[vishnugupta]

> removing people and organizational slack

You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made. When bean-counters took over the ecosystem they optimised immediate profitability over everything else. Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time. There's no room for experimentation, repair, or anything else.

I've commented about lack of slack on several times here on HN because when I notice a broken system now a days, 90% of it is due to lack of slack in the system to absorb short term shocks.

[aleqs]

The problem is, in the minds of these people 'firing at 100% all the time' generally means doing busywork and/or thinking of ways to cheat/manipulate their customers and the market for maximum gain whole delivering minimum value. I would have loved to be 100% engaged working on solving real problems in honest ways at some of my past jobs, but alas MBA/marketing leadership, which has taken over much of tech has very little interest in actually building good things and solving real problems in honest ways.

[joquarky]

This is what happens when companies become so nepotistic that they only believe in their own bullshit.

"Can they really breathe fire or did we make that up?"

[WalterBright]

Profit maximization is a continuous process that has generated our high standard of living.

P.S. I welcome all attempts to prove me wrong!

[spiorf]

No, the process has impeded even higher standard of living, because it misallocates resources from value generation to value appropriation. It's the extreme short term profit maximization that makes the economy a zero sum game. Otherwise it is not.

[WalterBright]

Do you really think the economy is zero sum?

For example, who was Elon Musk's wealth transferred from?

What do you think about all that money being invested into AI? Is that "extreme short term profit maximization"?

[cowmix]

I don’t know who his wealth was transferred from, exactly. But I do know what he’s using it for now: as a gravitational force to unilaterally screw with public institutions and systems the rest of us depend on.

Even if you agree with some of DOGE projects’s goals, the way it operated was wildly thoughtless about consequences beyond Musk’s personal wishes, and almost completely unaccountable.

I’m honestly sick that my personal Model Y purchase helped add to that power.

And I say that as someone who was a huge Musk fan for years, despite the warning signs — the Thai “pedo” comments, and his very public turn during COVID.

[WalterBright]

Musk's money came from creating a business that was worth a lot of money. I.e. he created his wealth.

It was not transferred to him.

The same goes for Bezos, Jobs, Gates, etc.

[Unmotivator2677]

I don't know but I will speak:

Cantillon Effect

How much does your bread cost and how much did it cost in the 90s? Where do you think all that value gone? Has bread some what become much better quality or something? Are they lacing it with gold?

They are stealing from your pocket, in many ways than one.

Another point to consider is that musk wealth is on paper only, real value if he wanted to cash out would turn much smaller, it's all hypothetical.

[WalterBright]

American bread was worse in previous decades. Now I have many more options, and I buy organic bread.

> They are stealing from your pocket, in many ways than one.

You need a more compelling argument than that. Agriculture is not a particularly lucrative industry.

> Another point to consider is that musk wealth is on paper only, real value if he wanted to cash out would turn much smaller, it's all hypothetical.

Back to "what is value?" There is no such thing as intrinsic value. Value is what people are willing to pay for something. That's it. If people are willing to pay more, then the value is higher. If the are only willing to pay less, then the value is lower. And certainly the value of x is different for different people, and varies moment by moment.

The value of a TSLA share of stock is no different from the value of that piece of paper you have that says "One Dollar" on it.

[rkuodys]

What is the point on Musk you are making? The monetary success does not neccesserily correlate to the common good they have created. In case of Musk there is a lot of governement subsidies, lots of market manipulation and false claim s. So not all activieties that bring profit to the richest are good to the rest. And stats on inequality just highlights that trend

[WalterBright]

> subsidies.

The government gave Musk a trillion dollars?

> So not all activieties that bring profit to the richest are good to the rest

I didn't say they were all good. I said he created his wealth, it was not transferred to him.

> And stats on inequality just highlights that trend

All those stats highlight is some people create more wealth than others.

[AngryData]

On the short term every economy is effectively zero sum. Even if you invented something magical that is worth trillions, the economy can't pull trillions of dollars out of nowhere in any short period of time without devaluing everything else.

[WalterBright]

Sigh. A brief explanation of how money is created. If I create something of value, you can go to a bank and borrow money based on that value. Where did that borrowed money come from? The bank created it out of thin air! Yes, that's right. Created value can be transformed into money. The books balance. And this is unlimited.

What happens when you pay back the money? Yes, it is symmetric, the money is destroyed! (wild, isn't it!)

So why does the bank do this? They make money on the interest from the loan.

This is how "free banking" works, and it applies to your scenario. Creating value does not devalue the rest of the economy. The supply of money is not fixed, it rises and falls relative to the value in the economy.

I know this is a difficult thing to describe briefly, there are college degrees on this topic.

[YZF]

These two positions are not mutually exclusive:

- Over-optimizing for short term profit can hurt innovation and value creation.

- The economy is not a zero sum game and new value is created out of thin air.

[afpx]

Partly this is because total global debt is 3x global GDP.

[Yizahi]

It transferred from the S&P-493, obviously :) .

[ryandrake]

When it comes to what actually matters, people's standards of living, what matters most is percentages, which are zero sum. In a simplified economy where 10 people have $100 each, everyone is worth 10% of the economy, have about equal buying power, equal standards of living, equal political power, and so on.

If one of those people suddenly "creates wealth" and now has $100,000, then the average value of the dollar goes down and the cost of everything goes up. Person X can trivially afford the increase, but the other nine now have lower buying power, lower standards of living, and the $100,000 now can exert coercive control over those with less.

We are all slightly worse off every time there is a new billionaire.

[WalterBright]

> We are all slightly worse off every time there is a new billionaire.

I responded to the zero sum theory in another reply.

I'll just say that every country that decided to get rid of its wealthy people wound up poorer, a lot poorer.

For a specific example, Massachusetts has a luxury yacht industry. The government decided that they wanted to tax the wealthy, and slapped a hefty tax on yachts. The billionaires simply took their yacht buying elsewhere, and the yacht industry collapsed, costing thousands of highly paid jobs. The government rescinded the tax.

