Why are devs so obsessed with technology?

Last Update: 21.08.2018. By Jens in Newsletter

A rant is coming, so read it or click away, whatever you want it’s your choice.

What I hate the most of my peers is this obsession with technology. Which is the better language, framework, tabs vs spaces, brackets on a new line, TDD or you name it.

There are folks who can argue for days about some tiny detail, who actually nobody cares about. The more I move forward in my own business, the less I care about such things. Just solve the fucking problem in a way it works and does not break in the next month.

The position of brackets does NOT give your customer any value at all. But that’s what they pay for. The outcome, the value, whatever our code is actually solving. Be it making more money or saving money, reducing errors through automation and so on.

Yeah, in my early days I focused a lot on the technical side too. It’s normal, you need to build up experience of actually delivering something and creating software that’s maintainable for some years. But after a while, other things are more important. Like talking with business people, understanding and helping to fix their problems. That’s what developing software is all about. Not some toy with the latest shiny language on the market. It ridiculous how many new languages and frameworks pop up every day nowadays. Do you want to learn them all? Do you really think it makes it better?

And then all this bitching about marketing, project managers and whoever is not technical in any sense. Just because, they don’t know how to code in Java or maybe what an FTP server is, does not make them stupid. Nor are they just sitting there and doing nothing. Or unimportant things. It is a profession and they do things which are important to the company. But devs don’t notice that. I didn’t do. We don’t care. How stupid is that?

You can code all day but without marketing and sales, it does not matter. Nobody is buying and using it. Yeah, I know money is the root of all evil and software should be free and open source.
Honestly, how are you going to put food on the table?

Most of us code for a living. That involves money. So, someone who is paying you must make money with the thingy you built. Yet, this thingy is just a tiny part of the whole game of running a business. And that part is important too and not run by morons....