The economics of boredom

Quoting from the product formally known as Twitter:

There are two technical problems in web hosting: how to serve templated content at scale, and how to minimize programmer boredom. The first was solved decades ago, but the second continues to tax the limits of our hardware.

Even on Hacker News (a tech industry forum) people aren’t shamed when their text-only websites fall over from the modest traffic bump of reaching the front page. Stuff you would have been fired over in 2002 gets you keynote speaking slots at PerformanceCon today.

As an industry, as a society, we don’t really know how to handle boredom. And I see this as the root of so many of our problems, as a great many things can be solved by decades-old technology and a bit of hard, albeit uninspiring work.

Instead we have to always be chasing the latest shiny thing. Saying that you want to use old tech that’s tried and true with basic information architecture and design practices from decades ago is recipe for career suicide. Talk about AI and some buzzwords that you know nothing about, and it’s time for a promotion!

That’s not to say the old stalwarts like Don Norman are end of the story. There have been some nice additions to the field, especially in accessibility and inclusivity, but nothing that merits a handful of conferences a year, chasing shiny new things and career FOMO.

Cue Hail the maintainers.