- 7
- Episodes
- 1
- Ratings
- Weekly
- Cadence
- 2026
- First episode
About Out of the Software Crisis
How do we get out of the political, economic, cultural, and societal crises caused by our current software industry.
- Publisher
- Baldur Bjarnason
- Category
- technology
- Language
- en
- Explicit
- No
- First episode
- 14 Sept 2026
- Latest episode
- 21 Oct 2026
Latest episodes
7 episodes in the feed.
21 Oct 2026
The 'AI' Software Crisis: Software Developers have been promoted into incompetence
Software Developers have been promoted into incompetence Download audio Developers have been promoted into incompetence # My Patreon The video version on Youtube. With the age of “AI” and agents, software developers have been promoted into incompetence. And it all comes down to comedy and satire. Sort of. That probably requires some explanation. If you’re actually working in an industry – any industry – reading about management theory is often indistinguishable from reading comedy. Not just because the reality of how you experience “management” is frequently absurd or grotesque, which the theories often fail to address, but also because the alternative to laughing at the mess, is to cry and despair. When we – as people working in a deeply flawed industry – read about management theory and practice, most of us won’t recognise any of the “good” practices, but we will be intimately familiar with all the “bad” practices. We could even probably list a few more “bad” examples so awful that they have hitherto been unknown to science or sanity. We’ve all had bad managers. Sometimes we’ve even been the bad manager. Occasionally you do get a management book that leans into the inherent comedy of the farce that is the reality of the modern corporation. Like the book Management of the Absurd by Richard Farson. It doesn’t take itself seriously, has a few useful pointers, and is appropriately mocking at times. But comedy has also made genuine contributions to both the theory and practice of management. One of those being The Peter Principle, which has its origin in a satirical book of the same name. The principle it describes is that people tend to rise through organisations through promotions until they reach a level of respective incompetence. What it means it that you or I might work, say at coding, at an organisation, and we get good at our entry-level job. Our skills get noticed so we get a promotion that involves more important coding. Same skills, just better and more important. It builds on our skills, which is recognised, so we continue to rise through promotion. Until, that is, we get promoted to a manager position that doesn’t involve coding. This position instead involves a bunch of skills we haven’t practiced at all. At this point, it’s entirely possible that we might be worse at the managerial job than we were in the entry-level job where we started. And because we are now incompetent, we no longer get promotions. We’re stuck. Our career has reached a dead-end because we’ve been promoted into incompetence. We’ve become bad at our jobs through no fault of our own. Why software industry career ladders have been different # This has especially been a problem for software companies. The job of a software developer has traditionally been very different from that of a manager. Coding lends itself to a singular focus during each task. Management requires juggling tasks. That singular focus means coding is very light on the kind of monitoring work that can be a big part of management. Coding lends itself to unambiguous communication that deliberately strips nuance and ambiguity away. You mean just what you say and nothing else. Management communication is almost entirely nuance and ambiguity. Management is all about coordinating unruly “processes” to make sure the work they do is delivering value to the organisation. Busywork of no value is worse than idleness because idleness actually reduces delays and shortens task queues. You can’t react quickly to an unexpected need, if you’re occupied with busywork. But you can react immediately if you’re idle. Management is all about maintaining a constant vigilance towards the bigger picture: the queues, the delays, where value is being created and destroyed, avoiding both over- and …
13 Oct 2026
It’s not our job to fix our employers
Contents # I have a Patreon! Video Audio The full essay I have a Patreon! # I’ve been writing since the 1900s (technically the late 90s, but still) on the web, about the web, and, over the past twenty years or so, about software development and publishing. I’ve been here a while and am not going away. But I’d like to write more, make more videos and podcasts, and specifically look at the problems we have who are now outsiders in our own industries, whether that’s in software development or in publishing. For that, I’d like your help. Hence, a Patreon. It’s going to offer exclusive material, support tiers, and hopefully a few novel goodies that I’m working on at the moment. Currently, it has two membership tiers: Supporters, who get access to all the stuff. €7 / month. Patrons, who get access but also mentions in the newsletter, podcast, and are listed at the end of the video. €25 / month. Any support you can give is very much appreciated. Video # Audio # It's not our job to fix our employers Download audio This broken industry is too big of a problem for software developers to solve alone # As I wrote in my last newsletter, software developers don’t seem to be doing well. I can relate. I’ve been unlucky enough to work for dysfunctional software companies and startups in the past, and those dysfunctions have increasingly become the norm across the industry over the past few years. The response was greater than I expected, both on the newsletter and elsewhere, so I wanted to pause and try to put those responses into context. I had already written and recorded the next couple of videos and newsletters even before I uploaded the last one, but I’m postponing those, because I think it’s important to