16 ms·

What the Goddamn Hell Is Going on in the Tech Industry?

256 points by l0b0 3y ago

l0b0 3y ago
How do big companies stay alive for so long? I guess it's still possible to coast on a single success for so long that the company has time to completely rot from the inside before any of it reaches their customers. Or maybe the early money gets invested in a bajillion projects, on the very slim chance that the company isn't a one-trick pony.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  Regulatory capture.
  - yesbut 3y ago
    and Zombie Companies https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/31/zombie-firm-bankruptcies-amid-fed-interest-rate-hikes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/31/zombie-firm-bankruptcies-ami...
  - gruez 3y ago
    What sort of regulations are preventing a google competitor from starting up? "GDPR/CCPA" isn't very convincing because it was only a recent thing, but google has been around for decades.
    - throwaway5959 3y ago
      Regulatory capture covers more than just regulations. It also covers the lack of regulation; including anti-trust. Do you want to do a search or mobile OS startup with Google’s market position? Do you think they’ll release a YouTube or Google Maps application for your phone OS?
      - pjc50 3y ago
        I think that's stretching the definition of "regulatory capture" beyond useful meaning. Just say "monopoly" or the softer "market power".
    - imhoguy 3y ago
      - Patents, grow a bit more and the sharks will come. - Unfair taxation advantages, and fines are laughable.
- TulliusCicero 3y ago
  Because they're not actually much more dysfunctional than smaller companies, you just hear more stories because they're bigger. Bigger means more employees for things to go wrong around, bigger means that people are more likely to be interested in hearing stories and thus other people are more likely to tell, remember, and repeat said stories. A story about some idiot doing an idiotic thing at Google is vastly more likely to be passed around forever than a story at a random mom and pop company*. People love hearing about morons at big tech giants, and the storytellers oblige. That, plus sufficient economies of scale or complementary tech products. * unless that story is REALLY incredible, like that guy who went to an interview and accidentally killed the CEO's dog
  - habitue 3y ago
    The bigness itself causes dysfunction, apart from just having more employees and more chances to have a disaster. It's the whole Dunbar's number thing, we really haven't figured out a great way to work effectively in huge groups yet. But... some things can only be done with huge groups, so even working ineffectively can be worth it. And in a competitive setting, your competition also has these problems, so you can win in the market despite them.
    - blablabla123 3y ago
      The problem with tiny startups is often that people are really inexperienced with people problems. Large corps somewhat fix that by having HR departments and all. But ultimately I'm starting to think today's business often relies on some sort of hype train.
      - fallingknife 3y ago
        I tend to think of HR departments as a people problem, not the solution to one.
        atq2119 3y ago
        HR is often awful, sure. But it helps get the basics right. My brother works at a small (<100 people) startup in the material sciences, and the amount of times that his and his co-workers pay statements got messed up in creative ways is incredible. Meanwhile I'm working at a decades old big company and never had any problems like that.
- nullc 3y ago
  There are many companies that are so wealthy that they could just stop all revenue completely and coast no for decades while management continues to skim out their fat paychecks. Some theorize that this has already occurred. Besides, -- if you think how some companies work is fugly, go take a look at biology or politics. Companies are evolved systems. Once they're old enough they're almost always messy even when they aren't especially dysfunctional. The human body is full of almost vestigial parts and dead end metabolic pathways... huge chunks of our DNA are just self replicating repeating sequences. In reality the cruft in companies is often not even non-functional, but sometimes it serves some more complex purpose. Lots of large companies, for example, have some useless figurehead security position that exists for the actual purpose of having someone to fire when there the inevitable serious security issue occurs, without putting anyone actually productive at risk. Companies are built out of and owned by people. Like anything else they have to respect the the limitations of the building material and the needs of their owners. The resulting requirements are no less real even though they might not exist in a world populated by homoeconomicus instead of man kind. If man kind wants a blood sacrifice for security incidents then it's reasonable and good for a company to have one.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    For investors winding down and returning money fast might be preferable to a company without profits.
    - nullc 3y ago
      Sure, and for a period corporate raiders took advantage of companies like that-- but standard defenses against raiding have become well known and widely deployed. Like life learning how to make cellulose suddenly the landscapes were littered with the husks of things that nothing knew how to digest. But the value to society at large isn't just a profit (much less an ever growing profit). It's good that we have businesses which simply satisfy the involved parties (their customers, their employees, and their owners)-- even if they don't perform well on any external metric of efficiency.
      - 3y ago
- csomar 3y ago
  One overlooked reason is the government intervening to save these companies. Either by bailout, lowering rate, special loans, etc… This prevents these companies from going into bankruptcy and restructuring and keeps the status quo as is. It’s kind of a disguised communism and the longer the government keeps proping the economy (and making it difficult to start new companies), the worse this will get.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    > is the government intervening to save these companies Name some. Many very dysfunctional companies are also very profitable and have no need of outside bailouts. How long has IBM been at it?
    - Dracophoenix 3y ago
      General Electric.
  - ace32229 3y ago
    Corporate socialism it's often called.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    Where's the disguise?
- _tk_ 3y ago
  A lot of big companies don’t. Additionally, a single success often implies multiple times smaller successes that are just not visible outside a corporation.
- lmm 3y ago
  Sometimes being big is a structural advantage. Also there's a variant of the Peter Principle at work: any effective company grows until it is ineffective, therefore productive work is done only by companies that haven't finished growing yet.
- ian0 3y ago
  At its core a company is a machine that makes money. Once the machine is up and running, you just have to avoid not breaking it. An org at this stage can be completely dysfunctional as long as the machine keeps running. Also figuring out the "wins" while scaling are much more obvious than while trying to start.
  - freefaler 3y ago
    That's true if the environment where the machine work doesn't change. However with business environment changing the machine need to change as well. Big corporations have "moats" (as per Buffet's definition) and a big bank vendor locked into your solution will drag a badly working machine for years.
- ludicity 3y ago
  Author here. My organization continues to exist in its current massive form due to regulatory capture - I can't provide details and remain anonymous, unfortunately. We would probably survive at 1/10th the size or something akin to that without that protection, and we would be considerably more efficient. EDIT: Oh, and the part that earns money through regulatory capture earns so much money that we can have all these departments doing nothing in the meantime. We might do something one day with amazing leadership, but the incentives and odds are stacked against us.
- swiftcoder 3y ago
  Big companies tend to have a handful of divisions that generate almost all of the revenue, and then everyone else is a cost centre. As long as the revenue generators outweigh the cost centres, no one really cares broadly about efficiency. For Facebook the revenue generator is Ads. For Amazon it was initially physical shipping, and later cloud hosting. Outside of those divisions you could burn billions on long shot projects that went nowhere, and nobody really cared...
nullc 3y ago
> There's a team out there where the main drama isn't one right faction and one wrong faction, there are two factions fighting to the death over how best to use a spreadsheet as a database for a production application. This is the authors ideal of hell? oh you sweet summer child.
- ludicity 3y ago
  I am the author and uh, I'm worried about what could be that much worse than this. Stories are still welcome at ludicity.hackernews@gmail.com!
f5e4 3y ago
Wow, I made it to the compliments page! I feel like it's cheating a bit that I knew about the page before writing a comment. I don't really have anything important to say, but I did find this interesting. I'm unused to this sort of indirect response. It feels slightly like a personal response, since he links to a page where my comment is one of a few added, and refers to "commenters". However, my criticism was close to the opposite of what he is replying to. I criticized the author for writing a story where I felt they mostly acted like a cog in a dysfunctional system, but was sneering at everyone else doing the same. I suppose, though, that perhaps they believe that the best/only solution for being in a poorly-functioning company is to jump ship. edit: To clarify, I do agree that most corporate systems are dysfunctional and I'm not an agile fan. I'm not defending these systems.
- ludicity 3y ago
  Hello! Sorry, that whole page is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there are two types of comment on there. One batch is from people that... well, you can see that they're like. The other half I put up there because I think they actually have me dead to rights. It's one of those weird things where, being fairly young, I already know that I'm going to look back on many of the things I write and realize they were hot-headed, and I wasn't nearly as good as I thought I was. I didn't think the writing came off as smug - I'm pretty aware that I clicked five buttons and skipped a computer science education - but I still appreciate the reality check that maybe I -am- being obnoxious. It's just fun to be a hothead sometimes, and I'm actually starting to get nervous with all the HN traffic. Yelling into the void is less threatening to my career. The only quibble I have with the original comment is the assumption I didn't try very hard to let people know it was an issue - I promise I did, sometimes management just... doesn't care. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, sorry for any unintended offense I might have caused, because you were totally fair. It feels wrong to take it off the page anyway though!
tester756 3y ago
>There is a high likelihood that many other people in the org were lightyears ahead of the author. It's even more likely that an engineer or manager in their group was "Banking" the inefficiencies to use during a cost-cutting period - and the author ruined that chance... which will inevitably cause massive suffering and possibly poor performance reviews when there is nothing to trim." That's crazy, how it isn't pure sabotage? career oriented people, jezz christ. That's instant fire by me if somebody considered such a thing
- klabb3 3y ago
  Seems like a normal day in a corporation? Bean counters who decide your salary use beyond-stupid metrics. For instance, fighting fires is often rewarded disproportionately, so it’s good to be “visible” during many, recurring fires. Of course people game that, intentionally or unintentionally. You don’t get the behavior you say you want, you get what you incentivize. Even at pure tech companies with somewhat technically competent leadership the incentives are whack, and often the people at the very top are still replicating some MBA doctrine that will be debunked as horse manure within a decade. Just because our computers get exponentially better doesn’t mean people do, particularly groups of people.
