Why being in tech feels like running in place

On the incessant busyness that everyone in tech feels

There’s this fear in tech that you need make sure that people know what you’ve been busy in, and you need to continually re-prove yourself to everyone else.

I suspect it’s a consequence of the quarterly heartbeat from Wall Street. But for us in tech, there’s almost never any let up.

We’ve reinvented the wheel 70 times over, we have 70 different wheels to maintain, and for some reason we expect each other to know all about them.

Gotta keep up with the new JS frameworks.

Gotta check in on the CSS trends. css-grid has arrived, and we can forget about flex completely now. (Right?)

Gotta look over the tech trends: blockchain, IoT, coroutines, containers, and wasm (someone clearly didn’t think through that acronym).

Gotta try out the newest SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and DaaS.

Gotta checkout the latest things in augmented/virtual/mixed reality.

Gotta get the newest patch, the latest release, the last update, the recent PR.

Gotta vet it, review it, benchmark it, and evangelize it.

From Apple, from Google, from Microsoft, from Facebook, from Amazon.

This seems inherently unsustainable.

I’m beginning to have a strong preference for looking past the initial splash to see what endures, as I suspect lots of these technologies are built for launch—not for a sustained lifespan.