[SquibblesRedux]

Musk got a huge leg up through the government, whether it be tax credits, incentives, side-stepping regulations, etc.

Bezos ran at a loss for so long it drove out actual and potential competitors.

Most (or all?) of the recent titans seem like each has his own company town. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town )

While their activities certainly fall in the realm of capitalism, and are just blips at longer time scales, it certainly feels like capitalism has been a bit under the weather for the past couple decades.

Regarding the money invested in AI, it all gives me "irrational exuberance" vibes.

[WalterBright]

> Musk got a huge leg up through the government, whether it be tax credits, incentives, side-stepping regulations, etc.

Nope. (Any government incentives were available to all the other car companies.)

> Bezos ran at a loss for so long it drove out actual and potential competitors.

Where do you think he got the money to sustain those losses? Investors! Including me. That is not a "transfer" of wealth, as in exchange the investors received an ownership share of the company.

> Regarding the money invested in AI, it all gives me "irrational exuberance" vibes.

It still is the opposite of short term thinking.

[Yoric]

I would argue that profit maximization has had very many effects.

On the one side, it has succeeded at reducing costs, which has indeed given rich societies unprecedented access to consumer goods.

On the other, it has outsourced from us both jobs and knowledge, which has resulted in higher unemployment and dissatisfaction, with as consequences the political dominoes we see falling internationally. That and the shoddy US health system (which the rest of the world seems to have decided to follow, for some reason).

And there is the small fact that we're in the process of optimizing the planet to death, and that not-so-rich countries (as well as formerly-rich ones) have starved to death for this high standard of living.

So, let's appreciate our standard of living, but not assume that it's necessarily a good thing in the grand scheme of things.

[WalterBright]

Outsourcing happens when it is cheaper to build something somewhere else. Tariffs can compensate for that.

Where are the starving people in capitalist countries?

The US health care system is pretty much run by the government. It is not a result of free markets.

A large part of profit maximization (i.e. optimizing) usually means reducing the amount of material needed. Isn't that a good thing?

The people who "rough it" in the wilderness still seem to be backpacking in hi tech equipment. I read about the kit that Lewis & Clark carried. No thanks. (Even on that "Alone" show, they bring hi tech equipment.)

[Yoric]

> Outsourcing happens when it is cheaper to build something somewhere else. Tariffs can compensate for that.

Is that free market?

> Where are the starving people in capitalist countries?

The first example from the top of my head is Argentina.

> A large part of profit maximization (i.e. optimizing) usually means reducing the amount of material needed. Isn't that a good thing?

This very much depends on the industry. In software, for instance, it's exactly the opposite.

> The people who "rough it" in the wilderness still seem to be backpacking in hi tech equipment. I read about the kit that Lewis & Clark carried. No thanks. (Even on that "Alone" show, they bring hi tech equipment.)

No idea what you're talking about.

[WalterBright]

Is what a free market? outsourcing - yes. Tariffs - no.

Argentina is hardly a free market country - https://borgenproject.org/hunger-in-argentina/

> In software, for instance, it's exactly the opposite.

??

> No idea what you're talking about.

Watch "Alone". I think it's on Netflix. Compare it with the kit of Lewis and Clark.

[danmaz74]

"Profit maximization" on its own would have left most people working 12+ hours a day 6 days a week, like it was very common in the 19th century. Luckily, it's never been the only force shaping our societies.

[WalterBright]

Working long hours was necessary in those days because productivity was much lower.

Productivity has gone up so much people can work a lot less, and vast part of the population doesn't work at all.

[danmaz74]

Sure, productivity increase is hugely important, but if you only pursue profit maximization, then all the productivity increase goes into profits, which means that the general population doesn't increase their well being much if at all.

The 40hr work week didn't come by as a consequence of the profit maximization mentality, but as a consequence of hard fought battles by the workers/employees against that mentality. And when I say "hard fought" I mean in the literal sense, with at least 1,000 workers killed just in the US in those days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...

[WalterBright]

The Law of Supply and Demand is in play, and it means a company cannot dictate prices, wages, or working conditions in a free market economy. Rising productivity would have reduced the average work week regardless.

If you still aren't convinced, consider that the benefits package routinely offered to employees is worth around 40% of their pay.

[amanaplanacanal]

Depends what you mean by work.

Most people do a lot of work themselves that the Richie Rich would pay somebody else to do, like cooking, cleaning, childcare, gardening, etc. If it counts as work when you hire somebody to do it, it should equally count as work if you do it yourself.

[WalterBright]

People still did cooking, cleaning, childcare, and gardening in those times of 12 hour work days.

BTW, cooking in those days was an all day affair. The wood stove required continuous feeding and watching. Today one can just put the food in a microwave.

I cook a steak now and then, it's the only cooking I do. It takes about 10 minutes. The dishwasher does the cleaning.

Rich people hire others to do the cooking because the rich peoples' jobs pay off far more per hour of work. For example, if my profession pays me $100/hr, it makes perfect sense to pay someone $30/hr to do the cooking for me, as I am still $70/hr ahead.

[AngryData]

Working long hours was not necessary in those days, it was forced upon people by declining wages as profit was transferred from individuals, families, and small businesses towards the capital class. The entire movement to introduce the 40 hour work week was based on people wanting to reduce their hours towards what their grandparents worked and survived on. The entire luddite movement was based on declining wages and worsening work conditions compared to the generations before them.

[WalterBright]

I don't know where you're getting that information from, but analysis of the bones of American colonists shows they worked themselves to an early death.

Life expectancy and average height improved throughout the 19th century.

[keeda]

I think it's more accurate to say it is a process that has resulted in our high standard of living faster than other processes... so far.

There is no guarantee it will keep working for the majority of us going forward; as is becoming very clear all around the world, it also has downsides especially without checks and balances (which was predicted and observed in the past, which is why other processes were conceptualized in the first place!)