  - aardvark179 3y ago
    I think there’s a spectrum here, I doubt many people are deliberately hoarding huge, easy, and /certain/ cost or resource savings just to use later, but it is easy to end up with a long list of possible things that you haven’t had time to try, and won’t get prioritised until somebody else cares. Also, be careful what you wish for regarding cost savings. You may think you’re doing well saving 500k, but in a medium sized company there are likely a lot of easy ways to save a chunk more than that which you really aren’t going to like.
    - arethuza 3y ago
      I have a book about the management consulting industry that suggest there is at least one large successful firm of management consultants where the answer is always "fire 23% - 33% of your staff" regardless of what the question was. Apparently this is the level that most organisations can stagger on long enough for senior management to bank the bonuses and move on and upwards and before long term effects kick in.
benjaminwootton 3y ago
The cost saving comes from the fact that Snowflake virtual warehouses by default time out after 10 minutes and this can be lowered, realistically to 60 seconds. They must have been using very overprovisioned servers to run up $1 million per year in Snowflake spend for occasional 10 minute bursts of activity prior to the change. I think this points more to poor and ungoverned use of Snowflake and Cloud than it does organisational dysfunction.
- pjc50 3y ago
  > I think this points more to poor and ungoverned use of Snowflake and Cloud than it does organisational dysfunction. Those are the same thing. (one of the massive, massive advantages and disadvantages of cloud in general is that it circumvents "purchasing" departments. One the one hand: you don't have to spend $10,000 of time trying to buy $1000 of computer. On the other: you can waste millions on the cloud and maybe nobody will even notice.)
  - arethuza 3y ago
    It can also circumvent in-house infrastructure teams - who I used to find were a far bigger challenge than purchasing. I used to work somewhere where the main mission of the infrastructure team seemed to be to prevent anyone actually running anything on all of the lovely hardware they managed - which reached peak madness when I was quoted £75,000 for hosting a single static HTML page for internal only access.
- dustingetz 3y ago
  number is also reported out of context and not as a % - i detect moral hazard by author here
- hodgesrm 3y ago
  > I think this points more to poor and ungoverned use of Snowflake and Cloud than it does organisational dysfunction. This is a "blame the user" argument that I hear a lot. It's true that in many or most cases users being super attentive can mitigate cost issues. But it's also true that this turns out to be very difficult in practice for a variety of reasons like scattered responsibility, complexity of cloud costs, and vendor cost models that encourage spending. For my own money this problem looks like a business opportunity for vendors that offer customers ways to avoid it. The high margin era of cloud services with 10x markup on compute (e.g., Snowflake) won't last forever.
kubanczyk 3y ago
A better analysis: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/what-is-life-in-an-immoral-maze https://thezvi.substack.com/p/what-is-life-in-an-immoral-maz...
- inquirerGeneral 3y ago
  [dead]
- brazzy 3y ago
  Reads more like fictional worldbuilding than an analysis.
_tk_ 3y ago
It is kinda interesting, that these rants about corporate life that are filled with little substance but with lots of swearing are so popular here. Is there one interesting takeaway here? Big organizations tend to grow in weird ways, opaque to the folks on the ground. They sometimes make big mistakes and spend money where they shouldn’t. But because of their size, that doesn’t mean the end for them.
- fallingknife 3y ago
  This is why it's a major red flag when your org starts doing things "because big company X does it." And they never stop to think whether they do it because it works or that it's a failure and they are getting away with it because they are big.
- RamblingCTO 3y ago
  Full of swearing? Have we read different articles?
  - ludicity 3y ago
    To be fair, my other stuff is full of swearing. He's got me there. Although I started writing at 6PM on a random day after a stupid meeting, and actually tend to agree that there's worthier stuff to be popular - but people click on what they want. I have a whole bunch of more boring stuff around, with much less swearing, and I think I'm more comfortable with the low level of attention that gets.
    - RamblingCTO 3y ago
      Well, I don't mind the more flippant writing style anyway ;) I liked your writing and it reminded me of the phoenix project, not in writing but in content. I'll be sure to check out your more boring stuff!
  - gniv 3y ago
    There are four instances of the f-word and a few religious references, including in the title.
ZeroGravitas 3y ago
So, serious question: how do you maintain your health and sanity when you find yourself in such a situation? If the main reason to stay is a steady paycheck then you're only doing harm to yourself by being aware of and caring about the bigger picture.
- fnimick 3y ago
  That's exactly how you do it. Don't care about things the company doesn't measure and reward.
- probably_wrong 3y ago
  Assuming you can't leave the place (no other prospects around, family to feed, etc) you simply check out mentally. You do an okay job (no point in overachieving), stop being personally invested in the success of projects, roll your eyes a lot, and find meaning somewhere other than work. And if things get too overwhelming you can always vent to your co-workers who are also stuck in your same situation.
- ludicity 3y ago
  Don't stress too much about improving things there, spend time with the colleagues you like, and make incremental (and sometimes major) changes to your life, I think. Not super insightful, but you'll note it's a good idea in every domain of life.
- dbrueck 3y ago
  Being aware of and adjusting your sphere of concern vs sphere of influence (see e.g. Covey & 7 Habits) can help you survive in a way that at least feels more ethical than, say, quiet quitting. Ultimately though I got fed up and stopped working for large organizations. Small companies have their own problems, but they tend to be less maddening to me personally, so I'm happier overall. YMMV!
gumballindie 3y ago
> What The Goddamn Hell Is Going On In The Tech Industry? Management and agile happened. Instead of engineering, people chase tickets to achieve mediocre goals set by clueless non technical people. They thought something as creative as software development can easily be converted into assembly line manufacturing. Well, these are the results.
- ludicity 3y ago
  I was actually writing something on this, so I'm super interested that you brought this up. I have some strong theories, but I must admit I don't have the work experience to be that confident in them.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Pretty much all companies i’ve been with an did “agile” ended up debating agile more than doing it. The outcome expected by managers was unequivocally to be able to allocate work and measure output similar to factories. Obviously it has always been a struggle to add anything of technical importance because there was no user story for it (in their limited thinking everything needs to benefit users directly, clearing tech debt is only a nice to have). As systems degrade over time they’d hire more people to maintain or increase velocity (factory output basically). Goes without saying that that doesnt work and you end up with the horror stories described here. Agile engineering practices on the other hand are beneficial. But those arent really invented by agile. All existed well before agile. Also every single large corporation i served suffered from endless meetings. It was almost always managers demanding such meetings. Somehow their belief is that engineers shouldnt spend time thinking about a problem - they should instead discuss it right away. A dubious mindset and telling of how said managers have no clue how thinking is to be made generally speaking. There needs to be communication between team members, but a good technical person is one that understands that and does it when needed. However since management and a factory mindset leads to hiring assembly line workers that lack communication skills that can sometimes be an issue - then the vicious cycle dictates that there need to be more meetings to cover communication gaps made by managers that hired assembly line workers that dont communicate well with peers, and so on. Companies run by founders usually fare better because founders are either technical, domain experts and or care about inefficiencies - thus they rarely hire non technical managers. Such companies often get acquired by larger companies that then turn them into factories and so the cycle begins. They still generate revenue and profits because generating profits doesnt always require a stellar product or sometimes they abuse their dominant position (google’s regressing, amazon’s a swamp of counterfeits, and both still make money). After a long time in tech i’ve reached the conclusion that tech has been turned into factory work (including threats of automation replacing “workers”). Growth will indeed come from ai companies because … such companies are not yet managed and factorised to death (still run by tech founders, and so on). Thats why google’s struggling to get ai working while openai is smashing it. But those too will become bastardised.
sho 3y ago
I didn't write any reply to the original, but enjoyed reading it, and this one too - but as someone who's been on both sides of the IC/Senior Management divide, mixed with and worked with plenty of C-level types and has a pretty good understanding of how companies "really" work - none of this is shocking. It's not even surprising. It's just really, really hard to organise a large group of people towards any common purpose, let alone profitably, let alone efficiently, especially in something so relatively new and little-understood as tech. You think it's hard trying to find good programmers? Try finding good managers.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Tech companies need tech leads not managers, or managers with a solid technical background. Otherwise it ends up in a mediocre show of power and power games such as those described by the author. Sitting on your bottom and holding meetings all day long and discussing processes for the sake of processes has no place in tech. Tech companies need to understand that.
  - swiftcoder 3y ago
    You can't be an effective tech lead in most (large) companies without at least passable ability to manage all of your dev team, your counterparts in product, and your management chain in general. As a result, a lot of tech leads are engineer->management conversions who just haven't made the leap yet.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      > As a result, a lot of tech leads are engineer->management conversions who just haven't made the leap yet. And thats how it should be - folks with a technical background doing the management of technical people and work. How can you even manage that which you dont understand? Ticking boxes and measuring output is not management, that can be delegated to a script and graph charts. To manage the delivery of a technical project you need to understand the technology behind it - in an equal amount to how well you understand communicating with business stakeholders and balancing business and tech needs. And no, taking a udemy course in programming python doesnt mean you have tech experience, equally taking a udemy course in agile doesnt make you a manager.
blitzar 3y ago
> two factions fighting to the death over how best to use a spreadsheet as a database for a production application Remind me again are we using production_database_v6_new_final22_final.xlsm or production_database_v4_final_finaldraft23_final_v2.xls ?
yterdy 3y ago