sometimes stop and listen instead of constantly lecturing at people. Even though most of the responses were positive – at least, positive in the sense that they could relate to or recognised what many software developers seemed to be going through – some were less supportive. This is the internet. Obviously some people are going to be annoying. Most of it you can ignore, but a few of them highlighted the big shift in attitudes towards tech that has been taking place over the past decade. People aren’t on “our” side any more. Quite a few have gone from having largely positive feelings towards tech – considering it to be a force for progress – to thinking it’s an industry that’s ruining the world. Tech is the new tobacco. So, if we’re miserable, the attitude some have is that it’s our own fault for making the world we live in worse. Or, that we deserve what’s happening to our field because we didn’t do enough to prevent bad things from happening. Or, our work in the tech industry, no matter what it was we actually did, means we have it coming. This is what falls out from the now relatively common public sentiment that tech is the new tobacco industry. How that framing has played out in media coverage and discourse, has quite correctly emphasised the abuses, the legal shenanigans, how tech is spending money to manipulate the public, and other strategies that the tech industry seems to have copied from big tobacco. But the other consequence of that shift in public sentiment is: if your industry gets the reputation of being like the tobacco industry, people stop having any sympathy for those of us working in that industry. Nobody cares if a sales person in a tobacco company burns out from stress or pressure. If your job is selling opioids to college athletes – “but it’s legal! I’m only helping doctors decide on the correct treatment” – hearing that you’re suffering will only make people smile. Now, finally, a sign that the world is just place. This is a little bit unfair to many of us for two reasons: First, the industry wasn’t thi…
6 Oct 2026
Software developers are not okay
The full essay version is below the overview and embeds. You can subscribe to the audio-only podcast feed over on Apple’s Podcast app and other apps if audio is more your speed. It’s also available as a raw podcast feed if you want to subscribe to it directly in the podcast app of your choice. Video #
28 Sept 2026
Parasocial media: why influencers really aren't your friend
An essay version of the video is below. You can subscribe to the audio-only podcast feed over on Apple’s Podcast app and other apps if audio is more your speed. It’s also available as a raw podcast feed if you want to subscribe to it directly in the podcast app of your choice. For fans of video, there’s both the YouTube channel and the TikTok account. Overview # The “parasocial” illusion that’s created by social media platforms helps deceive and misguide you, the audience. Video # Audio # Why influencers really aren't your friend Download audio Parasocial media # Those people aren’t your friends. By those people I mean social media influencers and similarly popular accounts on your preferred social media platform. Obviously online friendships are real. I’ve based my entire career on the relationships I’ve built online. None of my work over the past 25 years would have happened without the mutual connections that you can build on the various social media networks. And those friendships are as real, as rewarding, as the ones I’ve formed in “real life”. They might possibly be better because I have a problem with eye contact for various neurodivergent reasons. It’s quite a bit easier to communicate with people in text or mediated through a computer in some other way without having to think about looking at their eyes. So I’m hugely grateful to the relationships I’ve built on social media, but that isn’t as much the case with social media today as it was when I started. I benefit from the fact that the social media experience twenty years ago or even twenty-five years ago, when I first started blogging, is very different from what passes as social media today. This is a bit of an informal series on how the design of social media – the technical side, the media design, the format of it – affects the way we get our information. I first covered the limitations of short-form video like TikTok. There are plenty of limitations to the form, but I focused specifically on the length and how that forces you to use editing to create an impression of an argument, as opposed to making an actual argument. In the last essay I focused on the context collapse that exists in most social media, but I focused specifically on text-oriented media such as X, Threads, Bluesky, or Mastodon because on those platforms it destroys our ability to deliver the specialised discourse that is needed to cover difficult topics. This time, it’s the false promise behind the term we use to label the platforms where we find each other: social media. Because that’s where things get dicey. I’m not focusing on anxiety or mental health or similar issues in this series, but instead on how it affects the way we get our information. When it comes to social media the asymmetry that now defines it wasn’t there at the beginning. The asymmetry I’m referring to is what danah boyd, an academic I’ve referred to before, called the parasocial nature of the current social media networks. In a recent paper she has argued that these networks have long since ceased to be “social” and are more properly parasocial networks: To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms. Many social interactions on these sites have become largely an illusion. They don’t exist to build a symmetrical, two-way relationship between people. They’re there to give you the illusion of interacting with anything ranging from a minor celebrity to a major celebrity. You might talk to somebody on social media who has hundreds of thousands of followers, and…
22 Sept 2026
Why is social media so humourless?
