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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
by 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 agoNot 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 agoDo you think people whose circumstances are favorable to them are more likely to succeed and less likely to complain?
- daishi55 2mo agoI 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 agoI 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.
- ajkjk 2mo agoI didn't say that AI products aren't related to the market. The problem is not that they're AI it's that they're badly done.
- daishi55 2mo agoEvery cloudflare product I've ever used has been a legit delight to use. I use it for lots of stuff on my homelab. Everything works well and is simply pleasant. Maybe if you use it heavily for enterprise that changes, but it just hasn't been my experience.
- ajkjk 2mo agoAh, I was only referring to the things in the OP. I don't know anything about Cloudflare in particular.