My "Crack Theory That Everyone Is Going To Hate": the tech industry as we know it arose out of the Great Financial Crisis and was a way to ensure that people with the "right" educational and professional pedigree were getting the spoils of the money-printing that was preventing the utter collapse of our economy. (Dotcom-era salaries vis a vis productivity were high, but not anything like today.) No one has to do anything because "job creators" don't care; tech workers are just a convenient receptacle to prevent a wage-price spiral in the broader economy. Here's some money, kid, go to town, don't start any fires. The accountability that does exist is largely for social, rather than business, reasons; "Don't make me look bad," instead of, "Make me money." Bonus, re: layoffs: Now, we are on the verge of another massive deflationary crisis for which we don't have any solution once the ball gets rolling, so such workers are no longer useful. The coddling ends, cuts to the bone begin (and justifications like TFA start appearing). Pigs get slaughtered.
- sandworm101 3y ago
  To add to the concept, how a tech company today makes money is very different than in the past. Profit doesnt matter anymore. It is all speculation against the dream of future profits once a tech company dominates a market. Money people will pay the kids because in faint hope of being on the ground floor of the next facebook or microsoft. But with entrenched companies now dominating tech, nobody will be the next microsoft. Investors are starting to realize those days are gone. Tech companies will be started and many will succeed, but now must actually compete with each other, often in courtrooms, to justify why they should be allowed into existing markets. Look at nokia. A few decades ago anyone with a billion dollars could start making cellphones. Good luck with that today. You would need a hundred billion, and a few decades of IP lawyering, before being allowed to compete with the likes of apple/samsung. If your device has a touch screen and connects to the internet, you will suffer innumerable patent issues.
  - brigadier132 3y ago
    > Profit doesnt matter anymore Uh, you might have not been paying attention to it but profit does matter now. If you look out the window you can see all the startups doing mass layoffs or going out of business.
arh5451 3y ago
The tech industry and business in general has an enormous challenge in how management is hired and selected. Currently it is either. 1. Selected by MBA or some management certification 2. Engineers who perform well/are more visible. Both are really poor choices for technology related management roles and inevitably lead to unethical/poor management practices regardless of the firm in many cases. The best manager traits are usually soft skills which are nearly impossible to measure and more impossible for HR to find (HR departments are largely lost in tech hiring). I think if you want to see examples of excellent run large companies you need to look in the places where there is an internal culture of up-skilling employees whether its rotational leadership programs or learning credits. Often my experience is they are much better run and invested in the people and it is reflected in the managers/management.
- koliber 3y ago
  It’s possible to develop those soft skills. Management concepts can be taught. It’s possible to teach a good engineer how to use existing management frameworks. Trouble is, often the learning materials are written in a way that does not “land” for people with an analytical technical background. Translating management tools and concepts into tech speak for engineers on the management has been my job for a good part of the past decade. It can be done.
  - sauwan 3y ago
    Can you speak more to this? Any suggested resources for companies struggling with teaching management skills?
    - bsenftner 3y ago
      Look into Cognitive Distortions, the fancy words for "how people play themselves". I've found that poor management and impostor syndrome are both manifestations of self deception. For managers, self deception takes the form of not listening or not taking seriously to developer concerns, trusting their management's every word rather than using critical analysis in all interactions with their management, and generally "playing the Cover-Your-Ass game" rather than actually being their upper management's objective communication channel to developers and the objective voice for developers back such that both are functionally optimally in respect to the other.
Roark66 3y ago
I've mixed feelings after reading this. On one hand I've had the "opportunity" to briefly work for some dysfunctional companies on short term projects and I know exactly what the author is talking about. But after over 2 decades in this line of work I disagree that this is the majority of Fortune 300~500. Every huge company I worked for had some level of apparent dysfunction that later, once I got to know the history why they did it this way turned out to be the best of the worst options available. At the same time I had people tell me, "of what a horrible mess and a dumpster fire of crap, are we allowed to throw it all out and do it properly? " when showing them around corporate systems and codebases. Then after eventually we obtain permission to "throw out and do it properly" for some small part of the system it is discovered that "no, the people that did it before us were not idiots, we were just not aware of certain constraints that forced their choices and now are forcing ours". You would have to replace everything... Which never was and never will be possible in a large company that has the same system and apps working since they started developing it on punch cards in 1960s...
- ludicity 3y ago
  Well, there's levels to it, right? I got an invite for a senior role at a company that some people here would recognize, and they had problems that sucked but were reasonable. Most of the problems I see don't really have a good reason, and I think people's experience is heavily influenced by career path-dependence. I started at a trash place that didn't even use version control, so the pathway of jobs through my contacts has been a very slow road to improvement. Similarly, people that start at better places just tend to stay at better places. Or as a much more experienced friend said to me: "All places are dysfunctional, but the difference between the best and worst I've worked at is indescribable."
nuc1e0n 3y ago
You need to view matters from the perspective the parasites do to understand the situation. Inefficiencies and waste are good for them because the wasted money is funneled into their own pockets. Controlling large budgets and teams gives them a sense of greater power. But the fact is, they don't need to horde all this. With a laptop anyone can achieve anything they need with the touch of a button. Minimalism is just more effective in the long run. They need to realise, the things you 'own', own you. It's especially important to be efficient when you're acting as a custodian for other people's money and wellbeing.
dalbasal 3y ago
Software is too valuable, too high potential. It's production methods too creative, too subjective, and insufficiently legible. So... We can't afford not to do it. Sometimes we can't do it, and we can't afford not to just pretend we're doing it. Do we really need to quantify the number of firms who's main declared priorities involve producing technology (eg "AI") that they have no idea how to make and no chance producing? I mean those who communicate this clearly to the board, the employees and such. Many/most aren't even tech companies. Their little teams that coordinate salesforce integration & automate google sheets are tasked with tasks somewhere between "winning ycombinator" and developing AGI in 5 months. The reason might be a penchant for "growth stories." It might be something else, but we know it is. Maybe someone said "why aren't we just using AI to cut our CS costs in half?" Maybe no one had a convincing retort. "I am near absolutely convinced that the vast majority of our species' ability to produce things of value for the human race is just utterly squandered at large companies." So... I studied economics circa 2004. A conservative school, during the peak of certainty in particular economic ideas. A very rational view of microeconomics... firms, prices, etc. Anything outside that paradigm was weird "alternative theory" and we learned the famous polemics to address the obvious rhetorical questions. I've gone back to most of those polemics over the years. I think they have some answers for us... Especially thought from the 1920s Anyway... I no longer think the model predicting that our species (or industry/company/etc) ability to produce things should be a limiting factor is totally wrong. Sometimes our actual ability is the limiting factor. Those problems get solved though. The rest of the time, other factors are limiting us and utilizing our productive potential is irrelevant. Eg smartphones. They were a hit. In about a decade they went from yuppie toy to prevalence among subsistence farmers. They got good, and cheap, fast. That's technology being efficient. Once everyone has a decent smartphone, that market has peaked. The "classical model" predicts that prices should now freefall. The market can't get bigger, but that shouldn't make price performance halt. Prices should take over as the driver of price performance now. ^FYI The classical model's definition of "technology" is pretty much "price performance" and it is treated as a black box. Irl, hat's not how this works. A commodity business model is not the next step. There's no incentive to go this route at all. The model T had a similar life journey. Rapidly reducing prices until market peak, then a different business model... one that wasn't really about efficiency anymore. Henry Ford hated it, but he did succumb eventually. That means we are no longer pursuing efficiency. Wasting productive potential is default, when in this mode. At least from the perspective of the individual firm... Efficiency is only the paradigm sometimes... Times when supply (the companies' output) is factor limiting profit, share price, reward... The rest of the time, it's demand. Take retail banking. I am sure, if the population of earth was growing 20% YoY... retail banking would keep pace. Accounts & credit cards for everyone would be no issue. They wouldn't need to scale their workforce by 20% pa. Banks/banking would get more efficient instead... especially if competition is weak. That doesn't mean that in a "normal" state, where banks have limited growth potential... Those efficiency gains are not going to happen. It doesn't matter what technology exists. Retail banks are not going to slowly shrink, as efficiency gains make it possible to operate with half the revenue/employees/buildings. That flavour of "pursuit of efficiency" does not exist, at scale, irl. Only in the model. The model, assuming that flavour should exist, concludes that efficiency gains cannot be made because technology doesn't allow it. Longshortlong... The phenomenon beneath, tech operations being a shishow... that's what it looks like when firms try to do less with more... the alternative to efficiency.
JackMorgan 3y ago
I have one opinion why this happens. Imagine you're in charge of Google Search in like 2005. You've got a killer product that could probably be run realistically by 50 extremely good engineers working efficiently. Take out server costs, what's your profit margin, like 99%? Well if you're the board, and you've got a 99% profit company, what do you do? On the one hand you can get rich and call it a day, but then how long before a competitor builds the same exact product and you lose half? Or lose everything if everyone switches? So you take a huge chunk that money and reinvest it with the hope of cementing your position or finding another product. At this stage there's tons of money flying around. Internal projects are started and stopped constantly. Extreme inefficiencies are tolerated, after all, as the business grows, plenty of people just want to get paid and do as little work as possible.
- prepend 3y ago
  I think it’s probably basic accounting math. Let’s say you can make $100B with 50 engineers at 99% profit margin. You pay your employees $1B and they are the highest paid in the world and all ecstatically happy and the stockholders make $99B and they are pretty happy too. The board decides they’d rather make $300B at 50% margins because that’s $150B to investors. So it’s lower margin, but they’ve already invested and they just want more money. Of course, I know many programmers that have insanely high profit margins with 1-4 employees and will never go public and no one except for an IRS computer will know they exist. I think corporations are usually pretty efficient. It’s just not always clear what they are efficient toward.
  - tcgv 3y ago
