5 ms·
Probably true. I'd argue, though, in my experience working at a large tech company, the impact of a particular decision on the company's overall bottom line ra
by jehb 5y ago
Probably true.
I'd argue, though, in my experience working at a large tech company, the impact of a particular decision on the company's overall bottom line rarely comes into play for a decision like this. Instead, it's a mid-level manager who has been given a goal to increase a particular number, and will be rewarded based on quarterly performance against said arbitrary number.
Which manager put in their OKRs for the year to grow usage of Apple's Music Library using a primary metric of total storage consumed? Now, they didn't necessarily cause the insertion of blank space into the files, but they'll be damned if they let some engineer make a change that makes it significantly harder to hit their growth goal for the year.
Organizations don't cause things to be the way what they are: the dynamics between people inside of organizations cause things to be the way that they are.
- travisgriggs 5y agoNever attribute to malice that which you can attribute to incompetence.
- cedilla 5y agoThat's a good maxim for dealing with people you meet in real life. It's a useless maxim for dealing with trillion dollar multinationals.
- jjoonathan 5y agoI'd say "dangerous" more than "useless." Big companies have plenty of incompetence to go around, but they also have plenty of malice disguised as incompetence, because children learn how to play dumb before they can talk and don't get worse at it when they grow up to become megacorp employees.
- mattnewton 5y agoHaving briefly worked (as a grunt with no visibility into exec decisions) in the maelstrom that is apple, I think the only sinister thing that could be happening is no one has an incentive to fix things like this, they only get exposure / promotions on shipping new features or large quality bugs. And so if they weren't bothered by it, and no execs we're bothered by it, it would just go unfixed.