I get suspicious whenever I read about companies piling on to technology trends, not least because of the damage it does to the rank and file developers who work on it. The short version is: leaders got bamboozled and their subordinates suffered, but it's a little more nuanced than that.
We tend to think of large companies as either these monolithic beasts that act according to their own best interests, or as emergent hiveminds that move in a direction because they smell money. These have the advantage of allowing us to presume that the actions taken by these organizations were vetted by many people and arrived at via consensus.
However, there is a third, less popular, way to view organizations, and that's as an organ of a handful of people, if not one person. This is an important framing because it allows us to consider the actions of these large companies as reflecting the foibles of the individuals at the helm. Viewed this way, Apple under Steve Jobs was an extension of one man's vision and design priorities. Microsoft under Ballmer was an extension of one man's putting the MBA approave above the tech approach.
I can't help but wonder if, within these Wall Street companies as well as throughout SV, there wasn't a single person or a handful of people who swallowed the blockchain coolaid and started these projects. Pitched high hopes to developers. Hired developers. Set goals. Failed to meet goals. Made their developers' lives miserable. Gave up. Blamed their subordinates. Moved on.
This is a tale as old as tech itself, but somehow it just keeps happening. To all young developers deciding where to invest their time and talent: be very careful choosing to follow an individual, because individuals are stupid enough to fall for nonsense like "blockchain for banking."
We tend to think of large companies as either these monolithic beasts that act according to their own best interests, or as emergent hiveminds that move in a direction because they smell money. These have the advantage of allowing us to presume that the actions taken by these organizations were vetted by many people and arrived at via consensus.
However, there is a third, less popular, way to view organizations, and that's as an organ of a handful of people, if not one person. This is an important framing because it allows us to consider the actions of these large companies as reflecting the foibles of the individuals at the helm. Viewed this way, Apple under Steve Jobs was an extension of one man's vision and design priorities. Microsoft under Ballmer was an extension of one man's putting the MBA approave above the tech approach.
I can't help but wonder if, within these Wall Street companies as well as throughout SV, there wasn't a single person or a handful of people who swallowed the blockchain coolaid and started these projects. Pitched high hopes to developers. Hired developers. Set goals. Failed to meet goals. Made their developers' lives miserable. Gave up. Blamed their subordinates. Moved on.
This is a tale as old as tech itself, but somehow it just keeps happening. To all young developers deciding where to invest their time and talent: be very careful choosing to follow an individual, because individuals are stupid enough to fall for nonsense like "blockchain for banking."