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There is a prominent subset of the tech crowd who are ladder climbers - ruthlessly pursuing what is rewarded with pay/title/prestige without regard to actually

There is a prominent subset of the tech crowd who are ladder climbers - ruthlessly pursuing what is rewarded with pay/title/prestige without regard to actually making good stuff. There are countless kidding-on-the-square jokes about projects where the innovators left at launch and passed it off to the maintenance team, or where a rebrand was in pursuit of someone's promo project. See also, killedbygoogle.com.

teaearlgraycold 2y ago
These people should be fired. I want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second. And the pay should be good. The lifestyle comfortable. No grindset bullshit. But I am confident that if you only employ passionate people working their dream jobs you will excel.
- escapecharacter 2y ago
  Unfortunately whether someone is checked out is a laggy measure. Even good honest motivated people can become checked out without even being aware of it. The alternative is to lay off people as soon as they hit 1.0 (with a severance bonus on the scale of an acquisition). This would obviously be worse, as you can’t take advantage of their institutional knowledge.
  - saturn8601 2y ago
    This motivated part of Musk's moves at Twitter(and now DOGE). You can't reliably evaluate which people are checked out and when you are against the clock, you have to take a hatchet and accept that you will break things that are in motion.
    - chronid 2y ago
      You can somewhat reliably evaluate what works and what does not, what brings you forward and what is slack you can cut. It takes time (6-12 months at least) of very engaged work of a very engaged team - which you can bring with you. You can go the hatchet way - I am strongly unconvinced it is indicative of anything resembling good management, mind - but most people and companies cannot rely on banks or investment firms loaning them 40 billion dollars and accepting passively a mark down of their mone~ to 1/4 of the value they loaned down the line. CEOs are ousted by investment firms for a far smaller drop in value all the time.
      - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
        The banks have mostly sold the loans at par now, fyi. I agree with everything you said, though.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      And seeing how many people they let go and then had to hire back in the government and seeing that Twitter is worth 80% less than we he bought it, that might not be the best strategy.
    - shigawire 2y ago
      The externalities of breaking stuff haphazardly can very well outweigh any efficiency gains.
    - escapecharacter 2y ago
      Ignoring the quagmire of praising/critiquing Musk/Twitter for a second… If you’re an exec who’s taken it upon themselves to evaluate, could use the hatchet, or you take some amount of time to figure out how things work. Whether this is okay depends on who is suffering the externalities. If it’s a private corporation, legally it’s the execs + employment law. If it’s a public service that measures toxin levels in water, uhhhhh.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  Why would those people be “fired” when the entire promotion process and promo docs emphasize “scope” and “impact”? No one works for any BigTech company because they think they are making the world a better place. They do it because a shit ton of money appears in their bank account every pay period and stock appears in their brokerage account every vesting period. I personally don’t have the shit tolerance to work in BigTech (again) at 50. But I suggest to all of my younger relatives who graduate in CS to “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG” and tell them how to play the politics to get ahead. As the Dilbert author said, “Passion is Bullshit”. I have never been able to trade passion for goods and services.
  - bsimpson 2y ago
    > No one works for any BigTech company because they think they are making the world a better place. I'm sure there are plenty of people who work at big companies for precisely this reason (or at least, with that as _a_ reason among many). Yes, much of the prestige has worn off as the old guard retired and current leadership emphasizes chasing AI buzzwords and cutting costs. But still, big companies are one of the few places where an individual really can point out something they worked on in day-to-day life. (Pull out any Android phone and I can show you the parts that my work touched.)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - int_19h 2y ago
      Can confirm that this is definitely the case. Working at BigTech company to "make the world a better place" can actually feel like it makes some sort of sense because - especially if you're on a team that ships a highly visible product - you have a lot of customers, so even small improvements have an outsized effect. And it takes a while for a young dev to register that the goals that the larger organization pursues are going to win out in the end anyway.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second. And the pay should be good. The lifestyle comfortable. No grindset bullshit Congratulations, you’ve invented the HR department in corporate America.
  - reverius42 2y ago
    > make good products first and get paid second. And the pay should be good. The better the pay, the more you will attract the people who are there for the pay first and making good products ... second or third or never. How do you combat that?
