Dear sweet christ, I’ve been the manager of a medium sized non profits databases (everything other than finance because they’re special, as in using an overpriced wacky proprietary tool because they are used to it, oh and probably commiting fraud) and, as the author references, I have actually had one of the members of the board get a bunch of other people with 0 technical competence to try to get me to ‘implement blockchain technology’ on postgres.

Non of those fucking morons could ever provide an actual project outline. None of these fucking morons even knew their own teams processes, and they would all change depending on team member asked and date.

Not relevant to this story, but basically I am now disabled and living off of SSDI after being assaulted and seriously injured.

I am 99% sure, after years of working with completely technically incompetent managers, I am never going to work in tech again.

I would literally rather be poor, do uber eats delivery when I feel like it, and slowly build a video game, by myself, not even to make money, just to give my tech brain something to sate it.

I am too autistic to be able to handle the constant stream of bullshit and social manipulation/pressure from everywhere I have ever worked.

Aside from the technology stack being the embodiment of vendor lock-in and misery, the scamming is really what makes me not want to work on Generative AI tasks, or whatever the next hype thing is going to be.

The worst part is that many people want to be scammed. We have customers come to us, asking for a solution to a problem they’ve had for long time, and asking it to be solved with GenAI.
Then we tell them that there’s really no use-case for GenAI there, that it could be better solved for half the money using traditional methods.

At which point, they ask us to integrate GenAI in some place anyways, because otherwise their boss will not give them the money. And of course, that boss also has a boss who also only frees up budget for GenAI.
And that just repeats upwards, until you have shareholders at the top, who eat up the hype, because other shareholders eat up the hype.