My tribe.

Right now seems like the perfect moment to write about my mission as a test consultant because it seems that a lot of people in tech simply stopped caring. They swallowed the proverbial red pill and are droning on about tools, technology, "AI", speed, productivity.

I thought technology on its own was meaningless. I thought we were making software solutions to actually help people with their problems. Technology as a supporting thing, not as raison d'être. But hey, what do I know?

Do you care?

I'm quite sure many people out there do share my point of view: Technology for the sake of technology is not the way to go. Speed doesn't matter if you're driving down a cliff. You can be productive on a road to nowhere. Technology can be used to advance a terrible mission, it can be part of an ideology that hurts a lot of people. Shall we do less of this, preferably zero?*

Mainstream (big) tech is going in this bad direction I just described. Or, in an even darker view, it has already arrived in enshittification hell?

My mission, as a test consultant, is therefore the exact opposite of what I've just described.

I want to work for, and work with, people who still care. Companies that still care.

I want to play a role, to the best of my testing abilities, in creating software that actually solves problems. That actually delights the users. As a context-driven tester, you can be sure I'll bring my A-game in finding problems that threaten the value of the product!

I will find problems, not to be an asshole, but because I genuinely want to improve the state of things. When you work with people who care, this is not a problem; they understand. They want the same thing!

People who share this mission, whether they are testers, developers, agile coaches, managers, you name it: they are my tribe. Let's call ourselves the "we still care about craftsmanship"-tribe.

Are you part of it?

*I cannot view LLM's as "technology". To me, they are part of an ideology that is meant to deskill people, to hurt people, to control people, to demonize groups of people. It's all based on one giant pile of theft, slave labour, and we're destroying the earth even further by using this. But sure, for your use case it has been helpful? It has made you more productive? Congrats, you're still advancing an ideology that will bite you in the ass at a later point. Think about me when you are laid off from your job because a manager thought the AI could now do it on its own, no matter if the output isn't good enough. You are nothing more than blood in the machine. Shame on you if you willingly offer your blood.