    - stavros 2y ago
      You interview them first.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        You act as if every experienced interviewer doesn’t know how to play the game and act like they are “passionate”.
- saturn8601 2y ago
  You are trying to combine two repelling magnets together. Case in point: Tesla/SpaceX meets your first criteria: "I want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second." Google meets your second criteria: "And the pay should be good. The lifestyle comfortable. No grindset bullshit." Other than small time boutique software firms like Fog Creek Software or Panic Inc(and thats a BIG maybe) you are not going to get this part of your message: "But I am confident that if you only employ passionate people working their dream jobs you will excel." There are tradeoffs in life and each employee has to choose what is important to them(and each company CEO has to set standards on what is truly valued at the company).
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    > Case in point: Tesla/SpaceX meets your first criteria: "I want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second Tesla has never been a good product. https://insideevs.com/news/731559/tesla-least-reliable-used-car-brands/ https://insideevs.com/news/731559/tesla-least-reliable-used-... https://www.carscoops.com/2024/11/tesla-model-3-comes-bottom-in-german-tuv-reliability-test-again/ https://www.carscoops.com/2024/11/tesla-model-3-comes-bottom... https://www.topspeed.com/tesla-reliability-and-repair-costs-the-true-story/ https://www.topspeed.com/tesla-reliability-and-repair-costs-... Not to mention the infotainment system is much worse than CarPlay/Android Auto compatible cars
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      Teslas are consistently rated high in customer satisfaction, but after several years of low ratings from top authorities in the industry, their reliability is undoubtedly in question. This is too funny to post alongside saying “Tesla has never been a good product.” Like “everyone that bought it loves it be car expert Joe from South Dakota ranks them very low.” Common sense also runs very much against this nonsense narrative - you just simply do not sell that many cars, at those prices especially, year after year after year, if the product is subpar. Don’t fall for this “experts” bullshit. The CEO is the biggest tool this Earth has ever seen but cars are awesome
supriyo-biswas 2y ago
At my former employer, there was a team who were very much into resume-driven development and wrote projects in Go even when Java would have been the better alternative considering the overall department and maintenance team expertise, all the while they were informally grumbling about how Go doesn’t have the features they need…
- darkhorse222 2y ago
  I see that a lot from the Go crowd. That's why I consider any strong opinions on languages to be a poor indicator for ability. Sure there's differences, but a language does not make the engineer. Someone who is attracted to flashy stuff makes for an indulgent planner.
  - scubbo 2y ago
    > That's why I consider any strong opinions on languages to be a poor indicator for ability. Hmm. Can't say I agree here - at least not with the literal text of what you've written (although maybe we agree in spirit). I agree that _simplistic_ strong opinions about languages are a sign of poor thoughtfulness ("<thing> is good and <other thing> is bad") - but I'd very much expect a Staff+ engineer to have enough experience to have strong opinions about the _relative_ strengths of various languages, where they're appropriate to use and where a different language would be better. Bonus points if they can tell me the worst aspects about their favourite one. Maybe we're using "opinion" differently, and you'd call what I described there "facts" rather than opinions. In which case - yeah, fair!
    - mikepurvis 2y ago
      Absolutely. Anyone senior should be able to fairly quickly get a handle on the requirements for a particular project and put forward a well-reasoned opinion on an appropriate tech stack for it. There might be some blank space in there for "I've heard of X and Y that actually might fit this use case slightly better, so it's probably worth a brief investigation of those options, but I've used Z before so I know about the corner cases we may run into, and that has value too."
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tossracct 2y ago
[dead]
Lerc 2y ago
I had not encountered the phrase kidding-on-the-square before. Searching seems to reveal a spectrum of opinions as to what it means. It seems distinct to the 'It's funny because it's true' of darker humour. It seems to be more on a spectrum of 'Haha, only joking' where the joke teller makes a statement that is ambiguously humorous to measure the values of the recipients, or if they are not sure of the values of the recipients. I think the distinction might be on whether the joke teller is revealing (perhaps unintentionally) a personal opinion or whether they are making an observation on the world in general, which might even imply that they hold a counter-opinion. Where do you see 'kidding on the square' falling? (apologies for thread derailment)
- MWil 2y ago
  good god, lemon
  - readyplayernull 2y ago
    Anyway, why does Microsoft bottleneck itself when it could have 10 different AI teams. That's why 10 new AI startups can achieve what these behemoths can't.
    - alternatex 2y ago
