Things the tech industry needs to leave in 2018

This is a short blog post, it’s the first day of work. I don’t have time to write something long, you don’t have time to read it. So let’s go:

1. Not talking about mental health enough. A lot of developers have some kind of mental health illness. Mental health awareness should be talked about in any space occupied by human beings. So while we are still human, let’s talk about it.
2. Looking down on other developers because they are not using the latest, coolest, most blogged about framework. Take it as an opportunity to learn about different technologies and how they are used in real life.
3. Non-technical people looking down on technical people AND technical people talking down on non-technical people. I find it really weird when people do the “my role is more important” dance.
4. Conference talks that have all the buzzwords in the title but it doesn’t really make sense: It’s great you have all the really cool trending technologies here but like does it really make sense.

5. Prioritising trendiness over feasibility when making decisions about your tech-stack: The other day I found a thread on twitter with team leads from large tech companies and they were all complaining about how kubernetes is not a practical container orchestrater, in spite of all the hype. A lot of organisations are pushing it because it’s trendy.

6. Interchanging Machine Learning and AI: There is not much harm in mistakenly using the wrong tech term, but as AI and Machine learning are being used more and more in social experiments, the distinction between the two has become imperative. AI algorithms carry out tasks in a way that the “ideal” human would, allowing programmers to somewhat hard-code ethics. Machine Learning(subset on AI) algorithms use existing data to learn . Machine Learning will replicate society as it is but AI has room to do better or worse. This is important because when the outcome of an ML is racist or misogynistic, it can be that the training data set was biased but it’s most likely an issue with society and not tech.

7. Lisa Adams was invited to be a speaker at a tech meet-up, one of the questions was about the importance of women in tech(WIT) and one of the male speakers said “women are really the moms of the office, they take care of everyone and they make sure we don’t play too much”. One: Stop asking why WIT are important. Two: We are not your moms, we are here to take your jobs. Be afraid.

8. Recruiters who don’t know what they want so they put out a job post that pretty much includes every technical requirement in the web. The picture on the left is from a tech recruiter who posted on the ZAtech-slack’s recruitment channel, I don’t even have the words.

Have a wonderful 2019 and I hope all your side projects go as planned.