An essay version of the video is below – not just a transcript but a text that I’ve rewritten thoroughly to work as text. You can subscribe to the audio-only podcast feed over on Apple’s Podcast app and other apps if audio is more your speed. It’s also available as a raw podcast feed if you want to subscribe to it directly in the podcast app of your choice. For fans of video, there’s both the YouTube channel and the TikTok account. Overview # Why do jokes fall flat online? Why is it so easy to get into trouble by saying something you thought was fine, but others found offensive? Turns out this is because of a basic feature of how these social media networks work. Video # Audio # Why is social media so humourless? Download audio Context collapse in social media # Have you ever made a joke on Facebook, or some other social media site only for land like a lead balloon? It might have worked for your friends – your pre-existing circle on social media – but as soon as somebody re-posted it or boosted it out of your circle, somebody utterly humourless reacted badly and didn’t get the joke. They got offended and angry about silliness merely existing. There’s a reason for that, and it goes to the root of most of what’s wrong with social media. Not everything that’s wrong, but it is one of the core problems, especially in short textual media. As I’ve been getting into doing videos and podcast episodes and thinking about the role that social media plays in my media landscape and my contributions to that landscape, I’ve been revisiting some of the research I studied and read about in the past. And it turns out there are reasons why the social media experience is so toxic for so many of us. In the last video I addressed many of the issues that affect TikTok and other short-form video. It gives you the impression of an argument as opposed to letting an argument unfold. The constraints imposed by the duration, by the screen size, limit the level of detail you can deliver in a video, which affects the argument they can deliver. This obviously is not great, since this is where much of our political discourse is taking place. But short-form textual social media – the ones that are all modelled after Twitter – aren’t much of a positive influence either. They have a lock on the journalistic class, the political class, and on quite a bit of academic research. People of influence tend to disproportionately get their information from these networks. Whereas the public tends to get them from videos – short and long. They are the first step in for modern information distribution. An academic who wants to promote their paper will start by posting about it on X, or Bluesky, or Mastodon. Politicians make their announcements and commentary on X and then on video. Reporters rely on these sites to discover news and scoops. These social media networks all have the issue where you can quite easily ruin your entire career – or at least your day – by saying something completely and perfectly innocuous that gets interpreted by somebody else as offensive. Sometimes these things are offensive, but you’re used to voicing them in a more forgiving environment. So when you switch to social media, you don’t adjust your language and tone. You don’t code-switch. You don’t change your vocabulary and approach to suit a more public audience. You might not even be aware that a more public audience was possible. Most of us only have our few followers and friends and people rarely notice our nonsense. But sometimes people do notice and it’s rarely pleasant. There’s a name for this: context collapse. It originates with the sociologist and psychologist Erving Goffman, but I personally first encountered it in the papers, essays, and talks, and books by danah boyd who is…
17 Sept 2026
Why are short videos bad for learning?
An essay version of the video is below – not just a transcript but a text that I’ve rewritten thoroughly to work as text. As is an audio version. You can subscribe to the audio-only unlisted podcast feed here if audio is more your speed. Overview # In this opinion piece – very much my opinion based on my experience and practice, not on academic studies – I explain one reason why short videos, such as what you get on TikTok, are bad for learning and information. Did I mention that this is my opinion? Well it is. Don’t go all “well, that’s just your opinion, man”. I already told you so. And the same goes for the academics who suddenly find themselves filled with the urge to debate me on how montage or Tarkovsky have been understood in academic writing over the years. In. My. Opinion. Video # Audio # Why are short videos bad for learning? Download audio The TikTok Problem # TikTok and its copycats have come to define how much of our societies consume information. The information that reaches us is bounded by the nature of the media that convey it. By emphasising dubious theories that misrepresent neuroplasticity and “brain changes” we’ve managed to downplay that these platforms are doing exactly what they’re designed to do. Their form and design direct how we experience “facts” and how we learn. I like to blame the Russians. Not the current lot. Older Russians. Though, if I’m to be fair, they more described the problem than caused it directly. Specifically, I tend to blame Eisenstein and Tarkovsky. Eisenstein was one of the early pioneers of cinema and was the first major filmmaker to come out of Russia in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet revolution. His contribution was the concept of the “montage”. As legend would have it – probably untrue and apocryphal, but it’s a good story – early Soviet filmmakers struggled with shortages. That meant that they had a harder time of constructing