Why Jobs Suck These Days

(I hear a lot of IT gurus say: ‘it’s no longer fun and I want out’)

There was a time — not that long ago — when tech was about doing. You had an idea you grabbed your soldering iron, a box of floppies a compiler and got to it. You didn’t need a Jira board to tell you what to do. You just did it!

Fast-forward to now: everything’s a meeting. A pre-meeting. A post-meeting. A retro about the meeting a bloody Excel sheet 🤮 because people can’t even code a little data entry app anymore — when it’s easier than ever. We’ve got tickets to describe tickets, stand-ups to discuss why nothing stood up, and TEAMS channels referring to other TEAMS channels, “stuck in digital bureaucratic ping-pong”.

Back in the 80s and 90s, engineers were pirates — caffeine-fueled, curious, smart, creative and occasionally on fire (literally). They built the foundations of the digital world. Now, we’re just optimising the margins of it, one sprint at a time, while a “product alignment lead” updates some useless KanBan board.

And recruiters! Once upon a time, companies hired people because they knew what they needed. They took responsibility- and pride for their hires. The head of engineering would hear about someone he’d ring them up and the next day you could start — because a culture fit. When you spoke the same nerd dialect, you were part of the team and it was fun!

Now, we have recruiters who don’t know what an API is but insist you need 12 years of experience in a 4-year-old framework 🙄 And don’t understand that k3s, k8s, AKS, EKS is all just Kubernetes.

Everything’s over-processed, over-managed, and over-approved. We’ve turned creativity into compliance paperwork and replaced freedom with “cross-functional synergy” — which is basically code for no one dares to actually do anything.

Thus, 20% of the people carry 90% of the load, while the rest drift through meetings like corporate spectres haunting the Jira board. We used to filter for skill — now we filter for people who can survive six rounds of interviews without saying anything controversial. Recruiters and managers proudly “hire a new family member” — correction, it’s just a job that people do in exchange for money. That’s why there are so many IT freelancers — we aren’t orphans, we don’t need a new ‘daddy!’. Who gave you that idea? The result? A demotivated workforce optimised for visibility, not velocity.

If the people who built the internet had to file a Jira ticket to request permission to innovate, we’d still be sending faxes.

We didn’t need “alignment.” We had ambition. We didn’t have “stakeholders.” We had builders.

It’s time we stop worshipping process and start making progress again. Stop this American management culture and bring back the hacker culture. Engineers can manage themselves just fine and I’ll guarantee you, you’ll find the people and pro-tip: keep HR people away from IT openings!