Thread by @IntuitMachine

In IT you can be employed for life because the technical debt keeps piling up. The garbage collector analogy is an apt analogy. Nobody wants to do it, so they'll pay people to do it.

https://twitter.com/ZDNet/status/1423610968752410627

The most predictable path to profitability is to create a business collecting other people's garbage. The riskiest business model is to do only the cool things that everyone else wants to do.

Too many startups are fixated only on doing the next cool thing. There's a survival bias that big companies are doing all the cool things. Doing the cool thing is profitable only when you are first to pick the low-hanging fruit.

There are always new and cool things to do in the exponentially growing technology economy that we are in. So if you are swift and efficient, then you can pick off the low-hanging fruit before everyone else. But it's not a sustainable business model.

If you seek a business model that will last, then pick up the rotten fruit that has fallen to the ground that nobody else wants. Pick up someone else's garbage and someone will pay you for relieving them of the inconvenience.

IT's technical debt keeps exploding exponentially. Over the years, fads have come and gone. It has invested heavily in the fads. But people have moved on. They are busy picking the low-hanging fruit elsewhere.

Nobody wants to pick up the garbage. In fact, it's even worse. The garbage over time begins to rot. Entropy is the natural course of the universe.

When theses IT systems were developed, the technologies were all the rage. There were many information sources and people who had an interest in contributing to the growth of the technology. But once the fad is over, there is nobody to help you.

There is zero incentive for a person who wants to accelerate their career to work on a dead fad. Nobody wants to work on a dead IT fad. But the people who want to, then there is lifetime employment.

But what about that next cool thing known as Artificial Intelligence. Can AI fix all the accumulated technical debt that has amassed in companies? I doubt it's possible in the next decade. It is more likely these companies will die on the weight of the garbage they collected.

But some companies never die because they are essential to the workings of civilization (see: public institutions). These entities will continue to pile up technical debt and we can see it first hand as bureaucracy.

There is lifetime employment collecting the garbage of a bureaucracy. This is why, to have permanent employment, one must live a Kafkaesque existence.

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