An alternative cause for the Great Stagnation: the cargo cult company
shyamsankar.com
shyamsankar.com
Web or even desktop apps these days really pale in comparison.
Their design consultant whined about how the lack of white space made the interface "unreadable and, hence, unusable" but, when I left, the ops team took me out to a bar for all I could drink and their manager drove me home.
These all need to be designed and built differently.
Sure, of course you can.
I wonder how much productivity is lost looking at spinners on single-page apps, and clicking around web interfaces instead of modifying files.
I really feel that when I do my accounting. These 1-3 second delays between pages add up to a lot.
They're easier on the eyes, I've been looking to buy one but don't know anyone who tried them firsthand
https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/17ggzdc/my_dasung_mon...
If that’s how we’re spinning it, forget the spinners and text editors altogether. Bring back the quill pen; surely it will restore many salaries!
But the writers and managers want clicky buttons and drop down menus, so here we all are. Article definitely hit a chord for me.
[1] Yes! Asciidoc is quite capable of acting like a CCMS . . if that's something you genuinely need. Component Content is another culty idea, something that really shouldn't be used for very much - if anything - but management acts like it's the second coming. And the effups it can (and probably will) introduce are colossal.
Yesterday I was testing generating audio files for glossary pages. It took an hour, because it's just another function called by the static dite generator. "For every word in this context, call the text to speech API". So elegant!
It's funny you should mention that. Year before last was the first year I decided to itemize every single expenditure. I did it using quickbooks, and it was a nightmare. It only took one time to decide never to do that again.
This year I itemized everything using beancount in emacs, and it's incredible how much easier it is to handle everything. Even having to download each bank period as a CSV and run it through a python script, I've just had a better time doing it and am able to more flexibly handle and analyze my finances.
I have yet to find out whether I can easily work with an accountant using ofx files exported from this setup though
This involves a lot of clicking around and a lot of network delays. They recently improved the UI but it's still slower than it should be.
The older I get, the more I understand graybeards and their command line workflows. Once it's committed to muscle memory, it's like a sharp knife in the hands of a chef.
Great games have amazing interfaces -- they let you do very complex tasks very quickly. They often take longer to learn than the standard GUI app, but so does the Costco text app, and it's a trade off worth making. Can that trickle down to the 8-hour-a-day type apps like the Costco screenshot?
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/24/rise_and_fall_of_cua/
So, the industry traded being able to walk up and use a thing in the first 30 seconds for having it be painfully bad after the first 30 minutes.
People like to say, “oh, but power users are rare”. That’s only true if you count users that bounce after 29 minutes the same as users that use the software more than once.
Huh, didn’t consider that power users being rare meant the software makes becoming a power user difficult.
But it needs to be rock-solid or it'll become a glorified unreliable voice control.
When you need to make a bunch peasants into soldiers on short notice, the equation is different.
They were in the process of replacing it with a web application when I left. Nobody I talked to could explain why.
The stupid self-checkout things... clunky, inaccurate, awful touchscreen calibrations, flag needlessly for "help" automatically. Whoever wrote those systems should feel bad for what they produced. I can't imagine that in the long term, they've helped the store save money or save anyone time.
As a young kid, I learned to use an AS/400 system and got fast at it quickly. I did a ton of data entry for my father's company. It felt so accurate and fast in comparison to the UI garbage today.
First, you need more POS stations, because customers are not as fast as trained/experienced cashiers/baggers. So you need more machines to serve the same volume. That cost might be worth the lower labor costs.
But those extra stations also consume space. Picture a Walmart that dedicates one entire edge of each store to a row of checkout lines. It's easy to imagine that 10% of their public floor space is devoted to that function. If it takes 50% longer to self-checkout, you might need 50% more floor space to handle the same volume of purchases. That's not completely accurate because stores don't convert all their checkout lines. But you get the point.
I have noticed that most places compensate for the space requirements by drastically compressing the space for a station. No more conveyor belts. No more funneling customers throught a gauntlet of magazines and chewing gum. They might replace 4 checkout registers with 10 self serve stations. In many ways this can be better for the customer but worse for the business. There's a lot of money to be made in all that merchandise immediately surrounding checkout stands. Even the endcaps on the aisles closest to the checkout lines are worth special attention for maximizing sales. Losing this hurts the business.
I'd be curious to see the results of rigorous studies. In the meantime, as a customer, I like the self checkout stations.
