Tech companies are irrational pop cultures
softwarecrisis.dev
softwarecrisis.dev
> Constant churn in a software development team, both among the programmers and designers, is absolutely devastating. It is the death knell for a software project. Makes deadlines meaningless. It turns software into a disposable, single-use product like a paper towel. Anything that increases team member churn threatens the very viability of the project and the software it’s creating.
From an essay that is worth reading in full, "Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies": https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/
I think it's exactly right about the importance of "mental models" and "theory building", and if we could keep that in mind we could build better more maintainable software. ("More maintainable" over the long-term I think is almost synonymous with "has easy to grasp mental models that are sufficient to guide your work with the system")
That adds a lot of overhead when employees inherit a pet project
It is a really easy way to make your employees overwhelmed, but you can always hire someone else to take ownership once they quit.
So I think this is overall very pro-microservices.
Most systems in my experience don't really benefit from separation of the entire application domain into a set of independent systems. Most use cases don't benefit from decoupling a request/response in a series of asynchronous calls across 20 different APIs.
So, most systems can and should be implemented as a simple abstracted interface inside a single application stack. But then, no one ever gets promoted/hired/funded to build the most optimal solution.
I'm not sure about this, there's so much going on in most software, a lot of the ruin comes from the dependencies around your code, like libraries and frameworks. Let's take web development as an example.
Suppose you need to query the database in some legacy project - well, it doesn't have a framework that supports proper logging of each query/parameter for debugging, it doesn't have any codegen capabilities, it has a wonky connection pool implementation. And yet, if you want to work within the same codebase, you have to use it. What could take a bit of codegen and an hour of work now can take close to a day, all because you're pigeonholed into using what's already there for "consistency".
Suppose instead you now want to have a task queue. Well, instead of RabbitMQ or something of the like being used, instead you have to work with what's present - a bunch of pre-existing abstractions and a DB centric implementation (with arguably poor documentation) that the business requirements have largely outgrown, so now you'll need to hack around the existing code, hope that you break nothing there, all while attempting to create something passable (which may or may not be viable with this approach, depending on the use case).
And doing logging? Well, maybe the team didn't do structured logging or log shipping, so you have to be very frugal with the logs, or spend time setting up Logrotate or an alternative for that monolithic app, just so you can turn on some additional logging and make sure that the eventual rollout actually works.
Well, what about the actual database or maybe tests? Be prepared that the test framework will be somewhat out of date, some of the test utilities won't quite fit what you'll try to do and perhaps your current ORM and DB choices won't really work well with the idea of letting integration tests test actual DB statements and migrations against a DB instance that would be setup for the tests and torn down automatically afterwards (say, a PostgreSQL/MariaDB container somewhere, as opposed to MS SQL or Oracle), so you won't be able to test every schema migration that easily.
You might even run into a situation where you need to run a relatively recent runtime (say JDK 11) but the project is stuck on an older release (JDK 8), whereas migrating everything isn't going to be done for now. So you can't do what you need now, because the libraries don't support your runtime. Worse yet if the monolithic project has dozens of business use cases, whereas the bit of code that's preventing the migration is needed for just one or two of them.
I won't even get into instrumentation and scaling parts of the total solution up or down, or things like configuration, since that'd make this needlessly long.
I think that microservices indeed are a good choice for mitigating some of these issues, by untying your hands - the impact of issues is lessened, to a per-service basis. An individual service might therefore rot and this rot could be addressed separately, without slowing everything else down. Even to the point where the old implementation can be thrown out and rewritten, if that's ever needed.
However, microservices come at a possibly huge operational and complexity cost otherwise, to the point where they might either make the project late, hard to work with, or unfeasible altogether. And it's hard to know which approach will be the best for any given situation. Starting out with monoliths makes sense, because most smaller projects will never need to be split up, but when you need to do that, you will really need to. Modular monoliths (e.g. feature flags for enabled/disabled bits of functionality) can be an intermediate step.
In an ideal world, programming language module systems would be enough. We don't live in a perfect world.
