[BeefWellington]

> What's been professionally frustrating me for years as a developer is how much of the engineering and operational budget for a project is tied up into identifying and tracking users.

To add onto this, as a security-adjacent person, it's sad how much people think user behaviour data will be worth to their company. From the well-intentioned "we must pave the cowpaths" to the harmful "harvest the data and sell it", the attitude appears to have cropped up in the past 15 or so years as a mainstay of what apps should be doing and it's absolute insanity to me.

My only victories in convincing teams are where I could demonstrate their ROI was never actually going to materialize, especially when the investment part required enough development hours that other features that might sell more apps would have to be delayed. And even then, it's been about 40% of the time, with the other 60% being met with, essentially, "we have assurances it will be profitable" hand-waving.

The painful part of this is that unless certain privacy regulations start to get much more painful economically for companies, there's basically no incentive not to do it.

It's the entire "Data is the new Oil" run amok.