Uh oh. A Twitter thread from an especially angry catfox that wants revenge. That can't be good.

You know how the West is completely fumbling the covid response? Doing absolutely the wrong things, or doing the right things far too late to make any kind of difference?

That has been the technology industry for DECADES. Tech PERFECTED this response.

Look at any security breach. Look at what remains of "release engineering" – that started with Google's bastardised processes with Chrome, but it's the whole industry now.

Good things are worse than worthless in this industry; they actively go against conventional wisdom.

So you have really good and promising projects in a world of hurt because they don't fit in with the tech industry's so-called sensibilities.

You don't release to "stable" every two weeks? Oh, obviously your project is dead or old.

It would be easy to blame Agile and Scrum. Sure, they took wrong lessons.

But they're symptoms. Orgs wouldn't adopt them if they weren't hailed as Word of God by certain big names in the industry.

There is nothing Holy about shipping unstable crap to unsuspecting customers.

Microsoft's "Windows Insider" program has another, less friendly, name: Outsourcing.

This was a complete outsourcing of their testing and QA personnel.

This is why updates are more jarring, and by necessity have to be more frequent.

Saying QA is "redundant" because you have thousands-to-millions of willing testers is absolutely, unequivocally, dead wrong.

Nothing can replace in-house testing and QA, nor plans and specifications. You can't build a product without knowing what to build, or what you've built.

Yes. I am an old fox yelling at a cloud.

It won't get better. It will never get better. I have seen so many great, talented, amazing people leave IT, SW Eng, and CompSci entirely because it never gets better and it is draining.

It drains me, too.

Am I at that breaking point? Not yet, but close.

If I may use a doomsday clock analogy, I'm about 10 seconds from midnight where midnight is leaving the industry entirely.

Nobody will miss me, either, because all I've ever done is championing the right things and good process.

To close this thread, it bears repeating again. It is so dire and important.

If you learn just one thing today. If you take just one thing to heart. Please, take this:

You. Cannot. Build. A. Product. Without. Understanding. The. Product. You. Want. To. Build.

You cannot build a product without understanding what product you want to build.

You cannot release a product without understanding the product you have built.

You cannot update a product without understanding what is wrong with it.