There's lots of different points in the article, most of them tangential at best to 'remote first'. The remarkable thing about 'software eating itself' is that

There's lots of different points in the article, most of them tangential at best to 'remote first'. The remarkable thing about 'software eating itself' is that it is true, in the sense that the potential of what a small team of good people can accomplish has gone up by orders of magnitude over the decades. We stand on the shoulders of gian( code base)s, but ... at the same time the dysfunctionality seems to have increased, and not just in corporations, but also in smaller outfits. Just as efficiency paradox observed in the infamous 'Bulshitt jobs' article, it is as if there are these ubiquitous hordes of 'overhead' cadre hiding in the wings relentlessly trying to bootstrap themselves at the slightest opportunity. I'll give an anecdote, but it is fairly typical for many situations I encounter. This job was putting a daily webpage dashboard on some existing data and and integrating an existing service that delivers new data-points. There were very few uncertainties, It was scoped as a one week effort for a team of two self-managed senior engineers, with a second week of polish and iteration. This is not what happened. First a manager was appointed for the project, who's first 'hire' was another line manager to keep track of meetings and progress. He hired a business analyst to write a spec, soon joined by two other analysts to read the spec and write more spec. Then a 'data scientist' consultant was brought on, who (rightly) ignored most of the gibberish in the analysis document but managed to instate a full enterprise cloud BI stack (hey, we're dealing with data and need to draw a chart), and instead of just reading the data from the nightly reports decides to integrate directly with the data-warehouse, now upping the need for enterprise security etc. etc. 2 months into the project this is still going and the end result will still just be a chart on a webpage. Second anecdote. This one in reverse, but putting light on the same principle. This concerns a large organization that for years was pondering to go digital with its mailing system (this org deals with thousands of pieces of physical mail coming in and thousands of paper pieces going out every day, often requiring multiple official approvals and signatures etc.). Thos was seen as a complex and large project, taking a year probably running into the multiple millions of euro). COVID-19 hits, and the organization is forced to go fully remote. A pragmatic team of 3,5 FTE is called in to 'just make this work ASAP', as the mail-flow is vital to the org. They finish the job in 3 (hectic) days. The solution has now been running for months. So there is this 'paradox of efficiency' in software as well. Software eats itself, but as it does it has the tendency to become morbidly obese (to stay within the metaphor).