    > I think corporations are usually pretty efficient. It’s just not always clear what they are efficient toward. This. People often examine things on a small scale and lack the context to understand why certain aspects appear counterintuitive. Once we gain a broader perspective, things begin to make more sense.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Yup; any department with money in their budget left over at the end of the budget period will see their budget reduced, even if they need it. And (I'm theorizing here, I know little of management layers) I'm confident that a manager's wage is a percentage of a department's budget. Therefore, it's in their interest to use up and ask for more budget constantly.
iandanforth 3y ago
So you know the latency numbers that every programmer should know? (I hope you do: https://colin-scott.github.io/personal_website/research/interactive_latency.html https://colin-scott.github.io/personal_website/research/inte...) Is there an equivalent for software org spend? Obviously it couldn't be as principled as the above but if you look at engineering at StackOverflow and their compute / requests ratio it's orders of magnitude better than companies I've worked at. I just want numbers in spend on compute and headcount related to operational requirements. Has someone compiled a set of simple heuristics that says "If you are serving thousands of requests per hour to hundreds of enterprise clients your AWS bills shouldn't be more than thousands per month?" Something which can be used to say very clearly "we are incompetent" to upper management?
lootsauce 3y ago
You think the waste is high in tech saving a few mill here and there with db settings an ec2 optimizations? Imagine all the low sophistication marketing managers and CDOs, CMOS literally with 10 to 100+ million budgets much of which is completely wasted. Ten years in this space I have 2nd hand knowledge of specific cases that make your face melt.
layer8 3y ago
> The places doing things right tend to be characterized by being small, not being obsessed with growth, and having calm, compassionate founders who still keep a hand on the wheel. This right here. Go look for those places.
- johhns4 3y ago
  I don't know. Just because a company doesn't move fast doesn't mean that they are a good company to work for. Calm and compassionate can just mean out of touch and dispassionate in investing in the future. Having energy and passion to move forward as well as the ability to place your bets somewhere is important too. When nothing ever happens because everything is too much of a risk, work can get a bit tedious. But I suppose in todays climate people will look towards these companies as the holy grail just to get some stability.
  - layer8 3y ago
    You’re manufacturing a false dichotomy here. There’s no contradiction between founders being compassionate and calm (in the sense of level-headed) and also being passionate and innovative. In those small companies where I worked, the work was anything but tedious, and there was no lack of risk. But exponential growth wasn’t the goal, making good products in a sustainable fashion was the goal.
    - johhns4 3y ago
      I will back up here a bit as my first claim came off as a bit confrontational. However, I find it a bit unrealistic to expect an environment where you have founders that are very compassionate and calm. The very nature of building a business is a maddening task. Which is something we seem to forget. Most level-headed people would never do it. The very idea of starting something that has a very minimal chance of success isn’t rational. Therefore I do find the traits you describe at somewhat of a contradiction. Many of the most known innovators and leaders are often described as intense, driven, and even obsessive. Their willingness to defy convention, take significant risks and challenge the status-quo can be seen as crazy. I suppose I’ve seen the other side of this coin, in small companies where everything is ”too much of a risk” if it cannot generate a good cash flow within a few months. This is a very level-headed approach. I’ve also seen them miss some great opportunities because of it. Nevertheless, they are still operating and probably will be for a long time. However, I'm uncertain that they have enough energy and will power to "change" the world. Now, I'm not saying that a small company with calm level-headed leaders are a bad thing. But I don’t believe that there aren’t trade-offs. Both have their pros and cons.
api 3y ago
Three words: zero interest rates. Since around 2008-2009, our customers have not been customers. Our customers have been investors. Money has been so cheap that the primary goal of most organizations has been to court investment, not to actually create value. It was easier to raise money than to build product or sell anything. To do this the goal is to make the company look like a potential "unicorn." That means burying whatever is wrong, over-hiring and over-engineering to make the company look serious and big, complexifying everything to give all those over-hired engineers something to do, and trying to gain as many users as possible as fast as possible even if it's completely unsustainable. In that world efficiency literally does not matter. In fact, it can be a liability since it means you're not spending investor cash fast enough and you don't have enough complexity to make your over-hired engineering teams feel like they are being productive. If you're not spending that cash you don't need to raise more. It's the startup fund raising version of the well known "you have to spend your entire budget by the end of the fiscal year or you will get less next year."
Spooky23 3y ago
The callous regard for human life jumped at me. My uncle worked for a big Wall St firm in the 80s and 90s. A CE from a big company was doing some early morning maintenance and long story short, had a heart attack and died in the data center. The ops people called 911, fire/ambulance came — and were turned away at the door by security because they took too long and they needed to avoid impact to trading. Basically they put some sort of tarp on the guy and wheeled him in and out of the way throughout the day. My uncle was some sort of big shot, heard about it, came in and reamed out the security director guy. Pretty sure the family never knew.
- teeray 3y ago
  > The ops people called 911, fire/ambulance came — and were turned away at the door by security It’s astounding that impeding an emergency response wasn’t an immediately arrestable offense. If there’s a mortal threat and “security” is in the way, police should have every right to subdue the rent-a-cops.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    My guess is the rent a cops were moonlighting or retired cops, and as “good guys”, someone shrugged.
mikewarot 3y ago
I know the answer.... Free Money[1], when the Fed lowered the prime interest rate to zero, the free money distorted the market and allowed all this insanity to happen. Now that the free money is drying up, all this shit has to evaporate. Just like the great simplification[2] that has to take place on the downside of the great carbon pulse that's feeding civilization right now. What a depressing thought in the short/medium term, in the long run, it'll be good for Humanity, my grandkids, should they every be born [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy [2] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/about https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/about
kunley 3y ago
Here is a story not about wasting cloud resources, but about wasting careers: A decade-long project at the ThreeLetterYouknowwho was turning into a separate business, so people were being convinced to abandon their dozen-years old employments at the mentioned ThreeLetterGiant (evil or not, but at least with perspectives and an established routine how to live in this corp), so they did the move, only to be fired 5 months later, as the newly born company was reduced to a half, to fit into parameters required by some stock market related operation. The crux is that the management knew about all the planned moves when negotiating people's leave from HAL (oops, I mean, ThreeLetterGiant). Yet they needed the massive flux of initial employees to fullfill some other business parameters. Everything was done with a cold blood. I wasn't reduced this way (I wasn't even at HAL originally, was part of the completely fresh hires) but I left these assholes a month after the layoffs. Even the mob is treating their own people better.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  > Even the mob is treating their own people better. They actually treat them quite well. I know a number of ex-wiseguys. When you manage folks that, by definition, don't like rules and structure, and can probably clip you in a moment, you learn to manage well. Bad managers don't last (literally).
readthenotes1 3y ago
Could we make the title more click bait and less substantive?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Spiwux 3y ago
Sometimes I have this urge to try getting into a manager role. I really want to see and experience for myself if most managers I work with are just bad at their job, or if being a "good" manager is simply impossible and you're doomed to fail regardless of skill.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
You might find pure $1M saving opportunities. But quite often the saviour of $1m is not aware that this can cause a $10m loss somewhere else, for example, a legal liability. Or maybe in order to find one $1m saving opportunity, established processes should be disrupted at a cost of $10m.
- deely3 3y ago
  Or maybe not. How do we know?
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
    Exactly.
nologic01 3y ago
Large corporate conglomerates are essentially how power is shared and delegated in any modern oligarchic society with large economic footprint. Details around public sector role vs market structure and function vary, but overall its the same story: A bunch of ruthless actors, with various degrees of starting point privilege, climb the greasy poles, typically in colluding cohorts of 'old boy networks'. Revolving doors between private and public roles are the norm. In this organizational design producing anything of value is a secondary concern and incidental to the job description. Control and maintenance of power structure is the prime objective. Large firms are lawyer and lobbyist undertakings with a tiny production engine attached. Rather gloomy but not really new. There is nevertheless something very intriguing about the tech industry. It may be at the forefront of disrupting this rather wasteful house of political cards. This very discussion on HN is point in case. Go and check Linkedin to see what corporate vacuity typically sound like :-) The success of the open source movement with its incredible efficiency and leverage is another interesting hint that something interesting is brewing. Why would tech be any different? Well its not "tech", its information tech. And power structures require and are shaped by the control of information. So for as long as tech is not completely locked down the next phase of human political-economic organization is in-principle up for grabs.
e12e 3y ago
> If you recognize yourself in these emails but didn't give me permission to write an email, then it isn't actually you, it turns out these stories are so similar that they really do sound the same. Gold.
lamontcg 3y ago
Tech is like a country that just discovered massive amounts of natural resources like oil or gas. The result is a whole lot of corruption and inefficiencies. And this is normally the process that plays out whenever a company gets a whole lot of money (through a windfall like a massive lawsuit or just via going IPO), you wind up with mangers empire-building rather than having any motive to focus on the bottom line. Every time I look at a tech companies financials these days, they're fucking awful with zero return on capital and often times negative operational margins. Wall street seems to assume that these are all fake-it-till-you-make-it stories and that management will find the next pot of gold and those companies will all turn it around. I tend to see the minor corruptions of managers spending as much of the companies money as they can to build their own empire.
Balgair 3y ago
> It is fucking awful out there. Maybe we should set up a support group. I've heard in the news that the UAW just got a great deal.
coffeesque 3y ago
> The first type, my favourite commenters, whose grim-faced no-nonsense corporate visages grace standups across the world. I'd have to put myself in this camp, how dare this guy prioritize making things not shit. Hasn't he gotten the message yet? I don't think the author is as smart as he thinks, he should definitely seek counseling

