Devops, Agile, Method. & TestsConference50min
Technical Enshittification: Why Everything in IT is Horrible Right Now and How to Fix It
This talk addresses the current decline in IT quality, termed "Technical Enshittification," highlighting bloated services, stagnation in innovation, and technical debt. It critiques the lack of progress in major tech products and explores how poor practices contribute to this decline. It aims to provide strategies to prevent these issues in individual projects and companies.
Baruch SadogurskyTuxCare
talkDetail.whenAndWhere
Friday, June 20, 10:15-11:05
Main Room
Did you notice how everything in IT is crap right now? Services are bloated, slow, and buggy, and the hardware requirements to run even the simplest applications are enormous. It’s not just me, right? Everything is full of bugs, support is clueless, nothing works as described, and don’t even get me started on IoT protocols and the Cloud Native space. Oh, and how about taking half of the world’s air traffic offline because of a null pointer exception pushed to production without verification?
And on top of what’s broken, the pace of innovation has crawled to a stop (except maybe in the AI space). There’s nothing materially new in the last ten versions of Android and iOS or the last hundred versions of Chrome and Firefox. Google spent months hyping a new login screen that ended up being just a rearrangement, and can you name one new exciting feature in any software older than five years (plugging in a ChatGPT bot doesn’t count)? When Facebook was bragging about breaking things, at least it was to move faster. What’s their excuse now?
This talk will dig into the reasons behind this technical decline, which we call “Technical Enshittification.” We’ll explore how technical debt, poor innovation practices, and stagnation in core products are dragging us down.
While this talk probably won’t be able to fix the Googles, the Apples, and the Metas, we will focus on what you can do to prevent this decline in your own projects and companies.
And on top of what’s broken, the pace of innovation has crawled to a stop (except maybe in the AI space). There’s nothing materially new in the last ten versions of Android and iOS or the last hundred versions of Chrome and Firefox. Google spent months hyping a new login screen that ended up being just a rearrangement, and can you name one new exciting feature in any software older than five years (plugging in a ChatGPT bot doesn’t count)? When Facebook was bragging about breaking things, at least it was to move faster. What’s their excuse now?
This talk will dig into the reasons behind this technical decline, which we call “Technical Enshittification.” We’ll explore how technical debt, poor innovation practices, and stagnation in core products are dragging us down.
While this talk probably won’t be able to fix the Googles, the Apples, and the Metas, we will focus on what you can do to prevent this decline in your own projects and companies.
Baruch Sadogursky
Baruch Sadogursky (@jbaruch) did Java before it had generics, DevOps before there was Docker, and DevRel before it had a name. He started DevRel at JFrog when it was ten people and took it all the way to a successful $6B IPO by helping engineers solve problems. Now Baruch keeps helping engineers solve problems but also helps companies help engineers solve problems. He is a co-author of the "Liquid Software" and "DevOps Tools for Java Developers" books, Java Champion and CNCF Ambassador alumni, serves on multiple conference program committees, and regularly speaks at numerous most prestigious industry conferences, including Kubecon, JavaOne (RIP), Devoxx, QCon, DevRelCon, DevOpsDays (all over), DevOops (not a typo) and others. Today he's taking care of developers at TuxCare.
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