7 ms·

> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immedia

> removing people and organizational slack You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else. I've commented about lack of slack on several times here on HN because when I notice a broken system now a days, 90% of it is due to lack of slack in the system to absorb short term shocks.

acomjean 5mo ago
I’ll note at the end of the last century I worked at IBM research which had a budget of 6 Billion dollars. Management was trying very hard to get better return on that investment. Even today IBM though often ridiculed in the tech space (sometimes they do deserve it) spends a lot on R&D.
- NordStreamYacht 5mo ago
  Lucent at the same time went through the same issue: how to monetise Bell Labs. Bell Labs greatest work came out when AT&T was a monopoly. Once they were broken up (1984?) they started feeling the pain. When the Lucent spinoff took place, the new entities had no Monopoly money to fund unconstrained research while management's behaviour never changed. I don't know how BL fared under Alcatel and now Nokia, but haven't heard of anything interesting for years.
  - Zigurd 5mo ago
    I've been to the Holmdel office in the decline years. It was very sad. A fraction of the former staff was rattling around in what could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set. In its heyday it must've been magnificent. Imagine taking an entire great research university and putting it into a single architectural masterpiece. I've also been to Nokia HQ after Elop ruined the place. Also sad.
    - 7402 5mo ago
      > could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set Of course, it was! AppleTV show “Severance” https://www.newsweek.com/lumon-building-severance-real-visit-real-life-2041285 https://www.newsweek.com/lumon-building-severance-real-visit...
    - neal_jones 5mo ago
      Could be mistaken but isn’t that building used for the Severance tv show?
- rvba 5mo ago
  Did anything come out from those billions?
  - swiftcoder 5mo ago
    > Did anything come out from those billions? Per wikipedia: IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards, 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology, five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. As of 2018, the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.
    - xienze 5mo ago
      > the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years. A couple things about those patents, from a former IBMer who has quite a few in his time there. First, not all patents are created equal. Most of those IBM patents are software-related, and for pretty trivial stuff. Second, most of those patents are generated by the rank and file employees, not research scientists. The IBM patent process is a well-oiled machine but they ain't exactly patenting transistor-level breakthroughs thousands of times a year.
      - fao_ 5mo ago
        Why do you need to generate transistor-level breakthroughs multiple times a year? Those breakthroughs are hard to generate, but they're important and industry-spanning. The problem is we've mostly stopped generating them.
        xienze 5mo ago
        I wasn't saying anything about that, I was just pointing out that yes, IBM produces a ton of patents, but they're mostly trivial junk that regular employees generate en masse in order to earn accomplishments and make up for the insultingly low bonuses.
chanux 5mo ago
> When bean-counters took over the ecosystem [...] in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. This is only fair, because they themselves are firing at 100% all the time IYKWIM ;)
SlinkyOnStairs 5mo ago
They also took out all the quality, though in pure business terms one can argue that's a kind of "slack" by itself. The beancounters have cut all the corners on physical products that they could find. Now even design and manufacturing is outsourced to the lowest bidder, a bunch of monkeys paid peanuts to do a job they're woefully unqualified for. And the end result is just a market for lemons. Nobody trusts products to be good anymore, so they just buy the cheapest garbage. Which, inevitably, is the stuff sold directly by Chinese manufacturers. And so the beancounters are hoisted by their own petard. We've seen it happen to small electronics and general goods. We're seeing it happen right now to cars. Manufacturers clinging on to combustion engines and cutting corners. Why spend twice the money on a western brand when their quality is rapidly declining to meet BYD models half the price. --- And we're seeing it happen to software. It was already kind of happening before AI; So much of software was enshittifying rapidly. But AI is just taking a sledgehammer to quality. (Setting aside whether this is an AI problem or a "beancounters push everyone into vibecoding" problem) E.g. Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke. It hasn't gotten better, the problems are all still there. Windows is just going down in flames. People are jumping ship now. SaaS is quickly going that way as well. If it's all garbage, why pay for it. Either stop using it or just slop something together yourself. --- And in the background of this something ominous: Companies can't just pivot back to higher quality after they've destroyed all their inhouse knowledge. So much manufacturing knowledge is just gone, starting a new manufacturing firm in the west is a staffing nightmare. Same story with cars, China has the EV knowledge. And software's going the same way. These beancounters are all chomping at the bit to fire all their devs and replace them with teenagers in the developing world spitting out prompts. They can't move back upmarket after that's done. Even when the knowledge still lives, when the people with the skills requires have simply moved to other industries and jobs, who's going to come back? Why leave your established job for the former field, when all it takes is the management or executive in charge being replaced by another dipshit beancounter for everyone to be laid off again.
- esseph 5mo ago
  > E.g. Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke And yet I run it every day, and it's by FAR the most enjoyable platform and tooling to use (for me).
t-3 5mo ago