256 points by l0b0 3y ago

l0b0 3y ago

How do big companies stay alive for so long? I guess it's still possible to coast on a single success for so long that the company has time to completely rot from the inside before any of it reaches their customers. Or maybe the early money gets invested in a bajillion projects, on the very slim chance that the company isn't a one-trick pony.

throwaway5959 3y ago
Regulatory capture.
- yesbut 3y ago
  and Zombie Companies https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/31/zombie-firm-bankruptcies-amid-fed-interest-rate-hikes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/31/zombie-firm-bankruptcies-ami...
- gruez 3y ago
  What sort of regulations are preventing a google competitor from starting up? "GDPR/CCPA" isn't very convincing because it was only a recent thing, but google has been around for decades.
  - throwaway5959 3y ago
    Regulatory capture covers more than just regulations. It also covers the lack of regulation; including anti-trust. Do you want to do a search or mobile OS startup with Google’s market position? Do you think they’ll release a YouTube or Google Maps application for your phone OS?
    - pjc50 3y ago
      I think that's stretching the definition of "regulatory capture" beyond useful meaning. Just say "monopoly" or the softer "market power".
  - imhoguy 3y ago
    - Patents, grow a bit more and the sharks will come. - Unfair taxation advantages, and fines are laughable.
TulliusCicero 3y ago
Because they're not actually much more dysfunctional than smaller companies, you just hear more stories because they're bigger. Bigger means more employees for things to go wrong around, bigger means that people are more likely to be interested in hearing stories and thus other people are more likely to tell, remember, and repeat said stories. A story about some idiot doing an idiotic thing at Google is vastly more likely to be passed around forever than a story at a random mom and pop company*. People love hearing about morons at big tech giants, and the storytellers oblige. That, plus sufficient economies of scale or complementary tech products. * unless that story is REALLY incredible, like that guy who went to an interview and accidentally killed the CEO's dog
- habitue 3y ago
  The bigness itself causes dysfunction, apart from just having more employees and more chances to have a disaster. It's the whole Dunbar's number thing, we really haven't figured out a great way to work effectively in huge groups yet. But... some things can only be done with huge groups, so even working ineffectively can be worth it. And in a competitive setting, your competition also has these problems, so you can win in the market despite them.
  - blablabla123 3y ago
    The problem with tiny startups is often that people are really inexperienced with people problems. Large corps somewhat fix that by having HR departments and all. But ultimately I'm starting to think today's business often relies on some sort of hype train.
    - fallingknife 3y ago
      I tend to think of HR departments as a people problem, not the solution to one.
      - atq2119 3y ago
        HR is often awful, sure. But it helps get the basics right. My brother works at a small (<100 people) startup in the material sciences, and the amount of times that his and his co-workers pay statements got messed up in creative ways is incredible. Meanwhile I'm working at a decades old big company and never had any problems like that.
nullc 3y ago
There are many companies that are so wealthy that they could just stop all revenue completely and coast no for decades while management continues to skim out their fat paychecks. Some theorize that this has already occurred. Besides, -- if you think how some companies work is fugly, go take a look at biology or politics. Companies are evolved systems. Once they're old enough they're almost always messy even when they aren't especially dysfunctional. The human body is full of almost vestigial parts and dead end metabolic pathways... huge chunks of our DNA are just self replicating repeating sequences. In reality the cruft in companies is often not even non-functional, but sometimes it serves some more complex purpose. Lots of large companies, for example, have some useless figurehead security position that exists for the actual purpose of having someone to fire when there the inevitable serious security issue occurs, without putting anyone actually productive at risk. Companies are built out of and owned by people. Like anything else they have to respect the the limitations of the building material and the needs of their owners. The resulting requirements are no less real even though they might not exist in a world populated by homoeconomicus instead of man kind. If man kind wants a blood sacrifice for security incidents then it's reasonable and good for a company to have one.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  For investors winding down and returning money fast might be preferable to a company without profits.
  - nullc 3y ago
    Sure, and for a period corporate raiders took advantage of companies like that-- but standard defenses against raiding have become well known and widely deployed. Like life learning how to make cellulose suddenly the landscapes were littered with the husks of things that nothing knew how to digest. But the value to society at large isn't just a profit (much less an ever growing profit). It's good that we have businesses which simply satisfy the involved parties (their customers, their employees, and their owners)-- even if they don't perform well on any external metric of efficiency.
    - 3y ago
csomar 3y ago
One overlooked reason is the government intervening to save these companies. Either by bailout, lowering rate, special loans, etc… This prevents these companies from going into bankruptcy and restructuring and keeps the status quo as is. It’s kind of a disguised communism and the longer the government keeps proping the economy (and making it difficult to start new companies), the worse this will get.
- pjc50 3y ago
  > is the government intervening to save these companies Name some. Many very dysfunctional companies are also very profitable and have no need of outside bailouts. How long has IBM been at it?
  - Dracophoenix 3y ago
    General Electric.
- ace32229 3y ago
  Corporate socialism it's often called.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Where's the disguise?
_tk_ 3y ago
A lot of big companies don’t. Additionally, a single success often implies multiple times smaller successes that are just not visible outside a corporation.
lmm 3y ago
Sometimes being big is a structural advantage. Also there's a variant of the Peter Principle at work: any effective company grows until it is ineffective, therefore productive work is done only by companies that haven't finished growing yet.
ian0 3y ago
At its core a company is a machine that makes money. Once the machine is up and running, you just have to avoid not breaking it. An org at this stage can be completely dysfunctional as long as the machine keeps running. Also figuring out the "wins" while scaling are much more obvious than while trying to start.
- freefaler 3y ago
  That's true if the environment where the machine work doesn't change. However with business environment changing the machine need to change as well. Big corporations have "moats" (as per Buffet's definition) and a big bank vendor locked into your solution will drag a badly working machine for years.
ludicity 3y ago
Author here. My organization continues to exist in its current massive form due to regulatory capture - I can't provide details and remain anonymous, unfortunately. We would probably survive at 1/10th the size or something akin to that without that protection, and we would be considerably more efficient. EDIT: Oh, and the part that earns money through regulatory capture earns so much money that we can have all these departments doing nothing in the meantime. We might do something one day with amazing leadership, but the incentives and odds are stacked against us.
swiftcoder 3y ago
Big companies tend to have a handful of divisions that generate almost all of the revenue, and then everyone else is a cost centre. As long as the revenue generators outweigh the cost centres, no one really cares broadly about efficiency. For Facebook the revenue generator is Ads. For Amazon it was initially physical shipping, and later cloud hosting. Outside of those divisions you could burn billions on long shot projects that went nowhere, and nobody really cared...

nullc 3y ago

> There's a team out there where the main drama isn't one right faction and one wrong faction, there are two factions fighting to the death over how best to use a spreadsheet as a database for a production application. This is the authors ideal of hell? oh you sweet summer child.

ludicity 3y ago
I am the author and uh, I'm worried about what could be that much worse than this. Stories are still welcome at ludicity.hackernews@gmail.com!

f5e4 3y ago

Wow, I made it to the compliments page! I feel like it's cheating a bit that I knew about the page before writing a comment. I don't really have anything important to say, but I did find this interesting. I'm unused to this sort of indirect response. It feels slightly like a personal response, since he links to a page where my comment is one of a few added, and refers to "commenters". However, my criticism was close to the opposite of what he is replying to. I criticized the author for writing a story where I felt they mostly acted like a cog in a dysfunctional system, but was sneering at everyone else doing the same. I suppose, though, that perhaps they believe that the best/only solution for being in a poorly-functioning company is to jump ship. edit: To clarify, I do agree that most corporate systems are dysfunctional and I'm not an agile fan. I'm not defending these systems.

ludicity 3y ago
Hello! Sorry, that whole page is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there are two types of comment on there. One batch is from people that... well, you can see that they're like. The other half I put up there because I think they actually have me dead to rights. It's one of those weird things where, being fairly young, I already know that I'm going to look back on many of the things I write and realize they were hot-headed, and I wasn't nearly as good as I thought I was. I didn't think the writing came off as smug - I'm pretty aware that I clicked five buttons and skipped a computer science education - but I still appreciate the reality check that maybe I -am- being obnoxious. It's just fun to be a hothead sometimes, and I'm actually starting to get nervous with all the HN traffic. Yelling into the void is less threatening to my career. The only quibble I have with the original comment is the assumption I didn't try very hard to let people know it was an issue - I promise I did, sometimes management just... doesn't care. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, sorry for any unintended offense I might have caused, because you were totally fair. It feels wrong to take it off the page anyway though!

tester756 3y ago

>There is a high likelihood that many other people in the org were lightyears ahead of the author. It's even more likely that an engineer or manager in their group was "Banking" the inefficiencies to use during a cost-cutting period - and the author ruined that chance... which will inevitably cause massive suffering and possibly poor performance reviews when there is nothing to trim." That's crazy, how it isn't pure sabotage? career oriented people, jezz christ. That's instant fire by me if somebody considered such a thing

klabb3 3y ago
Seems like a normal day in a corporation? Bean counters who decide your salary use beyond-stupid metrics. For instance, fighting fires is often rewarded disproportionately, so it’s good to be “visible” during many, recurring fires. Of course people game that, intentionally or unintentionally. You don’t get the behavior you say you want, you get what you incentivize. Even at pure tech companies with somewhat technically competent leadership the incentives are whack, and often the people at the very top are still replicating some MBA doctrine that will be debunked as horse manure within a decade. Just because our computers get exponentially better doesn’t mean people do, particularly groups of people.
- aardvark179 3y ago
  I think there’s a spectrum here, I doubt many people are deliberately hoarding huge, easy, and /certain/ cost or resource savings just to use later, but it is easy to end up with a long list of possible things that you haven’t had time to try, and won’t get prioritised until somebody else cares. Also, be careful what you wish for regarding cost savings. You may think you’re doing well saving 500k, but in a medium sized company there are likely a lot of easy ways to save a chunk more than that which you really aren’t going to like.
  - arethuza 3y ago
    I have a book about the management consulting industry that suggest there is at least one large successful firm of management consultants where the answer is always "fire 23% - 33% of your staff" regardless of what the question was. Apparently this is the level that most organisations can stagger on long enough for senior management to bank the bonuses and move on and upwards and before long term effects kick in.