I'd be super curious to see things completely flipped on their head. I'd like to see a grocery store where you walk through aisles that have only one item per SKU on the shelves and you point your phone at the qr code to "buy" one. The store app lets you indicate how many of that item you want. In the back room you have robots feeding your items up to a boxing station. In the time it takes you to walk to your car after pushing "Finalize and Pay" your order is waiting at the will call loading dock as you drive through.
No shoplifting losses, dramatically lower security costs, better and cheaper inventory management... A long list of benefits. And of course an offsetting list of increased costs. For example: smaller sales floor requirements, huge loading dock requirements.
I mean, this is HN, why do people still go to the grocery store instead of using a delivery app? Price? Browsing an app is slow? Item availability? Time? The app sucks? Orders always come wrong?
The grocery store offers an old fashioned produce section so I can hand pick a pear that isn't bruised by a robot.
And all the reasons you list.
Part of the beauty, though, is that it becomes obvious to offer both. Developing in-store system puts you 90% of the way to having shop-from-anywhere abilities. Developing shop-from-anywhere puts you 85% of the way to having in-store shopping without shopping carts.
In the US, there used to be a store like this back in the 80s-90s called Service Merchandise
They weren't supposed to. They were supposed to divert money away from checkout staff and towards the company making and servicing the terminals.
(Is my cynical streak showing? ;) )
modern self-checkout machines and touchscreen POSes are perfect examples of heaping more layers of abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction on top of a simple underlying system that really didn't need all those abstractions, but they sure look fancier and apparently that's all that matters, productivity be damned.
*That being said, I just realized I sound like the professor in my AutoCAD class who insisted that the way he learned AutoCAD (all keyboard commands) was better as we all happily clicked around.
Slowness of the interface aside, you just have to do the whole ceremony for some simple don't forget/think of it later note.
And it would probably take less than half of the development time for desktop than for the original terminal app, although the web version would probably take longer. And it would automatically come with a lot modern goodies like real databases and networks that don't fail.
People just don't do it.
People who judge software by the chrome and how recently 1.0 was released are the epitome of fools.
Anyone who thinks the world hasn’t progressed since the 1970’s and they personally have the secret for success are either delusional or grifting you.
[1] https://developer.gs.com/blog/posts/secdb-observability-jour...
Then they "upgraded" to an all-new, all-shiny Java enterprise app. And she was completely at sixes and sevens.
One of the things I learned about the corporate world was this: Management reserves the right to give you conflicting goals which must all be fulfilled as a condition of employment. It is the duty of the line worker, to resolve the conflict to the business's satisfaction.
In my mom's case the conflicting goals were "find the time to train on the new app" and "do NOT, under pain of termination, log into the system before hours, after hours, or during lunch or breaks".
It was only a few months after her retirement that the dementia started setting in. I blame that stupid insurance company, their stupid app, and their stupid policies for breaking my mom's brain. She spent the last few years of her career feeling like an incompetent idiot for not being able to do an immiserating job which, for all its warts, she could do just fine before. And once that was over and her pension was on lock, her brain just said "that's it. I'm done."
I don't have empirical evidence to know that this is the case. But it feels that way. And this is why I get assmad every time some BigTechCo completely flips the table and changes the UI on some app of theirs, "just 'cause".
(Fuck Instagram and their little popups: "We've moved/hidden that feature behind another menu. Check out the features we want you to use this month, because fuck what you want to do, we have KPIs to hit!")
So Costco is willing to accept a slower-ramp up period in exchange for longer term speed and efficiency, whereas companies which churn their employees care far more about initial discoverability and getting someone to be moderately capable very quickly.
My wife, a decade ago, worked at the transition of her pharmacy from when it was a local retail chain and then was purchased by one of the national chains. The local retail chain, which was a reasonably pleasant place to work for its employees, had a computer system that was an ancient DOS app like Costco uses, and when my wife would get a call from another employee on how to do something unusual in the system it was lots of "now hit tab three times, then Alt-F10 and select the glorbaldall from the drop-down and then two more tabs and then ctrl-shift-S and enter the frazzlematazz" and the new company was hellish towards their employees and had a slick new web interface with lots of menu options so you could eventually find what you needed without the keyboards, but you could never get to be as fast as my wife was on the older system.
It's far, far, far from just ERP either. In publications standards, we see this all the time, and as a proportion of cost/value[1], it's even worse than the ERP disasters.
[1] Of course, that might be because no one really has a way to quantify how much documentation is actually worth.
