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This is why I always gravitate towards software projects that are centered around making money (within ethical bounds, of course). The closer to the bottom line

This is why I always gravitate towards software projects that are centered around making money (within ethical bounds, of course). The closer to the bottom line my code is, the larger the sales and support team is around my code, and the more customers there are (real paying customers, not internal employees who like to be called customers) using my code, the better. It may sound overly hard-nosed and cynical to some people, but I find it's just the opposite. The drive to make more money is the only thing that trumps every other petty motivation people follow at work. It trumps favoritism, empire building, and intra-office rivalries. It trumps good ol' boys networks and tech bro networks. Money brings people into the same room who would never normally be in a room together, and they do it willingly. It forces people in power to listen to small fries. While money corrupts on an individual level, it purifies on an institutional level. Its universally accepted value allows a variety of individual motives to flourish. This seems to change once a company goes public and hits a certain size, as the flow of money becomes less and less tied to actual sales and consumer behavior and more and more based on financial engineering and stock price.

nullspace 6y ago
I have become exactly like this. My experience with free (as in beer) software and services is that it's usually offered as a "strategic offering", maybe as an attempt to commoditize your complement(?) but I'm speculating here. The downside is that the wider business does not care that much about your software. It needs to work, but just enough that customers don't use your complement. And critically, when it comes to prioritization of resources (especially the most senior people who could mentor you), they would rather put their best people in other parts of the business. I've become of the mindset that if you want to build best-in-class software with a best-in-class team, you should see if you can draw a direct line from the product to the revenue, or at least the core mission of the business.
- heimatau 6y ago
  Preface: Might be easier to read my comment withOUT the parenthesis. Then go back and read with them. I fully agree with you guys on a macro-scale. I didn't have this position years ago but now it's a firm position. But my observation is that no one (read: a significant majority) is financially sovereign (FS), therefore they mis-calculate the time/labor costs and it's economic value/costs. To think of this another way, if your (financial/material/etc) lives depended the Amish's* jam or chairs (or anything else they make). You can depend on their work, up to a certain scale. But even most software projects don't have this dependability because software is generally repackaged to fit a narrow use-case. Iff (if and only if) the Amish were to embrace the automation technology, then you could depend on the Amish scaling for whatever you need. Financial sovereignty is very powerful but the drawbacks are that the team, to do all the needed work, might not be FS. (Hence why I mention the Amish) This FS doesn't scale (this could with the Amish; if they wanted to provide jam to everyone, etc) with the complexity of the problem nor the robustness of the problem being solved. Another important drawback is that those that are FS tend to be myopic to those that aren't (i.e. their market/customers). This problem is pretty big as well. To find a product/service that solves all these criteria is immense and dare I say, improbable, hence my agreement to the two comments above. The simple solution is to try and align with the better alternative that have a positive feedback loop (i.e. monetary gain to improve the work). * Note: I do understand that Amish charge money for jam/chairs/etc but the cost is tends to be nominal/small.
  - gumbo 6y ago
    Just candid feedback here, I think you are being downvoted because your comment is actually quite hard to digest. And here, not event blaming it on the parentheses.
    - najarvg 6y ago
      Agreed. Took me a couple of passes to understand the point being made but makes solid sense and a viable rejoinder to the parent comment.
      - heimatau 6y ago
        Thanks for the feedback! I was going to edit it but looks like I can't. Regardless, the main idea is that I support greed as a motivator because financially sovereign teams don't exist nor scale enough to support a given cause (especially if it's a very difficult problem).
