[ToucanLoucan]

Almost every problem a modern corpo has can be solved with an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people, and that's why none of them get solved.

The processes suck because of decades of corner cutting and "fat" trimming while the executives congratulate themselves for only making the product a biiiit worse in exchange for a 0.0005% cost reduction, before then offsetting any gains by giving themselves all the money that would've gone to whatever is now dead.

Repeat this process for 30 years and you have companies like Microsoft that can barely ship anything that works anymore, and our 4 Big Websites frequently just fail to load pages for no explicable reason, Amazon goes down and takes 1/3 of the internet with it, and AI companies are now going to devour the carcass of our internet and shit it back to us in LLM waffle while charging us money for the privilege to eat it.

[Ologn]

It's The Mythical Man Month idea. Programming software is a different thing than working on an assembly line, or a call center, or in retail sales. You're much better off having four programmers who are worth paying $200k a year than ten programmers who are worth paying $75k a year.

[PaulHoule]

I'm going to argue that, at scale, process beats the quality of the people you're using -- and also that there are toxic cultures, around Google and C++, where very smart people get seduced into spending all their time and effort fighting complexity, battling 45 minute builds, etc.

[zahlman]

> and also that there are toxic cultures, around Google and C++, where very smart people get seduced into spending all their time and effort fighting complexity, battling 45 minute builds, etc.

Not sure what you mean here. "Fighting" as in "seeking to prevent", or "putting up with", or what exactly? Is this supposed to be bad because it's exploitative, or because it's a poor use of the smart person's time, or what exactly?

[PaulHoule]

Essentially that the idea that people can hold 7 + 2 things in their head simultaneously is basically true such that when your tools make a demand on your attention it subtracts from the attention you can put on other things.

There are many sorts of struggle. There is struggle managing essential complexity and also the struggle, especially in the pre-product phase, of getting consensus over what is "essential" [1] When it comes to accidental complexity you can just struggle following the process or struggle to struggle less in the future by some combination of technical and social innovations which themselves can backfire into increased complexity.

Google can afford to use management techniques that would be impossible elsewhere because of the scale and profitability of their operations. Many a young person goes there thinking they'll learn something transferable but the market monopolies are the one thing that they can't walk out with.

[1] Ashby's law https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27150 best exemplified by the Wright flyer which could fly without tumbling because it controlled roll, pitch and yaw.

[A4ET8a8uTh0_v2]

Honestly, I don't know if throwing people at a problem is the way to go. Doubly so given that a good chunk of the projects lately for me deal with third party vendors and those are so .. embedded that even getting basic requirements, documentation is an uphill battle ( which -- to me -- seems insane ). I have zero pull so I do what I can, notate the insanity for cya and move on.

I do agree on execs congratulating themselves afterwards though. It was obscene last year. This year it was mildly muted.

[jjk166]

Throwing people at a problem is very different from allocating an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people. A small but skilled team can accomplish a lot, whereas a lot of the wrong people can't do much at all. Generally there are more than enough warm bodies available, big companies are full of those, the issue is that skilled people aren't fungible - the team of 12 working on this project seems to be moving at a snails pace because really it's two people, both of whom are split across several other projects simultaneously, doing the real work and everyone else doing stuff that is likely unnecessary if not straight up counterproductive. It takes skill, effort and discipline to cultivate a team that actually has all the skills it needs to succeed, in the form of people who mutually work well together, to keep these people around over an extended period of time, and not try to split them up onto different projects and plug the gaps with the wrong people.

[venturecruelty]

Sorry, but the multiple colleagues I've lost through multiple rounds of layoffs were not simply "people thrown at a problem". They were helping keep the lights on, which is now my responsibility for no increase in pay.

[balamatom]

You can always throw other things at those people instead.

[nlawalker]

> Almost every problem a modern corpo has can be solved with an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people

Not really, because solving those problems with headcount defeats the point. Part of the definition of those kinds of problems is that solutions involving headcount are invalid.