I think the bean counters get a bad rap for this a bit unfairly. The past century has seen more progress in knowledge and technology than the rest of human history combined. The world and business environment are changing too rapidly to make longtermist thinking practical. Few care if you have a lifetime warranty and excellent service or replacement parts if the majority will upgrade in a few years! Mature technologies increasingly become cheaply available as services, eg. laundry, food, transportation. That further reduces demand on production, as many can get by with the bare minimum and don't need the highest quality, longest lasting appliances. Software is even more ephemeral and specialized. Developing education and training pipelines is wasting money if the skills you need are constantly changing! There is plenty of "slack" in the workforce so this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid. There are very few fields where qualified worker shortages are a real problem. R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Open source software has even further muddied the waters. Applications have only a limited lifetime before being replicated and becoming free products (this has only been intensified by the introduction of AI), so companies develop services instead. Technology and knowledge deepening and rapidly becoming more specialized makes the monolithic corporation much less practical, so companies also need to specialize in order to effectively compete. Going too far in the name of efficiency can destroy core competencies, but moving away from the old model was necessary and rational.
- aleph_minus_one 5mo ago
  > R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Because some problems that many companies in very specialized industries work on are so special that outside of this industry, nearly all people won't even have heard about them. Additionally, many problems companies have where research would make sense are not the kind of problems that are a good fit for universities.
  - SoftTalker 5mo ago
    Those fields still develop in-house expertise and world-leadning products. General Electric was cited above, but their turbine engine division is producing the most fuel-efficient, reliable, and lowest TCO aircraft engines there have ever been. The materials science and engineering expertise needed to do this isn't something you can find in a freshly-graduated university student. Products like jet engines, though, are still those where quality matters. They are so costly that there's room in the finances to deliver it. Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.
numpad0 5mo ago
> Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time Not just that, you have to be always doing less for more gains. Real work is bad work. Shrinkflation good. I don't know what it is if it wasn't a pure scammer mindset.
- flybrand 5mo ago
  > Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time This is a classic Goldratt / Theory of Constraints mistake.
  - themaninthedark 5mo ago
    Can you expound on what makes it a mistake?
abustamam 5mo ago
I haven't read this book but I see it often mentionedin contexts like this. it was written in 2001 and I think its synopsis still stands. Slack by Tom Demarco (2001) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack
aleqs 5mo ago
The problem is, in the minds of these people 'firing at 100% all the time' generally means doing busywork and/or thinking of ways to cheat/manipulate their customers and the market for maximum gain whole delivering minimum value. I would have loved to be 100% engaged working on solving real problems in honest ways at some of my past jobs, but alas MBA/marketing leadership, which has taken over much of tech has very little interest in actually building good things and solving real problems in honest ways.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  Profit maximization is a continuous process that has generated our high standard of living. P.S. I welcome all attempts to prove me wrong!
  - spiorf 5mo ago
    No, the process has impeded even higher standard of living, because it misallocates resources from value generation to value appropriation. It's the extreme short term profit maximization that makes the economy a zero sum game. Otherwise it is not.
    - WalterBright 5mo ago
      Do you really think the economy is zero sum? For example, who was Elon Musk's wealth transferred from? What do you think about all that money being invested into AI? Is that "extreme short term profit maximization"?
      - cowmix 5mo ago
        I don’t know who his wealth was transferred from, exactly. But I do know what he’s using it for now: as a gravitational force to unilaterally screw with public institutions and systems the rest of us depend on. Even if you agree with some of DOGE projects’s goals, the way it operated was wildly thoughtless about consequences beyond Musk’s personal wishes, and almost completely unaccountable. I’m honestly sick that my personal Model Y purchase helped add to that power. And I say that as someone who was a huge Musk fan for years, despite the warning signs — the Thai “pedo” comments, and his very public turn during COVID.
WalterBright 5mo ago
> optimised immediate profitability over everything else Which is the usual complaint that businesses are focused on short term results, sacrificing long term results. If that would be generally true, the stock market would be going down steeply, not up, as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits.
- mikem170 5mo ago
  Are stock market profit expectations mostly long term? Stock markets have been wrong before. Besides that, the U.S. stock market went up over several decades while manufacturing capabilities were transferred overseas. That has had, and will continue to have, domestic ramifications that might not be captured by investor profits.
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    The stock market has been going up for a couple hundred years. When do you expect the pervasive short term thinking will crater the economy?
    - mikem170 5mo ago
      I didn't say that the economy would be cratered. GDP doesn't capture everything.
- wredcoll 5mo ago
  > as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits. I thought stock prices were based one what I thought I could sell it for next week.
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    If you could sell it for more next week, that means the next week buyers are expecting higher profits.
    - 5mo ago
pembrook 5mo ago
