Hacker News Reader

Comment by FrustratedMonky | Hacker News Reader

All of his analysis about financial markets, can apply to all jobs, all hiring. Don't think he explicitly states that, but all hiring is down. Or at least all entry positions it seems like.

From a SWE perspective. Doesn't it seem like systems are falling apart? You can only cut back programmer/tech jobs for so long, someone has to know how it all works.

This is what I don't get, all around me, people don't know how things work, are literally walking a knifes edge toward collapse, systems are failing all over, and yet companies wont staff up on tech people. The enshitification.

View on HN

> Doesn't it seem like systems are falling apart?

They always were.

> This is what I don't get, all around me, people don't know how things work, are literally walking a knifes edge toward collapse, systems are failing all over, and yet companies wont staff up on tech people.

You'd think that you would take digitalisation seriously in a company where 100% of your employees spend 100% of their working hours on a computer. You'd be wrong to think so though. It is what it is, but it's not exactly new. At least not in the world of enterprise where all employees have wanted for the past 40 years is an Excel that scaled. I once worked in an organisation where IT spent a lot of money (by company size) on a real world scenario roleplay of cyber security. They had this whole thing lined up in a fancy hotel to simulate a ransomware attack, and at the last minute the CEO canceled to go golfing and sent some personal assistant instead.

A lot of decision makers just don't care about IT until it really, really, doesn't work. Since IT is always sort of wonky though, I think that people are just so used to it being mediocre that they won't notice if it drops a little further in quality.

An interesting thing to observe is that while everyone uses tech ever day the "mass" is getting further away from having a good understanding of it instead of having a better understanding.

And I man it makes sense, the technology is constantly getting more complex and at the same time you increasingly don't have to know how it works to use it effectively/professionally. At the same time knowing how it works doesn't mean you can use it effectively, e.g. knowing how to program a Windows GUI app doesn't mean you know the keyboard shortcuts of any specific GUI app or where in the settings you find some important option etc.

To add on top of that there is a lot of artificial nonsense obfuscating proper technical understanding.

> An interesting thing to observe is that while everyone uses tech ever day the "mass" is getting further away from having a good understanding of it instead of having a better understanding.

IMO that's mostly because earlier technology required a greater degree of dedication and study and troubleshooting. Back In My Day when I wanted to play computer games I had to check my IRQs and configure Sound Blaster.

Oh that is a blast ( happy coincidence ) from the past. I remember the first time I saw autodetect. What a time saver that was. And don't get me started on getting the memory in batch set up just right for moonstone.

Things are a lot easier now, but it getting easier made us forget how complicated it is underneath it all.

Depending on who he went golfing with, it could actually be the right call.

I read an assumption there, that if a company hires more tech people, the situation of its systems will improve. This contradicts the tao of programming, from which I quote:

The manager asked the Master: "How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?"

"It will take one year," said the Master promptly.

"But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?"

The Master Programmer frowned. "In that case, it will take two years."

"And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?"

The Master Programmer shrugged. "Then the design will never be completed," he said.

That's talking about one project, not a company. A company might have repressed demand and more people could allow it to take on more projects and/or take care of tasks that are being left behind.

Yes.

That does go along with article I just saw on Valve that they operate their systems with 350 admins, versus EA with 10,000 people.

not the best comparison to be fair on EA (thanks, I'm sympathizing with EA). Valve has 1-3 "major projects" outside of games, live updating 2-3 games, maintaining 2 others, and then maybe has some misc. developers here and there for R&D. then you can muliply that by 3 or 4 for art, support, legal, and other stuff.

EA works on and releases a dozen games in house a year, if not more. And the studios are scatered all over the world, not all in WA. Then it maintains a few dozen more that still makes big money. Then has publishing wings to publish more 3rd party games. Then has a mediocre store to manage, then has sales and outreach, and probably a few more wings I'm forgetting.

They spread out a lot more, so they'll need more staff for that.

Doesn't Valve only have like 400 employees?

Was using this. You're right, total was 350. Compared to EA at 10K.

Was remembering the section on Admins, Valve pays a lot for top Admins, and do a lot with little.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/07/valve-runs-its-massiv...

valve is not publisher. Valve is 95% Steam + 4% side projects + 1% keeping their games barely alive. They have minimal pr.

EA manages (with aim to kill) many game dev studios. Schedules and executes release PR campaigns.

Its not a fair comparison to be honest

I predict that in a few years we're going to see a lot of these companies get "disrupted" by new entrants who eschewed current trends and actually make proper investments in technology, allowing them to build things people actually want to use.

What's interesting is the tech industry itself made a big deal about how it disrupted dinosaurs who under-invested in technology only for them slowly fall into the same trap. Everything feels so much like it did in the early aughts.

That’s how I see it. We’ll give enough business info to AI and ask it to design a disruptive competitor. Half the time, it’s design will lose upper management in favor of a team of endurance problem solvers.

I see what you see. I'm not sure what the motive is here. So many business processes designed to minimize risk, but core technical and design knowledge that is required to keep systems operational is left to rot away.

This thing won't take long to collapse. We already see this happening when it comes to security: every major company has already been hacked, frequently quite easily. The web search industry is already serving 99% ads instead of proper results, the job market is completely broken, social networks are saturated with bots, and AI companies are proposing to replace knowledgeable people with machines that fabricate their own dreamed of solutions.

> Doesn't it seem like systems are falling apart?

Far beyond the scope of tech staffing, yes.

https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

I'll add: Generally, everything works just as well as it needs to, and no better.

outsurcing to India or similar cheap places has been the "solution" to most big non-tech firms for decades now, smaller ones hire local or "same continent" contractors (latam or eastern Europe), keeping a small team onsite for operations / reliability

Reply on news.ycombinator.com