Here’s a New Year post that found itself already written.

Happy 2022, everybody! To help everybody to start it in the spirit of this website, that is by helping everybody find and ask the right questions, here are a few nuggets of wisdom I found, of all places, in a discussion titled “Why is everything changing too fast?". Enjoy them, noting how they all apply well beyond the realm of software development in which they were written.

“Is this rate of change supportable?”

Someone working (I guess) in the software /online content industry as “more of a project manager” wrote something that I suspect will resonate with many people, whatever their job (or lack thereof) is:

Recently, the rate of change [of the tools we have to use] has just made work untenable. I’d log into a tool like Google Analytics and the whole thing would be different… I’d log into Teamwork [to manage projects] - and they’re “retiring” the plan I’ve been on for years. Nothing is where I’m used to it being…

Wordpress? The rate of change here is insane, too - every single update brings new features, none of which is documented, bedded in or understood. None of which can be written about, supported or workshopped.

Trello? It was fine. And then Atlassian bought it and it became this horrific behemoth of “features”, all of which just clutter everything up, none of which seems to actually do anything useful.

And on, and on.

Is this rate of change supportable? Am I just too old?

Some of the best answers

Ashildr: Everything is bloating now. Instead of a collection of good tools interacting I have now 3+ ways of opening an Excel-File someone shared in Teams. All of them are broken and Teams is broken, too.

I feel as if the excellent wrenches I have been using for 20+ years are growing tumors in the form of a can opener. All to please people who never used a wrench or a can opener before. And production of the original wrenches is cancelled. Over night.

TigeriusKirk: One good thing about the old (?) model of installing software on your pc rather than subscribing to software was you could just keep using the version you liked as long as you liked. You might eventually face an upgrade that offered a bug fix or a new feature you really wanted, but the hard choice was in your hands.

If you wanted to move slowly (or not at all), at least you had the option.

Mikewarot”: Having stuff in the cloud, as a service, means you have no control over change. That is an unsustainable model for the end users. It’ll take a while for the pendulum to shift back.

Billylo: Technology, no doubt, can do amazing things. However, there is ONE important side effect.

Most technologists crave speed. Faster processors, faster disk drives, faster networks, faster everything. Bottlenecks are our common enemy. YES. They are evil. No one likes to wait for the computer to respond.

Unfortunately, this craving for speed (in technology) has quietly bled into other aspects of our living. People learn to speed read to gain more knowledge faster. People speed walk regularly (yes, I can also feel it in Hong Kong’s subway stations.) And the most crazy thing is: we don’t realize it until our body cannot cope with the demands of our speedoholic minds.

Consider this Carl Honore’s talk from 2005. 10 years later, it’s hard to believe that many of us (including myself) still get caught up in thinking “Slow is bad.” But no, there is such thing as “Good slow.”

Enough said, right? Happy SLOW 2022, everybody