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It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem m

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacles that make these problems difficult to fix or even sometimes perceive. I will note that I often wish Dan Luu was a bit less apparently-uniformly-confident in some of the statements he writes. He does back up what he says, but he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
The article is yet another one about supply and demand that ignores first day of microeconomics price theory: If supply is low, demand is high, the price goes up.
- Strilanc 5y ago
  In what way is the article about that? How is Apple getting a better chip by learning to do it themselves, because cpu manufacturers are trapped by misaligned benchmarks, just a trivial statement about supply and demand?
  - cdogl 5y ago
    Perhaps the strategic decisions of one the largest and one of the most complex organisations in human history cannot be explained by simple reference to undergraduate microeconomics
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    It isn't about supply and demand at all, but about another, even more basic, economic concept: incentives, and a second relatively modern economic concept, information asymmetries.[1] Over-summarising and over-simplifying:- "Third-party service providers are incentivised to minimise their costs. If their clients cannot assess the quality of their service and/or end-users cannot reward or penalise them based on the quality of the services, then quality is poor, because it is cheaper to not provide services and later argue about it than to provide the service. Third party deficiencies/misbehaviour get so bad sometimes that there are no gains from trade and occasional losses. "Internally, inside companies, the incentives may be to act similarly to third-parties, or they may not. This depends on "culture"." And here the essay would be improved with an analysis of the compnents of "culture" that matter. It talks about trustworthiness of company leadership, but that is only one factor, surely. 1. Akerlof's "Market for Lemons" paper is the seminal one here.
- klodolph 5y ago
  And if the market is inefficient, the pricing will be irrational (for certain ideas of what “irrational” means).
civilized 5y ago
> It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. This is a HN pattern as old as the hills. If the headline invites bikeshedding, most people will bikeshed. If the article is long and complex, almost no one will read the article. This one has both.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  To be fair, I read it, but not all the way to the end. This was almost a novel.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    Because I’m a writer, I’m going to be a bit pedantic here. Novels start around 50,000 words and usually take several hours to read. ;)
    - Aeolun 5y ago
      Novella then? Guess that’s still not quite what the article is, but it’s a bit hard to get through in one sitting.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Huh? It's not bikeshedding to focus on a particular subtopic.
Aeolun 5y ago
> he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating At least the parts about build vs buy sound extremely familiar to me. Setting up and integrating something you’ve bought often takes as much or more time than building it yourself. The best argument for buying is that you’d make all stakeholders equally unhappy.
- andrewingram 5y ago
  Reminds me of hiring an in-house team of Salesforce engineers to build out and maintain the hugely expensive CRM you bought because you… didn’t want to spend engineering time on a CRM.
  - hallway_monitor 5y ago
    The new CTO getting drunk on sales Kool aid and deciding to move many functions to Salesforce was a strong signal of incompetence at a previous workplace.
everyone 5y ago
Comments here are often more interesting than the linked articles. I think the 'comment on title' phenomenon is acceptable and possibly good here.
klodolph 5y ago
> …he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating. A.k.a. “avoiding weasel words”. I don’t mean to be clever here, it’s just that it’s far more efficient to assume that reader can make their own informed decision, and give them citations & instructions for reproducibility to help them along the way, rather than shovel a bunch of weasel words into the parts of your writing that are less grounded in reproducible facts. There are also different expectations for blog posts and heavily researched&vetted articles.
- randallsquared 5y ago
  I'm not sure "efficient" is the word you're looking for here. For a given post, there's only one of the poster, and presumably many readers...
  - klodolph 5y ago
    You’re going to have to explain more of the argument, because I don’t follow. It sounds like you are arguing that writers should spend more time spelling things out for readers which aren’t very good at reading comprehension. That doesn’t seem very efficient—it wastes most people’s time, since the writer is spending more time spelling things out explicitly and avoiding ambiguity, all of the readers with decent reading comprehension skills have to spend more time sifting through crap that doesn’t add value to the text (for them), and only the people with lower reading comprehension skills get any benefit. People with lower reading comprehension skills are less likely to be reading text-heavy blogs in the first place! The following claim may be controversial—generally, there is a tradeoff between clarity and precision, and the right tradeoff depends on the context and what your goals are. The internet, and forums like HN, distort our perception of where the correct tradeoff is, because the people complaining about lack of precision are the loudest. You should be aware of who your audience really is… is it people capable of interpreting claims in persuasive documents? Or is it people who decide to complain on HN?
    - lanstin 5y ago
      I think the additional clarity benefits smart people too. And fast readers can read faster over text with redundancy than maximally cryptic prose. The sweet spot of course is a short, clear and correct explanation, but finding that can take a lot of effort.
throwaway984393 5y ago
