6 ms·

software development costs are out of control the whole industry is one big grift, there’s no accountability anywhere, 20% of the devs are doing 80% of the work

software development costs are out of control the whole industry is one big grift, there’s no accountability anywhere, 20% of the devs are doing 80% of the work, the business would instantly terminate the 80% for cause if they could only discern the difference, but they can’t, because the business side is also a big grift with the exact same problem all the way up to the founders recursively

only-one1701 2y ago
Good lord I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it put so succinctly. Well done.
HappyJoy 2y ago
And, of course, you can site a reference for those statistics. That aside, I don't agree with your overall sentiment.
VWWHFSfQ 2y ago
So much of the software industry is just an outrageous combination of inexperience and "YOLO". Every problem can be solved by just giving AWS another $100,000 this month because we don't have time (and don't know how) to make even basically optimized software. So just burn the gas and electricity and give more money to the YAML merchants at Amazon.
- georgemcbay 2y ago
  I still have PTSD from around 2012 when a company I worked for and loved very much (chumby) imploded financially and almost all of the employees including myself got vacuumed up in an acquihire-type deal into a streaming media company that was building a would-be netflix competitor. Us former chumby developers were working primarily on the front-end across a variety of embedded-system-like devices (writing code for early versions of 'Smart' TVs from the likes of Vizio, etc) while another team was creating the backend and whenever they would show us the infrastructure diagrams of what they were working on they would just place a "HADOOP Server" wherever they had no idea how they were going to solve some large difficult problem, it was effectively a stand-in for "magic happens here". Got to the point where there were a hilarious number of layers upon layers of little cylinder icons in the system design titled "HADOOP Server" all interlinked in non-decipherable directed graphs. I'm pretty sure every single one of us left the new company within 6 months, I lasted about a month and a half.
  - FreebasingLLMs 2y ago
    [dead]
thrance 2y ago
I'll start to call this mindset the "DOGE mind-virus": "80% of workers are doing absolutely nothing and can be cut with no repercussions whatsoever". Sure buddy.
- billy99k 2y ago
  Well, it worked for Twitter. Lots of people screamed that Twitter would implode withing 6 months, after the massive cuts. There was some scrambling for a while, but I haven't noticed any issues. In fact, they've added tons of new features and Grok AI (which is much better than competitors).
  - dpkirchner 2y ago
    Last I heard Twitter is so desperate they've resorted to suing former customers who stopped buying poorly performing ad space. Edit: removed supposition
    - Nextgrid 2y ago
      This has nothing to do with the tech side of things though? In fact the business was always on shaky grounds even before the acquisition. From a tech perspective, the company was indeed massively bloated with tons of people clearly not contributing anything.
      - slackernews9 2y ago
        There go the goal posts, whooshing by at the speed of sound.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      My understanding is that twitter's struggles are/were a result of advertiser and customer boycotts, not site functionality. People were aghast at the brutality of the layoffs, and ideological direction. However, my impression was that there was in fact a tremendous amount of bloat.
  - 2y ago
dartos 2y ago
Got news for you. It’s not the devs who are bloating development costs. It’s the layers of management making hour long meetings to discuss button placement. It’s the hours of retros, design meetings, and skip-levels designed to remove any personal investment or sense of ownership from everything. Since so few individuals are trusted with real decision making power, you need a lot more people to achieve some kind of consensus/buy-in so that you can ship anything. The devs are at the extreme bottom of this totem poll. It’s like blaming construction workers for houses being expensive. And, ofc, that goes without mentioning the multimillion yearly bonuses for C-suite, but we can just forget about that and blame the lowest ranking corporate employees (devs) Source: I worked at a large tech firm for many years and saw this over and over again.
- ozim 2y ago
  Second that, scrum teams having 3 business analysts, scrum master, product owner, ops/it, ux designer, 2 testers, 4 developers is basically how it goes. Blaming developers in such scenarios is silly.
- ttoinou 2y ago
  I agree with your point but at the same time developers do need to be managed and they don’t want to manage themselves
  - dartos 2y ago
    I’m not saying just leave everyone to their own devices, but some individuals should be able to have ownership and make decisions without layers and layers of process. Ofc decisions can have consequences, but that’s what the high pay should be for. It’s not a black and white issue and I don’t think you need to present it like one.
    - ttoinou 2y ago
      A more risky job should be compensated more ? It'd be the opposite, if it's risky then the variance of the income should be greater (success = more income) I don't want to present the problem as black and white but merely express a simple idea : developers DO want to be managed to simplify their lives and focus their time on more important things for them
markus_zhang 2y ago
The twist is that when you layoff the 80% who supposedly only did the 20% part, you pretty much still have to hire the same amount of people to do that 20%.
- jajko 2y ago
  But with lower rates, and with abysmal rampup period (or even afterwards). Don't blame managers, they just follow money, why else would they work those crappy jobs. Blame idiots who think short term bonuses should be massive instead of some long term performance and investment of oneself in company's success.
  - markus_zhang 2y ago
    Then by the same principle, don't blame the devs, they are just drifting as most people would do.
  - dustingetz 2y ago
    Blame the board, full stop. "Follow the money", there is really no other possible answer. Some set of people are responsible and to determine who that is, you read the corporate ledger, you read the financing contracts, you read the bylaws and governance structures, and what they literally state is that the board of directors are responsible for directing the company. The board is responsible. If you wish to be a director and responsible, then go incorporate, now you are the board! You are responsible! Good luck!
gedy 2y ago
> the business would instantly terminate the 80% for cause if they could only discern the difference There's many many companies and leadership who want their big empires of people. I'm not too sure they want to fire 80% or be more efficient.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dv_dt 2y ago
The big tech companies paying the largest salaries are raking in billions in profits. How does this square with the view that software development costs are out of control? Layoffs today seem more like execs following management fads for easy visible actions and this data would suggest that the actions are actually detrimental to company profits. Juice the numbers for a quarter but add another long term drag to the company
- Nextgrid 2y ago
  Just because a company can be overall profitable doesn't mean costs aren't out of control. If you make enough profits, you can literally feed money into a shredder and still come out ahead if you earn profits faster than your shredder can eat them.
  - slackernews9 2y ago
    So maybe we don't take jobs away from people with families and mortgages then, if all we have to do is sacrifice some profits, yeah? Gee, maybe the company can only make $9 billion instead of $9.5 billion, and everyone can stay employed.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - dv_dt 2y ago
    What you're describing isn't out of control, all businesses have income and expenses, good management is watching both sides and building the organization that connects the two in the middle. Sudden drastic moves if the business is delivering profits seems like the out-of-control action to take. If the business salary structure is off, or if you need to a different skill mix there are ways to shift that in a profitable business without sudden layoffs damaging the very organization that delivers your current profits.

