It took me decades to figure out something that I should have long ago. Call it naivete. When I first came back to Trinidad and Tobago, I thought my software engineering knowledge and experience would be considered worthwhile and useful, but all too often it was rejected in the need to pursue more local and deprecated technology use. It would drive me nuts.

No more. After considering the events around and surrounding what I wrote about starting with the basics, it dawned on me that the culture, at least for the last decades, demanded making it’s own mistakes. The winning bidder in technology is generally something that was marketed to the government, or which requires an allegiance to the software manufacturer in Redmond, Washington, all the while complaining about the United States.
For me, it seems technology usage lags by about 20 years behind the United States, which is becoming very awkward with the new technologies coming out faster than the crippling bureaucracy of Trinidad and Tobago can adapt – and when they adapt, it’s without learning the lessons of the last 20 years in other countries. That’s a very negative thing to write, but all too often it’s true.

Technology, though, can’t exist in a vacuum. Technology can only serve those who know how to operate it, or they get burned. Listening to a conversation today in a coffee shop, where an apparent meeting was taking place to sell tech adaptation services or something along those lines, the guy in running shorts with ear buds in was explaining to the professionally attired woman that he had saved the world with technology at other companies, and thus he knew what he was talking about.

I chuckled even though their loud conversation was annoying while I was reading because I’d see those guys for at least 3 decades sell themselves as solutions. People then buy the solutions, and then complain about the solutions, then want to fix the solutions because nobody wants to admit bad money was spent, even in a committee… until eventually they get someone who actually has some experience but they’re too broke to pay. There was a part of me that just wanted to look at them and say in a very level voice, “That’s a bunch of bullshit”, but then I remembered something very important.

It’s part of the process, and I may have been underestimating that woman’s bullshit sensor and that’s what needs to evolve. The bullshit sensor, and perhaps the bullshit feedback mechanism. Bypassing that is dangerous, and it’s a necessary part of technology growth. In fact, I’d offer that there’s quite a bit of that bovine fecal matter stuck in the cogs of bureaucracy from various fields beyond technology.

So I sat and finished my coffee, reading my book, satisfied that the process was underway, and that bullshit sensors would self-adjust or deprecate. I had no part of it and that made my day brighter.