As a trivial example, profit maximization is directly responsible for the enshittification we're seeing everywhere, which definitely is negatively impacting our standard of living.

[WalterBright]

> I think it's more accurate to say it is a process that has resulted in our high standard of living faster than other processes... so far.

Nobody has found a better process. Not even close.

> As a trivial example

It's not an example, it's a generalization. If you have a specific example, let's have a look at it!

Have you ever wondered why communist countries never exported products?

Also, if you want better products and believe people will want to buy them, go into business making them and make yourself wealthy!

[keeda]

> Nobody has found a better process. Not even close.

Maybe, but as they say, "Past Performance Is Not Indicative of Future Results." The point was, this process may work up to a point, then it may work more against the interests of the population.

I mean, history is already littered with examples of the downsides of this process, like all the rampant anti-worker things profit maximizers tried to get away with that had to be fought literally with blood. Without that bloodshed it is highly likely the average standards of living of the general population would be much, much lower.

You don't even have to look at history, the process is literally playing out right now in various countries.

> It's not an example, it's a generalization. If you have a specific example, let's have a look at it!

I thought enshittification was a pretty specific example? You can find the many articles written about the various ways things are degrading on the Internet with a Google search (the experience of which is probably an even more specific example in itself ;-))

I chose that example because I think it's a microcosm of this process: in the beginning, the profit motive creates great innovation and products. But at some point, like when the market is saturated or monopolized, the profit incentive creates anti-consumer dynamics because companies turn to extractive methods rather than innovative ones.

[contingencies]

Your line of reasoning misses the clear example that China pulled 1.4 billion people out of poverty creating mass-literacy before embracing capitalism.

[WalterBright]

The Chinese did not come out of poverty until after China switched to capitalism.

[applied_heat]

They certainly turned away from socialism and towards capitalism though, I think as part of embracing capitalism. What parts of the economy are not capitalist? State owned companies? In Canada and the US there are many protected or subsidized companies as well. Genuinely curious on the differences on owning a company in China vs canada

Thanks

[striking]

Which country experiencing communism at any point in time didn't export any products?

[WalterBright]

The Soviet Union.

I don't recall ever seeing USSR products in stores, while plenty of manufactured goods from other countries were. (By products I meant manufactured products, not extracted resources like oil.)

[buzzerbetrayed]

> generally means doing busywork and/or thinking of ways to cheat/manipulate their customers and the market for maximum gain whole delivering minimum value

When I read comments like this I can’t help but wonder where people like you work. It’s completely unrepeatable to me. I work with really good people, all the way to the tip, and no try to make money by increasing value for our customers.

Apple, Google, Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot, Anthropic, Toyota, and a hundred other companies all offer me incredible value for so cheap. Why are people so cynical about a world that offers them unimaginable riches everywhere they look.

Sure there are bad companies. And if you work at one of those, go get a new job.

[rapnie]

The parents are talking about things in-the-large, negative societal trends, while you are talking your anecdotal experience and perhaps survival bias striking it so lucky with your employer. The world offers unimaginable riches, but at what cost really? Who benefits most? Where does it lead? Big picture.

[mikewarot]

>Apple, Google, Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot, Anthropic, Toyota, and a hundred other companies all offer me incredible value for so cheap.

Try to find something with Google these days. Try to use an Apple product past it's planned obsolescence. They crowd out innovation with their monopolistic rent seeking.

[vader_n]

Really?

[t-3]

I think the bean counters get a bad rap for this a bit unfairly. The past century has seen more progress in knowledge and technology than the rest of human history combined. The world and business environment are changing too rapidly to make longtermist thinking practical.

Few care if you have a lifetime warranty and excellent service or replacement parts if the majority will upgrade in a few years! Mature technologies increasingly become cheaply available as services, eg. laundry, food, transportation. That further reduces demand on production, as many can get by with the bare minimum and don't need the highest quality, longest lasting appliances. Software is even more ephemeral and specialized.

Developing education and training pipelines is wasting money if the skills you need are constantly changing! There is plenty of "slack" in the workforce so this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid. There are very few fields where qualified worker shortages are a real problem.

R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Open source software has even further muddied the waters. Applications have only a limited lifetime before being replicated and becoming free products (this has only been intensified by the introduction of AI), so companies develop services instead.

Technology and knowledge deepening and rapidly becoming more specialized makes the monolithic corporation much less practical, so companies also need to specialize in order to effectively compete. Going too far in the name of efficiency can destroy core competencies, but moving away from the old model was necessary and rational.

[aleph_minus_one]

> R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself?

Because some problems that many companies in very specialized industries work on are so special that outside of this industry, nearly all people won't even have heard about them.

Additionally, many problems companies have where research would make sense are not the kind of problems that are a good fit for universities.

[SoftTalker]

Those fields still develop in-house expertise and world-leadning products. General Electric was cited above, but their turbine engine division is producing the most fuel-efficient, reliable, and lowest TCO aircraft engines there have ever been. The materials science and engineering expertise needed to do this isn't something you can find in a freshly-graduated university student.

Products like jet engines, though, are still those where quality matters. They are so costly that there's room in the finances to deliver it. Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.

[Zak]

> Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.

A part of this is that consumers usually don't have very good information about products like that. I would almost always pay twice as much for an appliance that's going to last three times as long, but I usually can't find a review that's based on a teardown and rebuild or testing to destruction.

Aircraft engines are subjected to both.

[com]

Not quite; for wide-bodies at least RR pips GE for fuel-efficiency, but there’s not much in it for the latest generation of power plants.

[WorldMaker]

> Unlike household appliances, where consumers make decisions mostly on the basis of price and being $5 cheaper than the competition is what will get you the sale even if it means using plastic instead of cast or forged metal parts.