only-one1701 2y ago

Good lord I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it put so succinctly. Well done.

HappyJoy 2y ago

And, of course, you can site a reference for those statistics. That aside, I don't agree with your overall sentiment.

VWWHFSfQ 2y ago

So much of the software industry is just an outrageous combination of inexperience and "YOLO". Every problem can be solved by just giving AWS another $100,000 this month because we don't have time (and don't know how) to make even basically optimized software. So just burn the gas and electricity and give more money to the YAML merchants at Amazon.

georgemcbay 2y ago
I still have PTSD from around 2012 when a company I worked for and loved very much (chumby) imploded financially and almost all of the employees including myself got vacuumed up in an acquihire-type deal into a streaming media company that was building a would-be netflix competitor. Us former chumby developers were working primarily on the front-end across a variety of embedded-system-like devices (writing code for early versions of 'Smart' TVs from the likes of Vizio, etc) while another team was creating the backend and whenever they would show us the infrastructure diagrams of what they were working on they would just place a "HADOOP Server" wherever they had no idea how they were going to solve some large difficult problem, it was effectively a stand-in for "magic happens here". Got to the point where there were a hilarious number of layers upon layers of little cylinder icons in the system design titled "HADOOP Server" all interlinked in non-decipherable directed graphs. I'm pretty sure every single one of us left the new company within 6 months, I lasted about a month and a half.
- FreebasingLLMs 2y ago
  [dead]

thrance 2y ago

I'll start to call this mindset the "DOGE mind-virus": "80% of workers are doing absolutely nothing and can be cut with no repercussions whatsoever". Sure buddy.