> Without people who have actually worked with the system, you end up with a loss of tacit knowledge—and eventually, declining productivity. > You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. Huh? What happened to the concept of "debate" on HN. It's just a bunch of people agreeing with each other. Yet the data doesn't support any of OP's thesis. Here's a chart of the rise in productivity per hour worked in the United States since 1947. It's a steady linear increase every single year: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB Yours is the type of story big company workers tell themselves to feel important while refusing to learn anything new and never taking any risks. But the truth is 99.999% of companies are not doing anything that unique or complex. Most companies are not ASML. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard someone justify their do-nothing position within a giant bureaucracy while saying the phrase "institutional knowledge" I'd be rich. This is just a sign of a poorly run giant company full of engineers building esoteric and overly complex in-house solutions to already-solved problems as job security. The truth is all of this "institutional knowledge" is worthless in the face of disruption, and it has a half life that's getting shorter every day. Everybody talks shit about global just-in-time supply chains and specialization...but just because we had a fake toilet paper shortage for a few months during a 100-year global pandemic doesn't mean running things like it's 1947 for the last 70 years would have been better. You enjoy a much higher quality of life today due to these "evil" JIT supply chains which it turns out are far more durable than people want to claim.
- jdw64 5mo ago
  US aggregate productivity metrics fail to address this nuance. There is a fundamental difference in abstraction layers between a macro-system becoming more efficient and an individual enterprise experiencing operational failure. As a software engineer, distinguishing between these layers is critical. Your argument is akin to claiming that because the Google Play Store sees a higher volume of app releases (increased productivity), the intrinsic quality of individual apps has naturally improved. In this analogy, the individual app represents a company, and the Play Store represents the broader US market. Silicon Valley’s highly liquid labor market allows talent to flow freely, which opens up and elevates the baseline of the overall market. However, that is entirely distinct from the fact that individual companies are suffering severe drops in internal quality and productivity. Furthermore, in software architecture, 'productivity' and 'quality' are rarely directly proportional. With AI coding tools, we can ship an app orders of magnitude faster. Historically, it took me three months to write 60,000 lines of code; recently, I am generating that same volume in just two weeks. My productivity has undeniably spiked, but can I confidently claim the code quality is better than when I manually scrutinized every single line? The real issue is not whether the broader economy has grown more productive since 1947. The core issue is whether a specific organization bleeds capability when the exact people who understand its real-world constraints, failure modes, and operational history walk out the door. Both realities can co-exist: National productivity can trend upwards, while individual companies simultaneously suffer operational regressions due to botched migrations, failed refactors, or the loss of tacit knowledge. I agree that 'institutional knowledge' is sometimes weaponized to defend unnecessary complexity. However, the opposite fallacy is treating all localized, domain-specific knowledge as worthless. While some of it is merely job-security folklore, the rest is literally the only surviving documentation of why the system functions in the first place
ahussain 5mo ago
Engineers seem to think business people don’t know what they are doing, but if your post were true, then companies would add slack to outperform their competitors. The broken system likely doesn’t have enough business impact to justify the investment to maintain it.
- wredcoll 5mo ago
  This would be true if everyone was optimizing for the same thing. It's not terribly difficult to imagine someone optimizing for, say, a bonus at the end of the year.
- ozim 5mo ago
  Adding slack works over years. Cutting slack gets you quarterly bonuses. When you plan working 3-5 years in a single company you don’t care if it crashes and burns month after you leave just to burn down next one. Conversely we see the same dynamic with engineers, they build stuff to prop up their CV and don't care if company still supports crap they did after they leave.
- idle_zealot 5mo ago
  > companies would add slack to outperform their competitors. I think if they did this they'd get buried by the market. Your slack is someone else's opportunity to undercut you. It's a systemic problem, it's in every individual's self interest to work towards instability.
- array_key_first 5mo ago
  It's a measurement problem, which engineers also fall prey to, perhaps even more. It's the danger of data driven decision making. Cutting people and resources right now gets you a measurable gain. Not cutting them gets you a gain tomorrow. But, that gain is unmeasurable! Because in order to measure it you would need to know what happens in an alternate universe where you cut those people. So, if you're only making data driven decisions, you would cut the people 100% of the time. But that's why companies aren't run by algorithms, they're run by people. The algorithm would run the company into the ground.
stephen_cagle 5mo ago
I believe private equity ownership represents this in an aggressive form. The 2 and 20 percent takes that PE usually mandates as part of their purchase agreement means that they are highly highly incentivized to maximize short term "wins" over long term survival. I think Chesterton and Taleb also had pretty reasonable things to say about understanding a system before you make changes and fragile/anti-fragile systems as well.
_DeadFred_ 5mo ago
It's funny because when I first managed at a public company I was told no employee can work on something more than 80% (and sustained 80% actual work wasn't believable) and if my people were logging 80% or more time to capitalizable projects I would be in trouble.
jbn 5mo ago
Tom DeMarco wrote a book "Slack" about precisely this.
port11 5mo ago
It’s especially ironic since the bean counters produce no value. I like ‘Developer Hegemony’, even if the title needs changing. The author makes a great case for why information workers produce almost all the value. It’s them that make the profits, yet they’re always a cost center.