Consumer product build quality and outsourcing quality are the exact same problem. Somebody is making a thing and they don't make it well and the customer isn't happy. There is nothing special about the problem, it's simply hard to build things well. When you prioritize "shipping" over quality, you make crap. If you try to avoid the difficulty of quality by hiring somebody else to do it and they also prioritize "shipping" over quality, you buy crap. Re: "getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally", they either paid the wrong people, or they were trying to solve the wrong problem, or weren't good at using the product. If you're making Toyotas and you buy your parts from CheapPartCo, chances are good you end up with a crap car. If you buy your parts from Denso, at least you have the chance it will turn out well. If you take the Denso parts and assemble them terribly, you still end up with a crap car. And if you shouldn't have even used that part because your overall design was crap, you also end up with a crap car. I'd say it's more likely the average person/company/etc will not make something well. Not only does it take more skill and hard work to make things well, they end up more expensive. If things are made well they probably took a lot more work to make them well, or the people who make things well are in higher demand. Show me a company that pays a premium for good vendors and full training for all their staff and holds back products until they pass a Steve Jobs-level of quality engineering, and I'll show you a company whose products work well, and probably charge a premium. (The only exception I know of is Toyota, because they are crazy enough to literally stop a production line just to troubleshoot a tiny issue. Their focus on quality has led to efficiency which reduces cost and increases production. But this is all Lean 101) And this isn't a tech-specific problem because everything in the world has quality issues. The reason GM couldn't make a half-decent car while Toyotas were rock solid for decades was simply working harder on quality. You have to work hard to make something work well.
- fomine3 5y ago
  A bit different. End user/who decide to buy/whose money is used/ are often different for B2B products.
jseliger 5y ago
It's like most people don't read carefully or for comprehension: https://jakeseliger.com/2022/01/31/most-people-dont-read-carefully-or-for-comprehension/ https://jakeseliger.com/2022/01/31/most-people-dont-read-car... (A few of the replies I've gotten purely answered the title and didn't discuss the content.)
- klodolph 5y ago
  Most people can’t. “Read carefully or for comprehension” would probably translate to level 4/5 prose literacy skills in the NCES NAAL (National Center for Education Statistics National Assessment of Adult Literacy). Recent survey puts this group (level 4/5) at 12% of the adult population. Levels 4 and 5 are no longer separated because of the small percentage of people that fall into group 5. Level 4 tasks require you to be able to understand something in the presence of distractors. Just to make up an example, think about the last time you sent an email to someone that had two questions in it. Did they answer both questions? (I’m actually a bit unsure that this falls in level 4.) (Level 5 includes tasks such as “compare and contrast complex information, or to generate new information making high-level inferences or using specialized background knowledge”.)
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    Twelve percent?? That is scary.
  - watwut 5y ago
    > Just to make up an example, think about the last time you sent an email to someone that had two questions in it. Pretty often they are answering easy question and leaving the harder one sleep. Pretty often, the goal is to get rid of you email as fast as possible so that they can go back to what they actually want to be doing.
  - mattgreenrocks 5y ago
    This explains so much about our ambient media environment and misinformation.
  - Mezzie 5y ago
hffftz 5y ago
balaji1 5y ago
You are depressed for other reasons. People read the title and connected more with the title than the hard-to-read and dense article. If anything, call it a click-baity title. It is hard to buy consumer products that work well also. Look at the number of things you order on Amazon, and see how satisfied you are with stuff. All the synthetic material low-quality stuff.
- wittycardio 5y ago
  So not only did you not read the article , you are offended at the idea that you should have to read the article at all ?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
YZF 5y ago
I read the article so I'm gonna respond here ;) As a counter-anecdote I'll offer my experience working for a company that built large precision machinery. Many of the parts of said machinery were built by subcontractors. The quality was extremely high. We did do certain things in house if they require special expertise and we did have the capability to do rapid prototyping but it wouldn't make any business sense for us to purchase all the equipment to make all those parts that we subcontracted. I think this is common in many industries. (Automotive?) Even with software this is far less than clear cut. There's plenty of times where you should not build it yourself and the quality stuff isn't always terrible. Seems like there's some cherry-picking going on in the examples re: bad software. Sure, there's lots of bad software, but there's also awesome software that works really well. Building it yourself isn't a guarantee that it'll work well. 90% of the time the people that think they can do better if they build it themselves can't, they just don't know it yet. And sure Kyle is great but there are plenty of solid databases built before he was around (before he was born?) by companies like IBM and Microsoft. I've seen companies build in-house tooling that's much worse than what's available off the shelf and have an endless drain of resources due to that. Build vs. buy isn't an easy call. I'll agree with that. I felt like there was a self contradiction in the essay. You can't get great software but you can get great engineers that will build the great software in house? I don't think your chances of finding the team that can build that are any greater. You're just as likely to hire a bunch of people you think can do this and then find out they can't. 5 years later. Which sort of jives with the commentary of experts doing shoddy work... EDIT: I'd also say that the examples of the stuff that was built in-house that was superior might be a case of survivorship bias. EDIT2: Thinking more about machines... motors, sensors, cables, connectors, bolts, power supplies, pumps, linear rails, screws, etc. etc. all of which you buy, never make, the quality is generally very good, and it's almost unimaginable that you can be completely vertically integrated.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  I've never worked in the automotive industry, but I've worked adjacent to it occasionally. The amount of effort put into ensuring that suppliers do what they need to do and do it well is huge. Companies always have two (or more) suppliers and if you keep only to the letter of the contract, you get cut. They can afford to put so much effort into managing suppliers because volumes are large and margins are low. There are also cultural issues at play; he makes the point that things that are inevitable in one culture are unthinkable in another and different industries have different cultures