runawaybottle 6y ago
I lamented about this to a friend of mine recently. The first half of my short career were at companies where all we had were users. Endless customer support and feedback, endless eyeballs looking at anything you build. Every decision was based on ... reality. The second half of my career, even at larger places, was building MVPs where you go forever without a single user ever seriously using it. This duality in my work experience created an odd existential crisis. Push to prod after awhile felt like fake urgency. Ideas being thrown around by team members after awhile felt like needlessness. New hires and growth initiatives felt stupid, we barely saturate the existing team. Demos/Presentations felt futile, with a part of your soul just screaming ‘Who the fuck uses this!’.
- tboyd47 6y ago
  Ah, I've been there. I call this "rapid bozotyping" :D Hope you find something better! What tech stack do you work in?
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    The favorite tech stack for bozotyping, React/GQL :p
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    I call this "rapid bozotyping" :D I would read an entire research paper dedicated to this topic if it existed, heh.
- dmoy 6y ago
  It is a nice reality check where if you break something too bad, you have tens of thousand / hundreds / millions / ?? people breathing down your neck in like a few hours. I never really considered that without that it would get too loopy.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  This is where I am with my current gig. We are abstracted so far from the actual user that it feels like a useless amount of urgency for no particular reason. And middle management is more experienced in hardware than software, so they keep trying to use the "we will just hire more contractors to make it happen faster!" strategy. Feels like needless stress to build something nobody is really going to use anyway. And on top of that, I don't even get to do any code, I'm too senior, so all they want me to do now is draw up architecture diagrams. I'm thinking about jumping ship and taking a pay cut if necessary just to get back to something where I can actually solve real problems building software I know people will actually use. It's so much more satisfying to work on something you know is useful.
quicklime 6y ago
I dunno. In my experience, Google was easily the most ethical company I've worked for on a "per capita" basis. The big thing Google has going against it is the size of its user base. Every little bit of evil multiplied out by billions of users ends up having a large impact. But for two companies of an equal size, I don't think a company with an ad-driven revenue model is necessarily going to be less ethical. The sales and marketing people I've worked with at other companies were far, far worse than people at Google, and their evil was only limited by the scaling limits of their sales tactics.
- tboyd47 6y ago
  Interesting. Ethics aside, do you think Google's ad-driven revenue model has affected the company culture at all?
  - quicklime 6y ago
    Probably yes, and to be clear I'm not disputing the author's argument that revenue will come to dominate over culture in the long-term.
- Retric 6y ago
  Google is still a young company for it’s size. Ethically it’s been getting worse over time, which makes it’s current state less meaningful long term than the direction it’s headed.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    It could be argued that Google is getting more evil relative to its size, not its age. Ergo, you can’t extrapolate the trend unless you expect them to keep growing infinitely.
- ksk 6y ago
  Well, every ad-driven revenue model is at odds with privacy. There is zero chance that Google is going to support any privacy measure that will block themselves from spying on users. Google not only wants all your data to reside on their servers so they can mine it, but they're actively setting up tollbooths on the internet to take a cut from every online transaction. "Oh hey you Googled Tylers Texas BBQ, that must mean Google should get a cut from the order". Frankly its a bit scary that people honestly (and I truly believe you to be honest) believe Google could be a "most ethical" company.
baddox 6y ago
> It trumps favoritism, empire building, and intra-office rivalries. Does it? I associate those things very strongly with endeavors that are primarily concerned with making money.
- tboyd47 6y ago
  Those things exist everywhere people and power come together.
  - kfarr 6y ago