Some of this seems reverse causal to me. There were many consumers interested in options other than a race to the bottom. I certainly remember 90s Consumer Reports-era consciousness of consumers trying to find the best products as they all seemed to race to the bottom.

The irony seems to be that now that GE has sold GE Appliances they've been returning to higher quality and cutting fewer corners just because activist US shareholders wanted slightly higher dividends each quarter. It feels like only a matter of time before Heier finishes the next steps in the Lenovo playbook and stops paying GE to license their brand and stop giving credit to a US company that stopped caring about consumers and consumer product quality decades ago.

[watwut]

Universities dont do product oriented research. They do more general research. And also, they should not do product oriented research, that is companies role.

And universities research capabilities are being destroyed too right now.

[gopher_space]

> Developing education and training pipelines is wasting money if the skills you need are constantly changing! There is plenty of "slack" in the workforce so this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid. There are very few fields where qualified worker shortages are a real problem.

Here's the problem with your reasoning. This paragraph is simply wrong, with each sentence being untrue. Education and training are never wasted money, the skills aren't changing that quickly, there isn't any slack in the workforce, and qualified worker shortages are being reported in every trade across the board. Someone needs to solve the problems you hand-wave away.

> this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid.

That's me. I specialize in learning new domains. I cost like 8x more than the random junior you'd be able to hire with a functional onboarding program.

[t-3]

> there isn't any slack in the workforce, and qualified worker shortages are being reported in every trade across the board

Labor force participation is ~62%, far lower than historical peaks. I don't buy it.

[gopher_space]

Every employer had the same "let's hire seniors someone else trained" idea at the same time. This isn't just a tech phenomenon, the "qualified worker" pipeline was turned off and then ripped out of every industry.

[danmaz74]

"The world and business environment are changing too rapidly to make longtermist thinking practical." Tell that to the Chinese...

[acomjean]

I’ll note at the end of the last century I worked at IBM research which had a budget of 6 Billion dollars. Management was trying very hard to get better return on that investment. Even today IBM though often ridiculed in the tech space (sometimes they do deserve it) spends a lot on R&D.

[NordStreamYacht]

Lucent at the same time went through the same issue: how to monetise Bell Labs.

Bell Labs greatest work came out when AT&T was a monopoly. Once they were broken up (1984?) they started feeling the pain.

When the Lucent spinoff took place, the new entities had no Monopoly money to fund unconstrained research while management's behaviour never changed.

I don't know how BL fared under Alcatel and now Nokia, but haven't heard of anything interesting for years.

[Zigurd]

I've been to the Holmdel office in the decline years. It was very sad. A fraction of the former staff was rattling around in what could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set. In its heyday it must've been magnificent. Imagine taking an entire great research university and putting it into a single architectural masterpiece. I've also been to Nokia HQ after Elop ruined the place. Also sad.

[7402]

> could've been used for a post apocalyptic sci-fi set

Of course, it was!

AppleTV show “Severance”

https://www.newsweek.com/lumon-building-severance-real-visit...

[neal_jones]

Could be mistaken but isn’t that building used for the Severance tv show?

[rvba]

Did anything come out from those billions?

[swiftcoder]

> Did anything come out from those billions?

Per wikipedia:

  IBM employees have garnered six Nobel Prizes, seven Turing Awards,
  20 inductees into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame, 19 National Medals of Technology,
  five National Medals of Science and three Kavli Prizes. As of 2018,
  the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.

[xienze]

> the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.

A couple things about those patents, from a former IBMer who has quite a few in his time there.

First, not all patents are created equal. Most of those IBM patents are software-related, and for pretty trivial stuff.

Second, most of those patents are generated by the rank and file employees, not research scientists. The IBM patent process is a well-oiled machine but they ain't exactly patenting transistor-level breakthroughs thousands of times a year.

[fao_]

Why do you need to generate transistor-level breakthroughs multiple times a year? Those breakthroughs are hard to generate, but they're important and industry-spanning. The problem is we've mostly stopped generating them.

[xienze]

I wasn't saying anything about that, I was just pointing out that yes, IBM produces a ton of patents, but they're mostly trivial junk that regular employees generate en masse in order to earn accomplishments and make up for the insultingly low bonuses.

[raddan]

I also worked (briefly, as an intern) at IBM and IBM’s management also sometimes undermined the R&D that happened at the company.

I started at the tail of one research group’s mass exodus. It was like a bomb had gone off; the people left behind were trying to pick up the pieces. In essence, this group developed a sophisticated new technique, which the company urged them to commercialize. Pivoting to commercialization was a big effort, and not naturally within the expertise of this group, but they did it, largely at the expense of their own research productivity—for several years. They even hired programmers (ie, not people who are primarily computer scientists) and got it done. But just before launch, IBM pulled the plug.

This infuriated the researchers in the group. Keep in mind that career advancement in research is largely predicated on producing new research. In effect, IBM asked people to take a time out and then punished them for agreeing to do it. The whole group was extremely demoralized. Google was the largest beneficiary of this misstep.

I also had a similar, frustrating experience working for Microsoft, so it’s not just IBM, but the same dynamics were at work: bean counters asking researchers to commercialize something and then axing a project as it becomes deliverable.

If AI replaces any role in the company of the future, please let it be the managerial class.

[mschuster91]

The thing is, Nobel Prizes and other awards don't pay the bills.

Patents do, but in most cases it's trivial patents or patents for a "mutually assured destruction" portfolio (aka, you keep them in hand should someone ever decide to sue you).

That's a fundamental problem with how the Western sphere prioritizes and funds R&D. Either it has direct and massive ROI promises (that's how most pharma R&D works), some sort of government backing (that's how we got mRNA - pharma corps weren't interested, or how we got the Internet, lasers, radar and microwaves) or some uber wealthy billionaire (that's how we got Tesla and SpaceX, although government aids certainly helped).

All while we are cutting back government R&D funding in the pursuit of "austerity", China just floods the system with money. And they are winning the war.