IMO, this is also part of the challenges that come with dealing in software (understood as some sort of novel "substance"); in great part we (as a culture/civilization) haven't figured out how to deal with software (and in general, with digital artifacts) in the best way.
As much as Office Space is supposed to be a pastiche of corporate toxicity, Initech was perhaps more honest than most real-world companies. They had banners everywhere reading "Is it good for the COMPANY?" In the real world the same principle applies but you have to keep it in mind yourself. Any time corporate makes a decision which you think of as foolish because it hampers or disadvantages the line workers, ask yourself... Is it good for the COMPANY?
But perverse incentives make churn attractive. Switching jobs is often the best way to raise your income, for example.
This almost completely falls to pieces in the framing ... how does one explain the pop culture of 80s nostalgia that is prevalent in a lot of media? An 80's casio watch is, in some circles, the pinacle of timepiece fashion. Of course there are times where pop culture is a rejection of the prior art, but also there are times when current pop culture icons show deference to the past and their influences.
History is not what you can find at an older cousin's place. History is what someone had to make an effort to save for you, and you cannot experience it any more.
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O315300/walkman-personal-...
But, alas, as they say... those who don't know history are condemned to repeat, while those who know are condemned to watch other repeating it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19mi71/how_v...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ir3jm/in_wh...
What are you trying to accomplish?
I don't think we're there yet, but the last several years have made me a little more nervous. Are we close to groups of people resorting to political assassinations and if so, will it become normalized?
I actually think more about what Donald Kagan said about tyrannies (a tyrant is just someone who seizes power extra-constitutionally): they generally don't last more than three generations. That led me to compare with democracies, and I can't think of many much older than a couple centuries (though I'm claiming no erudition here).
We shouldn't prognosticate American politics based on the History of Ancient Rome, that is folly. One thing is to observe parallels and patterns in behavior. But entirely different systems and contexts cannot be used to analyze one another by cherry picking.
For the rest, I really should have just said "signal event". I wasn't suggesting anything along the lines of "but for that event things would have gone the other way". Here, I merely meant a threshold was passed.
Personally, I'm more interested in cultural comparisons, mainly because they were so different from us in many ways. And, if I may add to your concern about cherry-picking, we should also have a great deal of humility about how much we really know. What's the metaphor? The ancient world is Versailles, and everything we know about it is what we can see through the keyhole on the front door.
We wear a Casio because it looks retro, but we check our phones for the time. We have a cassette player in our house, but we use a Bluetooth cassette to play MP3s on it. We put a 3D-printed Sony Walkman phone case around our iPhones instead of digging out the real thing and enjoying the original media with all its perks and problems.
I would use tea as an example. We can drink a modern aluminum can of iced tea that contains 50 ingredients, none of which is tea, or we can take it slow and do a complete traditional tea ritual. One is loosely inspired by the past, the other is immersing yourself in tradition.
The floppy disk save icon comes to mind.
In a recent tweet from Japan, younger people wonder why the "Save" button in Excel is a vending machine with a drink in the tray. Another popular tweet shows a child wondering why their parents 3D printed a save button. In both cases, they understood the icon stood for save without knowing what it was.
As for your question, I would either use a circle with an arrow in it or an open box with an arrow in it. Perhaps a cloud with an arrow if it's saving to the cloud. Another alternative is a bookmark style icon (but then you need to ask: will the future generations experience physical books at all?)
However, I'm not a UI/UX expert, and this might clash with the Download button, so you'd have to ask whether or not the distinction is important in your own application. Keeping the convention of a mysterious floppy disk might still be the right choice.
If we were all just 'wearing them because they made sense' then yes, but they are specifically objectified as thing of adornment. It's mostly not about the past.
That guy who is still wearing the Casio because he always 'just did' - that's not pop culture.
There's nothing wrong with pop culture and it has many positive attributes, change is needed. It'd be boring without change. That said it can obviously be carried away.
Pruning is also healthy for the org in many ways, especially if it allows for adaptation and change. It obviously has some negative externalizations for individuals which is not nice.