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> I will note that I often wish Dan Luu was a bit less apparently-uniformly-confident in some of the statements he writes. He does back up what he says, but he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating. Dan Luu is one of my favorite currently-active bloggers. He's obviously a smart person with a good amount of experience in specific areas. However, I have to agree with your assessment. He has a tendency to present his personal anecdotes and perspective as the infallible ground truth and build elaborate essays and logic around it. I hesitate to talk about it because I think his blog is valuable, albeit if the reader can take it as one person's perspective rather than the absolute truth. The biggest example of this effect is his Twitter thread about his tendency to fail interviews ( https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1470890494775361538 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1470890494775361538 ). He spends a lot of time bragging about arguing with interviewers, dodging questions instead of trying to provide answers, and how he's never written production code that talks to a DB, performs an RPC call, or connects to an API. It's not at all surprising that anyone would be struggle to pass interviews like this, but he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing something wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the jobs he applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that the interviewers are simply wrong, and that they're making a mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline him. The interview topic is especially challenging because blaming the interviewer is so very appealing to his audience of developers (who all abhor interviews and hate rejection even more). I think my disappointment comes from the fact that he's well-positioned to display some humility and teach some lessons about how someone can learn from their shortcomings, yet instead he uses his platform to further demonize his interviewers and make some worst-case assumptions about why he didn't get these jobs. I think the best way to read this blog, like any, is to remember that the author is just another person with another set of perspectives and opinions. There's a lot of value there, as long as you take it with a grain of salt and remain open to other lines of reasoning.
- scaramanga 5y ago
  I think that's kind of the point. Dan Luu can change his priorities to do a performative display of what interviewers expect and then Dan Luu can pass a job interview. In which case you are not hiring Dan Luu, but a different guy who has most likely internalised a different world-view and set of values. Even if you assume he can compartmentalize his interview performance skills, he will have at least devoted time to that, instead of to something "more useful". I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work. So the question is do you want to hire someone like Dan Luu or not? If the answer is yes, then you might want to consider how your interview process might interact with such a person. If you are thinking from the perspective of someone doing the hiring (as those articles seem to be), it is nonsensical to simply respond by saying "well, the candidates just need to be more submissive and compliant to whatever our process is." Perhaps Dan Luu is a unique snowflake and/or nobody needs to hire someone like that. Or it could be that there are quite a large number of developers with attitudes and experience that lead to similarly unproductive or inefficient interactions with tech interview processes because those processes may be fixating on having the candidate do a specific performance rather than trying to understand what individuals can offer and whether that would be useful when added to the existing team. It could be that such developers would be as good or better fit, in a lot of cases, than people who can do oscar-winning interview performances.
jader201 5y ago
> It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. I’ve said this before on other threads, and it seems to resonate with others, so I’ll say it here too: I personally don’t care near as much about a single person’s opinion of a particular topic, as much as I care about the discussion of many people around a particular topic. And by “topic”, in the case of HN, I mean the title of an article. I often wish HN would just allow titles to get posted and HN folks just have a discussion around that. (Similar to Ask HN, but not necessarily in the form of a question.) I’m a terribly slow reader, so there’s no way I could take time out of my already busy day to read this (very long, dense) article of a single person’s opinion of a single topic, especially if I don’t even know whether this person is an expert on said topic. I guess this is particularly true when it’s a subject I’m only interested in on the surface, vs. caring more deeply about a particular subject. I get much more ROI reading many people’s shorter discussions vs. a lengthy single opinion (again, given the time it would have taken me to read the article).
- folli 5y ago
  Conversely, often it's more interesting to read a single person's well researched opinion than a dozen one-off comments.
  - Moru 5y ago
    But on Hackernews those one-off comments can come from years of studying the same topic. Sometimes even explaining why the long well researched opinion missed something so important that the whole article is wrong.
    - watwut 5y ago
      No, they dont. Which is pretty clear everytime something you do know a lot about pops up. Majority of it is just people shooting their opinions over coffee break. Which is fine, we go here to relax and slack, but does not produce super educated opinions.
WheelsAtLarge 5y ago
I read it but it's a mind dump that's not well structure so it's hard to follow. If asked I couldn't give you an answer to the title. I still don't know, " Why it's hard to buy things that work well." He has a lot of citations and footnotes but if it's hard to follow then the essay becomes a bunch or random thoughts which get condensed into the title. I suspect that's why most of the comments relate only to it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
It is very common to see HN commenters only address the title not the contents of the web page, a genuine phenomenon IMO. Experiment: No titles, just URLs. What would happen. I have some experience with this as I freqently stream edit HTTP response bodies to make customised web pages using only simple HTML wrapped around only the data I am interested in, no cruft. For example, when I do web searches I process the response, i.e., the SERP, into simplified HTML, e.g., <li><a href=[url]>[url]</a>. I do not include titles. Titles can be descriptive and helpful, however I find most times they are a distraction. Think about the "clickbait" tactic. It is heaviliy reliant on misleading titles.
- tiborsaas 5y ago
  I'd personally just stop using hacker news. Clickbait is a trait of media consumption for decades now, we have to learn to live with it.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