[cyberax]

mRNA is not a good example. If anything, it's a demonstration of why the Western capitalist model is superior to anything else. Most of the mRNA research was funded by venture capital as a high-risk high-reward investment.

In the world of government-sponsored research, mRNA likely would have been passed over in favor of funding research with more assured results.

[smallstepforman]

Every year they grant prizes. If hardly anyone is doing core R&D because of cost cutting, there is a higher chance those doing the smallest amount of R&D get the prizes.

A Nobel in 2026 doesnt carry the same weight as a Nobel in 1955.

[mandolin4]

Toshiba, IBM and Siemens had a DRAM joint development program 1993-1998. Several generations of DRAM was developed there. Also, while IBM exited the DRAM business, the knowledge survived in Rambus to an extent.

[numpad0]

> Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time

Not just that, you have to be always doing less for more gains. Real work is bad work. Shrinkflation good. I don't know what it is if it wasn't a pure scammer mindset.

[flybrand]

> Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time

This is a classic Goldratt / Theory of Constraints mistake.

[themaninthedark]

Can you expound on what makes it a mistake?

[chanux]

> When bean-counters took over the ecosystem [...] in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time.

This is only fair, because they themselves are firing at 100% all the time IYKWIM ;)

[stephen_cagle]

I believe private equity ownership represents this in an aggressive form. The 2 and 20 percent takes that PE usually mandates as part of their purchase agreement means that they are highly highly incentivized to maximize short term "wins" over long term survival.

I think Chesterton and Taleb also had pretty reasonable things to say about understanding a system before you make changes and fragile/anti-fragile systems as well.

[abustamam]

I haven't read this book but I see it often mentionedin contexts like this. it was written in 2001 and I think its synopsis still stands.

Slack by Tom Demarco (2001)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack

[port11]

It’s especially ironic since the bean counters produce no value. I like ‘Developer Hegemony’, even if the title needs changing. The author makes a great case for why information workers produce almost all the value. It’s them that make the profits, yet they’re always a cost center.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

They also took out all the quality, though in pure business terms one can argue that's a kind of "slack" by itself.

The beancounters have cut all the corners on physical products that they could find. Now even design and manufacturing is outsourced to the lowest bidder, a bunch of monkeys paid peanuts to do a job they're woefully unqualified for.

And the end result is just a market for lemons. Nobody trusts products to be good anymore, so they just buy the cheapest garbage.

Which, inevitably, is the stuff sold directly by Chinese manufacturers. And so the beancounters are hoisted by their own petard.

We've seen it happen to small electronics and general goods.

We're seeing it happen right now to cars. Manufacturers clinging on to combustion engines and cutting corners. Why spend twice the money on a western brand when their quality is rapidly declining to meet BYD models half the price.

---

And we're seeing it happen to software. It was already kind of happening before AI; So much of software was enshittifying rapidly. But AI is just taking a sledgehammer to quality. (Setting aside whether this is an AI problem or a "beancounters push everyone into vibecoding" problem)

E.g. Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke. It hasn't gotten better, the problems are all still there. Windows is just going down in flames. People are jumping ship now.

SaaS is quickly going that way as well. If it's all garbage, why pay for it. Either stop using it or just slop something together yourself.

---

And in the background of this something ominous: Companies can't just pivot back to higher quality after they've destroyed all their inhouse knowledge. So much manufacturing knowledge is just gone, starting a new manufacturing firm in the west is a staffing nightmare. Same story with cars, China has the EV knowledge. And software's going the same way. These beancounters are all chomping at the bit to fire all their devs and replace them with teenagers in the developing world spitting out prompts. They can't move back upmarket after that's done.

Even when the knowledge still lives, when the people with the skills requires have simply moved to other industries and jobs, who's going to come back? Why leave your established job for the former field, when all it takes is the management or executive in charge being replaced by another dipshit beancounter for everyone to be laid off again.

[ekidd]

> E.g. Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke. It hasn't gotten better, the problems are all still there.

Desktop Linux has gotten better, though much of the improvement happened decades ago. I believe the first person to prematurely declare "the year of Linux on the desktop" was Dirk Hohndel in 1999: https://www.linux.com/news/23-years-terrible-linux-predictio...

And speaking as someone who was running desktop Linux in 1999, I remember just how bad it was. Xfce, XFree86 config files, and endless messing around with everything. The most impressive Linux video game of 2000 was Tux Racer.

But over the next 10 years, Gnome and KDE matured, X learned how to auto-detect most hardware, and more-and-more installs started working out of the box.

By the mid-2010s, I could go to Dell's Ubuntu Linux page and buy a Linux laptop that Just Worked, and that came with next day on-site support. I went through a couple of those machines, and they were nearly hassle free over their entire operational life. (I think one needed an afternoon of work after an Ubuntu LTS upgrade.)

The big recent improvement has been largely thanks to Valve, and especially the Steam Deck. Valve has been pushing Proton, and they're encouraging Steam Deck support. So the big change in recent years is that more and more new game releases Just Work on Linux.

Is it perfect? No. Desktop Linux is still kind of shit. For examples, Chrome sometimes loses the ability to use hardware acceleration for WebGPU-style features. But I also have a Mac sitting on my desk, and that Mac also has plenty of weird interactions with Chrome, ones where audio or video just stops working. The Mac is slightly less shit, but not magically so.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> Desktop Linux has gotten better

This is on me for being a bit too snarky.

So yes, Desktop Linux has "gotten better". What it hasn't done is solved any of the systemic problems.

The Open Source development quirks that created the shitshow of the 1999 is still here. Gnome is better but still suffers massively from mainstream features being declared stupid by the maintainers. (A power button that turns off the machine? Heretical.)

Valve's recent successes are pretty illustrative here. They used their money to directly hijack the projects their products rely on.

For what it pertains the comparison, Windows is not without this "slow" improvement either. 95 and 98 are lightyears behind contemporary Windows in so many ways. Until quite recently it still made about as much sense to use Linux as it did back then; Not much.

