the modern IT industry stands as a hollow machine—vast, complex, and strangely empty. It is a factory of abstractions, a perpetual motion device of frameworks and workflows, tirelessly spinning without purpose, an industry more enamored with scaffolding than the structures it claims to build.
This critique is not born of nostalgia or disdain for progress. It is, rather, a lament for the industry's betrayal of its essence. Computing was once a discipline that united science, art, and engineering. Today, it has devolved into a marketplace of over-engineered tools, bloated solutions, and endless cycles of reinvention masquerading as progress.
Understanding is no longer encouraged; you are taught to configure, to patch. Here the solution to every problem is yet another dependency, another service, another abstraction atop the pile. And this dependency, service or abstraction is not taught as solution becuase it does the job well, but because its what the industry has decided to worship.
Agile workflows, standups, sprints, and retrospectives—all are rituals designed to enforce conformity. They present the illusion of collaboration, yet reduce human effort to quantifiable tickets and tasks, stripping work of its soul. Creativity is tolerated only insofar as it serves the machine. The problem with abstraction is that now it exists as an endless hall of mirrors. Each new one piled out of indulgence, because it has been anointed by the self-perpetuating cult of "modernity". Consider a once simple task, serving a static webpage, is now an exercise in futility, passing through layers of Docker images, Kubernetes pods, service meshes, and monitoring tools, all before a single byte reaches the client. Each layer is a microcosm of complexity built to solve problems that never existed until the industry decided they did.
"Velocity" and "burn rates" replace creative thought. The sprint ends, the retrospective begins, and the cycle repeats — a Sisyphean task designed not to achieve anything meaningful, but to sustain itself. Computing is not meant to be a factory; it is meant to be a discipline of mastery.