Return on Invention: Own Dreams vs. Breakthroughs at Work Your IT Department Never Asked You for.
Sorry for staying silent for a couple of years. Nothing much to add on the topics I covered: fair employment, meritocracy, and professional growth. The “miserable” 2020 has been uneventful (knock on wood) for me and my family. I feel for my favorite restaurants going out of business. My friends and colleagues brace for the next president’s promise to open the floodgates and let the “discount resources” in again, erasing the brief renaissance of IT hiring and wages — something I haven’t seen since the happy pre-outsourcing 1999.
This totally unjustified hiring boom shouldn’t matter to you — the topic of this article. Riding the wave will only get you disappointed, when it subsides about six months from now if not sooner. I learned it the hard way in 2002, that marked the beginning of mass “outsourcing” of, let’s be honest, not very useful “enterprise architect” and other glorified technician IT jobs. It’s healthy to vent about such disappointment. I do not regret a single post in my blog. It was very entertaining to indulge in bitching and moaning about the Great IT Consulting Food Chain, bodyshops and their hourly-billed “bodies”, age-discriminating Googles of the industry, and hilarious corporate IT department follies. You won’t hear it from me again. Not here. However I do plan to explore that topic in a more appropriate format.
I plan to write a book, that’ll hopefully materialize as a movie — 100x more hilarious, than the iconic Office Space. Yes, that was a reference to Px100. Whatever I write: code or fiction, that’s my target. I need an interrupted 4–5 months to write it, which I, hopefully, won’t have in 2021, because of my other priorities. Writing remains my most enjoyable hobby to date, however just a hobby.
Like a good engineer, I already thought out the perfect plot and characters: not really different from writing elegant code. It’ll be a lighthearted comedy about corporate IT to bring attention to a much bigger issue, the Western Civilization is facing right now: an awkward politically incorrect question why everyone in the out of control Earth population has to work for living. Particularly in creative fields like software development, that’s eliminated most of dumb coding by 2020, at least at the handful of real tech companies employing real programmers.
I’ll never get tired of saying it: there is a limited supply of real programmers on Earth, India included. That is, people able to write the code that works rather than create five bugs by fixing one. Stuffed (not a typo) with bodyshop-supplied “bodies”, corporate IT projects show better, than any other business, how throwing headcount on the problem has the exact opposite effect. I’ve changed enough IT jobs (well-known Fortune 100 corporations) to notice, how the infamous late-90s IT project failure rate jumped from 70 to 90% over the last 20 years (of mass “outsourcing”), and keeps rising. “No one’s ever gotten fired…”, right? Originally “…for buying IBM”, though you get what I’m saying about all “challenging” “digital transformations”.
It hurt me so much being part of those “failures” (obviously successes for staffing bodyshops and the rest of the hourly-charging IT Consulting Food Chain), I started working on Px100 to give the two (out of a 100) real programmers the last tool needed to get rid of the 98 bug-generating “bodies” (along with narrow semi-programmer specialists, managers of all kinds tasked with “keeping them (98/100) busy”, and so on). Ran properly, all software projects on Earth can be fulfilled by the limited number of real software engineers for decades to come — until the technology makes another leap e.g. the true AI.
The question remains: what those 98/100 are going to do for living after their ever important job of making layers of the staffing middlemen their commissions and getting in the way of the capable 2/100 was eliminated through technology? Colonize Mars? It’ll be up to Musk to “keep them busy”? It’s pointless laughing at dysfunctional IT departments without asking this question.
Back to my own employment. To sum up my career during the past two years, LionStack’s revenue predictably dried up (even before COVID), I depleted my savings, and took a day job in corporate IT. As you can guess, it provided lots of invaluable material for my future book. Seriously, I had choices two years ago and am very satisfied with my decision to go back to IT and look at everything I wrote about it again, from a close distance, to refine my vision and plans to help my unlucky fellow engineers, rejected by the Googles of the industry.
Looking back at my career, my current employer is not worse, than any of the IT departments I worked at in the past. Perhaps after analyzing IT atrocities in depth (including this blog articles), I’m more conscious and notice more things. Or maybe it reached the point after 25 years of dealing with the same follies, where I can no longer take dysfunctional IT seriously — to get upset about the bleak career future. It’s beyond worrying and complaining for me. I’m sure many of you feel the same way. Give me a couple of years. You’ll see the book.
Lessons Learned
Now to the more important topic: what I learned from my entrepreneurial mistakes. No more excuses. I am proud of Px100 platform, that can give Oracle and Salesforce the run for their money. I developed it to be 100x more productive myself (or with a small team) — to offer SMBs multi-million enterprise SaaS at the fraction of Oracle and Salesforce “implementation: (meaning hourly consulting) cost. The thing is, since I didn’t intend to commercially sell the tool itself (or offer it open-source and woo investors, apply to an accelerator, etc.), I used it to build products, which in turn needed to be sold. Note the passive tense. I wanted someone else to sell what I built.
And that’s what killed LionStack. I was passionate about the tool I invented. However, I didn’t care much what I built with it: CRMs, ERPs, HRMSes, etc. I knew they would be better than heavy conventional offerings, but I was looking at them from the engineer’s perspective instead of customer’s. I’ve never fathomed working 8 to 5 in Sales or HR departments using their awkward software. It wasn’t my lifelong dream to get my hands on a much better product.
Honestly, no one is truly excited about HRMS systems, as Steve Jobs once pointed out with his “want vs. need” remark. We need our toilets to work, don’t we? A toilet inventor can get very passionate about the (for the lack of a better term) “User Experience”. At the end of the day it’s still a toilet or another piece of plumbing we acknowledge only when it breaks.
