Systemic problems

Imagine you’re part of a six-person crew tasked with building, planning, and running a steam locomotive. You get the parts, you build the rails, you assemble all the pieces, you run all the numbers, and you get the thing going. You celebrate, high-five, and enjoy the fact that the train is in motion. Your crew then comes up with ways to shove more coal into it, accelerate and decelerate better, manage the overheating temperature of the engine better, and learn as you go. You know how the whole thing came together, you know how and why it exists, and you know its nuances and quirks. You’re able to contribute a lot to the day-to-day operations of the thing and can see a direct impact of your actions to improvements in the train’s condition and performance.

Now imagine it’s been a hundred years and the train still exists. It has gone through several phases of highly profitable years and some bad times. The crew has turned over several generations and is now made up of sixty members, not six. There are ticket collectors, service staff, engine operators, repairmen, off-duty conductors, maintenance workers, and all kinds of other disciplines on the train. You don’t entirely know the scope of everyone’s roles and responsibilities, you’re not sure why parts of the train are designed a specific way, and a lot of your questions are met with a disdainful “That’s how we’ve always done things around here” attitude. The crew is putting out multiple fires every day, from passenger complaints to outdated rail infrastructure to financial troubles to battling legal issues with polluting too much. Oh, and as the newest member of the crew, you’re expected to board the train while it’s moving at eighty-eight miles per hour.

Excuse the long analogy, but the latter scenario is how it currently feels to be born into the modern world. You exist, you’re made aware of all the things that are the way they are, and then you’re made aware of how broken all those things are. You’re confronted with a sudden realization at some point in your late teen years about how everything you use was built by someone trying to compromise and measure trade-offs between value, cost, and complexity. You must live with the fact that people that created the built environment around you were living in a capitalist society that prioritized shareholder profits over the well-being of people. And for some reason, everyone tells you that it’s up to you and your generation to fix the world’s problems and do better than the ones that came before you. And let me tell you, it is exhausting to live like this.

Let’s simplify it down even further. Let’s say you’re a new employee at a company that has been around for some twenty years. You can’t help but feel like a cog in the massive machine with hundreds of people, processes, systems, and tools. It has somehow kept itself running for so long without falling apart, so you hesitate to suggest any changes or improvements to the system. The deeper you prod and poke to update anything, the more you come to the realization that everything has been running on this delicately balanced set of Jenga blocks where if you accidentally tipped something too heavily, the whole thing comes crashing down. This is especially true in tech companies for software engineering, product management, product design, and almost every role that requires the creation and invention of new things.

It takes time to learn why a company exists in the space it does, how it grew and evolved into the behemoth that it currently is, and how your actions directly impact its bottom line. It can take an entire year or two for you to get comfortable with the organization’s rules and logistics of how to do things before you’re able to meaningfully contribute and create systemic changes. And yet, many managers and organizations reward quick, fast, band-aid solutions to problems for the sake of speed. Silicon Valley hasn’t learned its lesson in that after twenty years of moving fast and breaking things, your new hires are going to be hot-fixing the problems you created and things you broke. It is nearly impossible to address the root cause of the issue due to conflicting incentives.

Design debt, tech debt, and product debt are very real things. One seemingly innocuous decision about the user onboarding flow, or how to fetch notifications server-side, or making a tough call on pricing strategy can all have huge cascading effects into the work that future employees do several years after those people who made those decisions have moved on to other roles and are no longer with the company. How can you expect the new employees to undo the years of metrics, data, decisions, lines of code, system architecture, and user research? They say a healthy organization is resilient to attrition, but employees aren’t documenting every tiny decision they make in their day-to-day work. There is absolutely no incentive to do so. As a result, the new employees board the train moving at a hundred miles per hour, don’t know how to really do anything, hang around for a little bit, and get off at the next station.

Let’s take climate change, for another example. We’re hammered with messages about what we can do on an individual level to reduce our carbon footprint, but are doing little to nothing to stop corporations from releasing tons of harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. One of these has a much bigger impact than the other, and we’re failing catastrophically at this. Again, politicians making these decisions aren’t thinking about our collective future. Many are influenced by lobbyists who funnel money into their campaigns to protect coal and fossil fuel interests. And they simply pass on the burden of solving the issue to the “next generation” of politicians, all of whom cannot tackle a systemic problem as big as this without all the context and actions of what happened before and why.

In the information age, it is frighteningly easy to be exposed to all kinds of systemic problems happening all over the world at once. Volcanoes in the ring of fire, broken policing systems across the world, how governments failed their citizens in this pandemic, the dangerous rise of authoritarianism, and so much more. And the collective feeling of hopelessness amongst our generation weighs strong as a result. We literally feel like we can’t do anything to make a measly dent on anything. We get inundated with calls for donations and relief funds, and then get frustrated after realizing that we’re subsidizing the government for failing to do their job with taxpayer-funded money. It is maddening.

Sometime this century, it will get worse. With the meteoric rise of automation and machine learning, the new folks boarding that steam train will get on board, look around, realize that there’s not much for them to do, and get off at the next stop. The world will run itself well enough without their help. The feeling of uselessness and hopelessness will only exacerbate when they see a world running just fine without making room for them. They will feel like a burden in a world teeming with systemic problems that need to be solved, problems that their mere existence contributes to.

We cannot make any progress without recognizing the root cause of issues and making time to solve them. We cannot pretend to keep going with band-aid solutions and celebrating with drinks when we make the tiniest, most marginal improvement to a broken system. We cannot sustainably grow and enhance our lives in this way. A sea change needs to happen where we reprioritize our efforts and spend several years rebuilding and redoing things the right way, and I hope we start soon.