      Microsoft already suffers from lack of software consolidation. It costs a lot of money to maintain 10 different tech stacks. Not to mention having separate security/privacy review processes for each.
      - readyplayernull 2y ago
        We are talking multitrillion company here, money shouldn't be an issue. Though you prove my point, they lack coordination. Also AI lacks coordination and strategy and won't solve BigTech management problems any time soon. Best they can try is providing tools trying to capture what others, that are actually inventive, can do. That's why they will stay at Azure level.
- 2y ago
devsda 2y ago
> There is a prominent subset of the tech crowd who are ladder climbers - ruthlessly pursuing what is rewarded with pay/title/prestige without regard to actually making good stuff. I think the hiring and reward practices of the organizations & the industry as a whole also encourages this sort of behavior. When you reward people who are switching too often or only when moving internally/externally, switching becomes the primary goal and not the product. If you know beforehand that you are not going to stay long to see it through, you tend to take more shortcuts and risks that becomes the responsibility of maintainers later. We have a couple of job hoppers in our org where the number of jobs they held is almost equal to their years of experience and their role is similar to those with twice the experience! One can easily guess what their best skill is.
- CSMastermind 2y ago
  Okay but what's a better system?
  - only-one1701 2y ago
    Ideally it's the responsibility of management, starting at the top, to think critically about what kind of software most benefits the company and reward those that do it. Unfortunately, it's much harder to sell "amazing documentation and test coverage" to a CEO than "Gen AI wrapper that doesn't really do much", so here we are.
    - randmeerkat 2y ago
      > Ideally it's the responsibility of management, starting at the top, to think critically about what kind of software most benefits the company and reward those that do it. Unfortunately, it's much harder to sell "amazing documentation and test coverage" to a CEO than "Gen AI wrapper that doesn't really do much", so here we are. What do you think these technical ladder climbers become..? Technical leadership. The truth is, there’s no one technical in big tech leadership. They pay lip service to “tech” to keep up appearances and to satisfy the pleebs that work under them. The only things leadership cares about is the stock price and profitability, literally nothing else matters. If anything the tech itself is a nuisance that pulls their attention from where they’d rather have it, which is anywhere else.
deadbabe 2y ago
This is wrong. Google kills off projects because the legal liability and security risks of those projects becomes too large to justify for something that has niche uses or gives them no revenue. User data is practically toxic waste.
- kindeyoowee 2y ago
  [dead]
grepLeigh 2y ago
As an outsider looking at Microsoft, I've always been impressed by the attention to maintaining legacy APIs and backward compatibility in the Windows ecosystem. In my mind, Microsoft is at the opposite end of the killedbygoogle.com spectrum. However, none of this is grounded in real evidence (just perception). Red Hat is another company I'd put forth as an example of a long-term support culture, although I don't know if that's still true under IBM. I'd love to know if my superficial impression of Microsoft's culture is wrong. I'm sure there's wild variance between organizational units, of course. I'm excluding the Xbox/games orgs from my mental picture.
- ahartmetz 2y ago
  Joel Spolsky wrote about this. Windows division (WinDiv) is as you say, development tools division (DevDiv) is framework of the week. How many APIs have not-actually-replaced Win32 so far? They do keep the old ones working though, I guess.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  It is but it's mainly to not bite the hand that feeds. Microsoft doesn't want to keep this stuff around, their enterprise customers do.
- __turbobrew__ 2y ago
  Red Hat killed CentOS and violated their support commitments so I wouldn’t trust them anymore.
  - grepLeigh 2y ago
    That was after the IBM acquisition.
- iamdelirium 2y ago
  I don't understand where this idea that Microsoft doesn't kill projects. Zune, Games for Windows Live, Skype, Encarta, CodePlex, Windows Phone, Internet Explorer. https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
radicaldreamer 2y ago
It's a chronic problem at some companies and not so much at others, it's all about how internal incentives are set up.
cavisne 2y ago
Thats nothing during peak ZIRP people would move tech companies before the launch (or after a project was cancelled) and still ladder climb. "Failing upwards"
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  Or as Moral Mazes calls it, outrunning your mistakes.
weinzierl 2y ago
True and it often ends underwhelmingly. On the other hand "innovators left at launch and passed it off to the maintenance team" alone must not be a bad thing. Innovator types are rarely maintainer types and vice versa. In the open-source world look at Fabrice Bellard for example. Do you think he would have been able to create so many innovative projects if he had to maintain them too?
sharemywin 2y ago
crypto has that problem. payoff before the result.
pklausler 2y ago
People respond to the incentives presented to them. If you want different behavior, change the incentives.

