used. Instead, I'm proud that I delivered something useful.
Yet, I still completely agree with your statements about "MBA puff". I've been on projects where they extol how valuable a project is going to be and it doesn't stand up to a minute of scrutiny. Other projects would be valuable, but never get into the hands of real users.
On the projects I'm proud of, I was directly working with someone who actually would benefit from the project. There wasn't a question of whether it was worth it. The users weren't puffing up the project to be more than it was. They have a job to do and I'm helping them do it better. Interestingly, this also meant that they didn't care how I approached the problem.
The real sweet spot for projects is where working on interesting tech goes hand-in-hand with delivering something useful.
There are a ton of jobs that are tool-heavy, and the "solving problems" only applies to a small percentage of the team.
Some problems should not exist at all and only exists because of the tooling chosen.
Example: A friend of mine works at a company that is running their business on some clown-ish cloud infrastructure, and their SREs have to basically re-invent the wheel to work around the limitations of the cloud vendor the management has chosen (for example: no virtual machine autoscaling, in a cloud environment). Somebody at that company is certainly doing "creative work" and "solving problems" with code, but not those SREs.
When I was younger my family was really big into riding ATVs. At first it was cool, but then I started to realize we were just going to drive in the same circles at the same parks forever and it lost all meaning to me. ATVs are cool, I still think they are, but without a reason to ride one I can’t imagine spending a weekend in a tent driving around in circles. At the same time I know plenty of people who live for that, so I recognize that we’re all looking for our own things.
Yes, the entire software industry is akin to crack dealers.
Yea, if you think hard enough, you can have communications sent by horse, instead of by electronic mail.
Of daily infrastructure people already have, because someone dared turn it into software?
> You only need a few of them.
I guess we can keep email, but we should strip all the software layer from waste management plants, or the archiving systems of national libraries and museums, or the operating systems that support the browsers we're typing this from, or the avionics from passenger planes, or whatever you decide is the right number of software applications.
You hit right on the nail, so I don't generally disagree with you. This is how business works, there is no number! Consumerism works the same kind of way.
[Shifted-goal] Also I don't want to stop or reduce it either, I just want more quality of software, not some VC-pipedream-hype driven software.
Are we really discussing this?