Take your Linux Laptop example. Sure, Linux finally kind of worked on some specific models that were tested for it. Meanwhile, Windows had moved from "it'll work with some mucking about with drivers" to "It works universally, on practically all hardware". Really, by the mid 2010s Windows would finally be quite tolerant of you changing the hardware.

Hence my original point; Desktop Linux hasn't really caught up with Windows in any meaningful sense. Windows is just nose-diving into the ground in the last few years.

[noisy_boy]

> The Open Source development quirks that created the shitshow of the 1999 is still here. Gnome is better but still suffers massively from mainstream features being declared stupid by the maintainers. (A power button that turns off the machine? Heretical.)

Gnome have been chopping off their own limbs because it reduces weight. All in the name of simplicity. I think they are not the best example of Open Source development.

KDE on the other hand had a hard fall once and basically recovered and invested long term in Plasma and that has paid off handsomely. Today, it is one desktop that I can say is closest to typical/standard desktop paradigms out of the box while retaining a high degree of flexibility for those who choose to customise it. I have been using KDE on Fedora for a while now and it has been basically solid.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> I think they are not the best example of Open Source development.

They're not. I'm using them as an example of the "bad" in Open Source development.

But it's also not so much the individual OS components that are a problem, their interactions are just as fragile and usually subject to neither party taking ownership of the problem.

[noisy_boy]

I feel like open source is a forest, not a garden. Things grow and die and those who are strong enough and useful enough and can fit in the environment do survive. The linkages are there but they are not perfectly arranged by some curator because it is not a curated garden. It is not totally haphazard though because the ecology has rules and the better pieces are in harmony with the rest of the system.

We forget that it this organic nature that makes open source what it is. Nobody charges you entry fee, there are no hidden fees once you enter, nobody is trying to sell you crap but you need to learn how to survive yourself. Once you do that, you understand how to deal with shortcomings of a package or finding another solution to your needs. Sure it takes time, but when that becomes second nature and you stop fighting the nature of the ecology itself, there is no other system like it.

That's why comparing it with advantages of other systems is pointless. I didn't choose to walk into the forest because it was a perfectly tailored experience, I did because I wanted freedom. It required me to learn how to fit in and now that I have, I'm at peace with where I am.

[tim-projects]

For some reference back in Ubuntu 6 days around 2005 I switched. It took me 2 weeks to get X Org to run with my nvidia card at the time. 2 weeks of messing with config files. I only persisted because I was so sick of windows.

[TeMPOraL]

> And in the background of this something ominous: Companies can't just pivot back to higher quality after they've destroyed all their inhouse knowledge. (...) They can't move back upmarket after that's done.

The knowledge isn't the problem. It can be quickly regained, and progress of science and technology often offer new paths to even better quality, which limits the need for recovering details of old process.

The actual problem is, there is no market to go up to anymore. Once everyone is used to garbage being the only thing on offer, and adjust to cope with it, you cannot compete on quality anymore. Customers won't be able to tell whether you're honest, or just trying to charge suckers for the same garbage with a nicer finish, like every other brand that promises quality. It would take years of effort and low sales to convince the customers to start believing you're the real deal, which (as beancounters will happily tell you) you cannot afford. And even if you could, how are you going to convince people you're not going to start cutting corners again a few years down the line? In fact, how do you convince yourself? If it happened once, if it keeps happening everywhere around across all economy, it's bound to happen to your business too.

[pocksuppet]

Wrong on the first point, right on the second. Institutional knowledge can't be easily regained. To build up the knowledge to, say, make a transistor, you need a bunch of people experimenting with a bunch of things. Published scientific papers and patents will get you part of the way there, but the final stretch is still up to you, including things like which equipment to buy, purity of supplies (and where to get them!), how long the chip needs to be bombarded by each kind of particles, how much air the cleanroom needs to move. All the tiny details. You have to discover them by trial and error. Actual chip manufacturing companies have found themselves unable to get good yield until they copied the floor plan of another working fabrication plant, and they still have no idea why that mattered, but that's an extreme case. Maybe nobody expected miniscule air contamination from one process step was affecting another nearby process step, and in the original plan they were farther apart.

Yes if you want to wire a neighborhood for internet you can skip DSL and go straight to fiber. That's not the problem. The problem is that nobody in your company knows how deep to put the fiber to minimize problems, how much redundancy is needed, how strong the mechanical armor around the fiber needs to be, how many fibers per cable to meet future capacity needs without excessive costs, which landlords are friendly to you, nobody has the right connections to city hall to get digging permits approved expediently, and so on.

[applied_heat]

10 year warranty on appliances instead of 1 would show the manufacturer was serious about quality !

[ben_w]

Only if everyone expects the business itself to continue to exist for 10 years.

Back when I was a kid, my dad claimed house construction firms (in the UK) regularly closed down after building homes to get around having to fix things under warranty.

Regardless of if this was actually true or not, the perception will kill trust.

[doubled112]

Or that it was so cheap to manufacture they still expect it not to be a problem.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

> It can be quickly regained

I'm not sure what you mean with this?

Sure, hypothetically e.g. any western car manufacturer could poach a bunch of BYD employees. But it's not really practical for most businesses.

> The actual problem is, there is no market to go up to anymore.

This is the "Market for Lemons" problem, yes.

It's less of a problem than you might think. Convincing the entire wider world that you're legitimate is a problem. One made infinitely worse by store marketplaces like Amazon preferring to push "aqekj;bgrsabhghwjbgawrjwsraG" brand garbage.

So you just don't. The trick is to start small. The smallest you can sustain. (This doesn't work for cars, or anything that's sufficiently complex. You won't be taking on Salesforce.)

But so long as you can find a market niche where there's demand for quality, you can carve out a living, and from there, scale up.

