my God, the image with Shinji on the chair with all the buzzwords and big-tech speak tormenting him from every direction hit me WAY harder than I expected
like, fuck man, I hate this industry. I miss working for a tiny company selling a single physical product that had to do its job well in order to be sold. No on-call, nothing in the cloud, no KPIs, no OKRs, no bullshit messaging, no sprint planning, and days on end without a single fucking meeting.
Thanks for posting this. Makes me feel like I should start looking for a job. I don't think I have quite the same motivations as the author of the article, but I think I at least share a desire for less bullshit and more meaning in what I do. I left the aforementioned tiny company because I was ultimately unable to change some of the regressive policies enacted by the leadership there (Mormons gonna Morm all over the place). I was young and inexperienced and ultimately lacked the authority to fix shit. Maybe things would be different this time, now that I have an established career and a better understanding of how to convince people to stop being dicks.
I really started to get into this article upon reading:
“My first client was one of the biggest banks in the country: a hellish circus of inefficiency, coked-out managers, feudal power dynamics, and pre-GDPR surveillance marketing.”