    Absolutely, you can see it in the power structures developed in large non-profits / government agencies.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  I would posit you want both. Without money you have a cool place to work until they close. Without money and you have crapy cowokers it still is a crappy place to work until they close. With money a cool place to work can last a long time. With money and you have crapy cowokers it still is a crappy place to work but still have a job.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
toiletfuneral 6y ago
Wow you really really really love money. Seems likes it’s sociopaths that only care about money which created the plastic gyre in the pacific or our complete dependency on oil. Congrats on your feelings of moral purity
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
juped 6y ago
This is why VC-backed vanity startups are so unpleasant.
softwarefounder 6y ago
"While money corrupts on an individual level, it purifies on an institutional level." Well said.
ChicagoBoy11 6y ago
"while money corrupts on an individual level, it purifies on an institutional level." Adam Smith wrote both "The Wealth of Nations" and also "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." Your comment is deeply insightful, and it is a feature of markets that wasn't missed by him. So dismayed that I think a lot of people overlook this important effect.
- dustingetz 6y ago
  An almost lossless compression is "people act in their interests", which is orthogonal to subjective judgement like purity and thus revealing the paradox or have I missed something? It is a very 1776 understanding of markets. A 2000 understanding is more like "Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value". At scale institutions don't purify, they consume. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-hate-your-family/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...
  - tboyd47 6y ago
    I was really reflecting more about my own experience working on different teams over the years than making a blanket statement about economics. I've found that the most dynamic and egalitarian teams are the ones that focus on making money because those are the ones where people are incentivized to keep an open mind and expect compensation for greater effort. On government and charitable projects, not so much. I don't really know why, but like the author, I suspected incentives have something to do with it. When your project is just a cost center, anything out of the norm will be seen as another risk or cost to avoid. As an engineer, this doesn't produce a great culture. It surprised me to learn this because, like many commenters, I always associated corruption and overall shadiness with making money. But my career has shown me that there's either no correlation or the opposite. At least at the team or project level.
biztos 6y ago
Wouldn't fintech be the ultimate distillation of this? You (often) don't have any product, you just have the money, and the purpose of the engineering is to increase its amount. Seems like a powerful motivator as long as everyone's getting a sufficiently motivating cut. OTOH, third prize is you're fired.
- tboyd47 6y ago
  The positive aspect of money is that people focus on creating valuable products instead of on navel-gazing / politics / whatever. Fintech kind of places the cart before the horse in that regard, don't you think? I wouldn't really know - I have never worked for a fintech project.
  - biztos 6y ago
    I also haven't worked in fintech so I'm speculating. You want to make software that adds value either way. But this way the value is directly generated for your employer, with no customer in the middle. I'm not saying that eliminates other influences, certainly I think (and have heard) this leads to workplaces dominated by strong and often eccentric personalities, which has its downsides. But insofar as a programmer is motivated by creating value, and by value we mean money here, I can't think of a way to be closer to it without being independent.
    - LB232323 6y ago
      I work in fintech. You are right, money is the product. The personality cliché in finance is the risk taking one. Men are more frequently found in riskier professions, including dangerous jobs like oil drilling. Some fintech companies actually do produce a software product for finance. However, many of them work for banks or funds to generate capital gains beyond a wage or salary. Regardless of personalities, the most important factor is profit. Everything else is secondary. It is not as flashy or famous as big tech companies, but this profit is paid in bonuses that far exceed the highest salaries for tech workers. If you work for Netflix, maybe you get a free subscription. If you work for a restaurant, maybe you get a free box of takeout at the end of the day. If you work in the business of money, your incentive is large bonuses.