acomjean 5mo ago

I’ll note at the end of the last century I worked at IBM research which had a budget of 6 Billion dollars. Management was trying very hard to get better return on that investment. Even today IBM though often ridiculed in the tech space (sometimes they do deserve it) spends a lot on R&D.

NordStreamYacht 5mo ago
Lucent at the same time went through the same issue: how to monetise Bell Labs. Bell Labs greatest work came out when AT&T was a monopoly. Once they were broken up (1984?) they started feeling the pain. When the Lucent spinoff took place, the new entities had no Monopoly money to fund unconstrained research while management's behaviour never changed. I don't know how BL fared under Alcatel and now Nokia, but haven't heard of anything interesting for years.
- Zigurd 5mo ago
  I've been to the Holmdel office in the decline years. It was very sad. A fraction of the former staff was rattling around in what could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set. In its heyday it must've been magnificent. Imagine taking an entire great research university and putting it into a single architectural masterpiece. I've also been to Nokia HQ after Elop ruined the place. Also sad.
  - 7402 5mo ago
    > could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set Of course, it was! AppleTV show “Severance” https://www.newsweek.com/lumon-building-severance-real-visit-real-life-2041285 https://www.newsweek.com/lumon-building-severance-real-visit...
  - neal_jones 5mo ago
    Could be mistaken but isn’t that building used for the Severance tv show?
rvba 5mo ago
Did anything come out from those billions?
- swiftcoder 5mo ago
  > Did anything come out from those billions? Per wikipedia: IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards, 20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology, five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. As of 2018, the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.
  - xienze 5mo ago
    > the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years. A couple things about those patents, from a former IBMer who has quite a few in his time there. First, not all patents are created equal. Most of those IBM patents are software-related, and for pretty trivial stuff. Second, most of those patents are generated by the rank and file employees, not research scientists. The IBM patent process is a well-oiled machine but they ain't exactly patenting transistor-level breakthroughs thousands of times a year.
    - fao_ 5mo ago
      Why do you need to generate transistor-level breakthroughs multiple times a year? Those breakthroughs are hard to generate, but they're important and industry-spanning. The problem is we've mostly stopped generating them.
      - xienze 5mo ago
        I wasn't saying anything about that, I was just pointing out that yes, IBM produces a ton of patents, but they're mostly trivial junk that regular employees generate en masse in order to earn accomplishments and make up for the insultingly low bonuses.

