My giant follows me wherever I go

In his "Self-Reliance" essay, Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

"At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go." — Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

It seems that in software engineering and IT at large, we have all lost sight of the fact that our problems follow us from project to project, from hype cycle to hype cycle.

Lousy architecture and poor code don't change if you ship them from on-prem to the cloud, and they won't change when you ship them back to on-prem, either. Poorly designed software goes from one place to another, but at the end of the day, it follows along. Our bad decisions follow us from on-prem to cloud and from cloud to on-prem. There is simply no other way.

We race to add AI to our applications, but we don't actually improve them. Poor UX does not improve by slapping AI on top of it. Users still use passwords and must fill out a mortgage application to sign up for apps. Incompetently built and poorly maintained systems continue to leak data to malicious actors. Nothing changes.

While our business leaders demand we use the latest and greatest in AI or whatever the new hype cycle is about, our employees are unproductive for reasons that will never improve with AI. They are forced to enter their passwords multiple times a day and contend with outdated bureaucracy to get anything done. They are constrained by contrived rules for the sake of rules, and endure a simply inhuman day-to-day experience.

The problem is that we professionals in the software field are chasing what's new, not what's better.

""What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream." — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

My call to action is simple: Let's improve our applications, increase the productivity of our users, both internal and external, delight our customers with a better overall user experience, and solve the prosaic problems we face daily that make us miserable in our jobs.

Just like traveling to exotic destinations does not change who we are, chasing what's new does not improve our work.