• Barx [none/use name]
    ·
    2 months ago

    Absolutely, IT and tech stuff is full of failing up. And it is exacerbsted by generational knowledge gaps that put vaguely millennial-aged people in the "sweet spot" for competent debugging and CS knowledge. The older generations that did not need to update their skills retained positions where those skills had been needed, passing them to a younger generation so they could join a massively incompetent managerial class. And zoomers etc never had to fight much with technical issues so they went straight to frameworks and web stuff.

    Obviously there are exceptions in all cases, but this tendency has lead to a situation where the Boomer/Gen X managerial class does the incompetent things you mention, with everything working only because one or two people under them put out the fires (usually but not always in the millennial range) and when younger still people get hired to replace them (I.e. pay people less) the whole thing explodes and management does its best to fail upwards again while everyone else gets to be unemployed for a while. This can be put off for a while by accidentally hiring competent zoomers that inevitably get sick of that shot and get a different job.

    My comment is really just joking about a silly extreme of this, which is CS students failing to learn basic CS because they think that AI solves everything for them. AI basically becomes the nerd they pay to do their homework poorly and then they will get a job, gear someone sat, "this is all built on linked lists" and have no idea what anyone is talking about despite dropping $130k on a degree that covered that topic a bunch of times.

    PS sorry you have to be in that environment, it sounds very frustrating. Nothing worse than being responsible to fix something that the higher-up decision-makers break. In my experience they even blame you for not fixing it fast enough or preventing the problem in the first place even though they forced the decision despite your objections. Scapegoating is rewarded in these corporate environments, it is how the nepotism fail-children protect their petty fiefdoms.