chanux 5mo ago

> When bean-counters took over the ecosystem [...] in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. This is only fair, because they themselves are firing at 100% all the time IYKWIM ;)

SlinkyOnStairs 5mo ago

They also took out all the quality, though in pure business terms one can argue that's a kind of "slack" by itself. The beancounters have cut all the corners on physical products that they could find. Now even design and manufacturing is outsourced to the lowest bidder, a bunch of monkeys paid peanuts to do a job they're woefully unqualified for. And the end result is just a market for lemons. Nobody trusts products to be good anymore, so they just buy the cheapest garbage. Which, inevitably, is the stuff sold directly by Chinese manufacturers. And so the beancounters are hoisted by their own petard. We've seen it happen to small electronics and general goods. We're seeing it happen right now to cars. Manufacturers clinging on to combustion engines and cutting corners. Why spend twice the money on a western brand when their quality is rapidly declining to meet BYD models half the price. --- And we're seeing it happen to software. It was already kind of happening before AI; So much of software was enshittifying rapidly. But AI is just taking a sledgehammer to quality. (Setting aside whether this is an AI problem or a "beancounters push everyone into vibecoding" problem) E.g. Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke. It hasn't gotten better, the problems are all still there. Windows is just going down in flames. People are jumping ship now. SaaS is quickly going that way as well. If it's all garbage, why pay for it. Either stop using it or just slop something together yourself. --- And in the background of this something ominous: Companies can't just pivot back to higher quality after they've destroyed all their inhouse knowledge. So much manufacturing knowledge is just gone, starting a new manufacturing firm in the west is a staffing nightmare. Same story with cars, China has the EV knowledge. And software's going the same way. These beancounters are all chomping at the bit to fire all their devs and replace them with teenagers in the developing world spitting out prompts. They can't move back upmarket after that's done. Even when the knowledge still lives, when the people with the skills requires have simply moved to other industries and jobs, who's going to come back? Why leave your established job for the former field, when all it takes is the management or executive in charge being replaced by another dipshit beancounter for everyone to be laid off again.

esseph 5mo ago
> E.g. Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke And yet I run it every day, and it's by FAR the most enjoyable platform and tooling to use (for me).

t-3 5mo ago

I think the bean counters get a bad rap for this a bit unfairly. The past century has seen more progress in knowledge and technology than the rest of human history combined. The world and business environment are changing too rapidly to make longtermist thinking practical. Few care if you have a lifetime warranty and excellent service or replacement parts if the majority will upgrade in a few years! Mature technologies increasingly become cheaply available as services, eg. laundry, food, transportation. That further reduces demand on production, as many can get by with the bare minimum and don't need the highest quality, longest lasting appliances. Software is even more ephemeral and specialized. Developing education and training pipelines is wasting money if the skills you need are constantly changing! There is plenty of "slack" in the workforce so this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid. There are very few fields where qualified worker shortages are a real problem. R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Open source software has even further muddied the waters. Applications have only a limited lifetime before being replicated and becoming free products (this has only been intensified by the introduction of AI), so companies develop services instead. Technology and knowledge deepening and rapidly becoming more specialized makes the monolithic corporation much less practical, so companies also need to specialize in order to effectively compete. Going too far in the name of efficiency can destroy core competencies, but moving away from the old model was necessary and rational.

aleph_minus_one 5mo ago
> R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Because some problems that many companies in very specialized industries work on are so special that outside of this industry, nearly all people won't even have heard about them. Additionally, many problems companies have where research would make sense are not the kind of problems that are a good fit for universities.
- SoftTalker 5mo ago
  Those fields still develop in-house expertise and world-leadning products. General Electric was cited above, but their turbine engine division is producing the most fuel-efficient, reliable, and lowest TCO aircraft engines there have ever been. The materials science and engineering expertise needed to do this isn't something you can find in a freshly-graduated university student. Products like jet engines, though, are still those where quality matters. They are so costly that there's room in the finances to deliver it. Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.

