Comment by shimman
4 days ago
Yes, thanks for the story. This is what I was trying to say. The idea that it's completely okay for companies to misallocate billions of dollars across the industry while people are legitimately suffering do to myriad of reasons is just bonkers level of selfishness.
I worked at a company that had an $80,000 monthly AWS spend when the total users in question was less than 100,000. The most concurrent users was <500.
This obscene waste actually isn't health for society nor the economy.
Ah I see the point you're making now. Yes, sometimes (often) businesses make very bad decisions.
But that doesn't imply that every project that does not ship was a poor investment of time and resources.
I disagree, especially if we are talking about potentially hundreds of billions in waste. How much better would say software be if instead of Meta wasting $100billion on Reality Labs we gave one time $100,000 grants to open source developers? That would be helping over 1,000,000 open source developers that are actually writing useful helpful software for others.
Instead we had a corporate jobs program that benefited no one outside of Meta's offices.
Software engineering projects expand to fill the deadlines you set for them (usually going over). Same thing for budget. You'll waste a bunch of a million pound budget. People are forced to get creative and thrifty with a £20k budget.
constraints can be useful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
> The idea that it's completely okay for companies to misallocate billions of dollars across the industry while people are legitimately suffering do to myriad of reasons is just bonkers level of selfishness.
Yes. The metaverse bullshit comes to mind. Something no-one wanted or needed, and exorbitant amounts of money spent on it.