What interview question tells you if someone will pick up a teammate when they’re down? When you think of company culture, is it just the pool table in the breakroom, or is it something more?
When things go south, who steps up? Who owns it? Who says, “I got this” instead of pointing fingers? How do you find that person? Data? Sure. But what about instincts? What about responsibility?
Nobody trusts themselves anymore. The moment things break, we look for someone to blame. “He said this”, “She was responsible for that” and the data? The data backs up whatever makes someone look good. Nobody cares if it’s true. Truth is secondary.
Fine. Let’s talk numbers. Requests per minute. Latency drops. Caching strategies—add, remove, tweak. We migrated to microservices. But why? Because someone said so. Because it looked good in a conference talk with sleek slides and a catchy title.
This isn’t rocket science. No one here is sending a spaceship to Mars, but we pretend like we are. We complicate the simple just to make it look impressive. We let people who don’t build anything talk down on technology, call things slow—because that makes them feel above it.
Engineering isn’t following the scientific method anymore. It’s following GitHub stars and corporate sponsorships. The trend of the day dictates the work. Promotions are given to those who follow the script, and no one cares about the next day. “That’s tomorrow’s problem.”
And at dinner? Let’s pick the local wine. More sustainable, they say. The same people telling us to think about the future are the ones sleeping through today.
But hey, that’s different, right?