The IT industry is toxic and dishonest

The IT industry is toxic and dishonest. Because it has many problems no one talks about. I'm not writing this sentence out of the frustration of a bad month. I'm writing it after 23 years in this industry, with customers, partners, competitors, and colleagues, and I thought long about whether to leave it standing in public. I'm leaving it standing because I think we'll otherwise keep lying to ourselves.

This industry makes a respectable impression from the outside. It's innovative, growing, pays good salaries. It's one of the few areas in Germany where real growth is still happening. All that is true. And at the same time, the way we deal with ourselves and our customers is, in many places, far from what we claim publicly.

What I mean by "dishonest"

I'll name three patterns I've watched for years. First: the systematic over-statement of one's own capabilities in pitches. I've seen more decks with "enterprise-ready" written on them when the product was actually running on a single VM at five customers. I've heard more "we're AWS-certified" sentences with one individual behind them holding an expired exam. The industry knows this about itself and plays along. That's not a minor offence, that's a culture of collective varnish.

Second: the bill-at-any-cost stance in consulting. There are many good consultants. I work with some of them. But there's also a quiet agreement in parts of the industry to artificially extend projects, overload scope, complicate processes so a three-month project becomes a three-year contract. That's not isolated. That's a business model. And it isn't criticised internally because everyone lives off it.

Third: the unsaid assumption that the customer doesn't understand anything anyway. I've sat in customer meetings in which colleagues from other firms explained things that were technically wrong but sounded intelligent. The customer nodded because they didn't know better. Afterwards in the car, people laughed. That's the part that really bothers me. Not the mistake. The laughter.

What I mean by "toxic"

On the employee side there are patterns of their own. I talk with young developers having their third burn-out because they've ended up in projects where overtime isn't the exception but the rhythm. I talk with experienced colleagues who had to work past men's-club architecture debates, not because of bad work, but because nobody listened to them. I talk with senior people noticing that their domain knowledge is worth less in the new corporate structure than the ability to moderate Teams meetings.

I'm not romanticising employees or employers. Both sides contribute to this culture. But anyone claiming the industry is "basically fair and merit-based" is ignoring a lot of reality. Performance is one factor. Network is one factor. Self-marketing is often the biggest.

Why I stay anyway

This text sounds negative, and at this point it's meant to. But it isn't the end of my story. I'm in this industry because, despite everything, it's the best craft I know. Because we build things that help people. Because there are good people, many good people, who take their craft seriously, advise customers honestly, and don't laugh when the customer phrases a technical question wrong.

My own way of dealing with this discrepancy is fairly pragmatic. I've built my company so it doesn't have to afford these patterns. We turn customers down when we notice the project doesn't help them. We write proposals that also include what we won't do. We end conversations when we notice someone is just looking for a supplier for bad decisions. That reduces our addressable market. It increases the share of work I'm proud of.

Anyone reading this text as a blanket judgement has misunderstood me. I'm not talking about "the others". I'm talking about us, as an industry, and I include myself. It took me years to understand when I'd gone along with certain patterns without noticing. The honest part starts where I stop looking for blame for the state of the industry only with the big firms, only with the cheap ones, only with the corporates.

The IT industry could be better. We who work in it decide every day how toxic or how healthy it is. That isn't a sermon. That's a list of micro-decisions: which pitch you push back on, which customer you answer honestly, who you bring into your team, which culture you tolerate. In sum, that makes the industry, not the keynote quotes on LinkedIn.