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It's a function of scale: the larger the team/company behind the product, the greater its enshittification factor/potential. The author recently went full time
by sph 3y ago
It's a function of scale: the larger the team/company behind the product, the greater its enshittification factor/potential.
The author recently went full time on their Marginalia search engine, AFAIK it's a team size of 1, so it's the farthest away from any enshittification risk. Au contraire, like you say: it's at these sizes where you make jewels. Where creativity, ingenuity and vision shines.
This comment is sponsored by the "quit your desk job and go work for yourself" gang.
- scyzoryk_xyz 3y agoI would wonder if there wouldn’t be inherent survivorship bias that would only make it seem like most smaller projects are as you call them “jewels”. The small bad ones don’t make it to you, but the big ones are too big to fail that sort of thing. Could extend that to big good ones being less surprising and normal because “it just works”.
- paulsutter 3y agoYeah! Elon could have already landed on Mars if he’d just built the rockets himself /s
- sph 3y agoElon is running a company, not working a desk job for someone else. The point is following YOUR vision, either by yourself on your project, or by running your OWN company. The goal is intellectual and creative freedom. Or don't, I guess the world needs its mindless drones, that discourage everybody else from taking the leap and following their dreams.
- rebolek 3y agoFortunately, he's running multiple companies and he can't focus on all of them, so SpaceX can work fine, unlike the company formerly known as Twitter which he is right now focused on running and ruining it.
- PaulHoule 3y agoMy impression is (i) Musk has a great team doing the work at SpaceX and (ii) those people have a clear, compelling mission they believe in. SpaceX may not need a lot of his attention.
- KSteffensen 3y agoIt's possible to work for someone else without being a mindless drone.
- slashdev 3y agoThen you’re doing it wrong! I joke, but a lot of people just want to show up and do the bare minimal until quitting time. Disturbingly, many seem employed in customer facing positions. To be fair, if they’re paying minimum wage, the employer has the same attitude towards the employees.
- Fanmade 3y agoOr you're working in companies that basically stop you from being productive. Managers questioning the developer's decisions, focus on the sales topics instead of fixing the existing product and colleagues taking shortcuts and exponentially increasing the technical debt is something I basically have to work with every day. I now have worked on multiple projects on the side, both alone and with others who know their stuff and I've never had any of those issues there. That's why I'm currently in the process of starting a company with a few of those "good guys" to get out of this madness.
- grumblingdev 3y agoThe only issue is motivation. With a team size of 1, people don't realize how much they depend on having just one other person there. Some people can do it. I think a lot are in for a surprise.
- boyter 3y agoI wonder if there should be a website like busfactorone.com that lists projects maintained by one person to assist with surfacing this. It could be it’s resolved though funding them, or getting more people across it. Anything to help mitigate the risk.
- Damogran6 3y agoThis is something I tried doing 10-15 years ago, and while talent, and drive, and a good message is all absolutely necessary, there's also some kinda catalyst to get the idea in front of an audience I was never able to crack. So yeah, small teams bring a greater possibility of a good product, but there's a little bit of lottery ticket to the exercise, too.
- marcosdumay 3y agoCapital structure may be more important than size. A bootstraped company can resist enshitification indefinitely, but if it gets any investment, resisting it becomes harder and harder up to the point where a publicly traded one can't resist it at all.