shrimp_emoji 6y ago
>[money] purifies on an institutional level It purifies the institution to be a profit-seeking machine. That's had really good effects on the film & game industry.
sixdimensional 6y ago
Something about your quote screams "maybe true in a perfectly efficient/functioning economy", but my gut says, maybe not always true when there are inefficiencies. There are tangible and intangible costs and benefits to every pursuit (interesting example, externalities in economics). Focusing on only tangible benefits (money) does, to me, seem very common - rarely do I see intangibles being considered. For example, how many times I see profitable companies making money hand over fist, but when you look at their operations internally, they are completely inefficient and chaotic, maybe even damaging. Like, if they did things even 10% more effectively (let's say at a bit of reasonable cost), they would make even more profit. But doing so takes hard work, they are already making so much money, so they have no desire to look further. If the profit is so good, that ignoring the money "left on the table" doesn't cause enough pain for the subject involved - well, I think that also creates inefficiencies, complacency, etc. I also think, when profit is "so good" that other efficiencies go by the wayside, the same behaviors you describe continue. I don't find that the other behaviors go away, really. I once heard a quote that said, if you wanted any data project funded, convince the CFO that it makes money and they'll go for it. Much like the approaches of TCO, ROI, NPV, IRR, etc - prove the profitable case and you'd think people would buy in. I have found something like this to be somewhat true - except in companies where they are already making so much money, they don't care about doing the right (or "better") thing. The "more money" they could make is imaginary to them, and they are happy with how much they are already raking in. Until it's super, super tangible/convincing.
- tboyd47 6y ago
  I think you're identifying the difference between lots of money being made available to a team and revenue being the main focus of that team. Not the same. For example, the Fed can shower Wall St. with all the money it wants to, and it may actually make teams inside those companies less efficient and less of a joy to work for. Although money is available, making money is not the main goal of the team. Or take a fictional company with 100 projects and 1,000 engineers, where only 1 project with 10 engineers makes 90% of the revenue. The 99 other teams at the company are probably not going to have the best culture because the revenue incentive isn't present on those teams. They might just exist to check some compliance checkbox or stroke the ego of some middle manager. What I'm talking about is not necessarily the availability of money, but a direct relationship of your project to the money-making potential of the company. Big difference.
keithnz 6y ago
This has been my general experience too, the more a company is focused on revenue, often the experience is better and it does cut through the bullshit. One of the worse companies I worked for was one that had LOTs of money at its disposal, there wasn't really any focus on making money, but building massive projects, and the amount of politics, waste, and empire building was crazy.
eru 6y ago
I mostly agree. Minor correction: by itself it doesn't matter too much how large the sales team is or how many customers there are. What matter is how much money there is to be made. In my experience, internal customers are also fine, _if_ they are close to the money making side of the company, and especially if they have alternatives. Think eg traders in an investment bank. Stock price should be the outcome of making money. Financial engineering, when done right, is just a set of optimizations that makes sense at larger scales given the regulatory and market environment. A lot of superfluous financial engineering would disappear with simpler policies. Eg many jurisdictions tax interest payments less than dividend payments (or stock buybacks). Companies respond to that incentive by shifting the ratio of debt to equity. Put both on equal footing, and companies would be less interested in loading up their balance sheet with debt. (And stock buybacks are perfectly harmless. They are economically exactly equivalent to dividend payments, and have the essentially the same effect on a company's balance sheet.)

