Our “Dog-Eat-Dog” IT World Is A Very Real And Destructive Path With No Good End

This was just posted on LinkedIn … I was struck by the sentiment of this guy and although I feel sorry for him it might make him feel better if you knows that he’s far from alone…

Not that there are a lot of true “Haters” out there who are basically just a-hole Trolls, but the “Oh … you’re the competition” thing is just rampant … oddly even from the biggest software vendors themselves.

This is a problem in the entire tech industry in my opinion – not just VR/AR.  I’m sure that  market is especially frantic right now as it is a classic case of “A Solution Looking For A Problem To Solve” – not being negative here just honest.  I’m in one of those markets myself right now too.

In my marketplace, (you know the one with the little 700 million user-base), I recently went to show my “stuff” to one “competitor” and his response was something like  “I’m not interested in anything that would make it harder for me to sell my complex solutions to clients?”  I know that he was MOSTLY kidding … but just MOSTLY 🙂 ..

There was a time when there was a “Birds-of-a-Feather” attitude and interaction of ideas was commonplace.  We worked together, made fast and long-term friends, “friendly” competitors in the industry and life-long friendships with many clients as well. But not anymore.

The fact is that the ultimate customer for tech solutions is being “treated like a mushroom”  (look it up 😉 ) by members of our industry only driven by the maintenance and support of their own legitimacy and the tech that THEY only know – apparently.

And businesses haven’t caught on to this because their managers are in the same boat.

I believe that this is because of the constant change in the industry. I’ve seen Integrators business just dry up as their customers are sucked up to the Cloud, I’ve seen promises of great wonderful visual solutions that do not discuss how hard it’s really going to get past that one pretty demo, I’ve seen so many friends over 50 just fall right out of the business because they just aren’t wanted anymore, despite their huge experience, their need for gainful employment  and their willingness to work hard and smart.

I believe that all this is simply because the core technologies have got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper (internet, communications generally, computers, software, etc.), while the human component is following the same path … but can only go so far down before disaster happens.

So everyone in IT is under threat of losing their livelihood at any time and this is leading to the natural cornered rat instinct in many people in the industry.  At the same time the economy really does suck (regardless of what they say) as companies are forced to try to save their lives by cost-cutting at all levels.  Yet at the same time these same companies are trying to become more and more dependent on IT and not people.

But the way things are going there just won’t be anyone left in IT to support them.  If business won’t pay or if their expectations are so affected by the BS they hear out there from these same frantically promoting IT vendors and consulting forms, then in the end the whole thing’s gonna come off the rails … and not just their IT departments.

Everyone both in and outside of businesses are hanging onto their jobs/reputations by their fingernails, and in an IT environment when in a second everything you believe could be completely made useless in a single day, people are pretty self-defensive.  As long as  getting another job/gig is impossible unless you are 30 years old and living over your parents’ garage, with 25 years of experience in technology that’s only been on the market for 1 year, people will get even meaner.

Not sure what will fix this.  Frankly I think this is an irreversible trend. It will just get worse and worse as less and less young people go into IT because there just aren’t enough opportunities there, pay is going down and because there is no security.  But it is important not to kid ourselves about this fact and find ways to protect ourselves and our businesses from the inevitable. “Be Prepared”

While we beat each other up like Alan Smithson points out, we ALL lose .. no one wins … not even our Customers.

And in the end the Customers themselves will stand there and say “Where’d everybody go ?” … and no one will answer at any price.

And they will be at fault to a large extent … but we will all be as well for letting all this negativity consume us.  The old saying “We have to hang together or we’ll all hang separately” might just apply here.

Have a nice day everyone 🙂

Dick