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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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dgerard@awful.systems

The Remarkable Incompetence At The Heart Of Tech (www.wheresyoured.at)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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edit 2 this is the article I meant to share from Nik Suresh who Ed featured https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

edit sorry I meant to link unpaywalled article, there is another similar current one from Ed

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-more-you-buy-the-more-you-lose/

Ed asked me to write about why leaders around the world are constantly buying software they don’t need. He probably had a few high-profile companies in mind, like Snowflake. Put aside whether Snowflake is a good product – most people don’t know what a database is, so why on earth does a specialized and very expensive database have a market cap of $71B?

That’s a fair question – and being both a software engineer and the managing director at a tech consultancy, I can talk about what’s happening on the ground. And yes, people are buying software that they don’t need.

I wish that was the extent of our problems.

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[–] jaschop@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

You're argument seems like Suresh's to me, in that making working software is just laughably easy for a competent engineer.

This begs the question why noone is exploiting this market gap. But there's a couple explanations...

It can be a coordination problem, in that there are just barely any competent software organisations with enough engineers. The problem can also lie in how software is bought, since customers seem completely unable to determine the competence of vendors. Perceptions on what kind of software is a safe, respectable choice may even be anti-helpful in this regard.

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Zero Interest Rates Policy from 2008-2022 and lack of antitrust enforcement in the USA lead to two things: incumbent software companies got bigger because they could borrow so much money and buy or crush their competition, and small software companies did not have to make profits now because investors tossed in more money and hoped they would make big profits one day. That world is dead but the industry has not adapted.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think corporate consolidation is a huge part of it, but I think a lot of software and tech falls into the same trap that a lot of infrastructure projects do: even if everyone uses it, nobody wants to think about it. That general apathy (until it fails catastrophically in a bridge collapse or a major service outage) limits the avenues for feedback on whether software is actually good or not in the same way that people don't have a lot of feedback on whether a water main is being routed in a reasonable way. It also creates room for grifters who specialize in obfuscating exactly what you're paying for.

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

That was a deliberate offer from Big Tech: put aside your old convival systems and let us handle the details. Google deliberately deskilled web search, other companies broke systems administration and software packages that users can understand and edit. The point is that once you don't understand the details and cannot operate on your own, the big company can do what it likes and you have to take it. Organizations who switch to AWS rarely find that it saved them money but hiring a new team of IT people to build an alternative would be a hassle.

[–] diz@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Well, the big issue is that there's only this much demand. How many web browsers is there genuine end user demand for, worldwide? Probably just 1. Several are made thanks to other demands by large corporations. How much value does a web browser provide, to billions of people who use it? What ever the number may be, it's orders of magnitude more than it costs to develop.

Why is software observably hard for companies? When 90% of people are working on projects that are going nowhere, that creates a situation where competence is quite rare. Because in most projects it is objectively unnecessary (would make no difference). Where majority of software engineers never seen a successful project all the way from the start to the finish line.

Then there's startups, these are (predominantly) mere vehicles for moving money from the coffers of large publicly traded corporations into pockets of VCs (who sell startups to said corporations). Whole world of pretend software engineering.

Then there's large corporations, where CEOs want to get paid more and to be able to get paid more they need to add more layers to the hierarchy underneath them, which they need to fill somehow, and they can't fill on merit because they just don't have enough stuff happening that they could measure merit in.

edit: basically the management always wants to do the equivalent of having hired a dozen heart surgeons to work on one heart and a "heart surgery architect" as well, the more layers the better because the more layers the higher is the pay their layer can get.