As a Tech-Leader, how do you respond when business smirks and dismisses your challenges in tech saying, "it ain't rocket science"? This post is my attempt of story-telling the complexity in Tech to the ruthless and impatient Business that dismisses it as just being CRUD and is no rocket-science.
I am a tech-entrepreneur who has made bets on tech, business ideas and its intersection. I have failed for various reasons which is out of scope for this post. Now that introduction is to tell the Business that I understand where their frustration comes from. So I think it is important that they believe in Tech Leadership and its challenges. Not always can this leadership be right. It will go wrong in its bets from time to time. But, hell Business too gets things wrong from time to time, don't you? We should learn to see failure as not the end of a road but only a bend, albeit a hairpin bend at times that if not given due diligence, it can be catastrophic. So what is so crazy about the Tech World that the Rocket Science isn't having? My answer would be EVERYTHING! In Rocket Science the problem space is fairly well defined in that it is mostly science. In the Tech Space, it is oscillates between being an art at one point in time and being science in another circumstances. In Tech Space the choices are umpteen, the shines are mostly mirage and the pitfalls are hardly visible until experienced. Now that is the shortest way in which I could describe the challenges in Tech leadership.
I can illustrate the tech landscape with my very own little experience in the realm of mobile app development. I had built a couple of Android applications as test of my ideas to understand its market. The Apple iOS ecosystem was a beast on its own and so was Android; each accelerating at a far greater pace in evolution than it is anticipated to be. Additionally the mobile ecosystem in itself had too many variables that you could hardly bet on.
Take the tangent of, platform for developing mobile mobile applications -- a couple of years back it was native Android/iOS, or cross-platform mobile app development frameworks like Ionic, jQueryMobile, Adobe's PhoneGap, Sencha, Xamarin etc. Today, the very native platforms evolved so much that yesteryears app is just dated to be polite. Add to it Kotlin became popular in the native Android development space, because it is a much better language than Java in terms of maintainability and brevity. The iOS space witnessed Swift replacing Objective C. The community adopted these for good and this was fairly predictable.
But not always is the community adoption a predictable thing. And not always it is wise to go with the crowd, for it might turn out to be a pop-culture thing. This is sort of a high-risk high-rewards sort of thing, in the business parlance. Take the case of community adoption in the cross-platform mobile application development platforms/frameworks. The Facebook's introduction of ReactNative for cross-platform mobile app development became a game changer in this space. Frankly, I didn't bet on it and I was so wrong about it. With the community going ga-ga for it, I had dismissed it as pop-culture; call me a conservative for that and I take it. But wait, this time around, the community made a huge difference by coming up with a ton of open-source tools and components, that I would say had surprised Facebook too. Or Facebook perhaps was anticipating this development from its earlier success with open-sourcing ReactJS. The adoption rate and good produce, prompted Google to come up with Flutter wanting to disrupt this space. While ReactNative (aka RN is based on React.js), Flutter is based on Dart programming language. Taking a stop to reflect back, as things stand today, yesteryear's cross-platform frameworks (like Xamarin, Sencha etc) is just gone from the scene of relevance. Had you invested in those tools years back, you would have had to re-invest in learning the new ways of development in this space. This is tech; the crazy tech, where the craziness of the tech wave comes from the community, which literally can change directions of the wave. You got to ride the wave, float to flaunt, flop but float, fasten and flip, fence from fall, and fall but survive!
I can share a similar story in the realm of backend development, devops, frontend, etc. but hope this story is more than enough (at least it worked for me in the past) to convince our Business about what it means to ride the Tech wave.
Tech is bloody hard to keep up with. Tell this story of evolution to anyone who is comparing it to Rocket Science. Tell them that Rocket Science don't change as much as tech do. In Rocket Science, you learn that there is so much more to discover in a supposedly closed domain. In Tech, you got to both learn and adopt within the constraints of time, opportunity, challenges and God damned people politics. The bad news is we do fail, and fail often. The good news is we can go past it learning our lessons.