Not my first post about the state of IT in the last twelve months and I doubt it will be my last but once again, this is all my own thoughts and opinions and certainly nothing to do with my employer or any clients I might work with. I really hope that it is something that changes or we might as well all give up hope, close our laptops and all head off home now.

A post by Keith Wesolowski on his departure from the IT business and why really got me thinking. When I first came into this business, having moved from being a mechanical engineer, it was all the geeky pain in the arse challenges around systems and hardware that I loved so much. The fight, that was often required to get things to work, it was great and such a buzz when things worked. It was all wrong, as much as I loved it, no one in the right mind should consider that spending days fighting drivers just to get a simple piece of hardware to work is sensible and I really do love the fact that we are able to pretty much just plug things in now and they just work. It has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort from lots of people far smarter than I will ever be to allow us this great luxury that people now appear to be taking for granted. With more and more companies moving further and further up the stack, how are we ever going to be able to continue moving forward. All of the cool stuff that we can now do is only because of the strong foundation that has been built under us over the past 30, neigh 50 years. Recently there has been great interest in things like the raspberry Pi and Arduino. Why were they created? No one was playing with hardware anymore. Both have been a great success but I wonder who with and will it be really teaching them the things that we need to be teaching. Yes a whole new generation of developers is great but we will also need electronic engineers, systems administrators, network engineers etc etc.

Sadly all I'm seeing is the call for more and more developers. It appears that they listened to my moan about a Rockstar developers and now everyone is looking for a 10x dev, they apparently deliver 10x more than mere mortals. I'm sure that in the past these people were the ones that everyone said to avoid, yes they could fix anything, yes they could churn out code as fast as a speeding bullet but didn't they do that with scant disregard to everything else? Didn't they stomp all over fellow teams members because they were so great that their ideas had to be right? Didn't the business become so reliant upon them that they could basically hold them to ransom?

I really hope I'm wrong about the future of this wonderful business that so many of us are in. Its very sad to see people like Keith moving on as that is such a wealth of knowledge leaving and he isn't the only one getting disillusioned. I don't know you Keith and we have never met but I think I know how your feeling, all the best for the future!