1,099 karma · joined April 9, 2009
Here's to 17 more! <3
Well said.
It feels like any kind of api-client work any organization or project would build to make users/customers happy and sticky.
It’s especially hard when a large company (80-90k employees) can’t see themselves as a conglomerate of smaller businesses that have individual/different cultures, customers and customer needs. The authors list destroyed $PreviousJob (not yet, it’s still there but all the “fruiting trees” that created the magic customers loved are gone. From top to bottom, it’s a shadow of itself in vision, ability and drive. It’s a shame, mostly for the customers.).
The biggest flag I can agree with is when sales timelines force corner cutting or outright premature/possible-unworking/unsustainable software get delivered to customers at outrageous prices all while losing focus on the needs of the core customer base. How can a business ignore the source of 60% of their core customers/fans for three-five years and believe they can recover from that? They can’t.
I know old peers and colleagues will read this and know what I mean. I hope they do, and I hope that my passion for what we were working on and our entire customer base was very obvious for all my time there.
It’s wild that “leaders” are deaf to internal experts who built and grew these smaller orgs into the businesses they are today. I don’t assume me or anyone else has all the answers, or are ever right, it’s the complete objection to suggestions of righting the course towards customers who actually need and want the product that’s wild.
I like to think of it like the Unix philosophy of “small sharp tools”, as our founders believed. Chasing extreme growth is a poison and when it infects giant organ from top to bottom… the issues the author highlights and the ones I experienced lead to these outcomes.
This is why companies/products die.
I’m not disagreeing that it’s wonderful to be able to make multiple backups, offsite storage, etc of digital data, I’m just making sure you understand how difficult it is to keep digital data stored long term without significant attention to that desire.
Dropping some markdown in git is not a long-term (using 200 yrs as my example) plan.
I spent years and years working in a newspaper publisher trying to preserve the output digitally and it required serious investment (network storage, auto backup to LTO tapes, and verifying recovery is possible years later). It was and almost always is easier to ship two or three copies of the physical paper to separate storage facilities. I had to remind folks countless times that things like a dvd-r or cd-r have a maximal lifetime where we can trust that the data is retrievable.
Maybe long term storage of personal data will have some future breakthroughs that make it dead simple to trust they can be viewable in 200+ years but today that’s not the case.
I will say that most personal data (sans photos imo) isn’t useful after a few years (maybe 10+) and digital options are great for that. But for stuff we want to keep for centuries, it’s extremely hard and expensive today.
I actually think this has the same potential of a “good” PE move as the Dell success.
Edit: also from the Oregon area.
From the paper.