this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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Everything is getting worse as companies are exclusively trying to squeeze more money out of everyone rather than build good products or services. Everything is done by fewer more overworked workers, with shittier components and features that are designed to extract money out of you rather than be useful or "good" (my favorite example is BMW's subscription based bench warmers.)
That's really what's going on.
Back in the days, people took the time it was necessary to write the software. And managers trusted the engineers to say when it's ready or not.
Nowadays, the software world is managers going "yes we know the database's gonna blow up over the weekend without the query optimizations, but we want to build this new feature before the end of the week. We can deal with the database when it blows up over the weekend, that's why you guys are on-call."
I did not make this up, I've actually heard this. This is why modern software is so fucked up, not because we can't handle the complexity, because reliability and quality just isn't prioritized at all anymore. Gotta dish out new features every day and you're not allowed to work on fixing known critical bugs.
I was in the IT industry for about 20 years until I finally had enough a couple of years ago, so none of this is a shock to me 😅 "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe."
Smaller companies can still manake to make quality stuff more often than the giants, but the moment they actually make it into the bigger leagues (if they make it), they have to bring in a a lot of your average MBA types and business "intelligence" folks, and that's when things go down the shitter. They might be making more money but now everything is suddenly about "KPIs" - ie. usually badly defined and/or incorrectly calculated metrics about the service that supposedly reflect how good it is, but at best measure how addictive it is and how much money it makes you, but not how enjoyable it is or if it's actually even a good thing for your users. Not to mention how often those metrics are literal garbage based on such creative abuses of basic statistics that they aren't even wrong. It's astonishing how much trust people put in numbers some BI moron churned out, when the reality very often is that not only was the data collected wrong, but they made completely wrong conclusions about what their data represents ("I'll call the interval between these events the session length") and then applied some statistical methods on them that basically destroyed any information there could possibly have been (like taking the average of averages when the original populations have very different sizes). The CEO may not always understand the tech, but by gawd they do understand numbers, and all these KPIs just seem so convincing. When this line goes up it means that were doing good and on the right path, it's math right?
And now the C-suite is mostly made up of MBA types, the founders probably either left or were stuck in some dark corner where they won't bother anyone too much with their day drinking.
And now the internet service, or TV, or car, or washing machine, or whatever your company has been making is no longer really a service for the users, but more of a machine designed to bleed money out of them as efficiently as possible and that's run according to the tenets of what's essentially modern numerology in a suit and tie (and barely any better at describing anything you could call objective reality).
</rant>Yep, it's all about selling features now and not caring about the actual product itself at all anymore. Nearsightedness took over the whole industry: boost this quarter's metrics, heck, boost this week's numbers above anything else.
This hits close to home.