The Tech Industry isn't really the Tech Industry anymore

I  want to have an honest conversation about tech and you can't really talk about tech in the tech industry the same way you used to be able to. 

I've been in the tech industry a really long time; I started in the 1980s selling PC Clones -- that's just what we call desktop computers now but it was anything that you built up from parts that wasn't IBM. I registered my first domain name in 1995, built my first database driven web application in ‘99 (it was a bunch of jokes still up there somewhere) and it was running on Microsoft access Windows 98 machine and on the end of a DSL line… you know it was primitive.

Let's see…  I worked to help build an Internet advertising agency in the 90s before anybody knew what Internet advertising was, and then I also ran my own internet development shop for 10 years where we built a bunch of applications from Health Care to financial services to an interesting project for the US Department of Transportation… did work for Disney… 

I got the whole gamut which then led me to the company Apigee that I worked with for a few years. It was a nice startup out of Palo Alto and we had Global customers so  I would travel the world and help them figure out how to use the product. I got to see the inside of pretty much most of the Fortune 20 Fortune 100 companies and look at their problems and it was all about problem solving.

Granted, Apigee was the beginning of where I started learning about Corporate Tech and Corporate Tech is often driven more from Wall Street money, we were going public so there were decisions that were being made that were not about making the product better but were being made so that we would satisfy the investors. And that was probably the only company I worked for where we had CEO who was able to tell me that that's what we were doing.

So then after that I worked for a couple other companies and the last big project I worked on, the last big company I worked for was Silicon Valley Bank which was the bank of innovation. It was the bank that all the big startups would put their money in and, as you may know, it failed. 

It failed about a year after I left and I left because they weren't innovating. The bank of innovation wasn't innovating. They were modernizing, which is a good thing; they were bringing all their technology up to a new level, but they confused the idea of innovation with modernization. They confused the idea of being a startup with doing Corporate Tech.

So, I've spent the last couple years kind of on sabbatical. I did a couple of consulting gigs… pretty much the same sort of stuff using the same sort of tools working with the same sorts of people. And I've been trying to figure out how do I talk about this how do I talk about what we need to change to make tech “Tech”  and make the corporate stuff corporate and understand the difference.

And with that, I decided I'm going to have some casual chats like this one and sort of talk about these differences talk about the problems that we have in technology that is why so many people who go into the business who want to be Engineers who want to be software developers who want to do something cool get so frustrated because they get stuck doing something that's not cool at all. It's not to say the cool stuff isn't there but it is to say that we've wrapped it in so many layers of “stuff” (and there are many words to describe that stuff just like there are many words to describe the internet). 

I want to take that apart try to make it simple try to just talk honestly about some of these things that we all think about in our various engineering software development internet technology security roles and have a conversation with you. You can find me you can go to my LinkedIn profile you can go to my website at michaelbissell.com but mainly let's learn from each other and I'm going to try to do one of these about every week and let's see let's see let's see if my ideas are right or if I'm just some guy making wooden bunnies in the shed.