A spectre is haunting competent professionals everywhere: the spectre of isolation. Good, hard-working and capable professionals are being sidelined in favour of convincing grifters. Quality of work is increasingly being ignored as irrelevant, even when failures actively kill people. And even when we do find ourselves in work, or in business, actually talking with or communicating with people beyond the most superficial interactions quickly proves to be impossible.
This situation is inhuman, and it needs to end.
The Engineer's tale
A few days ago my good friend Nik (who, by-the-by, is an absolutely brilliant person and who blogs over at Ludicity: go check his blog out) had the misfortune of being in a three-hour meeting that featured a slideshow. In this slideshow was a slide containing a hundred little boxes, each of which contained a technical term or buzzword. There was "web server", 'Firewall' and "Online Certificate Authority". We had "Directory as a Service" and "Robotics" (in a company that primarily runs on database technology). None of these had any real connections to each other.
So far, this is unusually bad, but perhaps not qualitatively different to other stuff that people have to deal with on the regular. What I found curious, however, was the fact that when my friend asked what any of this had to do with anything, the response from leadership was simply "you're right: there are a lot of unanswered questions", followed by him simply continuing as though the entire point of the meeting hadn't been undermined.
This is a brutally isolating situation to be in: you can clearly see that what your workplace is presenting to you or doing at all is bullshit, you point it out to people, and it becomes clear that the people you work with and spend much of your day with are aware of this on some level, but don't care. It's almost like the modern Russian nihilism that thinks that every democracy is fake, and thus that there's no point fighting against Putin's regime. Moreover, anything you do in order to try and change the situation (code reviews, for example) are consistently ignored, and on some level, you probably know that your attempts to care about such things as engineering quality are doing nothing but making other people resent you.
It's no surprise that, eventually, this leads to burnout and some serious mental strain.
High School Never Ends
So, why is this something I'm writing a few thousand words about? Well, for a start, we as a society rely heavily on competent professionals doing their jobs in order for everything to work. From our healthcare system, to our agriculture, to our electrical grid, we rely on smart, capable people to make these things not fall apart. Anything that's leaving these people feeling isolated or rejected is thus a top priority for us to fix.
Even us engineers, for all our flaws, want to feel liked, accepted and valued by the places we work. We want to feel that we're understood, and that other people value what we value. And so much of the time, we just don't. We see people who are far worse than us at our craft gain prestige by means of sycophancy, while we burn out and are eventually discarded. We see terrible work that could have life-destroying consequences be pushed into production, heedless of the human cost. And if we speak about this at all, we're shunned in social settings. And so we're left with a choice: hide all of this and slowly die inside, isolated from those we work with, or speak out, and face the consequences.
The issue, so far as I can tell, is that so many decisions in business and in our societies in general are made on the basis of vibes. Rigor and care aren't valued: all that matters is what sounds good, and what can make your superiors elevate you. Business leaders make decisions based on what feels good and the latest article they read in business press, and will never, under any circumstances, admit that they're wrong. The basic logic of our economy has become performative: we say things in order to enact a performance of good business, in complete opposition to actually delivering value.
Ultimately, the Bowling for Soup song was right: High School Never Ends. The workforce is the same cliquey, empty, institutionalised place that our schools are. Care, value and quality are routinely sidelined and isolated, as are the people that champion them.
The impact
The psychological impact of this is not pretty. So much of being psychologically healthy relies on mutually supportive communities with similar values. Not being included in the work or business community that you're a part of will thus, no matter who you are or where you're placed, read as rejection. Oftentimes it actually is rejection, but even when you're outwardly accepted, being in a space where you hold completely different values to what almost everyone else expresses still doesn't feel good. Your ideas are consistently ignored, your need to do good work is repeatedly shat on and you have very little that you can talk about with your colleagues. Eventually, you wind up feeling as though you're trapped behind a sheet of glass, able to observe all the comings and goings of your community but unable to interact with it or change it in a meaningful way: your experience is just that alien to everyone else's.
After facing a few years of this, it's hard not to conclude that the society you're in simply doesn't value what you bring to the table, no matter how valuable, profitable or blatantly necessary it is for the proper function of society. And that's a pretty crushing realisation to have to deal with: the hard-won skills that you've spent your entire life cultivating and that are extremely important to keep things like our electricity grid running are apparently way less valued by your society than a malevolent clown spewing buzzwords at an ever-increasing rate or a principal engineer who doesn't know how to use functions and thus just copy-pastes the same block of code two thousand times.
And it then becomes apparent that your options for actually dealing with this are all bad. The first option, and the one that many people recommend, is to try and reshape yourself to fit somehow. Give up on what you know you can bring to the world, give up on yourself. Either check out and put in minimal effort, or drink the Kool-Aid and somehow persuade yourself that all this is right and good.
Unfortunately, for your average high-performing professional, this just isn't possible. We know what we value, we know what kind of quality is possible and above all, we know what the consequences of doing things badly are. Ignoring the consequences of people spewing buzzwords rather than using source control, however, is an experience roughly akin to us repeatedly jamming a fork into our eye. Consequently, the only high-performing professionals that you'll be able to get are the ones that are completely psychologically broken, and those tend not to be particularly effective.
The second option is to go into business on your own account, and this is where the social isolation really starts punishing you. While I'm sure that neurodivergence is a thing that has some influence in a lot of cases, the plain fact is that becoming really good at a given field of study and really caring about it reshapes your brain in ways that mean we suffer a lot of the same issues (I will state that I may well be neurodivergent, but the more time I spend around professionals, the more questions I have about that). In any case, putting the effort in to gain mastery makes you weird in the eyes of people who haven't put that work in. That makes it harder to form the kinds of business relationships that you need to win business, makes it harder for you to compete for the kinds of useless-but-lucrative work that most of the market consists of, and people seem to almost sense the alienation in ways that make it that much harder to build the kinds of strong ties that business relies on.
Finally, you can detach. Live off whatever meagre income you can scrape together, learn how to bake your own bread and grow your own vegetables, and try to make your own way in those parts of the world that aren't controlled by the bullshit artists. This is, unfortunately, what a lot of us end up doing. Of course, this is punished by many of our societies as well, but the greatest loss here, I think, is the waste of talent and wisdom that this represents. Many brilliantly talented people, who could help contribute to mitigating the climate change crisis, fighting poverty or building new technology that could change our lives are instead barely scraping by themselves, while incompetent grifters make bank typing "import openai" or wasting millions of dollars of money on a Snowflake migration.
I don't really know what can be done about this state of affairs: clearly the only permanent solution is for our culture to come around on respecting and valuing expertise and mastery. Restricting ourselves to the realms of the possible, I think those of us who do value quality work need to connect and organise. Unions, professional organisations and even clandestine discord servers all have a part to play in this process, but ultimately, we are much stronger together than we are alone. And this has to be dealt with: the more we devalue committed, talented and serious professionals, the more things in our society are just going to break and fall apart. Things are going to get shittier and shittier, and I fear that in the end, we'll simply collapse before we start taking people seriously.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some dough proofing that I need to see to.