The article is yet another one about supply and demand that ignores first day of microeconomics price theory: If supply is low, demand is high, the price goes up.

Strilanc 5y ago
In what way is the article about that? How is Apple getting a better chip by learning to do it themselves, because cpu manufacturers are trapped by misaligned benchmarks, just a trivial statement about supply and demand?
- cdogl 5y ago
  Perhaps the strategic decisions of one the largest and one of the most complex organisations in human history cannot be explained by simple reference to undergraduate microeconomics
- tuatoru 5y ago
  It isn't about supply and demand at all, but about another, even more basic, economic concept: incentives, and a second relatively modern economic concept, information asymmetries.[1] Over-summarising and over-simplifying:- "Third-party service providers are incentivised to minimise their costs. If their clients cannot assess the quality of their service and/or end-users cannot reward or penalise them based on the quality of the services, then quality is poor, because it is cheaper to not provide services and later argue about it than to provide the service. Third party deficiencies/misbehaviour get so bad sometimes that there are no gains from trade and occasional losses. "Internally, inside companies, the incentives may be to act similarly to third-parties, or they may not. This depends on "culture"." And here the essay would be improved with an analysis of the compnents of "culture" that matter. It talks about trustworthiness of company leadership, but that is only one factor, surely. 1. Akerlof's "Market for Lemons" paper is the seminal one here.
klodolph 5y ago
And if the market is inefficient, the pricing will be irrational (for certain ideas of what “irrational” means).

