Why do I bother getting angry about software?

When I started writing, it came from a place of ennui — absolute despair at the amount of waste I was seeing in the technology sector since leaving university. I was paid spectacularly well, but nothing I produced had any value. No one I knew in the corporate world was producing any value, save for those who were completely deluding themselves. Even the most talented people spent all of their time trying (and failing) to stop uncaring amateurs and empty suits from blowing millions on nonsense.

Two years later, after much writing and agonizing, I've quit my job to start my own consultancy. Whether it works or not surprisingly doesn't bother me at all — I know the risks I am taking. Money comes, money goes, at least I'm not storming the beaches of Normandy.

No, the question that actually keeps me up is this:

Will I look back on the past two years of writing and think "Software engineering doesn't really matter in almost any context. I wasn't putting anyone on the moon — I should just have taken the easy money and shut my mouth?"

In six months, perhaps I will find myself wishing that I had kept doing the easy thing, wishing that I could draw a six-figure salary to do nothing more strenuous than sit quietly through a meeting every morning until being laid off in the next restructure, five years down the line, then repeat the same tired trick until I retire.

I wonder about this because many people, either by outright speech or implication, have stated that trying to improve things in the world is fundamentally misguided. They would not say it in these precise words, because they would realize those words are horrific, but instead emit "wisdom" at every possible juncture to discourage one from seeking meaning or change.

I. Gratitude

The advice I received in handling this consisted of variations on two main themes. The first theme comes from the older generation, retired, home-owning, and convalescing after a lifetime of grinding away at the gears of society. They would encourage the youth in their families to enjoy ease while they have it, and enjoy money while it flows. I would hear:

You're being paid very well. You should be happy. Work is always terrible but some work is more terrible. Change will never happen at an organization so lower your sights. You are being spared back-breaking labor and have air conditioning. Be diligent for moral reasons, but not diligent enough to affect systemic change. Clock out at 5 PM. Don't think about the job too much. Get a hobby. Liking what you do at work is an extreme privilege, and you should expect less.

There are sentiments here that are true. The romantic element of waking up to milk cows at 5:00 AM must surely have lost its charm by 4:59 AM the same day, leaving nothing but winter cold and aching joints. My grandfather was forced to work as a translator for the Japanese during the occupation of Malaysia. My grandmother would tell us stories about how, due to British sugar rationing, they'd worked out which plants could be ground to sweeten tea. There are difficulties I can scarcely imagine. It's important to remember that, as much as the modern corporation can produce real depression, it isn't as bad as working for an institution that publicly beheaded people a few hundred meters from my childhood home.

In this worldview, starting a business or doing anything different is needless risk. Starting the business is risk. Telling a journalist about waste is risk. Letting a grifter know in a public setting that you see them as they are is risk. Risk, the dreadful spike of anxiety when a number in a banking application doesn't go up on precisely the schedule one is accustomed to! Risk, the willing acceptance of which implies personal immaturity and personality defect! Risk, the specter that keeps people in miserable situations, because rote depression is easier than novel anxiety! Risk, a board game that is universally reviled and still overrated!

But my father is a surgeon now, and he did this because my grandfather made the sacrifices required to support him through medical school. Not the measly sacrifice of a few years here or there studying, but sacrificing a lifetime of youth and experiences to propel his children into an astonishing future. That was the hard thing they had to do. A delinquent motorcycle racer and a public school teacher produced one of Asia's most talented surgeons, another doctor currently sitting on seven properties¹, and a PhD in electrical engineering living in San Francisco.

There was a time where struggling through Japanese lessons was the only way forward, but that time is certainly not now, for me and for many of us. Instead, for those of us who are lucky enough to hold comfortable office jobs and write software for a living, it seems to me that our challenge lies in having a shred of backbone.

II. Cynicism

From the younger generation, of the variety that watches social media content which accurately ridicules corporate culture and clumsily decries capitalism², I hear:

All the houses are gone, and work is done to make the Boring Illuminati that runs the world richer. Everything is fundamentally bad, and society is falling apart at the seams. Liking what you do at work is a trick you're playing on yourself on behalf of corporate overlords, and you should affect an air of total irony as the last line of defense.