I doubt that most wearers think the Casio is the superior watch compared to nowadays smartwatches
It's a modern reinvention of how people assume the 80s felt, filtered through a gauzy haze of nostalgia for an imaginary pop culture that never existed in that form.
Which is similar to computing and other tech nostalgia. An Amiga was out there on the edge in the 80s, now it's a source of fond reminiscence. Likewise 1980s music equipment, especially synthesizers.
The modern anti-pop-culture equivalent would be asking what's out on the edge today. And there isn't much, because the vibe of computing - actually the vibe of everything - has changed from excited exploration and boundary breaking with constant invention and surprises, to backward-looking and derivative commoditised corporate consumption and collectorism, and the generation of content and items for same.
The most innovative thing at the moment - AI - is an evolving set of automated systems for summarising what has already been generated, rather than for generating something completely new from out of left field.
I was around lots and lots of different computers that were not common in the 80s due to being a "tailgate" kid into facilities. And yet I've still never seen an Amiga in person I think, and I have never had a "IRL" friend who ever had one either.
And yet you'd think from nostalgia that we all had them in the 80s.
> It's a modern reinvention of how people assume the 80s felt, filtered through a gauzy haze of nostalgia for an imaginary pop culture that never existed in that form.
Not really. I write Synthwave music, and I was alive in the 80s and writing similar music back then. I have a deep respect for the bands that pioneered the way via New Wave and Industrial music at the time. I really enjoyed at the time and still enjoy things like the incidental music in Miami Vice, for example. (And Jan Hammer, who wrote much of it, has an interesting history going back to Mahavishnu Orchestra, for example.)
It sounds like your own experience is different than that, but don't assume everyone who's into something are into it for naive reasons.
There's also an anthropological aspect about this.. watching 70s videos, with lots of glare, or halos, probably limitations of optics/film .. but giving some pretty aesthetics. Having more physically correct capture of an event doesn't improve that aspect. People are romantics.
If you go back and watch TV shows from the 80s, you'll see a lot of 50s nostalgia.
In the 90s, it was the 60s that was being fetishized. They even brought back Woodstock, twice. I was in high school in the 90s and "hippie fashion" was very popular. Tie dyed shirts came back etc.
In the 2000s the 70s were in. We had TV shows like That 70s Show etc.
Then it was the 80s, and now 90s nostalgia is starting to come in.
It's the cycle of aging. All the kids and teenagers from those decades are now middle aged and they want to consume nostalgia. If they had kids in their 20s, then those kids are now teenagers and young adults and are becoming curious about their parents lived experiences and all the things that they just missed out on (during the 00s I was very interested in the 70s since that decade happened right before I was born).
But this is a specific exception, not the rule. Middle aged consumers are not the trend-setting hipsters who create new fashion trends (the stuff that they will fetishize when they are middle age).
What's really ironic, though, is that in tech there really isn't much that is new. Even AI/ML was being researched as far back as the 1940s, we had working proof of concepts in the 80s. We knew how to do this stuff ages ago, and had practical applications. We just needed the hardware and data accessibility to catch up so that we have the storage and computing to actually train these things. Every advancement over the last 20 years has been small incremental refinements. The big stuff is not new.
But the industry still fetishizes it like it's new.
"Cloud" is just resource sharing. We're back to mainframes, complete with the vendor lock-in caused by proprietary APIs. And yet it is branded, marketed and fetishized as if it's "new."
OOP is soooo passe. We tried that in the 90s and 00s and there were ... gasp... problems! People wrote buggy and difficult to maintain code. Enter Functional Programming and now this is the way that we do things. It's impossible to write bad code in this paradigm ... right?!
Relational databases are slow and complicated and require DBAs to maintain. In comes NoSQL and key/value doc-stores ... now THIS is the way we do things. You can't develop a bad product using a doc store database ... right?!
Restful APIs require strong collaboration between backend and frontend developers and simple, single-purpose contracts aren't very flexible. In comes GraphQL now ALL web apps need to use it because you can't develop a difficult to maintain application using GraphQL .. .right!?
