Comment by stego-tech
7 hours ago
I will add some commentary from my subjective POV in IT:
“Efficiency” is a damned lie. Enterprise IT is one of the most inefficient spaces out there, full of decades of band-aids layered atop one another in the form of fad products, fancy buzzwords, and “defining leadership” projects. The reason you cannot get shit done at work quickly isn’t because of bureaucracy or management layers standing in the way so much as it’s the vested interest in weakening IT and Ops teams so that those higher-ups can retain more of the profit pie for themselves.
My entire job is to make technology become so efficient that it fades into the background as a force amplifier for your actual work, and I’ve only spent ~1/3rd of my 15+ year career actually doing that in some form. I should be the one making sure documentation is maintained so that new hires onboard in days, not months. I should be the owner of the network and/or compute infrastructure the business needs to operate, not some MSP in another country whose contract you’ll replace with a lower bidder next year. I should be the one driving improvements to the enterprise technology stack in areas we could benefit from, not some overpriced consultant justifying whatever the CIO has a hard-on for from his recent country club outing.
Consultants, outsourcing, and fad-chasing aren’t efficient. They do not better the business, overwhelmingly. AI won’t magically fix broken pipelines, bad datasets, or undocumented processes, because it is only ever aware of what it is told to be aware of, and none of those groups have any interest or incentive in actually fixing broken things.
The tech industry is woefully and powerfully inefficient. It hoards engineers and then blocks them from solving actual problems in favor of prestige projects. It squanders entire datacenters on prompt ingestion and token prediction instead of paying a handful of basically competent engineers a livable salary to buy a home near the office and fucking fix shit. Its leaders demand awards and recognition for existing, not for actually contributing positively back to society - which leads to stupid and short-sighted decision-making processes and outcomes.
And all of this, as OP points out, is built on a history of government bailouts for failures and cheap debt for rampant speculation. There’s no incentive to actually be efficient or run efficient businesses, and this is the resultant mess.
I think you need some kind of source to back up the idea that IT or the software industry as a whole isn’t efficient.
Software companies have much higher profit margins than companies that ship physical products. There really aren’t many industries that do better margins than software.
To sell software, you don’t need a production facility, warehouse, nor do you even need an office building if you don’t want one.
https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile...
…bruh. Literally the very first line:
> I will add some commentary from my subjective POV in IT:
Subjective is doing the carrying, there. I am admitting up front that this is specific to me, my career, and the specific life experiences I’ve had with it thus far.
Like…I won’t even entertain the rest of your comment if you’re not even going to read the entirety of mine before vomiting out an “UhM aHkShUaLlY” retort.
Well, from my subjective POV, the earth is flat.
The point of my comment is that a subjective anecdote from a very limited perspective isn’t telling a good story about why the industry is the way it is. You said these businesses aren’t efficient but they have extremely high profit margins, which objectively paints a different picture: they are sufficiently efficient. They are more efficient than most other businesses.
All this financial risk in the industry where employees are over-hired and low interest rate VC funds are thrown around haphazardly is accepted because even a modestly successful software business has high profit margins.
The investors that funded less than $10 million to Airbnb’s series A ended up a significant shareholder of a company that has the same market cap as PNC Financial Services in less than 20 years. PNC spent 180 years getting to that size.
Software-driven products have huge profit potential and they can grow fast.
If you think I’m being some kind of pedantic loser, fine, so be it. You can put the blindfolds on and ignore a data-supported viewpoint.