benjaminwootton 3y ago

The cost saving comes from the fact that Snowflake virtual warehouses by default time out after 10 minutes and this can be lowered, realistically to 60 seconds. They must have been using very overprovisioned servers to run up $1 million per year in Snowflake spend for occasional 10 minute bursts of activity prior to the change. I think this points more to poor and ungoverned use of Snowflake and Cloud than it does organisational dysfunction.

pjc50 3y ago
> I think this points more to poor and ungoverned use of Snowflake and Cloud than it does organisational dysfunction. Those are the same thing. (one of the massive, massive advantages and disadvantages of cloud in general is that it circumvents "purchasing" departments. One the one hand: you don't have to spend $10,000 of time trying to buy $1000 of computer. On the other: you can waste millions on the cloud and maybe nobody will even notice.)
- arethuza 3y ago
  It can also circumvent in-house infrastructure teams - who I used to find were a far bigger challenge than purchasing. I used to work somewhere where the main mission of the infrastructure team seemed to be to prevent anyone actually running anything on all of the lovely hardware they managed - which reached peak madness when I was quoted £75,000 for hosting a single static HTML page for internal only access.
dustingetz 3y ago
number is also reported out of context and not as a % - i detect moral hazard by author here
hodgesrm 3y ago
> I think this points more to poor and ungoverned use of Snowflake and Cloud than it does organisational dysfunction. This is a "blame the user" argument that I hear a lot. It's true that in many or most cases users being super attentive can mitigate cost issues. But it's also true that this turns out to be very difficult in practice for a variety of reasons like scattered responsibility, complexity of cloud costs, and vendor cost models that encourage spending. For my own money this problem looks like a business opportunity for vendors that offer customers ways to avoid it. The high margin era of cloud services with 10x markup on compute (e.g., Snowflake) won't last forever.

kubanczyk 3y ago

A better analysis: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/what-is-life-in-an-immoral-maze https://thezvi.substack.com/p/what-is-life-in-an-immoral-maz...

inquirerGeneral 3y ago
[dead]
brazzy 3y ago
Reads more like fictional worldbuilding than an analysis.

_tk_ 3y ago

It is kinda interesting, that these rants about corporate life that are filled with little substance but with lots of swearing are so popular here. Is there one interesting takeaway here? Big organizations tend to grow in weird ways, opaque to the folks on the ground. They sometimes make big mistakes and spend money where they shouldn’t. But because of their size, that doesn’t mean the end for them.

fallingknife 3y ago
This is why it's a major red flag when your org starts doing things "because big company X does it." And they never stop to think whether they do it because it works or that it's a failure and they are getting away with it because they are big.
RamblingCTO 3y ago
Full of swearing? Have we read different articles?
- ludicity 3y ago
  To be fair, my other stuff is full of swearing. He's got me there. Although I started writing at 6PM on a random day after a stupid meeting, and actually tend to agree that there's worthier stuff to be popular - but people click on what they want. I have a whole bunch of more boring stuff around, with much less swearing, and I think I'm more comfortable with the low level of attention that gets.
  - RamblingCTO 3y ago
    Well, I don't mind the more flippant writing style anyway ;) I liked your writing and it reminded me of the phoenix project, not in writing but in content. I'll be sure to check out your more boring stuff!
- gniv 3y ago
  There are four instances of the f-word and a few religious references, including in the title.

ZeroGravitas 3y ago

So, serious question: how do you maintain your health and sanity when you find yourself in such a situation? If the main reason to stay is a steady paycheck then you're only doing harm to yourself by being aware of and caring about the bigger picture.

fnimick 3y ago
That's exactly how you do it. Don't care about things the company doesn't measure and reward.
probably_wrong 3y ago
Assuming you can't leave the place (no other prospects around, family to feed, etc) you simply check out mentally. You do an okay job (no point in overachieving), stop being personally invested in the success of projects, roll your eyes a lot, and find meaning somewhere other than work. And if things get too overwhelming you can always vent to your co-workers who are also stuck in your same situation.
ludicity 3y ago
Don't stress too much about improving things there, spend time with the colleagues you like, and make incremental (and sometimes major) changes to your life, I think. Not super insightful, but you'll note it's a good idea in every domain of life.
dbrueck 3y ago
Being aware of and adjusting your sphere of concern vs sphere of influence (see e.g. Covey & 7 Habits) can help you survive in a way that at least feels more ethical than, say, quiet quitting. Ultimately though I got fed up and stopped working for large organizations. Small companies have their own problems, but they tend to be less maddening to me personally, so I'm happier overall. YMMV!

gumballindie 3y ago

> What The Goddamn Hell Is Going On In The Tech Industry? Management and agile happened. Instead of engineering, people chase tickets to achieve mediocre goals set by clueless non technical people. They thought something as creative as software development can easily be converted into assembly line manufacturing. Well, these are the results.

ludicity 3y ago
I was actually writing something on this, so I'm super interested that you brought this up. I have some strong theories, but I must admit I don't have the work experience to be that confident in them.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Pretty much all companies i’ve been with an did “agile” ended up debating agile more than doing it. The outcome expected by managers was unequivocally to be able to allocate work and measure output similar to factories. Obviously it has always been a struggle to add anything of technical importance because there was no user story for it (in their limited thinking everything needs to benefit users directly, clearing tech debt is only a nice to have). As systems degrade over time they’d hire more people to maintain or increase velocity (factory output basically). Goes without saying that that doesnt work and you end up with the horror stories described here. Agile engineering practices on the other hand are beneficial. But those arent really invented by agile. All existed well before agile. Also every single large corporation i served suffered from endless meetings. It was almost always managers demanding such meetings. Somehow their belief is that engineers shouldnt spend time thinking about a problem - they should instead discuss it right away. A dubious mindset and telling of how said managers have no clue how thinking is to be made generally speaking. There needs to be communication between team members, but a good technical person is one that understands that and does it when needed. However since management and a factory mindset leads to hiring assembly line workers that lack communication skills that can sometimes be an issue - then the vicious cycle dictates that there need to be more meetings to cover communication gaps made by managers that hired assembly line workers that dont communicate well with peers, and so on. Companies run by founders usually fare better because founders are either technical, domain experts and or care about inefficiencies - thus they rarely hire non technical managers. Such companies often get acquired by larger companies that then turn them into factories and so the cycle begins. They still generate revenue and profits because generating profits doesnt always require a stellar product or sometimes they abuse their dominant position (google’s regressing, amazon’s a swamp of counterfeits, and both still make money). After a long time in tech i’ve reached the conclusion that tech has been turned into factory work (including threats of automation replacing “workers”). Growth will indeed come from ai companies because … such companies are not yet managed and factorised to death (still run by tech founders, and so on). Thats why google’s struggling to get ai working while openai is smashing it. But those too will become bastardised.

sho 3y ago

I didn't write any reply to the original, but enjoyed reading it, and this one too - but as someone who's been on both sides of the IC/Senior Management divide, mixed with and worked with plenty of C-level types and has a pretty good understanding of how companies "really" work - none of this is shocking. It's not even surprising. It's just really, really hard to organise a large group of people towards any common purpose, let alone profitably, let alone efficiently, especially in something so relatively new and little-understood as tech. You think it's hard trying to find good programmers? Try finding good managers.

gumballindie 3y ago
Tech companies need tech leads not managers, or managers with a solid technical background. Otherwise it ends up in a mediocre show of power and power games such as those described by the author. Sitting on your bottom and holding meetings all day long and discussing processes for the sake of processes has no place in tech. Tech companies need to understand that.
- swiftcoder 3y ago
  You can't be an effective tech lead in most (large) companies without at least passable ability to manage all of your dev team, your counterparts in product, and your management chain in general. As a result, a lot of tech leads are engineer->management conversions who just haven't made the leap yet.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    > As a result, a lot of tech leads are engineer->management conversions who just haven't made the leap yet. And thats how it should be - folks with a technical background doing the management of technical people and work. How can you even manage that which you dont understand? Ticking boxes and measuring output is not management, that can be delegated to a script and graph charts. To manage the delivery of a technical project you need to understand the technology behind it - in an equal amount to how well you understand communicating with business stakeholders and balancing business and tech needs. And no, taking a udemy course in programming python doesnt mean you have tech experience, equally taking a udemy course in agile doesnt make you a manager.

blitzar 3y ago

> two factions fighting to the death over how best to use a spreadsheet as a database for a production application Remind me again are we using production_database_v6_new_final22_final.xlsm or production_database_v4_final_finaldraft23_final_v2.xls ?

