Tech Work for 20+ Years

 I've had a "tech" job since about 1997. That's the year I jumped into full time software development from my first after college job in physics.

I generally enjoy some aspects of work in "tech", like solving problems and learning sometimes interesting and clever things. There are two things about it that I can't stand.

One is, tech is really a giant parasite, as depicted in "The Matrix" movies. That hollywood depiction is a fanciful over the top depiction of how it really functions. I write about this in probably 25% of the blog posts I do, so I won't belabor the point. All the tech stuff requires human time and energy to function and maintain. It's been the same story ever since the very beginning of "tech" when men settled in cities and sought to "free" themselves from the cycles of nature.

The other one is more of a complaint about tech work. It's gotten pretty standardized and formulaic over the years, and there's been a steady growth of overhead in doing any tech work. Now there's essentially "paperwork" (the electronic version) straight out of "Office Space" associated with doing any tech project, except at small companies, or when I do projects myself.

That phenomenon is pretty interesting.

In theory, corporate America is all about "efficiency", but in reality it's always wasting time, money, and people's lives especially on paperwork, or the electronic equivalent. One of the popular revision control systems (where software source code is stored) is "gitlab". It produces many Office Space style "TPS Reports". It's possible to use a minimalist set of the functions of a program like gitlab and avoid the electronic paperwork, but many corporations like to have all the paperwork done.

What's the net result of all that paperwork? It just takes much longer for anything to be finished. The idea is with all the extra paperwork, there's more "control" over what's in the source code repository... but that doesn't even happen. It's possible for the code to be a mess and dysfunctional and broken with all those TPS reports attached.

Why do people do that, then? If it doesn't really work, why do people put time and effort into it?

The short answer is people are docile sheep and just go along with trends and fads. Somebody sold gitlab, people bought it and regurgitate whatever the original sales pitch was.