teaearlgraycold 2y ago

These people should be fired. I want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second. And the pay should be good. The lifestyle comfortable. No grindset bullshit. But I am confident that if you only employ passionate people working their dream jobs you will excel.

escapecharacter 2y ago
Unfortunately whether someone is checked out is a laggy measure. Even good honest motivated people can become checked out without even being aware of it. The alternative is to lay off people as soon as they hit 1.0 (with a severance bonus on the scale of an acquisition). This would obviously be worse, as you can’t take advantage of their institutional knowledge.
- saturn8601 2y ago
  This motivated part of Musk's moves at Twitter(and now DOGE). You can't reliably evaluate which people are checked out and when you are against the clock, you have to take a hatchet and accept that you will break things that are in motion.
  - chronid 2y ago
    You can somewhat reliably evaluate what works and what does not, what brings you forward and what is slack you can cut. It takes time (6-12 months at least) of very engaged work of a very engaged team - which you can bring with you. You can go the hatchet way - I am strongly unconvinced it is indicative of anything resembling good management, mind - but most people and companies cannot rely on banks or investment firms loaning them 40 billion dollars and accepting passively a mark down of their mone~ to 1/4 of the value they loaned down the line. CEOs are ousted by investment firms for a far smaller drop in value all the time.
    - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      The banks have mostly sold the loans at par now, fyi. I agree with everything you said, though.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    And seeing how many people they let go and then had to hire back in the government and seeing that Twitter is worth 80% less than we he bought it, that might not be the best strategy.
  - shigawire 2y ago
    The externalities of breaking stuff haphazardly can very well outweigh any efficiency gains.
  - escapecharacter 2y ago
    Ignoring the quagmire of praising/critiquing Musk/Twitter for a second… If you’re an exec who’s taken it upon themselves to evaluate, could use the hatchet, or you take some amount of time to figure out how things work. Whether this is okay depends on who is suffering the externalities. If it’s a private corporation, legally it’s the execs + employment law. If it’s a public service that measures toxin levels in water, uhhhhh.
scarface_74 2y ago
Why would those people be “fired” when the entire promotion process and promo docs emphasize “scope” and “impact”? No one works for any BigTech company because they think they are making the world a better place. They do it because a shit ton of money appears in their bank account every pay period and stock appears in their brokerage account every vesting period. I personally don’t have the shit tolerance to work in BigTech (again) at 50. But I suggest to all of my younger relatives who graduate in CS to “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG” and tell them how to play the politics to get ahead. As the Dilbert author said, “Passion is Bullshit”. I have never been able to trade passion for goods and services.
- bsimpson 2y ago
  > No one works for any BigTech company because they think they are making the world a better place. I'm sure there are plenty of people who work at big companies for precisely this reason (or at least, with that as _a_ reason among many). Yes, much of the prestige has worn off as the old guard retired and current leadership emphasizes chasing AI buzzwords and cutting costs. But still, big companies are one of the few places where an individual really can point out something they worked on in day-to-day life. (Pull out any Android phone and I can show you the parts that my work touched.)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Can confirm that this is definitely the case. Working at BigTech company to "make the world a better place" can actually feel like it makes some sort of sense because - especially if you're on a team that ships a highly visible product - you have a lot of customers, so even small improvements have an outsized effect. And it takes a while for a young dev to register that the goals that the larger organization pursues are going to win out in the end anyway.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second. And the pay should be good. The lifestyle comfortable. No grindset bullshit Congratulations, you’ve invented the HR department in corporate America.
- reverius42 2y ago
  > make good products first and get paid second. And the pay should be good. The better the pay, the more you will attract the people who are there for the pay first and making good products ... second or third or never. How do you combat that?
  - stavros 2y ago
    You interview them first.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      You act as if every experienced interviewer doesn’t know how to play the game and act like they are “passionate”.
saturn8601 2y ago
You are trying to combine two repelling magnets together. Case in point: Tesla/SpaceX meets your first criteria: "I want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second." Google meets your second criteria: "And the pay should be good. The lifestyle comfortable. No grindset bullshit." Other than small time boutique software firms like Fog Creek Software or Panic Inc(and thats a BIG maybe) you are not going to get this part of your message: "But I am confident that if you only employ passionate people working their dream jobs you will excel." There are tradeoffs in life and each employee has to choose what is important to them(and each company CEO has to set standards on what is truly valued at the company).
- scarface_74 2y ago
  > Case in point: Tesla/SpaceX meets your first criteria: "I want a tech company where people are there to make good products first and get paid second Tesla has never been a good product. https://insideevs.com/news/731559/tesla-least-reliable-used-car-brands/ https://insideevs.com/news/731559/tesla-least-reliable-used-... https://www.carscoops.com/2024/11/tesla-model-3-comes-bottom-in-german-tuv-reliability-test-again/ https://www.carscoops.com/2024/11/tesla-model-3-comes-bottom... https://www.topspeed.com/tesla-reliability-and-repair-costs-the-true-story/ https://www.topspeed.com/tesla-reliability-and-repair-costs-... Not to mention the infotainment system is much worse than CarPlay/Android Auto compatible cars
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    Teslas are consistently rated high in customer satisfaction, but after several years of low ratings from top authorities in the industry, their reliability is undoubtedly in question. This is too funny to post alongside saying “Tesla has never been a good product.” Like “everyone that bought it loves it be car expert Joe from South Dakota ranks them very low.” Common sense also runs very much against this nonsense narrative - you just simply do not sell that many cars, at those prices especially, year after year after year, if the product is subpar. Don’t fall for this “experts” bullshit. The CEO is the biggest tool this Earth has ever seen but cars are awesome

