99.9% correct
I’m a technology pessimist.
It’s always broken. There are always more bugs to fix. There will be outages. What they call “innovation”, I call, “a new way to fail”.
You’d be this way too, after a decade of MongoDB balancer problems, half-baked card processing APIs, random disappearance of EC2 instances, the endless parade of security-destroying bugs (now with cute names like “Heartbleed” and “Spectre”), and bash syntax errors. I’ve lost years of my life to this stuff, pondering what trap door led to today’s “impossible” corner case, pulling yet another block from the legacy code Library of Babel/jenga tower (TODO write tests).
I’m not alone in this, either; a lot of us feel this way; proto-pessimist James Mickens, in The Night Watch:
The systems programmer has written drivers for buggy devices whose firmware was implemented by a drunken child or a sober goldfish. The systems programmer has traced a network problem across eight machines, three time zones, and a brief diversion into Amish country, where the problem was transmitted in the front left hoof of a mule named Deliverance. The systems programmer has read the kernel source, to better understand the deep ways of the universe, and the systems programmer has seen the comment in the scheduler that says “DOES THIS WORK LOL,” and the systems programmer has wept instead of LOLed, and the systems programmer has submitted a kernel patch to restore balance to The Force and fix the priority inversion that was causing MySQL to hang. A systems programmer will know what to do when society breaks down, because the systems programmer already lives in a world without law.
Remember that stuff about crazy people and bad code? The internet is that except it’s literally a billion times worse. Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There’s a team at a Google office that hasn’t slept in three days. Somewhere there’s a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she’s dead. And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.
Then there are the technology optimists, the ones who, again from Mickens, do not “secretly believe that true progress is a fantasy”. These are the people who buy the latest iPhone the day it’s released; the people replacing all the switches in their house with ones that work with Zigbee, or HomeKit, only to do it again next year with WeMo, or Z-Wave, or whatever comes next.
They do this stuff to themselves, for fun.
As a technology pessimist, my first — and mostly correct — instinct, is to dismiss the hope of the technology optimists. 99.9% of the time, maybe more, I’m right.
Betting against progress is always the safe bet.
The problem is that pesky 0.1% of the time when they’re right and you’re wrong. Those are the once-in-a-generation companies and things that beat the odds, the Black Swans. They really matter. They make you question your jaded ways as the world changes before your eyes, their founders get rich, and all of us pessimists kick ourselves for not “seeing it coming”.
I’m still trying to figure this one out. I’m not sure what to do about it, but keeping my ego in check and being less critical seems like a good start.
