There is no sadder story in American capitalism than the decline of HP from a wonderful equipment engineering company to a racket for selling tiny little tubs of overpriced ink.
At my Fortune 250, our threat model apparently includes -- rather conveniently and coincidentally -- everything! Well, everything they make an off-the-shelf product for, anyway. It makes new purchasing decisions easy:
"Does your product make any thing, in any way, more secure?"
"Uh... Yes?"
"You son of a bitch. We're in. Roll it out everywhere. Now."
Remember AOL keywords? They basically had their own private DNS alternative. Every commercial on TV for a website would say "AOL keyword !" instead of the actual URL. I guess it was a lot less scary for your average internet user to type in "nick" instead of "http://www.nick.com". I feel like we still kind of have the "URLs are hard" problem. I've noticed a lot of ads in Japan tell the users to search (presumably Google) for a specific phrase, and buying the adwords for that is more or less the modern equivalent of paying for an AOL keyword. Search was really rough back then (although it's gone full circle into shit again I feel), and the URL bar UX wasn't quite figured out yet. Will users be able to adapt to wacky new TLDs or will we be stuck with .com forever because it's recognizable as a domain name? Do people still type "www."? Is the app store the modern equivalent of AOL channels? Sometimes I wonder if we're stuck in an infinite cycle of reinventing AOL.
That's what happened with the internet, which was supposed to be the new Library of Alexandria, educating the world, liberating the masses from the grip of corporate ownership of data and government surveillance, and enabling free global communication and publishing.
It's almost entirely shit now. Instead of being educated, people are manipulated into bubbles of paranoid delusion and unreality, fed by memes and disinformation. Instead of liberation from corporate ownership, everything is infested with dark patterns, data mining, advertising, DRM and subscriptions. You will own nothing and be happy. Instead of liberation from government, the internet has become a platform for government surveillance, propaganda and psyops. Everyone used to have personal webpages and blogs, now everything is siloed into algorithmically-driven social media silos, gatekeeping content unless it drives addiction, parasociality or clickbait. What little that remains on the internet that's even worth anyone's time is all but impossible to find, and will eventually succumb to the cancer in due time.
LLMs will go the same way, because there is no other way for technology to go. Everything will be corrupted by the capitalist imperative, everything will be debased by the tragedy of the commons, every app, service and cool new thing will claw its way down the lobster bucket of society, across our beaten and scarred backs, to find the bottom common denominator of value and suck the marrow [from] its bones.
But at least I'll be able to run it on a cellphone. Score for progress?
Everyone here knows where this is heading, and yet people will sit here and defend these companies as if they're on some righteous path. Humans are already becoming disposable statistics and the engines of compute, all for free and all for the benefit of corporations who didn't pay for any of it and don't even contribute back taxes.
Originally advertising was designed around the premise of explicitly highlighting utility and functionality of goods/content. It wasn't until Bernays came along and adapted his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories into practice by designing advertising to manipulate people into believing that they actually need the product.
Things will continue to spiral downwards for the majority of people while the rich will benefit from people like you to spread the word to all the commoners that everything’s fine and this is great for innovation!
Be it animal, human, or machine. In every case where something made a better slave, capital has switched to using it.
Recognize what class you're in and see it for what it is (lotta people identify with the ruling class on this site), but don't pretend for a second us tech workers are somehow insulated from being workers. No one will care when we're homeless on the street anymore than the current group of i-got-mines care about the current homeless.
The only way for upper management to really understand what's going on and give useful input would be for them to be directly involved on a day-to-day basis.
In other words, they would have to do actual work.
That's not going to happen. So the best they can do is to stay out of the way of people who are actually working, avoid making decrees, and maybe try to keep the other managers from interfering with the work also.
Maybe another approach would be for the workers to share more equally in the spoils so that they would be naturally inclined to integrate business improvements and goals. But that's never going to happen.
The structure is much more directly related to a caste system than people may acknowledge.