films using the method that had been the norm in early cinema: a series of long takes spliced together, as you would if you were recording a play. They had to work with scraps of film. So, as legend has it, they resorted to splicing together short bits of film and discovered that spliced end result worked very differently. As he described the concept in his book (I think, it’s been twenty years since I read it, so I’m probably both misremembering and paraphrasing it badly): If you record a long take of a man walking to a dinner table, looking down at the food, and licking his lips, you are very directly telling the viewer that the man is hungry and is about to eat. But if you edit together a shot of the man entering a room, a close-up of food on the table, and a close-up of his face as he licks his lips, you are giving the viewer the impression of the same without actually showing it. You never actually visually show the man responding to the food one the screen at the same time. And if you change the shot of the food to the shot of another person, you transform the impression into a sexual one. Same core elements and shots, but because you aren’t directly telling the story visually – you’re implying it – you can transform the impression just by changing one shot. The meaning, the scene, and the whole is constructed in the mind of the viewer without having to go through the effort of doing the thing itself on screen. This is labour-saving, but it also means you can tell the story without having to show the story in detail. The counterpoint to this approach came from another Russian – Tarkovsky – who made Solaris and Stalker and quite a few other movies. He believed that the montage was a bit of a deception. (Again, paraphrasing as it’s been almost two decades since I read his book as well.) He saw the strength of film as being its time…
14 Sept 2026
Getting out of your own way when making video
Overview # Essay version of the video is below. You can also listen to the audio-only podcast version and subscribe to the unlisted podcast feed here if audio is more your speed. How do you get out of your own way when making videos or media? Download audio Let it be messy! # How do you get out of your own way when you’re trying to make media? It isn’t easy. If you aren’t used to it – if, for example, text is your primary medium – this shit is quite hard. I don’t know how many takes I’ve tried, or how often I’ve recorded videos only to find them unusable. This isn’t even my first attempt at this particular YouTube channel and starting something here. Video is not easy. There’s a reason why it often requires an entire crew for it to look good. There are people who find video to be an easy fit to how they think. They process the world using vlogs and “tic tocs”, much as I process my experience of the world using text. Text is how I think. I write even when I don’t have to – even when it’s not a part of an overall business or freelancing strategy. Video is quite unnatural to me, and it’s taken me a while to figure out a process that I don’t completely hate. Even so, I threw away a couple (or a dozen) of videos because they didn’t work out. The question for this essay is: how do you get a get out of your own way when you’re trying to do something that’s new, that doesn’t fit your normal mode of thinking? When you’re working in a format that doesn’t work with how you usually think? The best advice I got was a little bit too simple, but works overall. ‘Just let it be messy!’ This actually goes back to when I was teaching twenty years ago. If you don’t know my background, I have worked at the crossroads between technology, publishing, and media for twenty-five years. So I have this background where I’m aware of the – not just the technical side or the practice, but also the theoretical context. It doesn’t help! It doesn’t make this easier. Doesn’t make sitting in front of a camera and, well, avoiding an anxiety attack any easier. For some reason I don’t mind recording audio as much. I can handle recording and even the sound of my own voice, but as soon as I’m on camera it gets a bit more stressful. The core problem I’m facing is that as a consumer, as a reader, or watcher of video, I have taste. I have skills as a consumer. It’s one of the reasons why, if you didn’t start writing regularly when you were young, and try to start writing later on when you’re an adult, one of the things that gets in your way, is that you actually have a well-honed assessment of what kind of writing you like. That gets in your own way because you can tell as soon as you start writing that you aren’t delivering the same quality or the same structure. Your writing isn’t convincing like the writing you prefer as a reader. So this mismatch between your skills as a reader and skills as a writer can cause a sort of mental roadblock. This applies to most creative fields – design, photography, and so on. If you have got an eye, but you don’t have the hand-to-eye coordination or the skills to create a composition, you’re going to have a hard time starting. I actually worked for a very brief period of time in TV. And I went through the earliest version of what later became Iceland’s film school. I helped many work on video and I can tell that what I’m making now isn’t as good as I’d like, which might confuse some because they look at it and go: That’s fine. It’s at least as good as the other nonsense I watch. This is why I should just get out of my way and let things be messy. I’m going to try and not obsess about that slight noise disturbance that I keep hearing in the audio setup that makes me paranoid and worried that something in all of this is cau…
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