Today, "modern" means slow, with large attack surface; often broken on arrival and thus requiring constant "updates"
This article is all over the place. It's written in a very confident and attention-grabbing style but lacks clarity and concreteness - especially so for an article criticizing abstraction!
The quote above is the closest I could find to an interesting thesis. I would restate the argument as:
1. SaaS companies optimize for revenue
2. The buyers of SaaS are undiscerning and will buy convoluted SaaS products even if the software doesn't actually improve worker productivity
3. Therefore economic growth has slowed because so much talent goes into SaaS which builds products that no one needs.
It's an interesting argument and I'm sure there's some truth to it. But surely the article would be better if it focused on supplying evidence for the incentive mismatch in #2 and showing that the magnitude is large enough to cause #3, rather than throwing out ambiguous and condescending claims about Covid, consultants, cargo cults. The core concept of "decision advantage" is not even defined, and seems to be borrowed from military terminology.
Having said that, it would be awesome if everyone stopped cargo culting on the backs of cargo cult analogies. The number of blog entries and articles describing South Pacific cargo cults, and using it to describe any and all follow-the-leader, copy-paste behaviours is...well it's painfully ironic.
It was successful in drawing in my attention initially , but by focusing on that so much it leaves me thinking about how the article arguably isn’t describing a cargo cult. It ultimately comes across as slightly clunky sales copy for Palantir.
Everyone getting into AI? Well, you see there was a tribe in the South Pacific that saw planes bring supplies... People adopting agile methodologies? Well the planes would bring supplies and they thought if they just copied the behaviours...
People (and people in the aggregate in the form of orgs) try to copy what they see the "winners" doing. In this case, an uncountable number of viral blog posts have somehow used some South Pacifican tribe as the basis for some profound lesson, exponentially yielding another crop of bloggers talking about cargo cults, rinse and repeat.
How's it ironic?
Eventually, some country is going to realize a piece of software is essentially a utility and letting some private company keep a sector of the economy in it's grasp prevents progress and it'll be nationalized.
everything in China already was nationalizes and they've been trying to give some , mostly fictious freedom.
we're talking and socialism and European compromises.
it's really weird you think we're talking about China.
I assumed we were not talking about the U.S. (and to a lesser degree European countries) since nationalization of the private industry is anathema to these countries. To be sure though I know nothing about nationalization sentiments in Europe these days.
they were never independent to begin with. you have a naive comparison and force it uncritically into this conversation.
This is highly ironic.
I was replying to your second paragraph. But on Oracle: I don't like Oracle very much, but you'd be wrong to think that the jump into relational databases on commodity hardware wasn't massively facilitated by Oracle. We aren't all renting mainframes in the cloud right now in a large part down to Oracle's advances in the last quarter of the 20th century. Oracle is still the world's third-largest tech company. That means what it does, even today, is extremely valuable.
Not going to refute that, but what is that value really? Database software is readily available for free, so there's actually very little value in just the software right? Is it the stability of the product? Support? Just the big name behind it? Those are probably part of it.
The software may be beneficial, but the siphoning off of "profit" only benefits the company owners. It's friction. That's not to say it's bad.
I once had a conversation with a reasonably successful investor. I tried to point out that he didn't contribute anything and get lectured on how hard he works to pick good investments. I really had to spell it out - the money comes from a transaction between the company and its customers. The customer gets something and the company gets money. The money pays for the employees who make the things or provide the service or whatever. Profit goes to the owners/investors but it really does nothing for the people who actually provide something or pay for that something. There was a time when a company issued shares to raise money, and those investors actually did something for the company. Every trader since then is simply trying to profit on what those before them did while offering zero value in the actual transactions making money for the company.
I'm not saying that's bad, its how the system works today and it seems to work reasonably well. But lets not pretend the "profit" isn't friction between the parties involved in the transactions that lead to that profit.
That's not rent seeking.
SaaS companies are quite literally charging rent for the use of software. Presumably that software does something of value, so they call it a "service" so people can feel like they're getting something for their money.
You're paying for the use of something (software) not a service. I can rent a U-Haul by the day (rent) or I can pay for the use of some software by the day (rent). Calling the use of software a "service" was just a fancy way to disguise what's really happening to make it sound more acceptable.
More to the point, rent seeking involves taking money for something that provides no additional value in return, usually because you have a monopoly on something that isn't related to the service you charge for.
For example, you own the land so you charge for passage, without building a road or giving back anything or investing any of that money back to create wealth. That makes almost 0 sense for most software corporations. Sure, they might not be profitable but SaaS is basically the opposite since you get the service or a value out of the service directly, and if you don't, there's no reason to pay for it .
