It’s time we let companies die.
“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction” ~ Pablo Picasso
Developers, designers, product people, agile consultants–whatever you do in software–it’s getting late. You’re too smart to waste the opportunity of these next decades trying to get the industrial era money grubbers to understand things they don’t want to.
For the last couple of decades, most of the world’s smartest people have been wasting their most precious years fighting a system designed, intentionally or not, to suppress creativity at the bottom.
Since the agile movement began at the turn of the century, there’s been a pressure within software to be a change agent. I am an embattled change agent and I think it’s unfair to expect low-ranking software people to move entire institutions, especially those whose continued existence may not be for the greater good. By the time my kids look for jobs, I hope many of the companies I’ve worked for, and many I wouldn’t look at, are no longer around.
The Web changed so much so quickly that the people most able to seize the moment were those lucky enough to have not yet assimilated into the corporate system, their minds unencumbered by its hopeless design. If you dig into the personal stories of many of today’s tech company founders, you’ll find that they rarely came out of traditional institutions, they often started straight from college, after a couple of years at another founder-led company or even after bumming around into their mid-20s.
Paradoxically, those best equipped to start great companies are those with no preconceptions on how best to do it.
One of the obvious impacts of the Web was that software — all software, not just websites — would play an increasingly important part in our lives. That meant that all companies would need to become software development shops, a profoundly creative and iterative new discipline.
The second impact, which is far more profound and yet much less obvious, has been a rapid rise in the knowledge and skill of populations with good, cheap web access. Connecting people, linking knowledge and global collaboration was the primary motivation for the World-Wide Web project in the early 90s, and it’s stunning that within just 15 years, all the world’s knowledge was in our back pocket.
Just as critical has been the sharing and distribution of inspiring personal experiences via blogging and tweeting, podcasts and YouTube.
The corporation wasn’t setup for a society where all information is available to all people and it wasn’t setup to exploit creativity at scale either. So when you consider how many people make up the system of a company and how averse people are to even small changes, let alone entire shifts in core beliefs, the arrival and rapid adoption of the web and software was a life-threatening shock.
It’s almost as if the survival of most of the world’s large institutions suddenly rested on them becoming Pixar.
Worse, and inevitably, many large companies applied their new software capability to further codify their existing mode of operation and culture of mistrust, using technology to exert further control and keep things from the changes they desperately need. The effect was to ensure that progress is excruciating for its perpetrator and ideally burnt them out in the process.
Mea culpa: In my early 20s I helped build such tools of oppression. In IT, where “locking down” the users is religion, I configured systems and even wrote clever software that did exactly this.
Meanwhile, the large enterprise software vendors responded to this demand and added more and more features to control and divide colleagues, especially Microsoft, who’s software is still the staple of the industrial era company and much less popular within open, new companies.
In the 90s I worked for Microsoft as a product specialist, helping companies to enforce policy, though oddly, Microsoft itself was and is a great company quite unlike the big European finance companies I later worked for.
I think the product designers at Microsoft see the world through rose-tinted spectacles. They assume that other companies are much the same as their own so they don’t consider the dark ramifications of the features they’re adding. Today, they’re adding detailed tracking and productivity reporting into their Teams product, which horrifies me because, for millions of employees, what gets measured gets used for subjugation.
The structure of almost all corporations makes it close to impossible for you to achieve your true potential. The chances are you already know this but are resigned to the fate of a world you cannot change — the very definition of learned helplessness, or “working class syndrome” as I once heard it called.
It’s worth stopping here to consider that if you’re anatomically dissimilar to the ranks of a legacy corporation, you’re in an even worse place; even the pink-skinned hims among us had better pick the right coloured shoes for a job at an old London investment bank (black leather, with laces).
Most big companies are designed to make you feel worthless, disempowered and deskilled from the moment you enter their cavernous foyers in your pressed uniform. After a few weeks you’ll have learned who to fear and what are the important anxieties to take home to the family.
