Stepping off
Many of you noticed I stopped writing about CDPs and martech and left LinkedIn. The reason is simple: I was overwhelmed by mostly AI-generated inquiries and couldn’t keep up. I also grew tired of irrelevant content in my feed.
After a while, I’d had enough. I’m not on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), or Bluesky either. I no longer trust these platforms; along with many others, they promote division and negativity, and it stressed me out. They are harmful to both younger and older people, unfamiliar with the mechanics our industry built to exploit them. I am complicit, but when there are thousands like me, it becomes an industry issue, ultimately driven by greed-focused leaders. I don’t believe I can fix, stop, or delay this inertia. So I am exiting it altogether. It's worn me out and down, and I suspect many will be happy my voice has exited the stage.
After the last software company I worked with closed down in September last year, I decided to leave the tech industry. I didn’t come to this decision lightly. I’ve been in tech—hardware and software—most of my life. I started coding at 16, on a Commodore 64 and an IBM PC. At the start of my corporate career, I spent a year and a half at Sun Microsystems, when JavaSoft made it feel like we were building something meaningful. Before that, I was in the Navy, doing hardware micro-electronics maintenance and data analysis for electronic warfare. From there, I moved into web analytics, then machine learning, and later martech data work (Omniture, SAS, Adobe). Some of what I did helped lay the groundwork for AI.
The real reason I am abandoning all this is that I feel disenfranchised by the industry that I believe I helped build and helped 1000s succeed in their roles. It started making me physically sick with what I was seeing of an industry I had wholly embraced and encompassed every hour of my life for 30 years. Today, what I thought the industry would become is just a small pebble of what it is - a greedy, unethical, and amoral blob. I’m sharing all this so you know I’m not an outsider; I was deeply involved, albeit in a minor capacity. Now, I feel I’ve defrauded myself and the clients I pitched tech stacks to over the years. Now, at the end of my career, feeling like a fraud is not good, especially at 58, when I should still be working and contributing. I made a huge strategic error early in my career, and now I have wasted 30 years. It is very disappointing.
While AI technology shows promise, my concern is who controls it. The same software industry leaders whose actions harmed software's integrity are now leading AI’s development, and I don’t trust them to use this power responsibly. Their credibility was already tainted, so why should we(I) trust them moving forward?
If you are considering a career in software and AI, I advise against it. Choose fields that genuinely help society, like biology, medicine, agricultural hardware, even philosophy, or public policy. Continue to learn the foundations of software, how to code, and how to build these machines, but apply them in these other industries. Hopefully, we won't need software companies one day, and every meaningful industry will be self-sufficient using AI to build its own software. Also, avoid working for those motivated by profit over people or the planet, or who create a business where people are the product. This includes AI companies, but more explicitly, social media or leaders who want to exploit this path. I believed software could help the planet in the early/mid 1990's, but my experience shows it did the opposite.
I’ll be honest: I made money in this industry(not a lot - just enough to survive, no windfalls - mostly brute force saving and investing what I saved from my salary), though some made far more via their options and stock windfalls. I helped sell tools and build systems that enriched companies, most of which went to a small group of men, and enabled the tracking and targeting of ordinary people, especially children and the elderly, because they were the most susceptible and vulnerable to becoming addicted and staying addicted. I used to think it was making things better. I don’t believe that anymore, and I’m not proud of it.
When one percent walks away with almost everything, and ninety-nine percent barely get by, something is broken. That isn’t how it was supposed to work. After thirty years in this, I don’t see another option I can accept, even if I’m not sure I’m ready to retire.
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