nullspace 6y ago

I have become exactly like this. My experience with free (as in beer) software and services is that it's usually offered as a "strategic offering", maybe as an attempt to commoditize your complement(?) but I'm speculating here. The downside is that the wider business does not care that much about your software. It needs to work, but just enough that customers don't use your complement. And critically, when it comes to prioritization of resources (especially the most senior people who could mentor you), they would rather put their best people in other parts of the business. I've become of the mindset that if you want to build best-in-class software with a best-in-class team, you should see if you can draw a direct line from the product to the revenue, or at least the core mission of the business.

heimatau 6y ago
Preface: Might be easier to read my comment withOUT the parenthesis. Then go back and read with them. I fully agree with you guys on a macro-scale. I didn't have this position years ago but now it's a firm position. But my observation is that no one (read: a significant majority) is financially sovereign (FS), therefore they mis-calculate the time/labor costs and it's economic value/costs. To think of this another way, if your (financial/material/etc) lives depended the Amish's* jam or chairs (or anything else they make). You can depend on their work, up to a certain scale. But even most software projects don't have this dependability because software is generally repackaged to fit a narrow use-case. Iff (if and only if) the Amish were to embrace the automation technology, then you could depend on the Amish scaling for whatever you need. Financial sovereignty is very powerful but the drawbacks are that the team, to do all the needed work, might not be FS. (Hence why I mention the Amish) This FS doesn't scale (this could with the Amish; if they wanted to provide jam to everyone, etc) with the complexity of the problem nor the robustness of the problem being solved. Another important drawback is that those that are FS tend to be myopic to those that aren't (i.e. their market/customers). This problem is pretty big as well. To find a product/service that solves all these criteria is immense and dare I say, improbable, hence my agreement to the two comments above. The simple solution is to try and align with the better alternative that have a positive feedback loop (i.e. monetary gain to improve the work). * Note: I do understand that Amish charge money for jam/chairs/etc but the cost is tends to be nominal/small.
- gumbo 6y ago
  Just candid feedback here, I think you are being downvoted because your comment is actually quite hard to digest. And here, not event blaming it on the parentheses.
  - najarvg 6y ago
    Agreed. Took me a couple of passes to understand the point being made but makes solid sense and a viable rejoinder to the parent comment.
    - heimatau 6y ago
      Thanks for the feedback! I was going to edit it but looks like I can't. Regardless, the main idea is that I support greed as a motivator because financially sovereign teams don't exist nor scale enough to support a given cause (especially if it's a very difficult problem).

runawaybottle 6y ago

I lamented about this to a friend of mine recently. The first half of my short career were at companies where all we had were users. Endless customer support and feedback, endless eyeballs looking at anything you build. Every decision was based on ... reality. The second half of my career, even at larger places, was building MVPs where you go forever without a single user ever seriously using it. This duality in my work experience created an odd existential crisis. Push to prod after awhile felt like fake urgency. Ideas being thrown around by team members after awhile felt like needlessness. New hires and growth initiatives felt stupid, we barely saturate the existing team. Demos/Presentations felt futile, with a part of your soul just screaming ‘Who the fuck uses this!’.

tboyd47 6y ago
Ah, I've been there. I call this "rapid bozotyping" :D Hope you find something better! What tech stack do you work in?
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  The favorite tech stack for bozotyping, React/GQL :p
- dvtrn 6y ago
  I call this "rapid bozotyping" :D I would read an entire research paper dedicated to this topic if it existed, heh.
dmoy 6y ago
It is a nice reality check where if you break something too bad, you have tens of thousand / hundreds / millions / ?? people breathing down your neck in like a few hours. I never really considered that without that it would get too loopy.
rootusrootus 6y ago
This is where I am with my current gig. We are abstracted so far from the actual user that it feels like a useless amount of urgency for no particular reason. And middle management is more experienced in hardware than software, so they keep trying to use the "we will just hire more contractors to make it happen faster!" strategy. Feels like needless stress to build something nobody is really going to use anyway. And on top of that, I don't even get to do any code, I'm too senior, so all they want me to do now is draw up architecture diagrams. I'm thinking about jumping ship and taking a pay cut if necessary just to get back to something where I can actually solve real problems building software I know people will actually use. It's so much more satisfying to work on something you know is useful.

quicklime 6y ago

I dunno. In my experience, Google was easily the most ethical company I've worked for on a "per capita" basis. The big thing Google has going against it is the size of its user base. Every little bit of evil multiplied out by billions of users ends up having a large impact. But for two companies of an equal size, I don't think a company with an ad-driven revenue model is necessarily going to be less ethical. The sales and marketing people I've worked with at other companies were far, far worse than people at Google, and their evil was only limited by the scaling limits of their sales tactics.

tboyd47 6y ago
Interesting. Ethics aside, do you think Google's ad-driven revenue model has affected the company culture at all?
- quicklime 6y ago
  Probably yes, and to be clear I'm not disputing the author's argument that revenue will come to dominate over culture in the long-term.
Retric 6y ago
Google is still a young company for it’s size. Ethically it’s been getting worse over time, which makes it’s current state less meaningful long term than the direction it’s headed.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  It could be argued that Google is getting more evil relative to its size, not its age. Ergo, you can’t extrapolate the trend unless you expect them to keep growing infinitely.
ksk 6y ago
Well, every ad-driven revenue model is at odds with privacy. There is zero chance that Google is going to support any privacy measure that will block themselves from spying on users. Google not only wants all your data to reside on their servers so they can mine it, but they're actively setting up tollbooths on the internet to take a cut from every online transaction. "Oh hey you Googled Tylers Texas BBQ, that must mean Google should get a cut from the order". Frankly its a bit scary that people honestly (and I truly believe you to be honest) believe Google could be a "most ethical" company.