civilized 5y ago

> It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. This is a HN pattern as old as the hills. If the headline invites bikeshedding, most people will bikeshed. If the article is long and complex, almost no one will read the article. This one has both.

Aeolun 5y ago
To be fair, I read it, but not all the way to the end. This was almost a novel.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  Because I’m a writer, I’m going to be a bit pedantic here. Novels start around 50,000 words and usually take several hours to read. ;)
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    Novella then? Guess that’s still not quite what the article is, but it’s a bit hard to get through in one sitting.
Dylan16807 5y ago
Huh? It's not bikeshedding to focus on a particular subtopic.

Aeolun 5y ago

> he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating At least the parts about build vs buy sound extremely familiar to me. Setting up and integrating something you’ve bought often takes as much or more time than building it yourself. The best argument for buying is that you’d make all stakeholders equally unhappy.

andrewingram 5y ago
Reminds me of hiring an in-house team of Salesforce engineers to build out and maintain the hugely expensive CRM you bought because you… didn’t want to spend engineering time on a CRM.
- hallway_monitor 5y ago
  The new CTO getting drunk on sales Kool aid and deciding to move many functions to Salesforce was a strong signal of incompetence at a previous workplace.

everyone 5y ago

Comments here are often more interesting than the linked articles. I think the 'comment on title' phenomenon is acceptable and possibly good here.

klodolph 5y ago

> …he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating. A.k.a. “avoiding weasel words”. I don’t mean to be clever here, it’s just that it’s far more efficient to assume that reader can make their own informed decision, and give them citations & instructions for reproducibility to help them along the way, rather than shovel a bunch of weasel words into the parts of your writing that are less grounded in reproducible facts. There are also different expectations for blog posts and heavily researched&vetted articles.

randallsquared 5y ago
I'm not sure "efficient" is the word you're looking for here. For a given post, there's only one of the poster, and presumably many readers...
- klodolph 5y ago
  You’re going to have to explain more of the argument, because I don’t follow. It sounds like you are arguing that writers should spend more time spelling things out for readers which aren’t very good at reading comprehension. That doesn’t seem very efficient—it wastes most people’s time, since the writer is spending more time spelling things out explicitly and avoiding ambiguity, all of the readers with decent reading comprehension skills have to spend more time sifting through crap that doesn’t add value to the text (for them), and only the people with lower reading comprehension skills get any benefit. People with lower reading comprehension skills are less likely to be reading text-heavy blogs in the first place! The following claim may be controversial—generally, there is a tradeoff between clarity and precision, and the right tradeoff depends on the context and what your goals are. The internet, and forums like HN, distort our perception of where the correct tradeoff is, because the people complaining about lack of precision are the loudest. You should be aware of who your audience really is… is it people capable of interpreting claims in persuasive documents? Or is it people who decide to complain on HN?
  - lanstin 5y ago
    I think the additional clarity benefits smart people too. And fast readers can read faster over text with redundancy than maximally cryptic prose. The sweet spot of course is a short, clear and correct explanation, but finding that can take a lot of effort.

