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

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.