baddox 6y ago

> It trumps favoritism, empire building, and intra-office rivalries. Does it? I associate those things very strongly with endeavors that are primarily concerned with making money.

tboyd47 6y ago
Those things exist everywhere people and power come together.
- kfarr 6y ago
  Absolutely, you can see it in the power structures developed in large non-profits / government agencies.
sumtechguy 6y ago
I would posit you want both. Without money you have a cool place to work until they close. Without money and you have crapy cowokers it still is a crappy place to work until they close. With money a cool place to work can last a long time. With money and you have crapy cowokers it still is a crappy place to work but still have a job.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

toiletfuneral 6y ago

Wow you really really really love money. Seems likes it’s sociopaths that only care about money which created the plastic gyre in the pacific or our complete dependency on oil. Congrats on your feelings of moral purity

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

juped 6y ago

This is why VC-backed vanity startups are so unpleasant.

softwarefounder 6y ago

"While money corrupts on an individual level, it purifies on an institutional level." Well said.

ChicagoBoy11 6y ago

"while money corrupts on an individual level, it purifies on an institutional level." Adam Smith wrote both "The Wealth of Nations" and also "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." Your comment is deeply insightful, and it is a feature of markets that wasn't missed by him. So dismayed that I think a lot of people overlook this important effect.

dustingetz 6y ago
An almost lossless compression is "people act in their interests", which is orthogonal to subjective judgement like purity and thus revealing the paradox or have I missed something? It is a very 1776 understanding of markets. A 2000 understanding is more like "Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value". At scale institutions don't purify, they consume. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-hate-your-family/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/does-big-business-ha...
- tboyd47 6y ago
  I was really reflecting more about my own experience working on different teams over the years than making a blanket statement about economics. I've found that the most dynamic and egalitarian teams are the ones that focus on making money because those are the ones where people are incentivized to keep an open mind and expect compensation for greater effort. On government and charitable projects, not so much. I don't really know why, but like the author, I suspected incentives have something to do with it. When your project is just a cost center, anything out of the norm will be seen as another risk or cost to avoid. As an engineer, this doesn't produce a great culture. It surprised me to learn this because, like many commenters, I always associated corruption and overall shadiness with making money. But my career has shown me that there's either no correlation or the opposite. At least at the team or project level.

biztos 6y ago

Wouldn't fintech be the ultimate distillation of this? You (often) don't have any product, you just have the money, and the purpose of the engineering is to increase its amount. Seems like a powerful motivator as long as everyone's getting a sufficiently motivating cut. OTOH, third prize is you're fired.

tboyd47 6y ago
The positive aspect of money is that people focus on creating valuable products instead of on navel-gazing / politics / whatever. Fintech kind of places the cart before the horse in that regard, don't you think? I wouldn't really know - I have never worked for a fintech project.
- biztos 6y ago
  I also haven't worked in fintech so I'm speculating. You want to make software that adds value either way. But this way the value is directly generated for your employer, with no customer in the middle. I'm not saying that eliminates other influences, certainly I think (and have heard) this leads to workplaces dominated by strong and often eccentric personalities, which has its downsides. But insofar as a programmer is motivated by creating value, and by value we mean money here, I can't think of a way to be closer to it without being independent.
  - LB232323 6y ago
    I work in fintech. You are right, money is the product. The personality cliché in finance is the risk taking one. Men are more frequently found in riskier professions, including dangerous jobs like oil drilling. Some fintech companies actually do produce a software product for finance. However, many of them work for banks or funds to generate capital gains beyond a wage or salary. Regardless of personalities, the most important factor is profit. Everything else is secondary. It is not as flashy or famous as big tech companies, but this profit is paid in bonuses that far exceed the highest salaries for tech workers. If you work for Netflix, maybe you get a free subscription. If you work for a restaurant, maybe you get a free box of takeout at the end of the day. If you work in the business of money, your incentive is large bonuses.