throwaway984393 5y ago

Consumer product build quality and outsourcing quality are the exact same problem. Somebody is making a thing and they don't make it well and the customer isn't happy. There is nothing special about the problem, it's simply hard to build things well. When you prioritize "shipping" over quality, you make crap. If you try to avoid the difficulty of quality by hiring somebody else to do it and they also prioritize "shipping" over quality, you buy crap. Re: "getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally", they either paid the wrong people, or they were trying to solve the wrong problem, or weren't good at using the product. If you're making Toyotas and you buy your parts from CheapPartCo, chances are good you end up with a crap car. If you buy your parts from Denso, at least you have the chance it will turn out well. If you take the Denso parts and assemble them terribly, you still end up with a crap car. And if you shouldn't have even used that part because your overall design was crap, you also end up with a crap car. I'd say it's more likely the average person/company/etc will not make something well. Not only does it take more skill and hard work to make things well, they end up more expensive. If things are made well they probably took a lot more work to make them well, or the people who make things well are in higher demand. Show me a company that pays a premium for good vendors and full training for all their staff and holds back products until they pass a Steve Jobs-level of quality engineering, and I'll show you a company whose products work well, and probably charge a premium. (The only exception I know of is Toyota, because they are crazy enough to literally stop a production line just to troubleshoot a tiny issue. Their focus on quality has led to efficiency which reduces cost and increases production. But this is all Lean 101) And this isn't a tech-specific problem because everything in the world has quality issues. The reason GM couldn't make a half-decent car while Toyotas were rock solid for decades was simply working harder on quality. You have to work hard to make something work well.

fomine3 5y ago
A bit different. End user/who decide to buy/whose money is used/ are often different for B2B products.

jseliger 5y ago

It's like most people don't read carefully or for comprehension: https://jakeseliger.com/2022/01/31/most-people-dont-read-carefully-or-for-comprehension/ https://jakeseliger.com/2022/01/31/most-people-dont-read-car... (A few of the replies I've gotten purely answered the title and didn't discuss the content.)

klodolph 5y ago
Most people can’t. “Read carefully or for comprehension” would probably translate to level 4/5 prose literacy skills in the NCES NAAL (National Center for Education Statistics National Assessment of Adult Literacy). Recent survey puts this group (level 4/5) at 12% of the adult population. Levels 4 and 5 are no longer separated because of the small percentage of people that fall into group 5. Level 4 tasks require you to be able to understand something in the presence of distractors. Just to make up an example, think about the last time you sent an email to someone that had two questions in it. Did they answer both questions? (I’m actually a bit unsure that this falls in level 4.) (Level 5 includes tasks such as “compare and contrast complex information, or to generate new information making high-level inferences or using specialized background knowledge”.)
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Twelve percent?? That is scary.
- watwut 5y ago
  > Just to make up an example, think about the last time you sent an email to someone that had two questions in it. Pretty often they are answering easy question and leaving the harder one sleep. Pretty often, the goal is to get rid of you email as fast as possible so that they can go back to what they actually want to be doing.
- mattgreenrocks 5y ago
  This explains so much about our ambient media environment and misinformation.
- Mezzie 5y ago

hffftz 5y ago

balaji1 5y ago

You are depressed for other reasons. People read the title and connected more with the title than the hard-to-read and dense article. If anything, call it a click-baity title. It is hard to buy consumer products that work well also. Look at the number of things you order on Amazon, and see how satisfied you are with stuff. All the synthetic material low-quality stuff.