There are parts of this that are true too.

Supermarkets put half-price chocolate at the self-checkout because a certain class of motherfucker doesn't think that there's an issue with establishing a correlation between obesity-related deaths and profit. Most companies will wring you for every drop of blood and sweat you've got, then lay you off because KPMG said it'll let your executive stick to their 20% cost-cutting mandate. The system will not prevent you from throwing another dollar after the first $100,000 on a mobile game designed for maximum addictiveness. Recruiters will ask you to name a salary first in case you say a number that's half as much as you could actually get. The system is out to get you, and it will get you if you lack sufficient tactical acumen. If you uncritically produce, without thought for who gets the surplus and how the system you inhabit behaves, you will be uncritically consumed.

This is by far a great deal less respectable than the position put forth by the older generation, and I am ashamed to admit that I've flirted with it half-heartedly. This type of person trends towards insisting that all ways of interacting with work in a sincere manner fundamentally consist of you being personally exploited, and the only sensible path is to maliciously, preferably with a healthy dose of sneering irony, extract wealth from the system before it gets you first. They might make some concessions for cases where the work has a clear positive impact for society — say, firefighting — but otherwise they will internally and externally ridicule care for craft if it looks like work.

This pure cynicism doesn't go anywhere. I could phone it in, and I've done so in the past, and get some cushy job well hidden amidst an ocean of squabbling bureaucrats. And then what? Work on projects that I know will never succeed for the next thirty years, then die? Sit around for eight hours a day, juggling spreadsheets and sharing TikToks about how funny it is that my manager is blowing paramedic budgets on fraudulent AI tools, then die?

To quote Freddie deBoer:

I know, I know, I know: it’s a defense mechanism, it’s a coping mechanism, capitalism killed all my hopes so I’m entitled to this, I hate my dad, yeah yeah yeah. You certainly are entitled to live this way. The question, my friend, is whether you actually want to live this way. How’s that coping mechanism going for you, hmmm? You coping pretty good? Posting Simpsons memes really defending you against the drudgery and injustice of a broken world? I’m guessing not! How many times a day do you have to evince derision without directly stating it to be impregnable? It seems exhausting. And how fucking old are people going to get, exactly, before they decide it’s beneath their dignity to live their entire lives in sneer quotes?

For months, I've struggled on and off with this, and I didn't know what it was appropriate or inappropriate to say about this. Then I had an experience, in a hospital.

III. Optimism

At about 6:42 AM last Tuesday, I awoke in a great mood, knowing that I had the first of many days off work. My only plan was to read Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment. As is the way of these things, this plan lasted approximately sixty seconds, as at 6:43 AM I received a phone call from my very panicked partner who had decided to head to the emergency department. The great unifying experience for adults worldwide, from which a great deal of empathy and mutual goodwill should flow, is the experience of swallowing dread and going to the hospital without complaining.

By 8:00 AM, we receive the verdict that she's fine, and it was all a false alarm. You can all calm down too. At this stage, I have nothing better to do than play Mario Kart with her to keep the boredom at bay, and watch the hospital running.

For all the people complaining about governmental inefficiency, including me, Guy That Worked In Government And Ran Screaming, the degree to which everything worked was remarkable. In fact, it was beyond remarkable — it was an unbelievable testament to whatever light we have managed to build into society.

My partner was triaged and admitted within ten minutes of arriving, and within fifteen minutes had been seen by a doctor. The nurses smiled and joked, but a glance at the endless trail of wires and oxygen canisters and flickering monitors reminded me that the least competent of these people was probably trained to a higher level than me, and I try pretty hard. I think back on my father's study, five massive dark-wood bookshelves packed with perhaps two hundred dusty medical tomes, and it occurs to me that he may have read all of them.