shrimp_emoji 6y ago

>[money] purifies on an institutional level It purifies the institution to be a profit-seeking machine. That's had really good effects on the film & game industry.

sixdimensional 6y ago

Something about your quote screams "maybe true in a perfectly efficient/functioning economy", but my gut says, maybe not always true when there are inefficiencies. There are tangible and intangible costs and benefits to every pursuit (interesting example, externalities in economics). Focusing on only tangible benefits (money) does, to me, seem very common - rarely do I see intangibles being considered. For example, how many times I see profitable companies making money hand over fist, but when you look at their operations internally, they are completely inefficient and chaotic, maybe even damaging. Like, if they did things even 10% more effectively (let's say at a bit of reasonable cost), they would make even more profit. But doing so takes hard work, they are already making so much money, so they have no desire to look further. If the profit is so good, that ignoring the money "left on the table" doesn't cause enough pain for the subject involved - well, I think that also creates inefficiencies, complacency, etc. I also think, when profit is "so good" that other efficiencies go by the wayside, the same behaviors you describe continue. I don't find that the other behaviors go away, really. I once heard a quote that said, if you wanted any data project funded, convince the CFO that it makes money and they'll go for it. Much like the approaches of TCO, ROI, NPV, IRR, etc - prove the profitable case and you'd think people would buy in. I have found something like this to be somewhat true - except in companies where they are already making so much money, they don't care about doing the right (or "better") thing. The "more money" they could make is imaginary to them, and they are happy with how much they are already raking in. Until it's super, super tangible/convincing.

tboyd47 6y ago
I think you're identifying the difference between lots of money being made available to a team and revenue being the main focus of that team. Not the same. For example, the Fed can shower Wall St. with all the money it wants to, and it may actually make teams inside those companies less efficient and less of a joy to work for. Although money is available, making money is not the main goal of the team. Or take a fictional company with 100 projects and 1,000 engineers, where only 1 project with 10 engineers makes 90% of the revenue. The 99 other teams at the company are probably not going to have the best culture because the revenue incentive isn't present on those teams. They might just exist to check some compliance checkbox or stroke the ego of some middle manager. What I'm talking about is not necessarily the availability of money, but a direct relationship of your project to the money-making potential of the company. Big difference.

keithnz 6y ago

This has been my general experience too, the more a company is focused on revenue, often the experience is better and it does cut through the bullshit. One of the worse companies I worked for was one that had LOTs of money at its disposal, there wasn't really any focus on making money, but building massive projects, and the amount of politics, waste, and empire building was crazy.

eru 6y ago

I mostly agree. Minor correction: by itself it doesn't matter too much how large the sales team is or how many customers there are. What matter is how much money there is to be made. In my experience, internal customers are also fine, _if_ they are close to the money making side of the company, and especially if they have alternatives. Think eg traders in an investment bank. Stock price should be the outcome of making money. Financial engineering, when done right, is just a set of optimizations that makes sense at larger scales given the regulatory and market environment. A lot of superfluous financial engineering would disappear with simpler policies. Eg many jurisdictions tax interest payments less than dividend payments (or stock buybacks). Companies respond to that incentive by shifting the ratio of debt to equity. Put both on equal footing, and companies would be less interested in loading up their balance sheet with debt. (And stock buybacks are perfectly harmless. They are economically exactly equivalent to dividend payments, and have the essentially the same effect on a company's balance sheet.)