We have a new president in America. Some say he is bullying companies to build their factories in the USA, at the same time communist leaders Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China are both saying they want to be globalists. While the terrible human rights and censorship issues from the communist countries persist, the paradox of the times is that the USA is being closed while the communists are becoming capitalists and more open. The inconsistency of the political situation is just another example of the crazy world we now live in.
The paradox of the current IT systems and development continue as sexy new tech and current new salesmen quota trends get all the headlines while basic customer service systems and web transactions’ integrity are lost forever. This was starkly demonstrated to me when a famous large online retailer completely lost my order for the holidays. Then after detailing the situation with exact order details and having them still screw things up makes me lose faith in modern development systems. Are the complexity of the systems or increase of new programming languages causing more problems? Or is it basic bad IT management that is causing project problems and helping me lose faith in the basic functionality for modern application development. If they lost my order, how many others were lost also?
Next, all the polling predictions and greatest minds were calculating and projecting the election results with the latest cloud big data systems. Their data predictions and AI systems built off models from years of significant research. I guess all those polls were built by “data dummies” as Van Jones said on Conan O’Brien the other night as you can see here. Is your latest analytics effort built by data dummies or are you going to give alternative facts about statistics as I talked about in this blog post.
The crazy paradox, especially the IT world, is exhibited more frequently and with more interesting twists as college IT education programs move further and further away from teaching basic computing concepts, data modeling, data relationship, and industry standard computing languages. In addition, some of the current IT education programs provide a student with a way to graduate with a computer science degree without ever having to code a single application program.
There is also the paradox of waterfall project development versus agile development sprints. Agile is good for some situations and scrum planning can bring out details never before revealed. One of the recent comics I saw showed there might be a little problem with agile programming.
As the decline of Java continues in the corporate landscape (according to Job trends from Indeed here, and as the old 2015 rumors of Oracle divesting Java persist, the paradox of today’s development/maintenance costs versus the old readable COBOL continues. Have Scala, JavaScript, and Python taken over, or are they the latest silver bullets corporations are looking for?
The paradox of data management are database designs that contain defined columns with associated domains and ranges versus the no-schema positional data and data lake concepts/techniques coming out of university computer science.
The paradoxes are becoming too much–especially in IT systems where money, transactions, and my stuff should arrive as promised. When communists are the capitalists and globalists it makes you think. Remember the book 1984: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength” … George Orwell 1984
What is the IT craziness or paradox that is driving you the craziest these days? Rant is over I want my package!!
Dave Beulke was honored again as an IBM Information Champion for Analytics for 2017 recognizing his work as a system strategist, application architect, security auditor and performance expert specializing in Big Data, data warehouses, and high performance internet business solutions. He is an IBM Gold Consultant, Information Champion, President of DAMA-NCR, former President of International DB2 User Group, and frequent speaker at national and international conferences. His architectures, designs, and performance tuning techniques help organization better leverage their information assets, saving millions in processing costs. Follow him on Twitter or connect through LinkedIn.
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