This is the point of the article and after 25 years in the industry I have a hard time finding the lie.
The fact that people who were teens in this era are a desirable market segment with a lot of purchasing power, and nostalgia works. If it were anything about the actual historical value, then the 80s references would last. But they won't.
Before the 80s nostalgia it was "That 70s Show."
Prior to that, it was "The Wonder Years" (set in the late 1960s/early 70s)
And before that, it was "Happy Days" (50s/early 60s).
It's all a cash grab, plucking on the heart strings of the people who were at the apex of their earning power.
You might find the biggest divide asking gen Z vs millennials what they think about the movie reboots. A few of those are done well and have their own merits, but most rely totally on the nostalgia factor.
Maybe the author of this article is meeting more of the first kind, but it's dangerous to issue advice that amounts to "wherever you are on this balance, move further East".
I don't see enough evidence to call it, but I wouldn't put it past them, given how several big players including AAPL and GOOG were caught and fined for making no-cold-call agreements several years ago. And it does seem like the tech scene has been less competitive lately on the consumer side.
* The current generation could not invent the internet. They don't have the attention span or the culture for it.
* People who spurn well thought out technologies like SQL or relational databases, are doomed to re-invent them, badly.
You vastly underestimate how much thought went into the internet. Look at:
- TCP delayed acks + Nagle’s algorithm
- IPv4 address size (Vincent said 32-bits was roughly as likely as 24 or 48).
- the 7 layer OSI
- class-based (A, B, C, …) routing
- most of the options in IPv4 headers
The Internet was as much hacks and a playground as other layers of the stack are today. The good stuff is still in use but there is a vast graveyard of bad ideas that didn’t pan out because they were security nightmares, couldn’t scale, etc.
The same applies to core protocols like BGP. BGP hijacking is still possible today.
.. in the same sense as http hijacking is possible today, i.e. without httpS. For BGP we have RPKI ROA for a quite a while, and ASPA is coming.
> and ASPA is coming
Yeah, but it’s not here and requires verification at each AS append, which means we’re a good 5 years before it’s really enforceable on arbitrary prefixes across transit networks.
> You're vastly underestimating how hard the old thing was
Sounds like you're agreeing with him, if anything. Where is gerbilly's 'underestimation'?
* 99.99% of modern software startups could be built, maintained, and scaled in production by a single dedicated programmer and served on a single machine. Yes, even with tens of millions of users.
* Most tech companies hire for the prestige and to not feel lonely, not because they need to hire. (And to have pretty young interns walking around the office).
* YCombinator has deviated far from the original vision of Paul Graham and his essays. Nowadays all of the startups coming out of YC batches are just trash, and the YC panel has suffered "death by committee", i.e. bland risk-averse pop conformism riding the trends with no deep understanding of anything.
i don't understand how this would work
Even production Twitter in 2023 is estimated to be able to fit on a very beefy machine: https://thume.ca/2023/01/02/one-machine-twitter/
Of course we would use a CDN in 2023, which is cheating, but from a business point of view it is juse one machine you manage.
Meanwhile $GENERATION is inventing general AI. Your so-called unpopular opinion is basically "old man yells at younger people", but with even less foundation.
I've had it confidently invent URLs when challenged to show the sources for an obviously false claim. It invented a URL which has never existed.
I mean it's impressive, but it has a long way to go to become intelligent.
You claimed the younger generation doesn't have the attention span to invent the internet. Someone else mentioned the clear and ongoing progress in machine learning, which involves many things not named ChatGPT, and has become one of the biggest economic engines of the world.
You're just making an inane generalization. You will rightly be criticized for this.
And you're completely missing out on the inevitable fact that those zoomers could teach you a lot of things you don't know too.
They're not inventing anything, they're just taking the concept of machine learning that has been around for ages and throwing more data and hardware at it. Underneath it all, it's still just an algorithm that finds and repeats patterns and nothing more, the patterns are just getting more complex. It's not in any way comparable to the invention of the internet in terms of innovation.
Not saying current generative ai will not have a huge impact. It will.
