The social trend to replace technology with marketing. The banishment of nerds from technical fields. The obsession with status and notoriety and money to the complete exclusion of intellectual curiosity.
To me this resonates with the idea that FAANGs swallow up promising engineers and have them work on mundane problems to help generate revenue.
Certainly there are novel or interesting problems to be solved even in these mundane areas, but I wonder what we may be leaving on the table as a species - if many of these brilliant people were to focus their energies on other problems or research, what could we achieve?
Tangentially, are there positive (but not necessarily profitable) uses for the pile of cash that big tech is just sitting on?
Has anyone seen this in practice?
You have teams that grow because the manager find work to do and no project is ever closed as finished or mature so tons of engineers are wasting time making incremental improvements to systems that already fulfill all requirements.
You also have these engineers see this and decide they can reinvent the system better because they’re so immersed and knowledgeable about it and boom you have huge numbers of worthless initiatives the size of which depends on how persuasive the lead is.
That reminds me of how 10 years ago, the smartest people in the world were working for investment banks on high-frequency trading to improve tiny efficiencies on stock market profits. And today they're working for FAANGs to improve ad targeting.
Both cases are really just shifting money around, not creating new technology or wealth. But apparently improving marginal efficiencies of administrative work reaps more short-term profits than creating new value.
Source?