For the first time in many years, I was participating in a system where I was acutely aware that there were adults in the room. Adults who do not have recourse to blaming Deloitte when things go wrong, for whom the phrase "post-mortem" means something decidedly more serious than yet another flaccid meeting on why the tenth project in a row has failed. If disaster struck at that moment, professionals would have handled it, without the expectation of trite failure that we have become accustomed to as a society. Perhaps the quality might have been less than it otherwise might be because Sturgeon's Law is broadly true everywhere, but it would still have been far superior to the pathetic standard we accept in software. Someone would be allowed to solve the problem, and if they really fucked it up, there would have been a reckoning later.

One room over, there was a man, drunk out of his mind, flanked by two police officers who were listening to him explain how furious his wife would be, and working out whether he had problems at home that needed addressing. And listen, I'm a brown guy with a beard from a country with shariah courts. I become very nervous around police-like figures such as airport security, and they in turn "randomly" check me for bombs at every opportunity, a beautifully symmetric relationship for which I am eternally grateful, please don't arrest me. But even I concede that the system was working.

As we were waiting to be discharged, I could hear an elderly Greek grandmother being addressed very kindly by a social worker, who was trying to work out if the patient needed government-provided assistance around the house to avoid whatever had landed her in the hospital in the first place. At one point, the social worker offered to bring in a Greek translator.

Finally, my partner is discharged, and while I know that Australian healthcare is cheap, the level of care was extremely high and a specialist team was consulted. I have already estimated a A$2,000 bill, which I would have paid gratefully despite my newly self-employed status.

The whole thing was free, other than A$20 in antibiotics.

The experience struck me profoundly. The societal machinery required to make that happen is unbelievable. You can have a team of specialists weigh in on whatever is bothering you, review your blood results, and provide you intravenous fluids, within an hour of turning up at a building that is open to the public. Each of those specialists trained for somewhere between five to ten years in some of the most rigorous educational environments in the world, and you can just get their help whenever. If you can't make it to the hospital, we can have an ambulance turn up at your door in minutes using the public investment of roads. We have so much surplus that we can dig up Greek translator for a grandmother to better allocate even more surplus to ensure she's getting enough help around the house.

Guess what? That didn't happen because a bunch of people decided to give up for the day.

IV. Anger

Someone occasionally writes in to say that they love the blog, but it's depressing. I've never understood this. The only time I felt depressed while writing was my first post on February 27, 2023, when I wrote that my work felt worthless. Every post since then has been either a story, an assessment of something infuriating, or my glorious victories but it is only depressing if you read any of those assessments then curl into the fetal position and think "I am helpless. Nothing can be fixed. I will now return to the Pain Zone, where the only deliverable is a stony-faced man dedicating five Story Points of effort to kicking me in the stomach".

Get angry instead.

We can call the depression void-gazing. Everyone does it sometimes, but step two has to be wrenching your gaze away from the void and doing something. There's nothing in the void but more void and the curse, upon staring overlong, of beginning to think that our media landscape needs more "dark and gritty" TV shows. We have to do better, because I just watched Season 6 of Buffy for the first time and it was very bad. Just awful.

On the flip side, some people take a step back and say "Blood tests! Humanity walking on the moon! Polio eradicated!", and do this gleefully all the time because it is a comfortable mode of being. It's certainly personally healthier than void-gazing all day. But Jesse Alford, in a private conversation, kicked off a lot of this post by referring to the people constantly pushing this narrative of "things are great, chill out" as succor peddlers.

The thing is that there's still void out there. I failed to find work for a reader a few weeks ago, and they are homeless now. I'm no longer in contact with them, as I don't believe they have email access. If I had stopped being a coward and started my business two years ago, I probably could have hired them for three months to keep them off the streets for a bit. Does work not matter now, hypothetical TikTok ironist? Huh? Yeah, that's what I thought.

The service at the hospital was fantastic, but that's because we arrived around 7 AM when it was quiet as opposed to having the typical one hour wait period due to resource misallocation. The nurses were phenomenal, but many are burned out and thinking of quitting — and the median pay for a job so sophisticated and good-aligned is tens of thousands of dollars lower than what some of the most incompetent software engineers I've ever met make.