After enough years of underinvested servitude, you’ll have a new fear, the HR bogeyman; one day after lunch your computer won’t unlock and a man you’ve never seen before will appear at your desk and escort you out to the pavement — you’ve relentlessly toiled your way to obsolescence. Thanks for your dedication.
Many people I’ve met have only ever known it this way. They can’t imagine that in some companies the current that they’ve spent a lifetime swimming against is flowing with them.
I have friends that have worked 20 years in the same cost-center — code for parts of the business that are a drag and permanently ear-marked for outsourcing — and when I tell them about great companies, they don’t believe me. It reminds me of the film Logan’s Run; I come speaking of the mythical “Sanctuary” outside.
Given all this, why then do we love our abusers? Why would we want to help these companies through a digital transformation? Especially when we know how hard we’ll struggle and that we won’t be beneficiaries in the outcome, since the profits flow to the old guard upstairs.
Why did we want to help the shareholders of these toxic, male dominated companies? The answer lies in four key ideas.
The first is that the pressure to be a change agent comes from agile consultancies and agile coaches shilling books, some of which I own. There’s no blame here, only that the agile movement puts pressure on some of us to be doing more and being a better team member. The problem is when it’s combined with the second idea.
There is a lack of viable alternative employers, particularly in Europe. The corporation and even the school system that feeds it, evolved in Europe over several industrial revolutions, so our traditions run much deeper. Historical political ideologies probably has a large part to play, too.
Agile is rooted in the free agency of workers to self-organise in the way that works best for them, not in a system of silos designed to work best for the ruling class. It is immediately anathema to traditional European corporations, especially professional and financial services companies.
With nowhere else to go, and large knowledge work companies providing the best salaries as well as carrying prestige in the minds of parents wanting the best for their graduate kids, software people fill the lower floors of these companies.
This leads into the third factor: the pain of trying to do great software work within these structures leads to a movement to improve things. We do this not only for our own sanity but also because of the fourth factor.
We love our customers, in spite of our employers. We recognise the end user as one of us. We could plausibly be building an app that our own grandmother will use to manage her pension. We recognise the societal importance of the products of these companies and the obligation to do a great job. And that means working differently, which in so many cases means trying to boil the ocean.
I’ve spent 20 years trying to push a large rock up a skyscraper from a desk in the basement on hardware I’ve had to pinch from leavers. On a couple of occasions I’ve loaded the rock into the elevator and taken it straight to the C-suite.
I’ve sent emails and bought books for old CEOs of large UK companies. If the subject is technology, or why tech companies are succeeding, they haven’t a clue. They think it’s about computers and code, about things that they can buy in.
Not long ago I consulted for an old and fairly well known pension and life insurance company on their first ever web app. I will spare you the full horror movie of that engagement but towards the end, the CEO announced that they were calving the company up and outsourcing IT. This was in 2016, when most of the world’s largest companies were tech or founder-led businesses, thinking different.
To some, IT might mean those people that build laptops and open ports, “bounce” servers, but this UK finance company couldn’t even make that distinction. They saw their entire mission critical product development team, the people they said were saving the company by building this bold new app, as living in the same electronic stationery cupboard as the people that reset domain passwords.
The company is effective dead now. The outsourcing company was terrible, ran on an even more straggly shoestring from offices full of old clutter and junk, so all the good people left, of course. The other parts of the business were sold to another one of the corporate walking dead.
Why are we burning ourselves out, thanklessly busting a gut for nothing when we could be working with likeminded people on something great?
Post-pandemic, there’ll be much more remote work, more options than ever and you’ll likely not need to be paid so much to live near the city and shell out for rail services, expensive food, dry cleaning and childcare. That means there might be more mums, too, reducing the ambient levels of testosterone.
Right now, the most responsible thing we can do as software and product people is turn off the life support.
“Capitalism proceeds through creative destruction.” ~ Zygmunt Bauman