yterdy 3y ago

My "Crack Theory That Everyone Is Going To Hate": the tech industry as we know it arose out of the Great Financial Crisis and was a way to ensure that people with the "right" educational and professional pedigree were getting the spoils of the money-printing that was preventing the utter collapse of our economy. (Dotcom-era salaries vis a vis productivity were high, but not anything like today.) No one has to do anything because "job creators" don't care; tech workers are just a convenient receptacle to prevent a wage-price spiral in the broader economy. Here's some money, kid, go to town, don't start any fires. The accountability that does exist is largely for social, rather than business, reasons; "Don't make me look bad," instead of, "Make me money." Bonus, re: layoffs: Now, we are on the verge of another massive deflationary crisis for which we don't have any solution once the ball gets rolling, so such workers are no longer useful. The coddling ends, cuts to the bone begin (and justifications like TFA start appearing). Pigs get slaughtered.

sandworm101 3y ago
To add to the concept, how a tech company today makes money is very different than in the past. Profit doesnt matter anymore. It is all speculation against the dream of future profits once a tech company dominates a market. Money people will pay the kids because in faint hope of being on the ground floor of the next facebook or microsoft. But with entrenched companies now dominating tech, nobody will be the next microsoft. Investors are starting to realize those days are gone. Tech companies will be started and many will succeed, but now must actually compete with each other, often in courtrooms, to justify why they should be allowed into existing markets. Look at nokia. A few decades ago anyone with a billion dollars could start making cellphones. Good luck with that today. You would need a hundred billion, and a few decades of IP lawyering, before being allowed to compete with the likes of apple/samsung. If your device has a touch screen and connects to the internet, you will suffer innumerable patent issues.
- brigadier132 3y ago
  > Profit doesnt matter anymore Uh, you might have not been paying attention to it but profit does matter now. If you look out the window you can see all the startups doing mass layoffs or going out of business.

arh5451 3y ago

The tech industry and business in general has an enormous challenge in how management is hired and selected. Currently it is either. 1. Selected by MBA or some management certification 2. Engineers who perform well/are more visible. Both are really poor choices for technology related management roles and inevitably lead to unethical/poor management practices regardless of the firm in many cases. The best manager traits are usually soft skills which are nearly impossible to measure and more impossible for HR to find (HR departments are largely lost in tech hiring). I think if you want to see examples of excellent run large companies you need to look in the places where there is an internal culture of up-skilling employees whether its rotational leadership programs or learning credits. Often my experience is they are much better run and invested in the people and it is reflected in the managers/management.

koliber 3y ago
It’s possible to develop those soft skills. Management concepts can be taught. It’s possible to teach a good engineer how to use existing management frameworks. Trouble is, often the learning materials are written in a way that does not “land” for people with an analytical technical background. Translating management tools and concepts into tech speak for engineers on the management has been my job for a good part of the past decade. It can be done.
- sauwan 3y ago
  Can you speak more to this? Any suggested resources for companies struggling with teaching management skills?
  - bsenftner 3y ago
    Look into Cognitive Distortions, the fancy words for "how people play themselves". I've found that poor management and impostor syndrome are both manifestations of self deception. For managers, self deception takes the form of not listening or not taking seriously to developer concerns, trusting their management's every word rather than using critical analysis in all interactions with their management, and generally "playing the Cover-Your-Ass game" rather than actually being their upper management's objective communication channel to developers and the objective voice for developers back such that both are functionally optimally in respect to the other.

Roark66 3y ago

I've mixed feelings after reading this. On one hand I've had the "opportunity" to briefly work for some dysfunctional companies on short term projects and I know exactly what the author is talking about. But after over 2 decades in this line of work I disagree that this is the majority of Fortune 300~500. Every huge company I worked for had some level of apparent dysfunction that later, once I got to know the history why they did it this way turned out to be the best of the worst options available. At the same time I had people tell me, "of what a horrible mess and a dumpster fire of crap, are we allowed to throw it all out and do it properly? " when showing them around corporate systems and codebases. Then after eventually we obtain permission to "throw out and do it properly" for some small part of the system it is discovered that "no, the people that did it before us were not idiots, we were just not aware of certain constraints that forced their choices and now are forcing ours". You would have to replace everything... Which never was and never will be possible in a large company that has the same system and apps working since they started developing it on punch cards in 1960s...

ludicity 3y ago
Well, there's levels to it, right? I got an invite for a senior role at a company that some people here would recognize, and they had problems that sucked but were reasonable. Most of the problems I see don't really have a good reason, and I think people's experience is heavily influenced by career path-dependence. I started at a trash place that didn't even use version control, so the pathway of jobs through my contacts has been a very slow road to improvement. Similarly, people that start at better places just tend to stay at better places. Or as a much more experienced friend said to me: "All places are dysfunctional, but the difference between the best and worst I've worked at is indescribable."

nuc1e0n 3y ago

You need to view matters from the perspective the parasites do to understand the situation. Inefficiencies and waste are good for them because the wasted money is funneled into their own pockets. Controlling large budgets and teams gives them a sense of greater power. But the fact is, they don't need to horde all this. With a laptop anyone can achieve anything they need with the touch of a button. Minimalism is just more effective in the long run. They need to realise, the things you 'own', own you. It's especially important to be efficient when you're acting as a custodian for other people's money and wellbeing.

dalbasal 3y ago

Software is too valuable, too high potential. It's production methods too creative, too subjective, and insufficiently legible. So... We can't afford not to do it. Sometimes we can't do it, and we can't afford not to just pretend we're doing it. Do we really need to quantify the number of firms who's main declared priorities involve producing technology (eg "AI") that they have no idea how to make and no chance producing? I mean those who communicate this clearly to the board, the employees and such. Many/most aren't even tech companies. Their little teams that coordinate salesforce integration & automate google sheets are tasked with tasks somewhere between "winning ycombinator" and developing AGI in 5 months. The reason might be a penchant for "growth stories." It might be something else, but we know it is. Maybe someone said "why aren't we just using AI to cut our CS costs in half?" Maybe no one had a convincing retort. "I am near absolutely convinced that the vast majority of our species' ability to produce things of value for the human race is just utterly squandered at large companies." So... I studied economics circa 2004. A conservative school, during the peak of certainty in particular economic ideas. A very rational view of microeconomics... firms, prices, etc. Anything outside that paradigm was weird "alternative theory" and we learned the famous polemics to address the obvious rhetorical questions. I've gone back to most of those polemics over the years. I think they have some answers for us... Especially thought from the 1920s Anyway... I no longer think the model predicting that our species (or industry/company/etc) ability to produce things should be a limiting factor is totally wrong. Sometimes our actual ability is the limiting factor. Those problems get solved though. The rest of the time, other factors are limiting us and utilizing our productive potential is irrelevant. Eg smartphones. They were a hit. In about a decade they went from yuppie toy to prevalence among subsistence farmers. They got good, and cheap, fast. That's technology being efficient. Once everyone has a decent smartphone, that market has peaked. The "classical model" predicts that prices should now freefall. The market can't get bigger, but that shouldn't make price performance halt. Prices should take over as the driver of price performance now. ^FYI The classical model's definition of "technology" is pretty much "price performance" and it is treated as a black box. Irl, hat's not how this works. A commodity business model is not the next step. There's no incentive to go this route at all. The model T had a similar life journey. Rapidly reducing prices until market peak, then a different business model... one that wasn't really about efficiency anymore. Henry Ford hated it, but he did succumb eventually. That means we are no longer pursuing efficiency. Wasting productive potential is default, when in this mode. At least from the perspective of the individual firm... Efficiency is only the paradigm sometimes... Times when supply (the companies' output) is factor limiting profit, share price, reward... The rest of the time, it's demand. Take retail banking. I am sure, if the population of earth was growing 20% YoY... retail banking would keep pace. Accounts & credit cards for everyone would be no issue. They wouldn't need to scale their workforce by 20% pa. Banks/banking would get more efficient instead... especially if competition is weak. That doesn't mean that in a "normal" state, where banks have limited growth potential... Those efficiency gains are not going to happen. It doesn't matter what technology exists. Retail banks are not going to slowly shrink, as efficiency gains make it possible to operate with half the revenue/employees/buildings. That flavour of "pursuit of efficiency" does not exist, at scale, irl. Only in the model. The model, assuming that flavour should exist, concludes that efficiency gains cannot be made because technology doesn't allow it. Longshortlong... The phenomenon beneath, tech operations being a shishow... that's what it looks like when firms try to do less with more... the alternative to efficiency.