This simply reads to me like a "kids these days" type of old-man argument, which has, as we know, existed since time immemorial.
And this counterargument has existed since time immemorial + 1. It proves nothing.
But I stand behind what I claim. A large collaborative, and disinterested project like DARPANET could not get off the ground today.
Are you seriously arguing that the generation who used pocket protectors and HP calculators didn't have an advantage in concentration over the one who's been shown to distractedly check their phones every 15sec in case a cat might be doing something interesting?
But really the argument behind your argument seems to be that there is a monotone increasing function to 'progress'. I'm arguing that it's not and that sometimes we regress.
We can't even agree on what is real anymore, isn't that a serious disadvantage?
Where did I ever say that? Your claim was about the Internet, not "progress" in general.
> Are you seriously arguing that the generation who used pocket protectors and HP calculators didn't have an advantage in concentration over the one who's been shown to distractedly check their phones every 15sec in case a cat might be doing something interesting?
Yes, because again you're generalizing to an entire population based on a stereotype. Do you think everyone back 50 years ago was similarly concentrating? No, because certain people can simply concentrate more than others, and those are the people building the Internet back then, and those are the same kinds of people who can build an Internet today. 99% of people were not doing so, we are talking about the differences of 0.0...1% of the population who built the Internet, so let's compare the same amount of people today too.
I have worked at a lot of companies and I find the kind of people who can or are willing and able to do that is decreasing. It's nearly zero today.
If the Internet was invented today, it would work only for the happy path and fail with a million different error modes, each handled differently depending on the specific implementation.
And you know what? People would accept it's unreliability probably, the way we accepted the 'all computers crash' from the DOS era till about NT 40. Everybody knew that computers just crash like that. :shrug:
Today ChatGPT makes up facts and gets things wrong. But it's OK cos it's newer than Google, or printed books.
Again you're focusing on coworkers and teams here and there at various companies, not in the best of the best who are the ones who built the internet and who would build it today. They are not average developers like one might normally work with, as I said, they are 0.0...1%.
This is exactly how the internet works today and you just don’t see it. Try using source routing in your IP packets and see how far it gets. BGP implementations had to carry a “work with Cisco’s bug” flag for decades. Send some >1500 MTU packets across the world with varying paths and see how fragmentation and assembly is inconsistent across operators and implementations.
RFCs are loaded with errata, they skimp on critical details, and have bullshit “design by committee” features that never panned out. They aren’t special.
You seem to be ascribing some moral failure to the younger generations whereas there are also factors at play that go beyond individuals. It might be more sensible to say that the internet could not be invented in the current economic/social climate.
It wasn’t a giant coordinated thing that needed decades of patience. It was the epitome of an iterative project that involved stitching university systems together as the opportunity arose.
Do we lack the vision for such big projects? Absolutely. Is it only the current generation's fault? Absolutely not. This is very widespread.
> They don't have the attention span or the culture for it.
I'd argue there is almost _no_ technical culture whatsoever. It is basically "trending on HN" and comment section discourse. This is a massive problem and contributes to the shoddy state of a lot of software nowadays.
Or you could just not make broad generalizations about different generations. Which is preferable.
I don't blame anyone, every step down this path has seemed like a good idea at the time, eh?
It seems like we are overcoming an AI winter, using the same technologies that was deemed infeasible 20 years ago.
When I did competitive programming 20 years ago. I would somewhat jokingly say that I would want to write and AI to solve all the problems. Our mentor laughed it of clearly not considering it even feasible – today ChatGPT would like outperform a highschool competitive programming competition.
We probably needed to look away from that generations presumptions in order to leap frog on some of these technologies.
Google did it first. You input a search string, find results on first or second attempt and then copy and paste the code.
At best, Googling StackOverflow gets me one function, but only if I know the right keywords and it is short. ChatGPT, I can (and have!) given it example data and said "make a python script to parse this", and it not only gives me code, not only does it work, but when I ask it to extend this to do more or differently, the changes also work coherently with the previous results. For example: https://github.com/BenWheatley/Studies-of-AI/blob/main/codin...