wittycardio 5y ago
So not only did you not read the article , you are offended at the idea that you should have to read the article at all ?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

YZF 5y ago

I read the article so I'm gonna respond here ;) As a counter-anecdote I'll offer my experience working for a company that built large precision machinery. Many of the parts of said machinery were built by subcontractors. The quality was extremely high. We did do certain things in house if they require special expertise and we did have the capability to do rapid prototyping but it wouldn't make any business sense for us to purchase all the equipment to make all those parts that we subcontracted. I think this is common in many industries. (Automotive?) Even with software this is far less than clear cut. There's plenty of times where you should not build it yourself and the quality stuff isn't always terrible. Seems like there's some cherry-picking going on in the examples re: bad software. Sure, there's lots of bad software, but there's also awesome software that works really well. Building it yourself isn't a guarantee that it'll work well. 90% of the time the people that think they can do better if they build it themselves can't, they just don't know it yet. And sure Kyle is great but there are plenty of solid databases built before he was around (before he was born?) by companies like IBM and Microsoft. I've seen companies build in-house tooling that's much worse than what's available off the shelf and have an endless drain of resources due to that. Build vs. buy isn't an easy call. I'll agree with that. I felt like there was a self contradiction in the essay. You can't get great software but you can get great engineers that will build the great software in house? I don't think your chances of finding the team that can build that are any greater. You're just as likely to hire a bunch of people you think can do this and then find out they can't. 5 years later. Which sort of jives with the commentary of experts doing shoddy work... EDIT: I'd also say that the examples of the stuff that was built in-house that was superior might be a case of survivorship bias. EDIT2: Thinking more about machines... motors, sensors, cables, connectors, bolts, power supplies, pumps, linear rails, screws, etc. etc. all of which you buy, never make, the quality is generally very good, and it's almost unimaginable that you can be completely vertically integrated.

aidenn0 5y ago
I've never worked in the automotive industry, but I've worked adjacent to it occasionally. The amount of effort put into ensuring that suppliers do what they need to do and do it well is huge. Companies always have two (or more) suppliers and if you keep only to the letter of the contract, you get cut. They can afford to put so much effort into managing suppliers because volumes are large and margins are low. There are also cultural issues at play; he makes the point that things that are inevitable in one culture are unthinkable in another and different industries have different cultures

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> I will note that I often wish Dan Luu was a bit less apparently-uniformly-confident in some of the statements he writes. He does back up what he says, but he'll use the same tone for something he's seen anecdotally and something he's spent a month personally investigating. Dan Luu is one of my favorite currently-active bloggers. He's obviously a smart person with a good amount of experience in specific areas. However, I have to agree with your assessment. He has a tendency to present his personal anecdotes and perspective as the infallible ground truth and build elaborate essays and logic around it. I hesitate to talk about it because I think his blog is valuable, albeit if the reader can take it as one person's perspective rather than the absolute truth. The biggest example of this effect is his Twitter thread about his tendency to fail interviews ( https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1470890494775361538 https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1470890494775361538 ). He spends a lot of time bragging about arguing with interviewers, dodging questions instead of trying to provide answers, and how he's never written production code that talks to a DB, performs an RPC call, or connects to an API. It's not at all surprising that anyone would be struggle to pass interviews like this, but he seems incapable of accepting that maybe he's doing something wrong or that he's simply not a good fit for the jobs he applied for. Instead, his implied analysis is that the interviewers are simply wrong, and that they're making a mistake to ask him those questions and eventually decline him. The interview topic is especially challenging because blaming the interviewer is so very appealing to his audience of developers (who all abhor interviews and hate rejection even more). I think my disappointment comes from the fact that he's well-positioned to display some humility and teach some lessons about how someone can learn from their shortcomings, yet instead he uses his platform to further demonize his interviewers and make some worst-case assumptions about why he didn't get these jobs. I think the best way to read this blog, like any, is to remember that the author is just another person with another set of perspectives and opinions. There's a lot of value there, as long as you take it with a grain of salt and remain open to other lines of reasoning.

