this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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I worked at Google for over a decade. The issue isn't that the engineers are unaware or unable. Time and time and time again there would be some new product or feature released for internal testing, it would be a complete disaster, bugs would be filed with tens of thousands of votes begging not to release it, and Memegen would go nuts. And all the feedback would be ignored and it would ship anyway.
Upper management just doesn't care. Reputational damage isn't something they understand. The company is run by professional management consultants whose main expertise is gaslighting. And the layers and layers of people in the middle who don't actually contribute any value have to constantly generate something to go into the constant cycle of performance reviews and promotion attempts, so they mess with everything, re-org, cancel projects, move teams around, duplicate work, compete with each other, and generally make life hell for everyone under them. It's surprising anything gets done at all, but what does moves at a snail's pace compared to the outside world. Not for lack of effort, the whole system is designed so you have to work 100 times harder than necessary and it feels like an accomplishment when you've spent a year adding a single checkbox to a UI.
I may have gone on a slight tangent there.
I fucking hate how accurate this is
Is this really the case? I feel like they might, but are deciding that its "worth the cost of business"
I'd think since companies get big enough they can just buy the promising competition before it becomes a problem, I'd say it's a worthwhile cost to them
Yeah, lack of competition is driving a lot of this. Fixing bugs doesn’t increase their stock value. It doesn’t make the line go up.
Launching products and bragging about profits makes the line go up (especially just before a quarter or monthly report is due).
AT&T/Bell Telephone was like this for years until they were finally broken up (nominally). When cellphones came out and provided nationwide competition, long distance suddenly became free.
We need to bust up google, Facebook, etc. They have nothing to push them to be better, just CEO egos and investors to please.
Facebook as a product is over. It's like 90% ads. I almost never see my friends posts anymore.
Its marketplace has been really popular in my area. Craigslist has all but dried up for may item types.
But they own Instagram as well don’t forget, and they have bought out many other competitors that we won’t ever get to experience.
I ran into a guy from high school and it turns out he worked for Microsoft back in the Windows Mobile days. He said that changing even a single button on a submenu would take six months of meetings, and if it involved other departments they would actively sabotage any progress due to the way MS internally made departments compete, so you could basically forget it. He said they literally backdoored software so they could sidestep other departments to get features in.
I think about that a lot.
A corporate analogy/strategy is to block your competition from the market share.
For example, a company I used to work for would open accounts in non-viable/non-profitable locations so that our competition would not have the chance to get more market share.
Big corps don't give a shit if it works or not, as long as they are the biggest they can squeeze out anyone else, so they will launch whatever is trending (meta/threads) and bullshit thier way into another piece of the pie.
This sounds like working as a North American public servant hahahahaha
This is what you get when humans try to work beyond our monkeysphere. It's not "capitalism" or "greed" or any other such childish ideas. Groups that large cannot be efficient.
https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
The article is so old the formatting is all jacked, but you can get the jist of it easily enough.
But the trick is having layers of monkey spheres! The ceo monkey has 20 directors below it and each of those has 20 people leading people so it all reports up and gets lost but is "good enough".
except capitalism incentivises top down organizations that lead to those problems?
It ain't that bad I'm sure