supriyo-biswas 2y ago

At my former employer, there was a team who were very much into resume-driven development and wrote projects in Go even when Java would have been the better alternative considering the overall department and maintenance team expertise, all the while they were informally grumbling about how Go doesn’t have the features they need…

darkhorse222 2y ago
I see that a lot from the Go crowd. That's why I consider any strong opinions on languages to be a poor indicator for ability. Sure there's differences, but a language does not make the engineer. Someone who is attracted to flashy stuff makes for an indulgent planner.
- scubbo 2y ago
  > That's why I consider any strong opinions on languages to be a poor indicator for ability. Hmm. Can't say I agree here - at least not with the literal text of what you've written (although maybe we agree in spirit). I agree that _simplistic_ strong opinions about languages are a sign of poor thoughtfulness ("<thing> is good and <other thing> is bad") - but I'd very much expect a Staff+ engineer to have enough experience to have strong opinions about the _relative_ strengths of various languages, where they're appropriate to use and where a different language would be better. Bonus points if they can tell me the worst aspects about their favourite one. Maybe we're using "opinion" differently, and you'd call what I described there "facts" rather than opinions. In which case - yeah, fair!
  - mikepurvis 2y ago
    Absolutely. Anyone senior should be able to fairly quickly get a handle on the requirements for a particular project and put forward a well-reasoned opinion on an appropriate tech stack for it. There might be some blank space in there for "I've heard of X and Y that actually might fit this use case slightly better, so it's probably worth a brief investigation of those options, but I've used Z before so I know about the corner cases we may run into, and that has value too."

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tossracct 2y ago

[dead]

Lerc 2y ago

I had not encountered the phrase kidding-on-the-square before. Searching seems to reveal a spectrum of opinions as to what it means. It seems distinct to the 'It's funny because it's true' of darker humour. It seems to be more on a spectrum of 'Haha, only joking' where the joke teller makes a statement that is ambiguously humorous to measure the values of the recipients, or if they are not sure of the values of the recipients. I think the distinction might be on whether the joke teller is revealing (perhaps unintentionally) a personal opinion or whether they are making an observation on the world in general, which might even imply that they hold a counter-opinion. Where do you see 'kidding on the square' falling? (apologies for thread derailment)