scaramanga 5y ago
I think that's kind of the point. Dan Luu can change his priorities to do a performative display of what interviewers expect and then Dan Luu can pass a job interview. In which case you are not hiring Dan Luu, but a different guy who has most likely internalised a different world-view and set of values. Even if you assume he can compartmentalize his interview performance skills, he will have at least devoted time to that, instead of to something "more useful". I don't think Dan Luu is struggling for work. So the question is do you want to hire someone like Dan Luu or not? If the answer is yes, then you might want to consider how your interview process might interact with such a person. If you are thinking from the perspective of someone doing the hiring (as those articles seem to be), it is nonsensical to simply respond by saying "well, the candidates just need to be more submissive and compliant to whatever our process is." Perhaps Dan Luu is a unique snowflake and/or nobody needs to hire someone like that. Or it could be that there are quite a large number of developers with attitudes and experience that lead to similarly unproductive or inefficient interactions with tech interview processes because those processes may be fixating on having the candidate do a specific performance rather than trying to understand what individuals can offer and whether that would be useful when added to the existing team. It could be that such developers would be as good or better fit, in a lot of cases, than people who can do oscar-winning interview performances.

jader201 5y ago

> It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. I’ve said this before on other threads, and it seems to resonate with others, so I’ll say it here too: I personally don’t care near as much about a single person’s opinion of a particular topic, as much as I care about the discussion of many people around a particular topic. And by “topic”, in the case of HN, I mean the title of an article. I often wish HN would just allow titles to get posted and HN folks just have a discussion around that. (Similar to Ask HN, but not necessarily in the form of a question.) I’m a terribly slow reader, so there’s no way I could take time out of my already busy day to read this (very long, dense) article of a single person’s opinion of a single topic, especially if I don’t even know whether this person is an expert on said topic. I guess this is particularly true when it’s a subject I’m only interested in on the surface, vs. caring more deeply about a particular subject. I get much more ROI reading many people’s shorter discussions vs. a lengthy single opinion (again, given the time it would have taken me to read the article).

folli 5y ago
Conversely, often it's more interesting to read a single person's well researched opinion than a dozen one-off comments.
- Moru 5y ago
  But on Hackernews those one-off comments can come from years of studying the same topic. Sometimes even explaining why the long well researched opinion missed something so important that the whole article is wrong.
  - watwut 5y ago
    No, they dont. Which is pretty clear everytime something you do know a lot about pops up. Majority of it is just people shooting their opinions over coffee break. Which is fine, we go here to relax and slack, but does not produce super educated opinions.

WheelsAtLarge 5y ago

I read it but it's a mind dump that's not well structure so it's hard to follow. If asked I couldn't give you an answer to the title. I still don't know, " Why it's hard to buy things that work well." He has a lot of citations and footnotes but if it's hard to follow then the essay becomes a bunch or random thoughts which get condensed into the title. I suspect that's why most of the comments relate only to it.

deleted 5y ago

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1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

It is very common to see HN commenters only address the title not the contents of the web page, a genuine phenomenon IMO. Experiment: No titles, just URLs. What would happen. I have some experience with this as I freqently stream edit HTTP response bodies to make customised web pages using only simple HTML wrapped around only the data I am interested in, no cruft. For example, when I do web searches I process the response, i.e., the SERP, into simplified HTML, e.g., <li><a href=[url]>[url]</a>. I do not include titles. Titles can be descriptive and helpful, however I find most times they are a distraction. Think about the "clickbait" tactic. It is heaviliy reliant on misleading titles.

tiborsaas 5y ago
I'd personally just stop using hacker news. Clickbait is a trait of media consumption for decades now, we have to learn to live with it.