Why was people's excitement allowed to trump data integrity? Are there not enough adults in the room to stop this from happening again?
Filesystems has been available for much longer than MongoDB. Using that as a database and having requirements changed to a relational database would be the same without anything about the filesystem being a fad.
However, most people don't seem to realize that Excel spreadsheets are rather poor databases... they're the _real_ issue.
Excel spreadsheets are terrible as databases and are also terrible as a file format for sending database records.
Its pretty obscure and arcane for the rules of read/write ordering on Linux/Windows systems and filesystems. You've got FILE* fwrites interacting with mmap regions, and locks don't exactly do what you think in Linux.
In both Linux / Windows, you end up needing to create a Filesystem mutex of some kind (Linux flock, Windows Mutex). Then, and only then, is it really safe to read or write to a file.
Lets say Bob's money in an ATM is being held in your "database" (be it a file, or SQL database, or whatever).
Thread#1: Depositing money --------------
int bob_balance = readfile();
bob_balance += 100; // Add 100 to Bob's account.
writefile(bob_balance);
int bob_balance = readfile();
bob_balance -= 100; // Add 100 to Bob's account.
writefile(bob_balance);
Lets say Bob started with X-dollars. What is Bob's value of his account after Thread#1 and Thread#2 run concurrently?
More than likely, Bob's account is either X, X-100, or X+100. But under the worst case scenario, a full corruption of Bob's account value could happen. If Bob's account straddles across a filesystem boundary, like across 4096 hard drive cluster or something, then the "writefile" itself could be corrupted and interleaved between the two threads.
There's a web-bias in the discussion. Database here is innately concurrent, such as when you and I submit a comment to this webpage (Hacker News), the ordering of our submissions are ill specified and effectively random.
A proper database organizes the data (ex: PostgreSQL) so that its in a form that's well defined.
This is true for even the smallest of web servers. Concurrency and concurrent access is fundamental to web applications today. I know PHP has access to raw files if you ever wanted them, but its definitely a dangerous proposition to be doing raw file access on web apps. There's just too much risk of data corruption.
But yes it'd be awful doing this with files.
It’s trivially solvable and it never results in complete DB corruption by getting the ordering wrong.
The working approaches aren't so obvious to users unfamiliar with the details of Postgres. People think they have full ACID, and it's not apparent that rows and uniqueness constraints are magically transaction-safe while aggregates are not. If you're following the usual advice of schema normalization, you will get something with race conditions.
Postgres is still my favorite DBMS regardless. Maybe there can be a clearer way to advise users.
Of course they work fine. You’re getting hung up in optimizing for scale when you’re already way beyond solving the two threads one file issue.
You know, like if you and I make a comment at the same time here on Hacker News, the server's hard drive has to serialize the data so that all the other readers can handle it.
- do not need or do concurrent anything
- do not need any form of transactions
- do only need some simple key value(blob) store
- are as ad-hoc scripts written in e.g. bash, making it just easier to access the file system for this
Sure most use cases do not fit this and should not use the file system.
I guess a lot of people have been bitten really painfully by MongoDB misbehaving int the past.
At the same time people generally understand that for most use-cases the fs isn't a good database and if they use it anyway they put the blame on themself as they did knew better.
Through I mean I have seen projects use the filesystem as a database successfully. Mainly in context of some initially ad-hoc versions of special purpose tooling written in bash or similar which worked surprisingly well for initial usage and long term anyway had to be rewritten (then normally not using bash and often using sqlite in rare cases postgres).
I see it all the time as well, the MongoDB example is far from the only case. This industry fetishes anything that's new and if it turns out to be a bad idea you can always get another job with a shiny new technology on your resume.
SQL has a problem, less of technical nature but more of organizational/knowledge transfer nature.