I can't think of a lot of cases where a SaaS product is more or less "forced" on you to the point where you continue paying for something that doesn't provide you value. Rent seeking isn't profit seeking.
That's not rent seeking either. Look up rent seeking and see if it means "charging for the thing you sell or lease". I don't think you'll find that.
It made sense when it was coined; it's not like that was the day before yesterday. (Can't recall for sure, but I'm guessing Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations.)
Accounting really loved the predictable expense, and it was easy for us to scale price with activity, so our customers paid less during slow months or as user count fluctuated.
We even had a competitor which was about our size nearly go bankrupt, as their customers weren't interested in the .Net rewrite they had spent 2 years on, opting to keep the old version rather than buying the new, but functionally very similar, version.
So it's not clear cut IMHO.
And Satya has a big investment he needs paid off. Had Satya's statements come from an economist or other it might be a little more believable.
> It is symptomatic of an engineer who doesn’t understand the underlying problem and tries to pattern match to get at the solution.
Pattern matching is absolutely the correct thing to do for most situations because it is rare that anything new is necessary. Almost all of engineering is a reflection of business processes and business has the same mode: a new business process is most of the time pieces of old processes rearranged.
> But when the abstraction isn’t tethered to empirical results or anything measurable and falsifiable, the abstraction is just an obfuscation, a cargo cult ritual.
That's not a problem with the abstraction that's a problem with observability. Abstractions are insanely useful both pragmatically and otherwise. O11y is often the last thing considered, if it's even implemented at all.
I'll also go on to say that it's interesting that the stagnation problem is framed in such a way. Software is a tool, not a product. It's going to take a product or class of products to fundamentally change the direction of growth and innovation. For all we know AI might even be it, contrary to the author's contrary.
So maybe the “cargo cult” is the ruthless pursuit of profit, as opposed to regular reinvestment in the firm. Companies are incentivized to optimize productivity rather than grow it, as every dollar saved is a dollar to take out of the economic cycle and put into the investor’s pocket.
Didn’t corporate tax rates plummet appropriately at the same rate that computer technology exploded? That seems to me to be important, to the point that I’m not sure we’ve got the right culprit here.
They seek growth instead of profit, and run unprofitable until then and burn investment cash hoping for a big payout, and when that big payout doesn't happen you get the big crash and layoffs...
Additionally the profit incentive is in direct conflict with the productivity goal, as additional profit may not arise as a result of additional productivity, given the cost of pursuit.
And while yes, big tech firms may have pursued growth, correctly so, many existing firms did not, and I didn’t think we were limiting our discussion to the tech industry, and we can be sure those tech firms have since shifted gears.
It gets invested into companies that doesn't make profit yet. Where did you think investment capital comes from? So profits is the company paying it forward, the company lived off investments at the start and later pay that forward in the form of profits to build new companies via investments.
> It’s redistributed to various yacht companies and the like.
Only a tiny part of profits goes to luxury consumption, rich people generally don't consume a lot relative to how much they have, otherwise they wouldn't continue to get richer.
An entrepreneur provides a resource, I wouldn’t deny that, but every other resource has a price. Why does entrepreneurial effort get to be uncapped? Shouldn’t it have a price too, a specific value, tied to what it gives a business?
Nobody loans money to risky startups, that sort of agreement isn't a good fit for risky ventures since the risk is high and the payout is low. Profit sharing is how they can get money to start making profits.
The problem here is the agreement is uncapped, leading to things like a preference for additional profits over additional productivity.
No, you don't promise to pay anything back, you promise to give them a share of the profits, no profits means you don't have to pay anything. When you take a loan you promise to pay it back, profit sharing doesn't come with such a promise.
> The problem here is the agreement is uncapped, leading to things like a preference for additional profits over additional productivity.
It is uncapped because otherwise nobody would give you any money. If you want peoples money you need to give them a good reason to give it to you, and sharing a fraction of the profits you make is the only thing you can give them to make it worth it to them to give you money.
If you have a very stable business idea with no risks, then some people would be willing to give you a loan. But that doesn't cover most startups. Instead you have to sell a share of your profits.
The question was how to spur productivity growth, and I think an answer involves looking at the conflicting nature of profit motives. I don’t know what the answer is, but I think looking there will be more fruitful than blaming technology, based on my limited exposure to classical economics.
Selling a part of your future profits is not a loan. That is your made up definition.