This is how corporations and the will to profit undermines first principal knowledge and leaves a wake of fake education that ultimately needs to be unlearned or unwisely held as a fragment of useful adrift in an island of potential non-logical nonsense
The reason why we don't have rockstar engineers is because the markets been filled with talentless hacks who can't code their way out of a paper bag without a jira epic breaking it down for them.
When we let "the industry" set our standards, we get a mess of crap that works for the specific use cases of the giant companies that created it. Meanwhile, actually using these things ourselves leaves out a lot of use cases, adds complexity, and becomes burdensome, to the point you don't even want to use it.
I worked with a designer that actually told me this un-sarcastically. "My KPI is signups, not logins. Bury the login link. Existing users don't move the metric."
Metrics-based and KPI-based software development has ruined quality for decades.
I felt like fighting this fight alone for years in the golden years of node, webpack and react where everybody was creating crazy stacks and adding GraphQL and so on, to basically get what Django + jquery did 10 years ago in a tenth of the time and code.
So far I also survived:
- xml is the future
- let's use nosql for all the things
- you must use the same language at the back and front
- yes, you site must have an AMP version (ah, you forgot this one, didn't you? It was sooo imporant, and then pouf, it was gone like tear in the rain)
- yes, your home page must be an SPA
- you can't code anything without async
- you can't live without a message queue
- everything must become a micro service
- of course you need a container for that
- of course you need a orchestrator to organize those containers
- of course you need the cloud, it would be crazy to deal with those containers and orchestrators yourself
- dude, why do you have a server? Use a serveless backend!
- dude, why do you have a backend? Just call saas from the edge!
Every year, some generation of engineers have to learn the concepts of "there is no silver bullet", "use the right tech for the right problem", "your are not google", "rewriting a codebase every 2 years is not a good business decision", "things cost money".
I encounter daily young people who are so stricken by anxiety about productivity, because they can't explain how they will actually benefit from the outcomes. Being productive is really hard when any value produced immediately and only goes towards lining the pockets of the wealthy.
If anything it's the incentive system in software industry, which is at fault.
1. No designer is given promotion for sticking to conventional designs. It's their creative & clever designs that get them attention and career incentives.
2. No engineer is paid extra for keeping the codebase without growing too much. It's re-writes and the effort he puts in to churn out more solutions (than there are problems) that offers him a chance to climb the ladder.
3. No product manager can put "Made the product more stable and usable" in their resume. It's all the new extra features that they thought out, which will earn them reputation.
4. No manager is rewarded for how lean a team they manage and how they get things done with a tiny & flat team. Managers pride themselves with how many people work under them and how tall in the hierarchy they are.
Our industry thrives on producing more solutions than needed. Efforts are rewarded based on conventional measurements, without thinking through- in what directions were the efforts pointed at.
I'm a self-taught developer at global market leader company. I worked on the business side for years and built quite a few internal apps end-to-end completely alone. I had no choice but to follow good practice to maintain them alone.
I was quite reluctant to join the dev team, it never had a good reputation, but eventually decided to give it a go. Agile and estimations, spill overs, etc is such a pain in the ass, it feels like a pseudo-science. A lot of people spend a lot of energy on just this administration while we are way behind on many other things, like proper unit testing, good quality documentation, well established CI/CD. And everybody is focusing so much on the estimates, tickets like this was the end goal. I want to change their approach but there's a long way to go.
Right now, in nearly all industries, and even in parts of tech, you become a manager, by being manager-like. That means playing politics and going to business school. Deeper understanding or appreciation of the job isn't really necessary.
The whole IT ecosystem has become a hail mary. Even admins usually have no idea what a certain program actually wants to do. If the admin knows how to install the app so that it actually runs, you call them a good admin.
From a security point of view, an application is like a nuclear power plant. It's good if it works as planned, but if something blows up it endangers your whole enterprise.
The whole container movement can be seen as putting the apps in a sarcophagus like Chernobyl. That way the radiation hopefully stays in, but history has shown that it really doesn't. Also, the wheel of history has just turned one more iteration and now admins just view the sarcophagus as something you deploy as you previously deployed the app. Who is responsible that it is air tight? Well, uh, nobody, really.
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