I have spent way to much time in discussions about schema, SQL types, SQL library usage and anything ORMs. Also a lot of hidden gotchas, like A LOT. Through most aren't really hidden it's more like people somehow having major knowledge gaps without realizing it. Like not understanding isolation levels and therefor misunderstanding which guarantees a transaction provides. Or somehow fundamentally rejecting that you design an application with a specific transaction level in mind and changing it later is non trivial, potentially to a point of making the change infeasible. Or pointless discussions about integer sizing and signing and the docent different ways you could map a unsiged 16bit number to SQL. Or people not understanding row/column locks. Or getting bitten by upserts not allowing upserting the same (compound)key twice in the same statement in some dbs. Or ...
Well I'm kinda feed up. But I still had way worse experiences with Mongo (but that was ~8? years ago).
It's also complicated out of necessity. A relational DBMS is doing a lot of things people maybe take for granted or don't realize they need.
I think NoSQL was the natural next step after ORMs, which are also used in a lot of places they shouldn't.
It all looked impressive the first few days, but the novelty wore off quite quickly.
Also, when an actual disruptive new technology is first invented, jumping on it and trying to do something with it is both trendy and arguably rational, but this is a relatively rare occurrence.
We didn't leap-frog our predecessors presumptions, we built exactly what many envisioned but were unable to put to fruition with the computers of their time.
It took 2 generations time for computers to improve enough that it became feasible. And also a huge unexpected discovery about 20 years ago, that you can pre-train a neural network and cost your costs by an order of magnitude.
Basically this piece is just saying "the dominant (read: popular) culture in tech companies is bad" and they all have basically slight variations on this bad culture.
Lemmings as a construct perhaps. Naive social media obsessed teens perhaps.
Kind of ironic for the innovation industry to just be a bunch of followers chasing whatever's popular huh.
Strongly disagree with this statement. It's currently linked to those things, but popular culture from even 300 years ago was not inherently linked to consumerism at all. It was more rooted in songs and stories that were performed and shared in relatively public spaces like taverns, schools and churches. What changed has mostly stemmed from the advent of the printing press and the subsequent creation of copyright laws.
Nowadays popular culture is linked to consumerism, but that's because new cultural content is treated strictly as a product first and a common point of reference second. We have created these perverse economic incentives that have wreaked absolute havoc on the creative commons, which for the vast majority of human history included essentially all of "popular culture".
> The “Pop” in “Pop Culture” stands for “popularity”. If it’s popular then it must be right.
No -- popular culture is simply what is currently popular.
The popular culture could value novelty and uniqueness -- inherently "unpopular" things. That's not the case today, but it fits the definition of pop culture.
As an “older,” I’ve encountered this exact attitude.
Really uplifting.
As a positive, it pissed me off enough, to “drop out,” and lean into early retirement.
I spent the majority of my career at the antithesis of “pop culture,” which was a 100-year-old Japanese company.
I am grateful for the lessons and habits I got, there.
Plenty of stuff that they did wrong, but they also did a lot of stuff right.
Same here. I was frustrating to watch young engineers insist on ignoring well-established knowledge only to go out and make mistakes that cost the company 6 to 8 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe more. And they were warned about the very things that happened during design reviews.
Two examples (without getting into identifiable details):
A complex mechanical assembly intended for challenging thermal and dynamic (vibration) environment. After studying the design I told the 20-something mechanical engineer the approach she took to the distribution of loads would fail instantly. This was done professionally, one-on-one and without any "attitude", to use the term. Her response: "I have a Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, I think I know what I am doing.".
Six months later the assembly, quite literally, exploded during the vibration test. Even after that she still refused to listen to my recommendations. This joke easily cost the company a million dollars and six months of wasted effort. If you consider this in the context of the larger project, the cost and delays could have been an order of magnitude greater.
Second example. A EE designing a board to drive a bunch of LEDs. Again, 20-something. If I remember correctly, the board had 15 independent channels. He executed this as what I call "datasheet design". He picked a switched-mode LED driver, used the circuit from the datasheet with little modification and stuffed the board with 15 of these circuit blocks.