billy99k 2y ago
Well, it worked for Twitter. Lots of people screamed that Twitter would implode withing 6 months, after the massive cuts. There was some scrambling for a while, but I haven't noticed any issues. In fact, they've added tons of new features and Grok AI (which is much better than competitors).
- dpkirchner 2y ago
  Last I heard Twitter is so desperate they've resorted to suing former customers who stopped buying poorly performing ad space. Edit: removed supposition
  - Nextgrid 2y ago
    This has nothing to do with the tech side of things though? In fact the business was always on shaky grounds even before the acquisition. From a tech perspective, the company was indeed massively bloated with tons of people clearly not contributing anything.
    - slackernews9 2y ago
      There go the goal posts, whooshing by at the speed of sound.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    My understanding is that twitter's struggles are/were a result of advertiser and customer boycotts, not site functionality. People were aghast at the brutality of the layoffs, and ideological direction. However, my impression was that there was in fact a tremendous amount of bloat.
- 2y ago

dartos 2y ago

Got news for you. It’s not the devs who are bloating development costs. It’s the layers of management making hour long meetings to discuss button placement. It’s the hours of retros, design meetings, and skip-levels designed to remove any personal investment or sense of ownership from everything. Since so few individuals are trusted with real decision making power, you need a lot more people to achieve some kind of consensus/buy-in so that you can ship anything. The devs are at the extreme bottom of this totem poll. It’s like blaming construction workers for houses being expensive. And, ofc, that goes without mentioning the multimillion yearly bonuses for C-suite, but we can just forget about that and blame the lowest ranking corporate employees (devs) Source: I worked at a large tech firm for many years and saw this over and over again.

ozim 2y ago
Second that, scrum teams having 3 business analysts, scrum master, product owner, ops/it, ux designer, 2 testers, 4 developers is basically how it goes. Blaming developers in such scenarios is silly.
ttoinou 2y ago
I agree with your point but at the same time developers do need to be managed and they don’t want to manage themselves
- dartos 2y ago
  I’m not saying just leave everyone to their own devices, but some individuals should be able to have ownership and make decisions without layers and layers of process. Ofc decisions can have consequences, but that’s what the high pay should be for. It’s not a black and white issue and I don’t think you need to present it like one.
  - ttoinou 2y ago
    A more risky job should be compensated more ? It'd be the opposite, if it's risky then the variance of the income should be greater (success = more income) I don't want to present the problem as black and white but merely express a simple idea : developers DO want to be managed to simplify their lives and focus their time on more important things for them

markus_zhang 2y ago

The twist is that when you layoff the 80% who supposedly only did the 20% part, you pretty much still have to hire the same amount of people to do that 20%.

jajko 2y ago
But with lower rates, and with abysmal rampup period (or even afterwards). Don't blame managers, they just follow money, why else would they work those crappy jobs. Blame idiots who think short term bonuses should be massive instead of some long term performance and investment of oneself in company's success.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  Then by the same principle, don't blame the devs, they are just drifting as most people would do.
- dustingetz 2y ago
  Blame the board, full stop. "Follow the money", there is really no other possible answer. Some set of people are responsible and to determine who that is, you read the corporate ledger, you read the financing contracts, you read the bylaws and governance structures, and what they literally state is that the board of directors are responsible for directing the company. The board is responsible. If you wish to be a director and responsible, then go incorporate, now you are the board! You are responsible! Good luck!

gedy 2y ago

> the business would instantly terminate the 80% for cause if they could only discern the difference There's many many companies and leadership who want their big empires of people. I'm not too sure they want to fire 80% or be more efficient.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dv_dt 2y ago

The big tech companies paying the largest salaries are raking in billions in profits. How does this square with the view that software development costs are out of control? Layoffs today seem more like execs following management fads for easy visible actions and this data would suggest that the actions are actually detrimental to company profits. Juice the numbers for a quarter but add another long term drag to the company

Nextgrid 2y ago
Just because a company can be overall profitable doesn't mean costs aren't out of control. If you make enough profits, you can literally feed money into a shredder and still come out ahead if you earn profits faster than your shredder can eat them.
- slackernews9 2y ago
  So maybe we don't take jobs away from people with families and mortgages then, if all we have to do is sacrifice some profits, yeah? Gee, maybe the company can only make $9 billion instead of $9.5 billion, and everyone can stay employed.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- dv_dt 2y ago
  What you're describing isn't out of control, all businesses have income and expenses, good management is watching both sides and building the organization that connects the two in the middle. Sudden drastic moves if the business is delivering profits seems like the out-of-control action to take. If the business salary structure is off, or if you need to a different skill mix there are ways to shift that in a profitable business without sudden layoffs damaging the very organization that delivers your current profits.