The problem with that is twofold: Venture Capital has supplanted other forms of investment and "small business generating single digit millions in revenue" is utterly unappealing to VCs, even though the investment required is downsized accordingly.

And problem #2: The cost of starting a business is too high right now. Real estate and cost of living just make it unaffordable to even try. + Healthcare if you're in the US.

[ben_w]

> And problem #2: The cost of starting a business is too high right now. Real estate and cost of living just make it unaffordable to even try. + Healthcare if you're in the US.

Fortunate for everyone that Europe exists and counts as "the west". Real estate isn't expensive everywhere, and much of Europe has affordable healthcare. Even in the current economy, several of my former coworkers from recent employers have founded new businesses.

[auggierose]

So, is that a market failure, or is that the market functioning as intended?

[rawgabbit]

Market failure. Customers cannot differentiate between quality and crap due to no fault of their own.

[the_af]

> Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke. It hasn't gotten better, the problems are all still there.

Desktop Linux mostly works these days. It does everything most regular people would want of it, with zero fuss. Including playing games. In some respects, it's easier to use than Mac or Windows.

When it has trouble with some things, one must remember neither Mac nor Windows is perfect, and they can be extremely frustrating at times.

Time to update those prejudices!

[ssl-3]

You know, I think you're right. I set up Void Linux on my desktop a couple of years ago, using the plainest base image. I chose that path because ZFS is important to me, and systemd is ugly to me.

I determined that this minimal start was the right confluence of those two preferences with the howto documentation available at the time, so that's what I did.

So I'm going along in rolling releases for years, and even playing games fine (except GTA:V online). Things are fine until there's some weird flickering-window bug that rolls down the pipe and apparently only affects nVidia users who use xfce4. It's an awful and particularly jarring bug.

The workaround is to disable vsync in xfce4, which solves that problem but always causes tearing for me. Even in YouTube videos. (Who knew how reliant we'd become on rote frame synchronization? Why, it seems like just yesterday when I was streaming potato-quality RealVideo episodes of South Park over dialup on a K6-2 box while marveling that any of it worked at all.)

I don't know which party is responsible for that problem, but nVidia has supposedly fixed it on their end in recent weeks. Which is cool, but this distro isn't shipping that version yet. And I'm reluctant to go off-script -- I loathe the idea of letting the nVidia installer do whatever it wants, and I'm not too keen on building my own package for xbps to handle (hopefully with better grace), either.

It was time to fix it anyway.

And I wanted to give Wayland a shot because there's a limitation with SDL that causes the clipboard method used by Factorio to fail to work with large blueprints under X11, so change was already in the air.

And so it began.

KDE Plasma: I couldn't get it to work. With both X11 and Wayland, parts of it would just die without leaving any traces I could find. It was unusable. I spent hours troubleshooting it and only a few minutes of actually using it, which is a terrible ratio. It had to go.

Gnome: It actually worked OK with Wayland. But when I say "worked OK", I mean that it acted like a touchscreen interface -- for toddlers. It didn't crash in mysterious and buried ways, which is good, but it I found it to be an affront to my sensibilities in ways that I simply could not tolerate. I won't apologize for hating it or for feeling insulted by it. That iteration of Gnome is dead to me.

So working down the list of non-ancient desktop environments: Cinnamon? It works. It's alright. It took some kicking to get sound to work because the mixer it comes with makes it impossible to set up default outputs in a way that behaves here and it reverts the system to its own broken ideas every time it runs, but it responded to my kicks without much of a fight and it works. The xfce4 volume mixer is on the taskbar instead, and I removed all traces of the Cinnamon mixer like it was a cancerous tumor, but with that done: Sound works. Regular X stuff works. It's good enough.

I haven't tried it with Wayland yet to see I can work around the SDL+Factorio SNAFU, but it's been behaving itself with X11 for a week or more.

---

Now, that may sound awful. And to be clear, it wasn't fun at all. But at least it's not like my Windows laptop. I've got stories about that, for sure.

One of things that sticks out right now is when that laptop would deplete its battery just sitting in my bag in the car. That was weird, but it became more urgent to fix it when I got the machine out of the bag and it was hot.

The cause for that was an HP printer driver (for a rather old color printer that I don't even own -- I do use it sometimes, but it's 25 miles away) that was periodically waking the machine from hibernation to check that printer's supply status, so it could try to sell me more stuff.

This task was so completely buried in Windows that it took hours to find it, and it was configured by its installer to wake the machine from hibernation -- including, specifically, while on battery. Because that's obviously what every user of any printer needs: Computers that turn themselves on using battery power to sell toner cartridges while hidden unseen inside of a bag in the back of a car.

It didn't have to be that way, but it was this way anyway. I consider that kind of thing to be deliberate in a fashion that extends beyond mere maliciousness: It is instead simply fucking evil.

---

So yeah, Linux is a great desktop.

I'd like to propose a new slogan: "Linux. At least it's not deliberately evil. Usually."

[the_af]

I mostly don't tweak anything at all these days.

Stock Ubuntu, binary NVIDIA drivers, no tearing on video, excellent frame rate on most games.

A few give me trouble (Space Marine II, one of the Need For Speeds). Sometimes the advice on ProtonDB works, sometimes it doesn't.

Beyond games, everything I want to do works out of the box, with some exceptions which I also remember from my Windows days.

No printer troubles (Mac sometimes gives me a headache here), no sound troubles.

Oh, there was some issue with bluetooth pairing. Which I sorted out.

[GorbachevyChase]

I think you’re not blaming political leadership enough. NAFTA, and other programs were always going to lead to the state of affairs we have now. This was a choice. Blaming greed is like blaming gravity.

[gzread]

Are you saying we need more tariffs to have quality?

[esseph]

> E.g. Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke

And yet I run it every day, and it's by FAR the most enjoyable platform and tooling to use (for me).