numpad0 5mo ago

> Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time Not just that, you have to be always doing less for more gains. Real work is bad work. Shrinkflation good. I don't know what it is if it wasn't a pure scammer mindset.

flybrand 5mo ago
> Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time This is a classic Goldratt / Theory of Constraints mistake.
- themaninthedark 5mo ago
  Can you expound on what makes it a mistake?

abustamam 5mo ago

I haven't read this book but I see it often mentionedin contexts like this. it was written in 2001 and I think its synopsis still stands. Slack by Tom Demarco (2001) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack

aleqs 5mo ago

The problem is, in the minds of these people 'firing at 100% all the time' generally means doing busywork and/or thinking of ways to cheat/manipulate their customers and the market for maximum gain whole delivering minimum value. I would have loved to be 100% engaged working on solving real problems in honest ways at some of my past jobs, but alas MBA/marketing leadership, which has taken over much of tech has very little interest in actually building good things and solving real problems in honest ways.

WalterBright 5mo ago
Profit maximization is a continuous process that has generated our high standard of living. P.S. I welcome all attempts to prove me wrong!
- spiorf 5mo ago
  No, the process has impeded even higher standard of living, because it misallocates resources from value generation to value appropriation. It's the extreme short term profit maximization that makes the economy a zero sum game. Otherwise it is not.
  - WalterBright 5mo ago
    Do you really think the economy is zero sum? For example, who was Elon Musk's wealth transferred from? What do you think about all that money being invested into AI? Is that "extreme short term profit maximization"?
    - cowmix 5mo ago
      I don’t know who his wealth was transferred from, exactly. But I do know what he’s using it for now: as a gravitational force to unilaterally screw with public institutions and systems the rest of us depend on. Even if you agree with some of DOGE projects’s goals, the way it operated was wildly thoughtless about consequences beyond Musk’s personal wishes, and almost completely unaccountable. I’m honestly sick that my personal Model Y purchase helped add to that power. And I say that as someone who was a huge Musk fan for years, despite the warning signs — the Thai “pedo” comments, and his very public turn during COVID.

WalterBright 5mo ago

> optimised immediate profitability over everything else Which is the usual complaint that businesses are focused on short term results, sacrificing long term results. If that would be generally true, the stock market would be going down steeply, not up, as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits.

mikem170 5mo ago
Are stock market profit expectations mostly long term? Stock markets have been wrong before. Besides that, the U.S. stock market went up over several decades while manufacturing capabilities were transferred overseas. That has had, and will continue to have, domestic ramifications that might not be captured by investor profits.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  The stock market has been going up for a couple hundred years. When do you expect the pervasive short term thinking will crater the economy?
  - mikem170 5mo ago
    I didn't say that the economy would be cratered. GDP doesn't capture everything.
wredcoll 5mo ago
> as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits. I thought stock prices were based one what I thought I could sell it for next week.
- WalterBright 5mo ago
  If you could sell it for more next week, that means the next week buyers are expecting higher profits.
  - 5mo ago

pembrook 5mo ago

> Without people who have actually worked with the system, you end up with a loss of tacit knowledge—and eventually, declining productivity. > You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. Huh? What happened to the concept of "debate" on HN. It's just a bunch of people agreeing with each other. Yet the data doesn't support any of OP's thesis. Here's a chart of the rise in productivity per hour worked in the United States since 1947. It's a steady linear increase every single year: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB Yours is the type of story big company workers tell themselves to feel important while refusing to learn anything new and never taking any risks. But the truth is 99.999% of companies are not doing anything that unique or complex. Most companies are not ASML. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard someone justify their do-nothing position within a giant bureaucracy while saying the phrase "institutional knowledge" I'd be rich. This is just a sign of a poorly run giant company full of engineers building esoteric and overly complex in-house solutions to already-solved problems as job security. The truth is all of this "institutional knowledge" is worthless in the face of disruption, and it has a half life that's getting shorter every day. Everybody talks shit about global just-in-time supply chains and specialization...but just because we had a fake toilet paper shortage for a few months during a 100-year global pandemic doesn't mean running things like it's 1947 for the last 70 years would have been better. You enjoy a much higher quality of life today due to these "evil" JIT supply chains which it turns out are far more durable than people want to claim.