It is impossible to discuss with you if you change the meaning of words like this to suit your own views.
It's not "redistributed". There aren't parental figures just apportioning money as they see fit. People are spending money on what they find valuable. Partly that's on the firm. Partly that's on salaries, particularly in places where creating competitors is easy and the incentives are good for people to want to take that risk. Partly on maintenance and the like. Then a chunk of the next lot must be given to the government or directors will be locked in jail. Finally, out of what's left, comes the money you're talking about. That can be reinvested, or pulled out. It doesn't "disappear".
You're doing a trick of pretending that an example that's been successfully countered wasn't just an example, but the only thing in question. Obviously CEOs spend on various things, as do we all.
> in order to maximally spur overall economic innovation and productivity
If I buy a Mars Bar I'm not putting my money into what's going to maximally spur overall economic innovation and productivity. You're creating a ludicrously high bar for their spending, that you're now pretending is all on yachts and cars, to clear - one which most people's spending also wouldn't clear, if we even knew what would clear it.
Uhh . . . first it pays the bills allowing the company to keep running, including your salary. Then the rest goes to shareholders, where it does things like power your 401(k) or if you're really old, your pension fund. Which then allows you to do nice things like retire someday.
I would guess that in a profitless world there would be something different than a 401k for retirement. Humans can exist without profits.
Of course - and they did for a long time. But they couldn't have anything that couldn't be scratched out of the soil.
It’s an old story, an individual or group of individuals becomes greedy and consumes enough resources to finally destabilize their society. A new society is born, people are afforded a new opportunity, for whatever reason a person or a small group of people gains an advantage, and then the cycle repeats. I think the question is how to shift incentives to break the cycle, while getting buy in from the stakeholders that are currently running it.
There’s been some ideas around potentially how to do this, one suggestion is changing quarterly reporting to annual reporting for public companies, but then this limits visibility into public companies even further and creates a new set of problems. Then there’s the idea of getting rid of public companies, but I’m not sure that would actually result in the outcome people imagine. Finally there’s talks about wealth tax, which could work but really is more of a stick than a carrot, and has been met with a lot of hostility. So we have what we have and hopefully someone figures it out before the cycle restarts.
In an economic sense, profit occurs when an enterprise produces goods & services more valuable than its input costs.
Such economic profit is always desirable- whether it’s made by a private corporation, state owned enterprise or government department.
An economically unprofitable enterprise is a burden to its customers, owners or both.
In economic terms profit would be reduced.
> That's still profit. It's just the profit is paid as dividends to workers.
How is that not dividends?
The persistent existence of surplus revenue implies the excess of resource production over resource consumption i.e profit.
However, if this sharing is involuntary it's likely the true cost of labour is higher it first appears. For example, bankers' bonuses and engineers' stock options are important parts of labour cost for the relevant enterprises.
In the one you describe, then the employees would profit more, unless they too have minimum costs equal to revenue.
Fortunately, humans have real minimum operational costs close to zero, and can live for a long time off a handful of dollars a day.
Alternatively, accounting hasn't kept up with the realities of the world. Profit today isn't measurable just in terms of the exchange of tangible items. Actors also seek to profit by way of other intangible things like, most notably, attention; something old-school accounting doesn't account for.
Maximal profit makes as much sense as ever, but maximal profit as it shows up on the books using traditional accounting methods may not.
Makes you wonder what significant financial and economic changes happened in the early ‘70s to cause that.
The analogy of cargo cult companies vividly illustrates the pitfalls of prioritizing abstractions and financial metrics over tangible solutions and innovations. This approach has not only stifled genuine innovation but has also diverted attention and resources away from sectors that are crucial for sustainable economic growth and competitiveness on the global stage.
Seems like you are criticizing profit seeking rather than tech.
It feels good to hear someone up high say the quiet part I’ve suspected may be true out loud.
It would necessarily imply basically every serious attempt at measuring economies, and valuing the activities taking place therein against inflation, is fundamentally, terribly wrong, by absolutely massive amounts. Now, those are hard tasks and there are many opportunities for flaws and biases, but many people around the world have devoted serious efforts to understanding and correcting for them, and the consensus is very much Not That.
The official definitions make no sense. "The ratio between volume of inputs and outputs."
What does that even mean? More stuff? More clicks? More eyeballs? More sales? More disposable income? More wealth disparity? (That last one being the real meaning, IMO.)