[_DeadFred_]

It's funny because when I first managed at a public company I was told no employee can work on something more than 80% (and sustained 80% actual work wasn't believable) and if my people were logging 80% or more time to capitalizable projects I would be in trouble.

[ahussain]

Engineers seem to think business people don’t know what they are doing, but if your post were true, then companies would add slack to outperform their competitors.

The broken system likely doesn’t have enough business impact to justify the investment to maintain it.

[ozim]

Adding slack works over years.

Cutting slack gets you quarterly bonuses.

When you plan working 3-5 years in a single company you don’t care if it crashes and burns month after you leave just to burn down next one.

Conversely we see the same dynamic with engineers, they build stuff to prop up their CV and don't care if company still supports crap they did after they leave.

[array_key_first]

It's a measurement problem, which engineers also fall prey to, perhaps even more.

It's the danger of data driven decision making. Cutting people and resources right now gets you a measurable gain. Not cutting them gets you a gain tomorrow.

But, that gain is unmeasurable! Because in order to measure it you would need to know what happens in an alternate universe where you cut those people. So, if you're only making data driven decisions, you would cut the people 100% of the time.

But that's why companies aren't run by algorithms, they're run by people. The algorithm would run the company into the ground.

[idle_zealot]

> companies would add slack to outperform their competitors.

I think if they did this they'd get buried by the market. Your slack is someone else's opportunity to undercut you. It's a systemic problem, it's in every individual's self interest to work towards instability.

[wredcoll]

This would be true if everyone was optimizing for the same thing.

It's not terribly difficult to imagine someone optimizing for, say, a bonus at the end of the year.

[WalterBright]

> optimised immediate profitability over everything else

Which is the usual complaint that businesses are focused on short term results, sacrificing long term results.

If that would be generally true, the stock market would be going down steeply, not up, as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits.

[mikem170]

Are stock market profit expectations mostly long term? Stock markets have been wrong before.

Besides that, the U.S. stock market went up over several decades while manufacturing capabilities were transferred overseas. That has had, and will continue to have, domestic ramifications that might not be captured by investor profits.

[WalterBright]

The stock market has been going up for a couple hundred years. When do you expect the pervasive short term thinking will crater the economy?

[mikem170]

I didn't say that the economy would be cratered. GDP doesn't capture everything.

[wredcoll]

> as stock prices are based on expectations of future profits.

I thought stock prices were based one what I thought I could sell it for next week.

[WalterBright]

If you could sell it for more next week, that means the next week buyers are expecting higher profits.

[wredcoll]

No, it just means they're expecting someone else to buy it from them at a higher price. See also: bitcoin.

[WalterBright]

Bitcoin is not a company selling a product.

[wredcoll]

What exactly is the difference? Someone tweets that next week bitcoin will be worth $x more, or elon tweets that tesla will be worth $x more next week?

[jbn]

Tom DeMarco wrote a book "Slack" about precisely this.

[pembrook]

> Without people who have actually worked with the system, you end up with a loss of tacit knowledge—and eventually, declining productivity.

> You are spot on w.r.t every assertion you've made.

Huh? What happened to the concept of "debate" on HN. It's just a bunch of people agreeing with each other. Yet the data doesn't support any of OP's thesis.

Here's a chart of the rise in productivity per hour worked in the United States since 1947. It's a steady linear increase every single year: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OPHNFB

Yours is the type of story big company workers tell themselves to feel important while refusing to learn anything new and never taking any risks. But the truth is 99.999% of companies are not doing anything that unique or complex. Most companies are not ASML.

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard someone justify their do-nothing position within a giant bureaucracy while saying the phrase "institutional knowledge" I'd be rich. This is just a sign of a poorly run giant company full of engineers building esoteric and overly complex in-house solutions to already-solved problems as job security.

The truth is all of this "institutional knowledge" is worthless in the face of disruption, and it has a half life that's getting shorter every day.

Everybody talks shit about global just-in-time supply chains and specialization...but just because we had a fake toilet paper shortage for a few months during a 100-year global pandemic doesn't mean running things like it's 1947 for the last 70 years would have been better. You enjoy a much higher quality of life today due to these "evil" JIT supply chains which it turns out are far more durable than people want to claim.

[gzread]

Most measurements measured in dollars are just stealth measurements of inflation. Even inflation adjusted measurements, because official inflation metrics are always lowball numbers with shady methodology.

[jdw64]

US aggregate productivity metrics fail to address this nuance. There is a fundamental difference in abstraction layers between a macro-system becoming more efficient and an individual enterprise experiencing operational failure. As a software engineer, distinguishing between these layers is critical. Your argument is akin to claiming that because the Google Play Store sees a higher volume of app releases (increased productivity), the intrinsic quality of individual apps has naturally improved.

In this analogy, the individual app represents a company, and the Play Store represents the broader US market. Silicon Valley’s highly liquid labor market allows talent to flow freely, which opens up and elevates the baseline of the overall market. However, that is entirely distinct from the fact that individual companies are suffering severe drops in internal quality and productivity.

Furthermore, in software architecture, 'productivity' and 'quality' are rarely directly proportional. With AI coding tools, we can ship an app orders of magnitude faster. Historically, it took me three months to write 60,000 lines of code; recently, I am generating that same volume in just two weeks. My productivity has undeniably spiked, but can I confidently claim the code quality is better than when I manually scrutinized every single line?

The real issue is not whether the broader economy has grown more productive since 1947. The core issue is whether a specific organization bleeds capability when the exact people who understand its real-world constraints, failure modes, and operational history walk out the door.

Both realities can co-exist: National productivity can trend upwards, while individual companies simultaneously suffer operational regressions due to botched migrations, failed refactors, or the loss of tacit knowledge.

I agree that 'institutional knowledge' is sometimes weaponized to defend unnecessary complexity. However, the opposite fallacy is treating all localized, domain-specific knowledge as worthless. While some of it is merely job-security folklore, the rest is literally the only surviving documentation of why the system functions in the first place