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Comment by 8n4vidtmkvmk | Hacker News Reader

Then blast the product, not the people who built it.

They are blasting the product tbf. The people part is a small part of it. And apparently at least distracting the HN Community from their point.

Which is exactly why to cut it out. If you put salt in my cup of tea, I’m gonna notice and it’s gonna ruin the drink.

Microsoft poured salt into your cup years ago, you just did not notice.

If you put more salt into this rather thinly-stretched metaphorical cup when telling me what Microsoft did you are not going to endear yourself to me. Why muddy your message?

You cannot divorce a product from the people who built it. The product reflects their priorities and internal group well-being. A different group of people would have built a different product.

If you've worked in a large company, you know that the product reflects the priorities of the company so much more than the people who work there. Leadership states the priority and the employees do what they're told.

Leadership is part of the group of people who built the product, therefore different leadership would have also built a different product.

With that said, it's also not correct to claim that line folk have no influence at all. I don't believe that you can blame any individual since they may have stood up against something bad being put in the product, but they're still part of a collective group of people that built a bad product.

There's no stupid product, only stupid people.

The product was made by people. Or by AI which was made and controlled by people.

The product isn't some result of a series of "oopsies". The worst aspects of bad and/or user-hostile software products are that way because the people working at these companies want them to be that way.

Unless you want to call them just that incompetent. I assume they'd complain about that label too.

In short: No it's not "the product", the people building it are the problem. Somehow everyone working in big tech wants all the praise all the time, individually, but never take even the slightest bit of responsibility fro the constant enshittification they drive forward..

If you only knew...

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