The subtext seems to be that OP believes CEOs are visionaries and he'll repeat whatever they say uncritically. Which is a good example of a cargo cult attitude.
It turns out Nadella and the writer are dead wrong, even if you use the official economic definitions.
The writer didn't bother to check this. He believed a simplistic narrative that appealed to his preconceptions without bothering to check the ground truth.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Illustration-on-Real-GDP...
How could you *possibly say this !?!
It is literally the definition of not having to break ones back to feed their family!
The problem is, we have allowed our money supply to become manipulated so that inflation can capture the productivity increases to those controlling the money supply instead of to those producing the output.
I post this wherever I see this argument, as someone else has done the work to CLEARLY show the data that shows where the output goes:
GDP and wages can both easily be adjusted for inflation.
We can then measure and see that with inflation, while GDP continued to grow in real terms, all median worker wage increases were offset by inflation.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
What does this mean? It means that in 1971, creating a purely FIAT currency with unrestricted ability to devalue it, gave those in charge the ability to move all productivity gains from the wage earner to the capital owner.
And as the data points out, at no point has there been even a smidgen of release of the pressure on the wage earners throat to allow them at those productivity gains.
Any income gain a "median" worker can ever hope to achieve is more and more exclusively tied to not earning that income via a wage.
This basically defines where our housing and other speculation bubbles are coming from, and shows that people fundamentally know this and are trying to escape the rat race of being employees if they ever hope to build wealth.
Perhaps the two are more closely related than OP realises?
And I think "cult of personality" CEOs typically end up as the outliers here (on both sides of the spectrum) as they're better at withstanding pressure from external forces (Wall Street, dumb industry trends). But the flip-side is if they've got a garbage business ideology or are frauds they're just ruining lives and setting money on fire.
https://www.employamerica.org/blog/it-wasnt-ai-how-fiscal-su... the endogenous growth story isn't as "fun" but much simpler: until we 'run out of workers', there is no reason to make anything more productive, and tech will be, at best, messing around with useless vanity stuff.
Labor force participation took a major hit during the pandemic worldwide and has not recovered; population growth is limited, and workers are harder to find than they’ve been. Obviously there remain opportunities to use workers overseas, but barriers to that remain or are even rising (usually political barriers - free trade is not popular right now - and even ocean shipping is hit by the near-war conditions of the Middle East).
Sounds like a prime time to make things more productive, at least in most western economies?
Think about the old meme that the smartest people are focused on increasing ad click through rates. Imagine a world where they could instead be focused on something useful.
I can’t say there has been any new tech that has made me excited or changed my life. Best I can come up with is turning on/off my lights with my phone, but even that is old AF already
"Computers"
It also doesn't really make sense that "great leaders" is a solution.
There's also a final recommendation to "exclusively work backwards from decision advantage" which might be good advice depending on what they actually mean (well, not the "exclusively" part, but I don't think that's meant literally), but not really to do with great leaders.
I think this must be a marketing piece by a management consultant (it's packed full of tropes and cliches)... and could kindof appeal to some C*O who is confounded by the technology their company uses and this could let them imagine themselves as a "great leader" by making more efficient use of software by "working backwards from decision advantage."
That wearing a mask and getting vaccinated was good advice?
That the internet is full of malicious people trying to discredit experts giving sensible advice just for their own profit and fame?
Maybe I'm remembering the pandemic differently than the author.
> To say the quiet part out loud: the OODA loop is all about the human. Technology serves humans. Instead, we have cargo cult companies such that the mere acquisition of architecturally-ordained technology is perceived to be the solution.
The first time I came across this basic thesis was back in maybe 2000ish? Or a few years later. There was a great article about an author who was whiteboarding out a solution, and the architect wrote this phrase, "Configuration data will be stored in XML" (the title of the article).
Their company was involved more in the supply and distribution of COVID vaccines, based on data collection of COVID metrics. The experts he may be referring to are the ones who were painting an inaccurate representation of COVID case distribution. Political messaging shadowed the reality of case distributions by region—inaccurate reporting of COVID cases due to a lack of pipeline and procedures for data collection.
In this scenario, the "experts" would be individuals ignoring the reality of the data collected and making decisions based on other motivations.
Sure, but had steam engines not been put over coal mines they wouldn’t have been refined to the point of propelling themselves [1]. It didn’t matter to contemporaneous productivity; it definitely mattered to it in the future.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
Sounds right on the money
And of course it has to be the latest bells and whistles without questioning why is it even there. Or how it can serve the company and not the way around.