In the absence of consumer hype Steve believed in — for the product to sell itself, someone at LionStack needed to have that passion to infect the customers with, and convince them to buy our SaaS. A passionate person always perseveres and figures out the way. I can’t blame my (business development) cofounders for the lack of said passion, because I didn’t have it myself. No passion == no sales. As simple, as that. Wanting to make it in the startup world financially is not enough. Building a great product is not enough.
It’s easier to build and sell something you love personally, don’t you think? I’d like to start a new mini-series on technology problems I find fascinating and am going to devote my career to, whether I’m hired to solve them or do it in my spare time.
They are vastly different from defeating business software follies and challenging dinosaurs like Oracle and Salesforce with Px100. I could evolve it indefinitely: generative native mobile apps to give React native the run for its money, switching to non-blocking I/O (Functional Reactive Programming paradigm) at the persistence level, externalizing it lambda-style thanks to Amazon and others offering those serverless capabilities, and so on.
Time to Chase My Dreams
And do something different — something, that came from passion rather than proving to my employers I can do a much better job solving their problems. Neither my bosses, nor even the company owners (whether the real founders or obscure shareholders) are passionate about the best solution for their “digital transformation” issues. Hate the kids reinventing TikTok and Instagram all you want, those single-purpose products come from real passion unlike CRM and ERP “plumbing”. No, I’m not building a yet another social network or messenger. I want to tackle something slightly more challenging.
I’m an engineer. I’m not afraid of learning completely new technologies to build a 100x more amazing product, than Px100. More importantly I don’t need to build it alone “in a garage”. My recent startup adventure taught me how to find likeminded engineers, scientists, and other specialists, and build a lean team of experts.
Lastly, unlike Musk, who couldn’t stand working for the man a single day in his life, I can join the right company to build things one can dream about — whether it’s my dream, or theirs doesn’t matter. There were almost none in mid-90s, when Musk started. Enough of them today.
A Few Ideas
Here’s what I’d love to do, ideally for living OTOMH. I’ll try to write a separate post on each topic and provide the links below, as I publish.
Next-gen Mainstream Computer Architecture and post-UNIX OS
Doing away with files, databases, and block device drivers. Way overdue.
Digital Version of the Human Brain vs “Artificial” Intelligence
Every earthling’s dream: immortality. Nuff said.
Matrix for the Masses
Personal heaven on demand. Controversial forbidden fantasies? Not enough to stop me from wanting it for everyone to enjoy responsibly in the privacy of their VR goggles. We’ve perfected staying connected during COVID lockdowns. Time to take it to the new level by building the perfect world populated by your “partners in crime”, though mostly by perfect virtual companions: AI people and creatures from your wildest dreams.
Democratizing Art
Have to say something important to the world, but lack the multi-million movie budget? True cinematic art will remain a pro field, produced by large crews using expensive equipment, while the general population will stick to TikTok or whatever comes next. There should be an easy to use AI/NLP-based alternative in between, ideally closer to the former than the latter.
VR and AR Beyond First-Person Shooter Games
Medical, pharmaceutical, and other critical applications. Already happening. Not fast enough.
Spam- and Lie-Free Internet
Picking up, where Google left off. The battle between AI/ML lie detection and AI-based liar bots is doomed. Time to change the information platforms and information delivery at their core to prevent lies at the (geek term) “kernel level”.
Haggle- and Middleman-Free Purchases of Consumer Products
A few years ago I was briefly involved in an attempt to disrupt the horrible car dealership experience. Lesson learned: be wary of partnering with flaky “people with ideas” and investing months of intense coding into a would-be unicorn startup. More importantly, a steam roller like Amazon will keep eliminating all sorts of middlemen, so I don’t need to stand up to old-school dealerships on my own.
Financed sales of cars and other complex products in an e-commerce manner require automating non-trivial logistics due to tricky business processes: my core expertise after 20 years in corporate IT. This is a classic case, when I’ll be happy to join a company and collaborate on an important idea, rather than take the credit for its invention. I’ll have enough opportunities to make mini-inventions on the job — solving the aforementioned logistics issues.
Smarter Transportation Infrastructure to Reduce Demand for Battery Capacity
Whether you drive an electric car or enjoy an ultra-thin laptop, you cannot ignore the current cobalt crisis, let alone inhuman work conditions of its miners e.g. in Congo. Musk’s tunnel idea or another fully-automated cargo transportation infrastructure, we need to start thinking in terms of flexible electric trains, that automatically accept and release self-driving carts w/o stopping, or better yet the new take on pneumatic tube technology; Instead of electrifying conventional trucks congesting conventional roads, let alone in the worst way possible: by putting massive cobalt batteries in them.
Precise Tech Hiring
Last, but not least, something I feel very strongly about and must do personally in this life: fix the atrocious tech recruiting system. The change never comes from the middleman. It won’t come from “busy” (among other things I’d avoid pointing out, as I’m done complaining about IT) hiring managers with MBA degrees. It must come from us, engineers, passionate about solving complex problems and skilled/experienced to deliver vs. facilitating and mitigating in a statistical darts in the dark MBA manner.
The idea is simple — the new kind of union: precisely engineered by engineers and for engineers. I want to help the poor hiring managers at truly good companies (vs. typical “Top 10 Best Places to Work”) starved of true programmers the Earth has a limited number of, India included. However way more than that, I view such vetted community of top engineers as a new “founder dating” place and pure, meaning investor-less kind of accelerator. Let VCs churn largely government money “investing” in vaporware, and take matters into our own hands. No one needs a data center or even an office nowadays to build something using free open-source libraries and inexpensive Cloud services.