jdw64 5mo ago
US aggregate productivity metrics fail to address this nuance. There is a fundamental difference in abstraction layers between a macro-system becoming more efficient and an individual enterprise experiencing operational failure. As a software engineer, distinguishing between these layers is critical. Your argument is akin to claiming that because the Google Play Store sees a higher volume of app releases (increased productivity), the intrinsic quality of individual apps has naturally improved. In this analogy, the individual app represents a company, and the Play Store represents the broader US market. Silicon Valley’s highly liquid labor market allows talent to flow freely, which opens up and elevates the baseline of the overall market. However, that is entirely distinct from the fact that individual companies are suffering severe drops in internal quality and productivity. Furthermore, in software architecture, 'productivity' and 'quality' are rarely directly proportional. With AI coding tools, we can ship an app orders of magnitude faster. Historically, it took me three months to write 60,000 lines of code; recently, I am generating that same volume in just two weeks. My productivity has undeniably spiked, but can I confidently claim the code quality is better than when I manually scrutinized every single line? The real issue is not whether the broader economy has grown more productive since 1947. The core issue is whether a specific organization bleeds capability when the exact people who understand its real-world constraints, failure modes, and operational history walk out the door. Both realities can co-exist: National productivity can trend upwards, while individual companies simultaneously suffer operational regressions due to botched migrations, failed refactors, or the loss of tacit knowledge. I agree that 'institutional knowledge' is sometimes weaponized to defend unnecessary complexity. However, the opposite fallacy is treating all localized, domain-specific knowledge as worthless. While some of it is merely job-security folklore, the rest is literally the only surviving documentation of why the system functions in the first place

ahussain 5mo ago

Engineers seem to think business people don’t know what they are doing, but if your post were true, then companies would add slack to outperform their competitors. The broken system likely doesn’t have enough business impact to justify the investment to maintain it.

wredcoll 5mo ago
This would be true if everyone was optimizing for the same thing. It's not terribly difficult to imagine someone optimizing for, say, a bonus at the end of the year.
ozim 5mo ago
Adding slack works over years. Cutting slack gets you quarterly bonuses. When you plan working 3-5 years in a single company you don’t care if it crashes and burns month after you leave just to burn down next one. Conversely we see the same dynamic with engineers, they build stuff to prop up their CV and don't care if company still supports crap they did after they leave.
idle_zealot 5mo ago
> companies would add slack to outperform their competitors. I think if they did this they'd get buried by the market. Your slack is someone else's opportunity to undercut you. It's a systemic problem, it's in every individual's self interest to work towards instability.
array_key_first 5mo ago
It's a measurement problem, which engineers also fall prey to, perhaps even more. It's the danger of data driven decision making. Cutting people and resources right now gets you a measurable gain. Not cutting them gets you a gain tomorrow. But, that gain is unmeasurable! Because in order to measure it you would need to know what happens in an alternate universe where you cut those people. So, if you're only making data driven decisions, you would cut the people 100% of the time. But that's why companies aren't run by algorithms, they're run by people. The algorithm would run the company into the ground.

stephen_cagle 5mo ago

I believe private equity ownership represents this in an aggressive form. The 2 and 20 percent takes that PE usually mandates as part of their purchase agreement means that they are highly highly incentivized to maximize short term "wins" over long term survival. I think Chesterton and Taleb also had pretty reasonable things to say about understanding a system before you make changes and fragile/anti-fragile systems as well.

_DeadFred_ 5mo ago

It's funny because when I first managed at a public company I was told no employee can work on something more than 80% (and sustained 80% actual work wasn't believable) and if my people were logging 80% or more time to capitalizable projects I would be in trouble.

jbn 5mo ago

Tom DeMarco wrote a book "Slack" about precisely this.

port11 5mo ago

It’s especially ironic since the bean counters produce no value. I like ‘Developer Hegemony’, even if the title needs changing. The author makes a great case for why information workers produce almost all the value. It’s them that make the profits, yet they’re always a cost center.