this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
24 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

2632 readers
94 users here now

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.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
dgerard@awful.systems
24
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
6 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 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.