Paramedics in Melbourne decorate their vehicles with messages about their absurdly poor working conditions.

And there were so many small things to go along with this. The hospital layout didn't leave the nurses with enough sunlight. While it might be fine for me just dipping in for an afternoon, improvements to the meals would probably meaningfully improve the lives of people who are in for extended stays. Provide notepads so the nurses aren't scribbling on their palms. The care that goes into little things shows up in the lives of cancer patients, even if it's mass-produced sandwich design.

What does any of that have to do with being angry about bad software?

Well, this experience about an organization borderline-fraudulently burning through A$1.2M from Google happened at a medical facility. This one about a A$500K Snowflake overspend happened at another non-profit. I left the government because the lifesaving project I was initially assigned to was repeatedly delayed because a politician's pet project was having SharePoint issues. By sheer coincidence, at a party last week a nurse from the same emergency department revealed that they're struggling immensely with their ancient Electronic Medical Record system. Much of this is due to a bunch of people doing their jobs like disaffected chimpanzees, and a bunch of other people thinking "Well, I've heard that conflict is bad, so I am going to gently raise these issues in the way that authority figures have prescribed, which don't threaten me because they also don't threaten them".

All that money and effort could be paramedic salaries, and roads, and books for impoverished children. In all of those circumstances, the people that stayed quiet and covered things up, including me³, can essentially go fuck themselves. Every little bit of uncaring makes the world a little bit worse, and once you're at a certain level of personal security then you have to own that.

At the end of the day, the reason I started the business isn't for the money. I was on track to be very comfortable. I started a consultancy because it is the only way that I see to position good software engineers to meaningfully exert violence against the flawed part of large systems. It is a tactical intervention, wherein I have an excuse to spend time studying why things are the way they are, and insert ethical practitioners into critical parts of companies with executive backing.

When we kicked it off, I had the extremely modest goal of just getting out of the office setting. It was selfish, even if part of the motivation was to encourage other people to do the same for themselves. But I've had time to think, and talk to the team, and we're instead going to push for more quality in software engineering in our local area. And when that's better, we'll keeping doing that by running grifters off the roads on a project-by-project basis. If we run out of dorks to rinse in Melbourne, we'll prey on grifters in broader Australia. Just watch us, we'll run a motherfucker out of business, we don't care. The next poor sap that tries to sell engineers who don't use version control to emergency services, a thing that I have seen, is going to catch a terminal case of Smite Evil.

To put it very simply, the little things matter. The sandwiches that get sent to hospitals matter. Ritalin supply chains matter, lumbar support in chairs matter, and yes, stupid React widgets matter. They go out into society, and every time someone says "Ah, I just want to get paid", we get another terrible intersection that haunts the community for five generations. I'm going to stay angry about bad software engineering. And you know what, if I leave software engineering some day to finish getting licensed as a clinical psychologist, then I'm going to be angry about terrible therapists.

Software is worth getting angry about because everything is worth getting angry about.

V.

And there's always a place for the angry young man
With his fist in the air and his head in the sand
And he's never been able to learn from mistakes
So he can't understand why his heart always breaks
And his honor is pure, and his courage as well
And he's fair, and he's true, and he's boring as hell
And he'll go to the grave as an angry old man

In conclusion, Risk is a very bad board game, maybe even worse than Monopoly, and I'm livid about that too.

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PS: Software engineers and anyone else struggling with IT issues can find my consultancy here. Even if you don't control budget, we're happy to walk you through how to sell us internally to actually fix whatever your problems are. I preferred not advertising on the blog, but you'll note that the past month has been the longest break from writing in a long time. That's because I pay my rent and feed five of my friends with the business, so I've struggled to justify taking days off to write when I could be doing sales instead. Having people discover us through here is good enough for now! We've also got a company blog that my co-founders and I will be writing on.