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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

Maybe Apple just got so many things right early on, then the people with experience slowly left and inexperienced people kept showing up and they felt compelled to keep making changes to justify their jobs. How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes? So they rationalize whatever change they wanna make and keep advocating for it until they get the green light, regardless of whether or not it's a good idea. The best part is that cleaning up this mess will probably lead to a whole bunch of promotions, even if just ends up circling back to what they should've already known.

I think a lot of key lessons that were studied and learned back in the day weren't adequately transferred to the new generation.

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>How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes?

This is the core rotting value in so much of big tech. So much of your bonus, performance review, promotion package, etc is hinging on "delivering impact" (ie: doing the flashy stuff). Imagine a world where some internal R&D team took a risk on liquid design but then thought it was okay to not ship it because it didn't work out.

To push the problem up a level, why can’t the company change the incentives to “happy customers”?

The issue is that so long as you play the "performance" game, you'll run into Goodhart's law:

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

All this data driven BS about impact is really just that. So much of it is just gaming the system.

Problem is that “the same” isn’t good enough. To get a promotion, you’d need to somehow prove that your specific change was so good that more customers are happy now than before.

To prove that, you need some data to compare before/after. Hm, how about how much time people send in the software? Seems like a decent proxy. Well, plenty of people are very unhappily addicted to social media. and yet that’s what companies and investors frequently look at.

It’s very hard to come up with an incentive where just keeping things the same is acceptable. I mean it’s basically an admission that you as a company cannot innovate or invent better ways for people to interact with a computer.

We used to treat macOS and Windows like direct competitors. They used to channel their efforts into competing for market share and routing one another from weak customer-bases. For a while, they did give us better operating systems.

Today, both software products are treated like monopolies. macOS is satisfied being an insular underdog, and Microsoft has no motivation to compete if Apple won't get off their ass.

When a feature reaches maturity, you have to be willing to shrink the team.

Yeah I think this is a well known problem. Humans tend to get a lot of stuff right on the first try, and then it's subsequently thrown away in the name of "progress".

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