Comment by pjc50
8 hours ago
Qualification is a very difficult problem, but I think everyone resents the characterization of "bad devs". Things like the Metaverse failure - apparently $70bn spent for no results - are primarily management failures. Like the Cybertruck, they succeeded 100% at building a product that the CEO wanted. The problem is that the CEO is basically the only person that wants that product.
There's also the thought nobody wants to examine: what if the consumer market total spend is kind of tapped out?
Not only this. The marketplace got way less efficient. These companies are so large that they rival small states, with very little actual competition and command economies internally.
When management decides to build the metaverse, it should be a career-ending and company-ending move. What did the shareholders say? Nothing, they know that there's no competition. The leadership stayed. $70B!
Huge swathes of tech (and the economy at large) are like this. The stock market plays a huge part -- there are very few active participants, and individual pockets are bigger than ever (think e.g. Softbank); capital flows to whoever is largest. Even VC's talk about "what's your moat" -- they don't want you to out innovate, that's actually difficult; why do that, when you can find a regulatory loophole, or market power, and exploit that instead.
When one earns better return on his dollar from monopolization and market power, it's a very very bad sign for the economy at large. And we very clearly have not yet learned this lesson, even when signs of it (China out innovating us in a rapidly growing number of industries; political instability; state capture, etc). We are already a couple decades into this habit and it will not end well for us. I think this is an issue with USA industrial strategy at large. We say over and over again, we need to do the hard stuff, we need to invest in energy, batteries, 'hard tech' etc. But what did we do? $1T to Sam Altman sitting on stage in the Steve Jobs outfit, doing the App Store for ChatGPT.
Individual SWEs are doing what individual people did in the Soviet Union. Join the party, read the party book, and get a cushy mid-level bureaucrat position. It beats working the factory, that's for sure!
Yes and no. Excellent developers deliver excellent products, like with the Cybertruck example. I wouldn't buy one either, but it appears to be well crafted.
Stellar developers are one step better. Yes, they too delivery excellent products, but they also produce things of value that nobody asked for. Business examples include Teflon, Postit Notes, antibiotics, linux, git, and much more.
The US Army changed leadership methodologies about 20 years ago to account for this. The current leadership philosophy is called Mission Command. In the fewest possible words a leader provides a stated intent and then steps back to monitor while subordinate leaders exercise their own creative initiative to meet that intent. The philosophy before that was called Military Decision Making Process (MDMP). MDMP required leadership buy in for each step of a process from among a set of discussed courses of action. MDMP is now largely relegated to small personnel teams.
i think the cybertruck is pretty well known to be crafted poorly, doesnt it always have problems with pieces falling off, or bursting into flames?
its insane that there wasnt any consequence for the metaverse at all. Oh yeah, we built a second life clone based totally around the idea that people want to spend rent money on fake digital real estate. Of course it tanked, no one was brave enough to point out ahead of time how bad an idea it was? And this doesnt hurt their standing, stock price, or marketability at all?
What makes you say it hasn't affected their stock price? Seems likely the Meta stock would be much higher if they had an additional $15B profit on their books each year.
Plenty of people wanted the Cybertruck, it's just that price is too high. It was originally announced to be under $40k, and with incentives, could have been in the $30k's.
The F-150 Lightening had the same problem.
Everyone works with bad devs, and they're addicted to AI.