Yesterday, I met a man who has run his business for more than 20 years. He is in his late 60s and definitely due for retirement. He told me one of the things that keeps him up at night is tech. He has spent a lot of money but he is not getting any results.
About a month ago, an old-time friend reached out to me because he wanted us to help him build the startup he has been working on in the past 3 years but there is nothing to launch. At a point he went into depression and just recently started looking into it again. Time will fall if I want to continue to give examples of instances like this so I will just stop there.
People in tech or those aspiring to get into tech need to understand what it is that it is all about. When I built my first application over a decade ago and deployed to a small company in Ibadan, I didn’t really understand the importance of what I was doing until I was invited to their office by the MD. I saw how big the place was, I saw how much money the software was used to manage and I got scared. I was not very comfortable throughout the meeting.
Immediately I got home I went back to the code and started refactoring. I understood beyond words how important the solution was. Many of us, especially those of us who freelance, are only about the quick cash we want to make. We under-estimate the job when we bill, then when the project gets complicated, we want to leave it to move to a new one. This hurts people, hurt businesses and lives.
Those of us who work with companies, lie about milestones just to scale to the end of the month so we get our salary. It’s not smart, it’s wicked. Don’t take a job you cannot do. Don’t take multiple jobs when you don’t have capacity for one, you are not smart, you are just wicked and hurting all of us.
You may say you are just young and exploring but you can actually take lives with such attitude. Each time we take a new project at Zealight Innovation Labs I do my best to continuously educate the team in the importance of the project and it’s greater good.
The pains of that old man really broke my heart. Technology should be an enabler of businesses not the end of them