JackMorgan 3y ago

I have one opinion why this happens. Imagine you're in charge of Google Search in like 2005. You've got a killer product that could probably be run realistically by 50 extremely good engineers working efficiently. Take out server costs, what's your profit margin, like 99%? Well if you're the board, and you've got a 99% profit company, what do you do? On the one hand you can get rich and call it a day, but then how long before a competitor builds the same exact product and you lose half? Or lose everything if everyone switches? So you take a huge chunk that money and reinvest it with the hope of cementing your position or finding another product. At this stage there's tons of money flying around. Internal projects are started and stopped constantly. Extreme inefficiencies are tolerated, after all, as the business grows, plenty of people just want to get paid and do as little work as possible.

prepend 3y ago
I think it’s probably basic accounting math. Let’s say you can make $100B with 50 engineers at 99% profit margin. You pay your employees $1B and they are the highest paid in the world and all ecstatically happy and the stockholders make $99B and they are pretty happy too. The board decides they’d rather make $300B at 50% margins because that’s $150B to investors. So it’s lower margin, but they’ve already invested and they just want more money. Of course, I know many programmers that have insanely high profit margins with 1-4 employees and will never go public and no one except for an IRS computer will know they exist. I think corporations are usually pretty efficient. It’s just not always clear what they are efficient toward.
- tcgv 3y ago
  > I think corporations are usually pretty efficient. It’s just not always clear what they are efficient toward. This. People often examine things on a small scale and lack the context to understand why certain aspects appear counterintuitive. Once we gain a broader perspective, things begin to make more sense.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Yup; any department with money in their budget left over at the end of the budget period will see their budget reduced, even if they need it. And (I'm theorizing here, I know little of management layers) I'm confident that a manager's wage is a percentage of a department's budget. Therefore, it's in their interest to use up and ask for more budget constantly.

iandanforth 3y ago

So you know the latency numbers that every programmer should know? (I hope you do: https://colin-scott.github.io/personal_website/research/interactive_latency.html https://colin-scott.github.io/personal_website/research/inte...) Is there an equivalent for software org spend? Obviously it couldn't be as principled as the above but if you look at engineering at StackOverflow and their compute / requests ratio it's orders of magnitude better than companies I've worked at. I just want numbers in spend on compute and headcount related to operational requirements. Has someone compiled a set of simple heuristics that says "If you are serving thousands of requests per hour to hundreds of enterprise clients your AWS bills shouldn't be more than thousands per month?" Something which can be used to say very clearly "we are incompetent" to upper management?

lootsauce 3y ago

You think the waste is high in tech saving a few mill here and there with db settings an ec2 optimizations? Imagine all the low sophistication marketing managers and CDOs, CMOS literally with 10 to 100+ million budgets much of which is completely wasted. Ten years in this space I have 2nd hand knowledge of specific cases that make your face melt.

layer8 3y ago

> The places doing things right tend to be characterized by being small, not being obsessed with growth, and having calm, compassionate founders who still keep a hand on the wheel. This right here. Go look for those places.

johhns4 3y ago
I don't know. Just because a company doesn't move fast doesn't mean that they are a good company to work for. Calm and compassionate can just mean out of touch and dispassionate in investing in the future. Having energy and passion to move forward as well as the ability to place your bets somewhere is important too. When nothing ever happens because everything is too much of a risk, work can get a bit tedious. But I suppose in todays climate people will look towards these companies as the holy grail just to get some stability.
- layer8 3y ago
  You’re manufacturing a false dichotomy here. There’s no contradiction between founders being compassionate and calm (in the sense of level-headed) and also being passionate and innovative. In those small companies where I worked, the work was anything but tedious, and there was no lack of risk. But exponential growth wasn’t the goal, making good products in a sustainable fashion was the goal.
  - johhns4 3y ago
    I will back up here a bit as my first claim came off as a bit confrontational. However, I find it a bit unrealistic to expect an environment where you have founders that are very compassionate and calm. The very nature of building a business is a maddening task. Which is something we seem to forget. Most level-headed people would never do it. The very idea of starting something that has a very minimal chance of success isn’t rational. Therefore I do find the traits you describe at somewhat of a contradiction. Many of the most known innovators and leaders are often described as intense, driven, and even obsessive. Their willingness to defy convention, take significant risks and challenge the status-quo can be seen as crazy. I suppose I’ve seen the other side of this coin, in small companies where everything is ”too much of a risk” if it cannot generate a good cash flow within a few months. This is a very level-headed approach. I’ve also seen them miss some great opportunities because of it. Nevertheless, they are still operating and probably will be for a long time. However, I'm uncertain that they have enough energy and will power to "change" the world. Now, I'm not saying that a small company with calm level-headed leaders are a bad thing. But I don’t believe that there aren’t trade-offs. Both have their pros and cons.

api 3y ago

Three words: zero interest rates. Since around 2008-2009, our customers have not been customers. Our customers have been investors. Money has been so cheap that the primary goal of most organizations has been to court investment, not to actually create value. It was easier to raise money than to build product or sell anything. To do this the goal is to make the company look like a potential "unicorn." That means burying whatever is wrong, over-hiring and over-engineering to make the company look serious and big, complexifying everything to give all those over-hired engineers something to do, and trying to gain as many users as possible as fast as possible even if it's completely unsustainable. In that world efficiency literally does not matter. In fact, it can be a liability since it means you're not spending investor cash fast enough and you don't have enough complexity to make your over-hired engineering teams feel like they are being productive. If you're not spending that cash you don't need to raise more. It's the startup fund raising version of the well known "you have to spend your entire budget by the end of the fiscal year or you will get less next year."

Spooky23 3y ago

The callous regard for human life jumped at me. My uncle worked for a big Wall St firm in the 80s and 90s. A CE from a big company was doing some early morning maintenance and long story short, had a heart attack and died in the data center. The ops people called 911, fire/ambulance came — and were turned away at the door by security because they took too long and they needed to avoid impact to trading. Basically they put some sort of tarp on the guy and wheeled him in and out of the way throughout the day. My uncle was some sort of big shot, heard about it, came in and reamed out the security director guy. Pretty sure the family never knew.

teeray 3y ago
> The ops people called 911, fire/ambulance came — and were turned away at the door by security It’s astounding that impeding an emergency response wasn’t an immediately arrestable offense. If there’s a mortal threat and “security” is in the way, police should have every right to subdue the rent-a-cops.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  My guess is the rent a cops were moonlighting or retired cops, and as “good guys”, someone shrugged.

mikewarot 3y ago

I know the answer.... Free Money[1], when the Fed lowered the prime interest rate to zero, the free money distorted the market and allowed all this insanity to happen. Now that the free money is drying up, all this shit has to evaporate. Just like the great simplification[2] that has to take place on the downside of the great carbon pulse that's feeding civilization right now. What a depressing thought in the short/medium term, in the long run, it'll be good for Humanity, my grandkids, should they every be born [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy [2] https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/about https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/about

kunley 3y ago

Here is a story not about wasting cloud resources, but about wasting careers: A decade-long project at the ThreeLetterYouknowwho was turning into a separate business, so people were being convinced to abandon their dozen-years old employments at the mentioned ThreeLetterGiant (evil or not, but at least with perspectives and an established routine how to live in this corp), so they did the move, only to be fired 5 months later, as the newly born company was reduced to a half, to fit into parameters required by some stock market related operation. The crux is that the management knew about all the planned moves when negotiating people's leave from HAL (oops, I mean, ThreeLetterGiant). Yet they needed the massive flux of initial employees to fullfill some other business parameters. Everything was done with a cold blood. I wasn't reduced this way (I wasn't even at HAL originally, was part of the completely fresh hires) but I left these assholes a month after the layoffs. Even the mob is treating their own people better.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> Even the mob is treating their own people better. They actually treat them quite well. I know a number of ex-wiseguys. When you manage folks that, by definition, don't like rules and structure, and can probably clip you in a moment, you learn to manage well. Bad managers don't last (literally).

readthenotes1 3y ago

Could we make the title more click bait and less substantive?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Spiwux 3y ago

Sometimes I have this urge to try getting into a manager role. I really want to see and experience for myself if most managers I work with are just bad at their job, or if being a "good" manager is simply impossible and you're doomed to fail regardless of skill.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago

You might find pure $1M saving opportunities. But quite often the saviour of $1m is not aware that this can cause a $10m loss somewhere else, for example, a legal liability. Or maybe in order to find one $1m saving opportunity, established processes should be disrupted at a cost of $10m.

deely3 3y ago
Or maybe not. How do we know?
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  Exactly.

nologic01 3y ago

Large corporate conglomerates are essentially how power is shared and delegated in any modern oligarchic society with large economic footprint. Details around public sector role vs market structure and function vary, but overall its the same story: A bunch of ruthless actors, with various degrees of starting point privilege, climb the greasy poles, typically in colluding cohorts of 'old boy networks'. Revolving doors between private and public roles are the norm. In this organizational design producing anything of value is a secondary concern and incidental to the job description. Control and maintenance of power structure is the prime objective. Large firms are lawyer and lobbyist undertakings with a tiny production engine attached. Rather gloomy but not really new. There is nevertheless something very intriguing about the tech industry. It may be at the forefront of disrupting this rather wasteful house of political cards. This very discussion on HN is point in case. Go and check Linkedin to see what corporate vacuity typically sound like :-) The success of the open source movement with its incredible efficiency and leverage is another interesting hint that something interesting is brewing. Why would tech be any different? Well its not "tech", its information tech. And power structures require and are shaped by the control of information. So for as long as tech is not completely locked down the next phase of human political-economic organization is in-principle up for grabs.

e12e 3y ago

> If you recognize yourself in these emails but didn't give me permission to write an email, then it isn't actually you, it turns out these stories are so similar that they really do sound the same. Gold.

lamontcg 3y ago

Tech is like a country that just discovered massive amounts of natural resources like oil or gas. The result is a whole lot of corruption and inefficiencies. And this is normally the process that plays out whenever a company gets a whole lot of money (through a windfall like a massive lawsuit or just via going IPO), you wind up with mangers empire-building rather than having any motive to focus on the bottom line. Every time I look at a tech companies financials these days, they're fucking awful with zero return on capital and often times negative operational margins. Wall street seems to assume that these are all fake-it-till-you-make-it stories and that management will find the next pot of gold and those companies will all turn it around. I tend to see the minor corruptions of managers spending as much of the companies money as they can to build their own empire.

Balgair 3y ago

> It is fucking awful out there. Maybe we should set up a support group. I've heard in the news that the UAW just got a great deal.

coffeesque 3y ago

> The first type, my favourite commenters, whose grim-faced no-nonsense corporate visages grace standups across the world. I'd have to put myself in this camp, how dare this guy prioritize making things not shit. Hasn't he gotten the message yet? I don't think the author is as smart as he thinks, he should definitely seek counseling