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I don’t understand the impulse to whine and complain about the aesthetics of a big company. > a little more cringey and clique Why on earth do I care if someo

I don’t understand the impulse to whine and complain about the aesthetics of a big company. > a little more cringey and clique Why on earth do I care if someone thinks Cloudflare is cringe? What is interesting about that? They are following the market like everyone else. > Too many ways to do the same thing, none of them great…They got D1 (SQLite serverless), Durable Objects with their own SQLite, KV, R2, Queues, and Hyperdrive to speed up external Postgres or MySQL. What does this have to do with AI psychosis? I thought that was the thesis of this article? As I said, it’s just directionless complaining.

gegtik 2mo ago
i read the article as caring about the values, principles, and goals of the human beings driving it. if you are looking exclusively at compiled bits and bytes and/or quarterly statements then I agree, human/societal judgment seems irrelevant.
- daishi55 2mo ago
  What values and principles are supposed to be preventing cloudflare, the internet and technology company, from exploring hot new internet markets and technologies?
  - orliesaurus 2mo ago
    the constant "fights" with Vercel instead of delivering shareholder value by refining the product
    - esseph 2mo ago
      I'm not even sure if I would know who Vercel is if I were at Cloudflare. The scale between the two is staggeringly different.
      - Plont 2mo ago
        That makes it worse, not better.
ajkjk 2mo ago
Because it affects people personally? They are using the stuff that's being neglected, and they could be using the stuff that is being half-assed if it's better. And I don't believe it has to do with the market. I've worked at a company that was run by pms doing stupid shit. It was dressed up as what the business needed, but it was sheer incompetence. Better people in exactly the same situation would have produced better results by doing different stuff. It's just a culture, not market pressure.
- daishi55 2mo ago
  Not directing this at you personally. But I've heard a lot of mediocre engineers whine and complain about PMs, MBAs, C-suite, etc. The best engineers I don't hear complaining much at all. Just a thought. And sorry but I don't agree that launching AI products in 2026 is not related to the market. I think that's the whole basis for the decision.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - GPerson 2mo ago
    Do you think people whose circumstances are favorable to them are more likely to succeed and less likely to complain?
    - daishi55 2mo ago
      I think that as soon as you start viewing certain groups/categories/etc as bad and blaming them for everything, as many engineers do to the non-engineering staff at tech companies, you have stopped thinking logically and are just reacting emotionally. "PMs bad, engineers good" is such a common idea in these spaces and it really makes me think less of the thinking skills of anyone who espouses it.
      - ajkjk 2mo ago
        I am just assessing the work that I saw. I saw people do stupid things constantly when people could have clearly done better work. It wasn't market pressure, it was just an organization with lax standards and weak leadership. Obviously this assessment is only as good as my skill at assessing things, so believe it or not, but I know what I saw and I know that it was disappointing. In my opinion there is a bizarre and largely harmful phenomenon in our culture where many people have come to believe that it is impossible to just look at something and know if it is good or bad. They learned about cognitive biases and subjectivity and then overindexed on them, entirely throwing out the idea that any subject assessment could even possibly be correct, on the basis that some of them are incorrect. When in fact it is clearly a question of skill: some people's subjective assessments are more correct, some are not. Of course I believe mine are good, but you have no reason to agree, and that's fine. Plenty of companies are run idiotically and everybody knows it. It is not hard to believe. It is not that they are following market pressures and their actions are therefore inscrutable to outsiders. It is that they are bad at their jobs, but the feedback loops that would do something about that either don't exist, or are weak, or work too slowly to be effective. or, often, that being bad at their jobs is totally fine: the requirements for survival are decorrelated with the quality of their work for various reasons, and so there is no particular reason they should figure out how to do better. Regardless, it can still be true that their work is disappointing in a way that is obvious to outsiders.

gegtik 2mo ago

i read the article as caring about the values, principles, and goals of the human beings driving it. if you are looking exclusively at compiled bits and bytes and/or quarterly statements then I agree, human/societal judgment seems irrelevant.

daishi55 2mo ago
What values and principles are supposed to be preventing cloudflare, the internet and technology company, from exploring hot new internet markets and technologies?
- orliesaurus 2mo ago
  the constant "fights" with Vercel instead of delivering shareholder value by refining the product
  - esseph 2mo ago
    I'm not even sure if I would know who Vercel is if I were at Cloudflare. The scale between the two is staggeringly different.
    - Plont 2mo ago
      That makes it worse, not better.

ajkjk 2mo ago

Because it affects people personally? They are using the stuff that's being neglected, and they could be using the stuff that is being half-assed if it's better. And I don't believe it has to do with the market. I've worked at a company that was run by pms doing stupid shit. It was dressed up as what the business needed, but it was sheer incompetence. Better people in exactly the same situation would have produced better results by doing different stuff. It's just a culture, not market pressure.

daishi55 2mo ago
Not directing this at you personally. But I've heard a lot of mediocre engineers whine and complain about PMs, MBAs, C-suite, etc. The best engineers I don't hear complaining much at all. Just a thought. And sorry but I don't agree that launching AI products in 2026 is not related to the market. I think that's the whole basis for the decision.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- GPerson 2mo ago
  Do you think people whose circumstances are favorable to them are more likely to succeed and less likely to complain?
  - daishi55 2mo ago
    I think that as soon as you start viewing certain groups/categories/etc as bad and blaming them for everything, as many engineers do to the non-engineering staff at tech companies, you have stopped thinking logically and are just reacting emotionally. "PMs bad, engineers good" is such a common idea in these spaces and it really makes me think less of the thinking skills of anyone who espouses it.
    - ajkjk 2mo ago
      I am just assessing the work that I saw. I saw people do stupid things constantly when people could have clearly done better work. It wasn't market pressure, it was just an organization with lax standards and weak leadership. Obviously this assessment is only as good as my skill at assessing things, so believe it or not, but I know what I saw and I know that it was disappointing. In my opinion there is a bizarre and largely harmful phenomenon in our culture where many people have come to believe that it is impossible to just look at something and know if it is good or bad. They learned about cognitive biases and subjectivity and then overindexed on them, entirely throwing out the idea that any subject assessment could even possibly be correct, on the basis that some of them are incorrect. When in fact it is clearly a question of skill: some people's subjective assessments are more correct, some are not. Of course I believe mine are good, but you have no reason to agree, and that's fine. Plenty of companies are run idiotically and everybody knows it. It is not hard to believe. It is not that they are following market pressures and their actions are therefore inscrutable to outsiders. It is that they are bad at their jobs, but the feedback loops that would do something about that either don't exist, or are weak, or work too slowly to be effective. or, often, that being bad at their jobs is totally fine: the requirements for survival are decorrelated with the quality of their work for various reasons, and so there is no particular reason they should figure out how to do better. Regardless, it can still be true that their work is disappointing in a way that is obvious to outsiders.