The board ends-up having hundreds of components, it bigger than what we wanted and complexity/reliability/RFI were of concern. After studying this I had a meeting with him and explained that we could use an analog circuit with somewhere around four components per channel to drive the LEDs with excellent efficiency. The board would shrink to 1/4 the size, use 80% less components, have a less intense RF signature, etc.
In this particular case, he actually laughed at me and said something like "Are you crazy? Everyone knows linear drive of LEDs is the most inefficient thing you can do". Of course, this is precisely the kind of thing a book-smart engineer who just copies circuits from datasheets would say. Not only is this not true, it is ridiculously easy math to show how you can build efficient LED drivers in the analog domain with just a few components (hint: control the power supply voltage with an efficient switched-mode regulator set to a precise voltage based on the LED string Vf range).
Once again, this design was implemented. It caused untold problems in the context of the greater project, all of which required mitigation in some form.
I don't know what it is. When I was a 20-something engineer I was eager to listen to and work with the older engineers. I learned more this way than I can possibly describe. Not just about engineering, about life.
At my company, in Tokyo, there were job titles you couldn't get, until you reached a certain chronological age. Would not be possible, here in the US.
Sometimes, I look at some of these Jurassic-scale meltdowns, and ask myself "Were there any adults in the room, when this idea was discussed? Even a minimally-experienced geek could have foreseen most of these problems."
Of course, it's a trick question. The answer is, inevitably, "No."
A common problem in contemporary culture is a disregard for history, which can be seen not only in startup companies and the technology industry, but throughout society as a whole. During times of significant change, it is common for people to believe that they are much more intelligent and advanced than previous generations, who they may view as ignorant or backward. As the consequences of the revolution inevitably become clear, when the revolution turns on its children, people often begin to appreciate the positive aspects of the past and recognize that revolutions are usually not the solution you want (for the exact same reason why you usually don't want to rewrite a huge software project).
Let us hope that the current period of revolution is coming to an end.
Let us hope that the current need of revolution is coming to an end. FTFY
One time there is a person who wants a system rewritten, because of some perceived complexity. The original builders who built the system from the ground up is still actively maintaining it, but there is no attempt to understand whether the perceived complexity is incidental or essential, which in fact most of them are the latter. Some people just want things to fit their world.
But, on the bright side, there are people who just don't know history, but they would be happy to learn. There's a hopeful number of those people!
> The “Pop” in “Pop Culture” stands for “popularity”. If it’s popular then it must be right.
And that's social media simplified. The internet is filled with pop-seeking garbage because pop was the best metric anyone could fathom. Even now the AI's are struggling to reach for a better version of "right".
But more to the author's point, yes, modern tech startups and their funders are absolutely obsessed with being trendy, even moreso than an 80's teenager (a lot of the big players were 80's teenagers, btw).
It's not AIs that are struggling to find a better version of "right", it's people building AIs.
[Edit: and Beauty are the automatic YC front page spots?]
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1. ▲ Everything we know about 'Outer Banks' Season 2
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The former is a little Lindy. The latter is ready for paradigm shifts. Ideal is if you don't choose based on age.
But I'll say something contrary: neither of these things matter in technology. The layoffs are good for the firms that 2xed in the pandemic. The kubernetes is survivable or beneficial.
"a system or group of people who practice excessive devotion to a figure, object, or belief system, typically following a charismatic leader"
https://study.com/learn/lesson/cult-characteristics-types-be...
Let's say as a company you need money. Money comes from investors and/or customers. Customers or (especially) investors may want you to make "modern" software using "modern" technology. Developers (especially the young talented ones you can afford) are also attracted to modern tech for rational ($£€) reasons.
So you can ignore that, and miss out on money and talent and thus maybe success. Or you can take the easier route and do what everyone else is doing.
We could have a system where companies don't do layoffs, and workers sit on 50% of board seats, and democracy in the workplace is standard.
I wonder how many majority shareholders truly want the billions of dollars in stock that comes with that, knowing that their wealth deprives countless thousands/millions of people of their opportunity. Would they be ok with a different kind of corporate structure? Something like a cooperative where management and the CEO are elected by workers, and difference in pay doesn't exceed perhaps 10:1?