MWil 2y ago
good god, lemon
- readyplayernull 2y ago
  Anyway, why does Microsoft bottleneck itself when it could have 10 different AI teams. That's why 10 new AI startups can achieve what these behemoths can't.
  - alternatex 2y ago
    Microsoft already suffers from lack of software consolidation. It costs a lot of money to maintain 10 different tech stacks. Not to mention having separate security/privacy review processes for each.
    - readyplayernull 2y ago
      We are talking multitrillion company here, money shouldn't be an issue. Though you prove my point, they lack coordination. Also AI lacks coordination and strategy and won't solve BigTech management problems any time soon. Best they can try is providing tools trying to capture what others, that are actually inventive, can do. That's why they will stay at Azure level.
2y ago

devsda 2y ago

> There is a prominent subset of the tech crowd who are ladder climbers - ruthlessly pursuing what is rewarded with pay/title/prestige without regard to actually making good stuff. I think the hiring and reward practices of the organizations & the industry as a whole also encourages this sort of behavior. When you reward people who are switching too often or only when moving internally/externally, switching becomes the primary goal and not the product. If you know beforehand that you are not going to stay long to see it through, you tend to take more shortcuts and risks that becomes the responsibility of maintainers later. We have a couple of job hoppers in our org where the number of jobs they held is almost equal to their years of experience and their role is similar to those with twice the experience! One can easily guess what their best skill is.

CSMastermind 2y ago
Okay but what's a better system?
- only-one1701 2y ago
  Ideally it's the responsibility of management, starting at the top, to think critically about what kind of software most benefits the company and reward those that do it. Unfortunately, it's much harder to sell "amazing documentation and test coverage" to a CEO than "Gen AI wrapper that doesn't really do much", so here we are.
  - randmeerkat 2y ago
    > Ideally it's the responsibility of management, starting at the top, to think critically about what kind of software most benefits the company and reward those that do it. Unfortunately, it's much harder to sell "amazing documentation and test coverage" to a CEO than "Gen AI wrapper that doesn't really do much", so here we are. What do you think these technical ladder climbers become..? Technical leadership. The truth is, there’s no one technical in big tech leadership. They pay lip service to “tech” to keep up appearances and to satisfy the pleebs that work under them. The only things leadership cares about is the stock price and profitability, literally nothing else matters. If anything the tech itself is a nuisance that pulls their attention from where they’d rather have it, which is anywhere else.

deadbabe 2y ago

This is wrong. Google kills off projects because the legal liability and security risks of those projects becomes too large to justify for something that has niche uses or gives them no revenue. User data is practically toxic waste.

kindeyoowee 2y ago
[dead]

grepLeigh 2y ago

As an outsider looking at Microsoft, I've always been impressed by the attention to maintaining legacy APIs and backward compatibility in the Windows ecosystem. In my mind, Microsoft is at the opposite end of the killedbygoogle.com spectrum. However, none of this is grounded in real evidence (just perception). Red Hat is another company I'd put forth as an example of a long-term support culture, although I don't know if that's still true under IBM. I'd love to know if my superficial impression of Microsoft's culture is wrong. I'm sure there's wild variance between organizational units, of course. I'm excluding the Xbox/games orgs from my mental picture.

ahartmetz 2y ago
Joel Spolsky wrote about this. Windows division (WinDiv) is as you say, development tools division (DevDiv) is framework of the week. How many APIs have not-actually-replaced Win32 so far? They do keep the old ones working though, I guess.
wkat4242 2y ago
It is but it's mainly to not bite the hand that feeds. Microsoft doesn't want to keep this stuff around, their enterprise customers do.
__turbobrew__ 2y ago
Red Hat killed CentOS and violated their support commitments so I wouldn’t trust them anymore.
- grepLeigh 2y ago
  That was after the IBM acquisition.
iamdelirium 2y ago
I don't understand where this idea that Microsoft doesn't kill projects. Zune, Games for Windows Live, Skype, Encarta, CodePlex, Windows Phone, Internet Explorer. https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ https://killedbymicrosoft.info/

radicaldreamer 2y ago

It's a chronic problem at some companies and not so much at others, it's all about how internal incentives are set up.

cavisne 2y ago

Thats nothing during peak ZIRP people would move tech companies before the launch (or after a project was cancelled) and still ladder climb. "Failing upwards"

disgruntledphd2 2y ago
Or as Moral Mazes calls it, outrunning your mistakes.

weinzierl 2y ago

True and it often ends underwhelmingly. On the other hand "innovators left at launch and passed it off to the maintenance team" alone must not be a bad thing. Innovator types are rarely maintainer types and vice versa. In the open-source world look at Fabrice Bellard for example. Do you think he would have been able to create so many innovative projects if he had to maintain them too?

sharemywin 2y ago

crypto has that problem. payoff before the result.

pklausler 2y ago

People respond to the incentives presented to them. If you want different behavior, change the incentives.