Sometimes I pour a stiff drink and read through the whole LinkedIn, Gartner, Webinar enterprise software literature and it has a kind of weird inebriated internal consistency to it. (1/)

If you set aside the fact that these people really don't know what the hell they're talking about, you have to see the it as this postmodern economy of sign value in which the appearance of software development is just as meaningful as actual development. (2/)

This isn't an economy that trades in software, it trades in the signs of "being seen to be doing software". In their worldview this illusion is all we can ever hope for because it's /all there is/.

The majority of software projects fail, the majority of vendors go under, the majority of devs you hire will not deliver anything. If we see all of this enterprise literature as myth making around these failures then it starts to have an internal logic that makes sense. (4/)

Because it starts from the assumption that nothing works as promised, there's no objective reality on which to stand and the haze of corporate vendor disinformation is all there is. (5/)

In the epistemic haze of enterprise software we're all forced into sensemaking clustered around external narratives regardless of the narrative's utility. It is a two-way process of fitting data into a frame and fitting a frame around the data. (6/)

This vendor is "modern", this is "fast", this is "enterprise grade", this is "niche player" ... these words have no meaning except within the mythopoetic framework that these vendors actually sell. (7/)

This worldview has absolutely explanatory power or utility for any problems we engineers encounter in our daily activities. But it is an alternative reality in which the software world perceives itself and it feeds back into the reality of engineering in weird ways. End of rant.