case of hype-cycle-itis

You, coffee in hand, staring at another Slack ping: “Strategic pivot. All-hands at 3 PM.”

Two years ago it was microservices. Before that, cloud-native. Today, AI-everywhere. The slogans change, the belt keeps moving.

This isn’t some nefarious conspiracy. It’s the Fad Treadmill: an infinite loop fueled by investor narratives, vendor demos, internal re-orgs, and developer FOMO. No single hand is on the switch; everyone’s jogging, hoping the belt will slow on its own.

But the belt never slows. Investors need a story to justify the next round, managers need progress for the slide deck, and engineers need fresh resume buzzwords in case the job market turns. Everyone gets a small win, so the machine just keeps running.

symptoms

You spend your days nursing Terraform files, tweaking CI configs, updating NPM dependencies—just enough duct tape to keep production from melting. Every sprint, you wear five different hats: SRE, DevOps, compliance whisperer, production log inspector. Somewhere in there, you write some code too.

And while you're buried in YAML and dashboards, your X timeline is off chasing React Server Components, debating algebraic effects, and launching AI coding agents from the terminal. Claude is writing better code reviews than your team lead. You’re still fighting a major version upgrade of Elasticsearch. It starts to feel like you missed the train. Or worse: maybe this is the train.

diagnosis

It doesn’t hit all at once. It creeps in.

At first, it just feels like “the job.” A few too many meetings. Another vendor integration. Every fix a patch job.

You start to wonder: who is this for?

You daydream about a clean slate. Rewrite the whole thing in a sane language. Nix the legacy stack, start fresh, build something that actually makes sense. But deep down, you know how that movie ends. First you learn Zig to feel something again, only to get sent straight to the Java 8 mines.

You’re not alone. What you’re feeling isn’t burnout. It’s the slow drift of meaning. The creeping realization that most of your momentum isn’t coming from vision or clarity, but from inertia.

treatment

Once the drift sets in, most people pick one of three moves:

Fight: Burn it all down. Rewrite the stack in a modern language. Start fresh. Convince your team this time will be different. (It won’t. The edge cases will return. The duct tape will find you.)

Flee: Jump to the next shiny startup. Reset the clock. Ride a new wave. New logo, new stack, new problems. Give it 12 months and the treadmill starts again, just with better branding.

Fade: The slow shutdown. You stop pushing. You stop caring. You optimize for quiet Fridays and passable standups. Your spark didn’t explode. It dimmed quietly, sprint by sprint.

But there’s a fourth option. One that doesn’t get you applause, or likes, or VC funding.

You go inward. You get honest about what matters to you. You work with intention, not trend-chasing. You accept that the treadmill exists—and choose how (or if) you engage with it.

There’s no cure for hype-cycle-itis. But there is a treatment: clarity. And it starts with opting out of autopilot.