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This is the result of a war that was fought two decades ago and the hackers/coders/sysadmins, the people to built things, lost and lost big. It was the dot-com
by zcw100 6y ago
This is the result of a war that was fought two decades ago and the hackers/coders/sysadmins, the people to built things, lost and lost big. It was the dot-com crash. Looking back it's absurd. Everyone was convinced there was this big bubble and everyone got caught up in the irrational exuberance of the future of computing. But was it really? The real financial damage was done by the likes of Enron and Anderson consulting. If it was so irrational why did that supposed bubble give rise to some of the largest companies that now exist? Because it wasn't. That's why we spend the next two decades wringing our hands and fretting that there was another bubble right around the corner. This never happened. Why? Because there wasn't a bubble in the first place to worry about repeating.
What did happen is a ton of people lost their jobs and those people, passionate about what they do, kept right on doing it in the form of open source software. Google, flush with cash, hovered up talent for bargain basement prices. The board room got the message that software was eating the world and if they didn't do something quick the people to wrote the software and built the systems might want a say in how those companies were run. So they outsourced what they could and doubled up what they couldn't. The message was clear. I don't need you. I've got a second one of you ready to go. The waged a war on GPL calling it "viral" and "insidious" and convinced everyone it would be much better to use more liberal licenses that would allow them to build and sell products.
The war was lost when they convinced you that management was "icky" and you didn't want that boring old stuff. You wanted to be coding so they hired the MBA to be the scrum master. The result is you were cut out of the decision making process. Your only input was on a technical level and even there you were kept a close eye on. Some people would even proudly exclaim that they liked this system because they thought they were winners based on their slightly higher than average salary all the wile cranking out multi-million or even billion dollar software for someone else. Doug Cutting, the creator of Hadoop and basically everything that was to become Cloudera was only given a job. They made so much money even they were embarrassed but only embarrassed enough to allow him to keep working for them.
You lost and they won and this is the result. You're made to jump through these absurd hoops because it's cheaper to create these pathological systems and waste your time than to do something more efficient.
- itronitron 6y agoI feel a common thread in the events and behaviors you describe is the prioritization of decisions by valuation, IP, and boundaries over execution, progress, and flow. Maybe the only way out of this mess is for business schools to start teaching new metrics for the latter category.