How does a formerly tech-savvy IT employee devolve into a tech dinosaur?  Just as plants and animals of the past, individuals run a great risk of having their technical know-how decay and become embedded in sedimentary rock.  The process of technical fossilization is one that is clearly on display in modern day IT departments.  In essence, enterprises are running on fossil fuel–or as HBR’s Susan Cramm puts it, “IT is Stocked with Out-of-Date Geeks“.  There look to be two driving factors that have led to a dependency on IT employees whose technical beliefs and opinions have been set in limestone: Confirmation Bias and The Corporate Ladder.

Confirmation Bias is seeing the world through a filter, thinking selectively.  Most people like to believe that they are always able to objectively process information; however, numerous studies have concluded that people tend to seek out consistent information that confirms their beliefs and evidence to the contrary is swiftly dismissed.  As IT employees solidify their preconceived notions about technology, they become staunch defenders of this selective filter that has been frozen over time.  Their attention becomes laser focused on what confirms…as opposed to what informs.  When technological innovations come along that challenge these dogmatic cognitive shortcuts and introduce cognitive dissonance, the typical response is to entrench themselves by means of motivated reasoning.  As TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington puts it, “These are the cavemen…who were afraid of fire when it was discovered because it burned, or was too technologically advanced to really understand. The smart guys used it to cook their meat and keep them warm, and multiplied.”  The only way to combat this bias is to not promote those who cling to their technical hammers and treat everything as it were a nail.  It is the innovator’s who need to be promoted and those who continuously make decisions based on “No one ever got fired for buying X” (FUD) logic, need to be promotionally starved to the point of evolution or extinction.  This is where the Corporate Ladder comes into play.

In large corporations today, it’s commonplace to have your most inexperienced programmers write the code that runs your business, while those who demonstrate great technical acumen work their way into positions of unaccountable authority.  As these once technical leaders progress towards positions of prestige, their first-hand technical knowledge quickly becomes defunct and ultimately outdated to the point of fossilization.  To resolve this, we need to invert the process.  The act of checking code into a production environment should be an earned privilege and not something you work away from.  Better yet, IT needs to adopt the Corporate Lattice approach to combat “the rigidity of the ladder’s hierarchy, its constraints on information flows, and the limitations of its singular upward path to success”.  Too many IT developers are being confronted with a false dichotomy–to get ahead, you need to choose one of two non-coding career tracks: architect or manager.  With a lattice, there’s no single track to success, but myriad routes to progress.  With such a structure, tech-savvy employees can work to keep up with the pace of technology and avoid the fate of the dinosaur.

To “consume OR create”…this is the notion being bandied about in the technology echochamber of today. The perception of the content consumer has been relegated to a distracted, shallow procrastinator who is but a mere bit player with a reliance on the grandiose visions of entrepreneurial content creators. The prospects of being the next tech billionaire have overshadowed the benefits that modern information access has thrust upon us. The internal struggle to appropriately ration attention has created a false dichotomy; wherein, if you’re not creating, then you’re focusing your finite attention on idle consumption. Like most seemingly binary choices, incredulity is the appropriate response. Consumption and creation are not adversarial, they are discretionary acts whose balance must be struck by the individual–preferably for altruistic means.  A myopic focus on the effects of over-consumption and under-creation overlooks the potential hazards of under-consumption and over-creation.  If over-creation is being driven by the goal of establishing an egoic legacy and not on the behalf of actual demand or posterity, then this creator could greatly benefit from consuming more information to gain a greater knowledge of self and humanity.  The aforementioned in no way validates conspicuous consumption, it’s just meant to shine a light on the actual benefits of moderate consumption.  Depending on how much we choose to consume, the information troughs of today can be seen as a gift or a curse.  Ultimately, the consumer must realize that their precious attention is the de facto currency of the web.  Being mindful/present as to where our attention is being distributed, will allow us to effectively create AND consume.

If agoraphobia is the fear of wide open spaces or uncontrolled social conditions, then digital agoraphobia is the fear of the open web or uncontrolled social media.  From those in the newspaper business to corporate security engineers, there seems to be an inherent fear of an open and uncontrolled digital future.  The world has shifted from a time where news media was controlled by editors and digital content was closed off by proprietary technologies and stored away behind silos/paywalls.  This change has caused binary thought to pervade our public discourse wherein an open/uncontrolled web is distorted by fear mongerers.  A democratized digital future is purported to be the exact opposite–a haven for data thieves, uninformed amateurs, and enemies of capitalism.  When it comes to debating the merits of technological progress, we need to avoid the logical fallacy of false dilemma and accept the notion that nuance is necessary.

Typing in “define:bit” into Google Search yields many results, but nothing definitive. “BIT” means many things to many people–typically dependent on the context it’s used in. If presented with a Warshack Test for the word “bit”, I would like to think that I would immediately associate the term with the following:

• Since I’m a developer by day, binary digit would be my initial reaction. In this sense, a bit has one of two boolean values–zero or one.
• My training in IT Project Management leads to my next association, an acronym representing Business/IT. Business and IT are integral units within an organization that allow a corporation to add value by successfully leveraging information and technology.
• Outside of the business lexicon, bit can refer to a small portion of a much larger entity (e.g. time, food, or a theatrical performance).
• The term can also be used to refer to material mediums (e.g. a metal piece in a horse’s mouth, money, or the cutting piece of a drill).