I think it’s lack of long term thinking. The IT and HR departments at my company constantly come up with new shiny initiatives for saving cost. They centralize a lot of stuff and save some money that way. Over time it turns out that things don’t work but the initiator has already been promoted away and the next guy starts his own initiative. So there is this constant cycle of short term savings that cause long term cost. And it seems nobody cares about these long term effects because they all are focused on putting up a good short term show.

I point my finger at modern financial markets.

If you bought some stock, and were forced to keep it for atleast 5 years, the CEOs would have to behave a lot more carefully (=good for the company in the long term), than they currently do. With millisecond stock tradings, noone cares about long term future, because the stocks are sold and rebought and resold again and again many times by many trading houses and their financial products.

I think it generally is what they are incentivised to direct to. Costs and speed. Not quality or long term viability.

What can you do if your bosses boss want everything cheap and fast. Or at least appearance of that.

Cost cutting. Speed to market. Expectations of perpetual continuous improvements. Quarterly mindset. Inability to admit mistakes. Move fast break things.

It’s basically the same thing that led to the Volkswagen fiasco.

Unfortunately there’s so much code in these products, they start to believe they are SV style startups a fail whale situation has slim consequences when it’s completely opposite.