Comment by pdonis

Most people nowadays are trying to optimize dollars for amount of work, without the dedication to the craft that was prevalent in previous generations. Large companies exacerbate this issue with all the layers of abstraction between a person's work and seeing the fruits of their labor.

There's way less pride from work: most people don't judge themselves too much on coworkers opinions since jobs are more changing, and it's unlikely for you to develop lifetime friendships with people who remain on your team.

Large corporations have too many regulations and HR policies to meaningfully pay based on performance, so there's little monetary incentive to be a strong performer.

You rarely get to see the product you've built get used in a meaningful way where someone would say something about it. It's likely that only one or two disinterested people quality check your work, and in this case you're either within spec (expected), "close enough to pass" (which wasn't getting reported), or failing miserably. The QA people hate getting the last one, but there's so much apathy these days from what I've seen because everyone just wants to be somewhere else doing something else.

So basically they've evolved to take away any dopamine one can get from pushing for quality from anyone but the most intrinsically motivated workers. They got rid of those people systemically and purposefully, and made a lot of money doing it.

The system is corrupt. From planes to tampons, it's self-checking and self-reporting and a conflict of interests: the regulators have no incentive to do more work (or are paid-out not to do), the companies are corrupt to the bone, the public is blissfully not interested to hear, the C level suite is there just for the money, middle management is hired and promoted based on weird criteria, the "fake it" system works too well and people hop through jobs before anyone takes action. Modern company management is not a science, but a smoke and mirrors act.

> why the system as a whole didn't spot much sooner that their engineering had been trashed

Current brokenthink of the management class is that their job is to wage war on their own workforce and labour rights. In the process destroying human capital. This isn't just my conclusion based on the fact that FANG was fined for having anti-poaching agreement - country-wide, corporate spending on workforce training and upskilling has been falling for the past 20 years.

You're sort of assuming it happened in some sort of explicit clear way. It doesn't and didn't. I've participated in this process and shrugged it off as kind of their fault and not my place. Until it was my turn.

When it's not you, it's just training data on the "wrong thing to do", and it's usually described as "being disagreeable" which accelerates the collapse - this seems perfectly reasonable at the time, they were overly difficult and an outlier.

Without explicit intent or some sudden accident, there's nothing to point at, especially in such a simplistic "what corrupt corporate or government official ignored this? Obviously someone reported it" way

The oversight we have into public companies is only financial. There's no annual third-party safety audit for engineering (yet).

Think about all the different things Boeing works on, all the details involved in the design of a modern airplane or spacecraft. How is a third party supposed to audit all that, when the designs are so complex and in such a relatively niche field? The most they can do is look for obvious things and make sure the data makes sense.

The problem isn't that the system is corrupt, it's that you're expecting a third party to both be close enough to be intimately familiar with all the details of the airplanes and spacecraft and yet separated enough from the company they're monitoring to not have conflicts of interest.

I have bad news.

There is no comforting answer. Welcome to unchecked capitalism, it's short-term-profit-driven thinking all the way down. In every industry it's the same. The guard rails have been systematically dismantled for decades by opportunists just like this, hoping to make some quick cash and jump ship before it falls down.

Whenever anyone points this out, they get labeled as cynics who hate capitalism and industry, and their complaints are swept under the rug -- after all, the company hasn't collapsed yet, so the worries must be unfounded!

This is exactly why strong government regulations and oversight is necessary. Strictly profit driven companies don't care about externalities like pollution or human lives. Literally, they only care about making one number go up, everything else (including the long term value of the number) means nothing at all.

Honestly, Chinese manufacturing with Western quality control strapped on top is probably the best bang for buck a consumer can get.

It's possible, there just needs to be someone willing to put the work in and to present the data in a manner that makes it accessable, easy to parse, and profitable enough to cover at least time and costs.

The work is building a database of filing locations and feeds (eg: public document feeds of each and every stock exchange, corporate filing register, etc) and builder parses to extract new names, boards of directors, name changes, major stock holdings, etc.

It takes some doing (*) - but with LLM's and advances in open software it gets easier every day.

( * Myself and a small team did this for the global mineral sector some years (15+) ago )

From 2016, only 10 companies control almost every large food and beverage brand in the world.

https://www.businessinsider.com/10-companies-control-the-foo...

If your point is that generalizations aren't universals, I agree. That's why I said "tends to". I further agree that markets like more than one thing, and you can see that with things like "growth stocks", "meme stocks", and "pump and dumps".

Amazon is particularly notable for how long and how energetically they resisted investor pushes to take short-term gains. They were famous for it, or perhaps notorious. So although it's a counterexample to my point, it's also great proof of it.

Opinions differ on Uber, but personally I think of it (and WeWork) as pump and dumps. After Facebook and Google ended up with quasi-monopolies, investors were hungry for another "to the moon" technology stock. I should say that was true of both VCs and retail investors. The VCs saw an opportunity to make things that looked vaguely Google-shaped, which they did, trying to sell them off to the general public before anybody caught on. They succeeded with Uber and failed with WeWork. But in both cases, it's still VCs favoring short-term cash extraction over long-term value creation.

I think others would for the reason described in sentence directly before it. Which, as "so" indicates, is the logical predecessor.

I used to write code for financial traders. I promise you that there are a lot of people who do not give half a shit what a company's up to as long as they can buy it for $100 and sell it later for $101. And based on infinite news reports, we can all see there are plenty of CEOs who will do pretty much anything that will boost the stock price in the short term so that they get to keep their jobs longer.

if you buy stock, but sell before others realize, then may be? If you could sniff out the quality momentum/inertia that the company is deriving revenue from, and sell shortly before it starts dropping, you'd have made profit.