Uhh... smartphones? Shale oil? EVs? AI? Those alone are at a significantly higher (inflation adjusted) market cap than the entire S&P 500 in the 90s.
I don't buy this argument at all. We have seen massive real growth in the last 20 years.
And this is just factually incorrect.
> Intel’s road to ruin was when the CFO became the CEO and managed the business by the numbers and abstractions.
And I would argue investment in infrastructure (I know, hand-wavy term) would do better.
Everyone knows this is it. But everyone likes worker protections and environmental regulations so we pretend it’s not. But we know.
Remove those rules and TSMC’s AZ plant will be done yesterday and SpaceX’s Starship will fly more often.
We can dance around it but this is reality. All this other stuff is just window dressing.
My conclusion, while simplistic, points to an unfortunate mismatch between (1) our personal/subjective expectations to “progress”, (2) business management dogma, and (3) the shift from “enabling-progress” to “distribution-progress”.
1. When I mean by subjective expectations, is that as the article refers to, many of us (techies), carry expectations to what progress must be like, the flying cars, spaceships and robot friends. These are images put into our minds, and some of them are based on pure fantasy and others, on former scientific trends, and their extrapolations. Others again, from former and current influencers, using them to manipulate us. An initial step to better grasp whether we are stagnating, is to look at the “possibility-space” between what is fundamentally possible within the principles of known science, and see where we are dragging our feet. If we are missing progress in obvious areas, it may come down to economics, but most likely is is due to the lack of transitional/incremental investment opportunities with a sufficiently small risk/capital step size to allow for progress (on this i (2) ). We are not likely to get anti-matter worm-drives as the next iteration from SpaceX’s Starship, the step-size is simply too risky even if the physical principles are understood.
2. Since the mid-70s, the general business trend has been to take all business decisions based on a NPV/ROI, hereby assuming that we have sufficient knowledge about the outcome of an effort to estimate whether it is worth doing. Likewise, the frameworks of risk management are seldom able to manage uncertainty in imagination (i.e. the “unknown-unknowns”), forcing a decision bias towards preferring investments with known risks, that can be managed. Combining these management practices makes it basically impossible to allocate capital towards fundamental R&D, with no certain outcomes, and where the ROI can have an asymmetric upside, by opening up a completely new paradigm for business and progress. On top of this, “Venture” Capital, is not and have never been free from this type of management, the ventures are known (whaling, SoMe, or SaaS) the risk taken is that of successfully capturing market. They are not the vessels of progress, but distribution. We could also put our faith in the academic institutions, and government labs to bring about the future. But they too, have largely been funded according to the same model, but with a different incentive structure (think grants, citations, recognition) that also values controlled risk and predictable outcomes. As an aside, I remember one of the most productive professors at my old institute also said to apply for research funding for the already concluded project, and then use the money for the next project. That way he always had a perfect success rate, and could match the research project to budget, time and scope.
3. When I mean with the two types of progress, is that we perceive the invention of telephony as progress, in the systemic sense, now “it is”, but having a telephone in every home, that availability is certainly also progress, as it makes it useful “I have it”, and doubly so for network-effect products, where “you’ll have it too” matters, like the phone.
Of these types of progress, “enabling” naturally most precede “distribution”, but as a society we can gain great wealth from the latter, ignoring the first for quite a long time, before we realize something is “missing”. I think that is what has happened from the factors in (3) for the last 4-5 decades. Computers and IT have driven a massive distribution-progress, blinding us to the fact that enabling-progress was dwindling. And now, when the economy can’t hide the fact much longer, we start to discover that lack of “progress” in the subjective sense.
Interesting observation about a complete lack of economic growth (as corrected for inflation), but I'm not convinced that the Service as a Service industry is to blame; I think it's more of a symptom than the cause.
In this (some would say terminal) stage of capitalism in the West, we no longer focus on creating value -- the main objective seems to be extracting it instead. If every organization's goal is to turn their capital into more capital, what they actually do to achieve it is incidental. One could argue that a company of five thousand paper pushers milling around performing ineffective rituals is at least not causing any harm on balance (as compared to, say, arms manufacturers). Nevertheless, the current trend is to reap everything and sow nothing - somehow without the foresight to acknowledge the absolutely desolate desert this is creating.
One observation that caught my attention was the mention of the OODA loop. Access to information is a prerequisite for power - even if you don't have leadership privileges, being well informed empowers individual decision-making. All this corporate obfuscation disempowers people at all layers of the hierarchy. It makes for really ineffective organizations - sadly, this is absolutely acceptable now, because they don't need to be effective at anything other than temporarily grouping resources as an entity in the big consolidation shell game.
