Afterwood

A Breakfast Bar,
Godmanchester,
Cambridgeshire, UK

Dear Santa,

Gosh, it’s been a long time since I’ve written to you. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure about where you stand on letters from adults, so I’m taking a punt on you being open to at least listening to anyone who is willing to put a (metaphorical) pen to paper. I really hope you do still accept old fashioned letters and I’ve not got to present my desires in the form of a TikTok or WhatsApp voice note. Okay, yes, I did make a joke in this column three years ago [Oldwood22] that you probably only accept requests in the form of JIRA tickets these days, and that was mean, but you weren’t the butt of the joke. In fact, it’s because of that same group of short-sighted miscreants that I’m writing to you. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First off, I want you to know that Christmas is still a magical time of year. Yes, there were a few years in my late teens when the prospect of being paid double-time and the pubs being open later than usual took priority, but luckily I found a partner who showed me that even though we’d grown-up, it didn’t mean we had to stop getting into the spirit of the festivities. Once children came along, the traditional practice of turfing contractors out for two weeks to cut costs and avoid them slacking off became something to celebrate. That said, I do look back fondly on the first Christmas after Doom was released and accept that productivity probably reached an all-time low, so maybe Management do have a point.

Hopefully, I made amends the following year when I was the only technical person left in the office on Christmas Eve and answered the support line to be greeted by a frantic clergyman in the Netherlands. He’d just bought the company’s desktop publishing software and was desperately trying to print out his beautifully designed Order of Service for Christmas Day but couldn’t get it to talk to the printer. It was my first gig, this was the 16-bit era, and as a developer I’d never really done any technical support before. I decided to try and help anyway. An hour and half later the pages were rattling out of his new inkjet printer, and we had another satisfied customer. Hopefully, the congregation appreciated his newfound artistic talent, too.

Little did I know this would also be the start of a lifelong struggle with printers. The only thing more soul-destroying on Christmas Day than unwrapping a printer is being greeted with a toy where the batteries are not included, or switching on an unpatched computer or games console. I feel like “Dear Santa, please can I have a fully patched Xbox with fully patched Call of Duty for Christmas” really kills the vibe.

Despite being a long time ago I’m still hoping my gesture of goodwill towards the clergy has helped me cement a solid place on the ‘Nice List’ and bought me some kudos. I believe there are other reasons since then that would have helped me retain my place in your good books. For one, I write tests, and not just afterwards either, I typically do them before writing my production code!

Okay, this is not purely an act of altruism as their presence is equally of benefit to me in the short term, but they benefit my teammates when I’m no longer around. Likewise, I try and plug the gap of what the code alone cannot say by documenting unobvious processes or the rationale behind architecture and design decisions to avoid people having to second guess my thoughts. Do they ever read it? Who knows. At a bare minimum, I’m always grateful to myself when I turn out to be the recipient.

I try my hardest to fix things when they’re broken, whether that be the product, tooling, or delivery process. I learned the hard way that if you’re always putting out fires, you never get the time to stop them happening in the first place, unless you place a genuine emphasis on quality. I appreciate that not everything can easily be fixed but there are always lots of small things which, when fixed together, can lead to a significant reduction in friction (marginal gains).

Okay Santa, I know what you’re thinking, I’m only calling out the good stuff, but what about that time recently when I banjaxed the entire UAT environment because I didn’t really think about the change I was making? Or that time I rebooted all the production servers because I wasn’t paying attention after restoring the database to a test environment? These were undoubtedly mistakes but they were not borne out of malice. If I am guilty of anything, it’s probably not maximising shareholder value in the short-term because I put my efforts into enabling sustainable delivery over the longer term.

And that brings me to my Christmas wish. While ‘world peace’ is always a venerable choice I want to bring the current obsession with so called ‘artificial intelligence’ to your attention in the hope that you can rein it in. Every company seems to have been taken in by the snake oil salesman such that every project, tool, blog post, conference talk, meet-up, etc. is about how we shoe-horn it in without questioning whether it even makes sense. My JIRA tickets and pull requests are now awash with bot generated ‘analysis’ which I have to wade through to find the valuable insights from my human colleagues. And this is all before we consider the wider implications of copyright theft, the impact on the environment, creative financing, reinforcement of cultural stereotypes and biases, mass lay-offs, and ultimately the continued rise in power for a few individuals only looking after number one.

Like the Luddites before me, this is not about being against the technology per se, it’s about the way it’s being abused and how this modern gold rush is fuelling the wrong kind of growth. There is undoubtedly great value in machine learning and LLMs, but let’s not kid ourselves that, as it stands, the benefits are going to be evenly distributed, despite what it says in the marketing brochure. So, Santa, it’s time for Jacob Marley to rise again, but this time he needs to visit the self-obsessed tech bros as we’re heading for a steel shortage due to the rate at which they’re forging their chains.

Yours,

A Disenchanted Programmer

Reference

[Oldwood22] Chris Oldwood (2022) ‘Afterwood’, Overload, 30(172), available at https://accu.org/journals/overload/30/172/oldwood/.

Chris Oldwood is a freelance programmer who started out as a bedroom coder in the 80s writing assembler on 8-bit micros. These days it’s enterprise grade technology from plush corporate offices the comfort of his breakfast bar. He has resumed commentating on the Godmanchester duck race but continues to be easily distracted by emails and DMs.