Why IT People Broke Everything Again

In today’s world, where coffee is fuel and code is a religion, IT projects promise to make our lives easier, faster, and a bit more automated. In reality, they increasingly turn into epic sagas of collapse, misunderstanding, and budgetary miracles, where investors’ expectations give way to bugs, deadlines, and collective psychoanalysis.

So why do IT “Titanics” inevitably meet the icebergs of reality? As usual, everyone and no one is to blame. Managers dream of unheard-of heights of automation but forget to ask users what they actually need. Programmers enthusiastically implement innovations that no one can later explain, not even to themselves. Clients are sure that “everything should work by itself,” preferably by Friday and without unnecessary questions.

Here we find three philosophical schools: “Let’s redo everything,” “Let’s not touch anything,” and “Let’s launch the beta and run away.” As a result, we often end up with what British scientists call “technical debt,” and Russian managers call “legacy.” When a project crashes spectacularly, the blame falls on either mysterious “external circumstances,” an ungrateful market, or evil testers.

One of the main curses is the urge to do it “like Google, only better,” without the budget, the team, or even Google itself. Add to this the “ever-changing requirements” effect, when the client suddenly remembers another feature five minutes before release, and you get the perfect recipe for IT chaos.

But there are upsides: catastrophic IT projects are an inexhaustible source of jokes, motivational lectures, and heartbreaking confessions at conferences. Some earn a PhD from it, others — chronic fatigue syndrome. In the end, every failed project is experience, or, as IT people themselves like to say, “a feature, not a bug.”