Sadly, I’ve been neglecting my blogging; the struggles associated with trying to find a new job in the midst of a recession have taken their toll. Fortunately, I’ve been successful, though not quite in the way I thought I would be.

When I sat in the Human Resources Manager’s office while on my way out of my last company, I said to her, “This will be my last job in technology.” It was something I blurted out, there was no coherent thought behind it, just a desire. I had no wish to continue to fight against company politics or to be forced into a position where I’d have to endorse mediocrity or worse. At that point, I had no idea how to realise that particular dream.

Happily, as a poet friend of mine once wrote, “everything has its own gravity”. I found a suitable position with the university where I am doing my Phd. I will start my new role tomorrow. While there is a technological aspect to my new line of work, it is fair to say that I am shutting the door on my internet career. In my mind, I can envisage that particular portal, like the thick white door leading to the spare room in my grandparents’ house: a brass key fits into the mortice lock, there is a clicking sound as the key turns and then it is time to bury the key in the yard where no one can find it.

It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed working with technology or no longer have an interest in it: it will always be part of my life. However, I believe the present economic climate, as well as the dysfunction at the heart of Western management techniques mean that it is nearly impossible for anyone who wants to innovate to succeed.  I have done my bit, but I’ve had enough.

When I began my career, the idea of change was not only something that was looked on positively, it was embraced. I helped companies move from print to web, and helped start ups get going. Over time, however, the drag of resistance has only increased, not decreased; the past seven years have been a long war against that resistance.

For example, a company that I worked for in 2003 was still stuck with an archaic infrastructure based upon the programming language Perl; the set-up had been in place since 1996. No formal project management techniques or procedures underpinned the development. Consequently, it was stuck. I argued for change, managed to demonstrate with my team that change was possible; our thanks was to have the team’s jobs shipped off to India.

The proliferation of technology has had the unintended consequence that bad ideas have become entrenched. In 2005, I worked for a company in the travel industry; its infrastructure was underpinned by a backoffice database that utilised the Visual Foxpro database / programming language. There is an inherent flaw in Foxpro in that it is a single threading application, namely, it can only do one thing at a time: this is hardly the stuff of modern e-commerce software. Because the owner of the company was fluent in Foxpro, and had personally built the database, he was ideologically bound to retain it. Thus the team I put together had to make a modern website work with archaic systems. The problem was compounded by the way Foxpro stored data in this instance: with Foxpro, there are two choices – one can either use an SQL database, which is standardised and would have avoided problems, or use what’s known as “local data”, which is prone to corruption and frequent collapse. It will likely come as no surprise if I say this latter approach was what was adopted.

Possibly the nadir of my career was when the owner of the company directly blamed me for this setup not working. I had to be stronger at that point than I’ve ever had to be – I looked him in the eye and refused to accept the blame. The owner’s response was to buy a server that had eight processors in order to see if that would overcome Foxpro’s technical limitations. It did not. Generally speaking, my thesis was proven correct: nonetheless, we managed to build the infrastructure for a series of websites which helped the travel company win awards later on. My immediate supervisor, however, was demoted, and my role was eliminated: I can only assume that my uncompromising stance did not help matters.

I’ve been lucky in some ways: after departing the Foxpro ghetto, I launched an open standards initiative for another firm which survives to this day. In my last company, the team put together a website which is going to be featured in the trade press. However, the response from management was to shrink back into their shell like a turtle and basically inform me that what I had to say was not only not going to be heeded, but rather, I was to go.

My latest interview cycle has shown that fear is driving many companies, particularly in the publishing sector: most of those I spoke to were going to use an open source content management platform called Drupal, cross their fingers and hope for the best. I don’t think what I had to say made matters any better for me.

I will repeat my thoughts here: I believe we are coming to the end of the “first phase” of the internet, in which its main value lay in the immediacy of information. Jobs, news, travel information, all became instantaneous to the point where we consider this just a normal part of life. It’s easy to forget that ten years ago, we used to have to wait for such information to arrive in the post.

The second phase, however, is much more exciting. Because there is the opportunity to store user preferences like never before, the vast flood of information can now be tailored around what the user is actually interested in. The buzzwords for this are “behavioural targeting”.  The technology exists, and is waiting to be utilised; however, few companies have the patience for this. They are so focused on driving quarterly results that investing thought and effort into genuine innovation which could secure the long-term future of their businesses has become impossible. I do not find it at all ironic that individuals and educational institutions like my University have become the driving force of innovation, far more than business is doing so on its own. Business has no stomach for it, no appetite for it, no desire for change; rather, the management of many companies is far more concerned about the requirements of internecine warfare and annual bonuses than they are about building anything that will endure. Managers, rather like my former boss, are concerned about stringing up one year after another, like beads on an abacus, watching their income grow to six figures or more: the welfare of the employees can go hang.

I suppose that is a secondary reason why I’m glad I’m done: during my career, the attitude that employers have held towards employees has grown worse rather than better. My last boss held a very “mechanistic” view of my employees: if one left, I could surely replace them with someone better. What made this statement particularly maddening and insensitive was the context: it was after we had gone through a very long and difficult recruitment cycle for developers. However, he is not alone in thinking that people are like for like, i.e., one C# developer is like another, one project manager can be replaced by someone superior. This reminded me uncomfortably of how Ford used to play groups of immigrants against each other in the 1930′s, saying to Italians that the Poles were more productive than they and vice versa, and threaten those who were employed with replacement. As I patiently explained to my boss, this kind of attitude was possible when digging for coal: threaten someone and they may dig faster. However, threatening someone in a knowledge industry has never made them think any more quickly or better. Perhaps the low point in my last job was when the board insisted on phoning one of my contractors explicitly for the purposes of yelling at him.

I do not believe the recession will make management any better. The people who are going to be most harmed by the slowdown are those who actually have knowledge, not those in the boardrooms. The latter will continue to be mystified by what is going on, and no clear plan will emerge apart from endless retreat: for example, I have received reliable information that a former firm of mine is actually going to try and rewind in order to focus more on print rather than web.

As such, I am forced to conclude that capitalism in its present form is failing all around: it is not delivering stability, it’s not preserving the environment, it’s not delivering growth, it’s not delivering social justice, and it is not delivering innovation. The moment I walk in the door of my new employer, finally beyond the reach of people who think that my pursuit of a Phd is an eccentricity rather than a boon, I will join the trade union, donate more money to the Green Party, and do whatever I can to advance the University and its interests. I will focus on creating knowledge instead of wealth. To be sure, I am truly glad it’s time to say good bye. Farewell to all that, and good riddance.