This has a lot to do with the scale of an organization, I think once a company grows beyond double digit headcount, things go downhill [1]
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172505 (I guess I like to harp on this subject)
But I disagree on one point: abstractions are not the problem. The lack of abstraction is what leads to opinionated frameworks like Ruby on Rails that obfuscate what's going on through magic like syntactic sugar without formally documenting the underlying abstractions. I work mostly in Laravel, which suffers from similar issues, but thankfully admits its flaws because it's written shamelessly in PHP. Frontend frameworks seem to mostly require the developer to drink the kool-aid because they don't even mention the determinism issues inherent to Javascript's async model and the various syntax hacks to emulate classes that diverge from its original conceptual simplicity. The same thing happened to PHP 5 when design-by-committee pass-by-reference classes were added, which broke its copy-on-write semantics and made it just like every other object-oriented frankenstein language.
No, the answer is to flip systems of control on their head and start talking to people at the bottom.
For example, Apple may never fix its external display support. I can't rely on my MacBook to wake up monitors, so sometimes it takes several minutes of plug and pray and even having to restart to get them to turn on. Or the other day, I discovered that mouse keys can't be enabled if the trackpad clicker is broken and tap to click is disabled. When you push command-option-(fn?)-f5 (a horrific keyboard shortcut), it brings up the modal to enable mouse keys, and you can tab through the options in an attempt to click the checkbox, but pressing return just closes the window. So a mouse is required to bypass the mouse. An astonishing oversight that was never fixed FOR YEARS.
At modern tech companies, there's nobody at the wheel, and there are no adults in the room. Yet FAANG has almost $1 trillion PER COMPANY. We get so mad at the government for squandering its trillions of our tax dollars on maintaining colonialism around the world, but meanwhile tech companies have vacuumed up all available capital so that we subsist on driving Uber to make rent.
I mean, I'm comfortable calling this. I think it's over, and we're into clear and present danger scenarios. I'm just so tired.
Basically the idea that your problems are your own, and the society (or government) has no responsibility to help people who are struggling for some reason.
This coupled with the ability to put debt burden onto people, one way or another, which enabled lot of rent seeking in the economy.
Today the 2 most popular articles are about javascript tools to generate a color palette..
I mean, aren't there more interesting things to talk about?
I submitted this, it got ignored: [1] (Chinese scientists make breakthrough in BCI-assisted rehabilitation trial, 'showing higher safety than Musk's Telepathy')
Transhumanism, gene selection/editing should be on everyone's mind, it'll shape the next civilization
The "great stagnation" is a political choice, it leads to interesting stuff happening elsewhere, while your group is left eating the junk food, it's an interesting paradox, almost like a bubble or a jail
this new software can be self-hosted or hosted on the company's servers, and we opted to try the self-hosted option out. it's been a complete nightmare. users have to wait 30 seconds or more after clicking "Submit" on a form before it gets submitted. form flows regularly get hung up or vanish completely.
right now, the software is using 24.2GB of RAM in IIS, and another 26.8GB for SQL Server, despite being used by only a few dozen users simultaneously—there is absolutely no excuse for this, in anything resembling a sane universe... but this is what we're stuck with for the time being. it's horrible. and the company who makes the software suggests we would get better performance if we went with their hosted option instead of self-hosting—as if that could somehow magically make this piece of utter shit run any better at all whatsoever.
but this is where things are right now with software: engineers who have no idea how to engineer things are building layers and layers of abstractions atop each other without giving a single shit about how well it all runs, or how many resources it consumes, or whether the entire functionality of the software you're building could be expressed several order of magnitude more simply by merely stepping back and reevaluating intended functionality and expressing it in code more directly than a billion layers of C# abstractions heaped on top of each other.
the funny (but sad) part is, many users, including some of my coworkers, think this is all completely normal, that such simple functionality must be difficult enough for modern computers to run, because their expectations have been set so low by contemporary software. people just don't care if a form takes 30 seconds to submit—maybe if it takes a full minute, then something might be wrong, but 30 seconds? to submit a form to an intranet web server? perfectly acceptable, why would that be a problem, they say.
I wish I could be more optimistic about the future of software but at this point it looks like we're kinda just fucked—nobody cares about making good software anymore, and most people have no idea how good, fast, and useful software could be if it was just written a slightly different way than we're taught in college.