This has been going on for a long time, now, and is becoming really worrying. There is a whole bunch of people, in the IT industry, whose sole goal is to be “recognized” as a “thought-leader”.

When I think about a thought-leader, the first face that comes to my mind is Einstein, even if with that famous tongue of his out :) That was a thought-leader. Hell, probably the greatest one. Do you really think, he ever cared how high his recognition rate was? All he cared about was his own curiosity and the desire to figure things out. That’s what real thinkers do, not - watch number of hits on his/her blog.

The problem with this “wanna be a thought-leader” craziness is greater than we may realize. Soon enough we will hardly have anybody who bothers to think. We will only have three groups: people who try to make buzz off of trivial stuff; people who were too late to get on that train and hence try to retaliate by criticizing; and finally the largest and most disgusting group of penguins who are too lazy to think for themselves and just blindly join one or the other group. That way, they won’t have to justify their poor decisions to the management - just mention some buzz words, some “legendary” names and - you are off the hook, if your manager is stupid nough, which of course, they usually are.

If you think this is an exaggeration, look around more tentatively and put some effort to notice all the heat around Spring, SOA, Agile practices - whatever else the buzzword of the day happens to be.

PEOPLE, it does not freaking matter whether you do agile or whatever, as far as you do your job well. And if you dont - you could as well get lost in a very agile way.

How hard is that to get?

*sigh* and cheers to all people who still have some common sense left.