It’s hard for people who haven’t experienced the loss of experts to understand. Not a programmer but I worked in aerospace engineering for 35 years. The drive to transfer value to execs and other stakeholders by reducing the cost of those who literally make that value always ends costing more.
which is ironical since without them the profits would likely soar. Doing bad shit 101 is to pin the consequences of your actions on others and falsely claim any benefits others have managed to do as your own achievements.
I’d argue the CEO is the most important person, usually. We see dipshits like Musk and turn around and bag on all of them.
Think of a business, doesn’t matter if it’s local or national. How do the employees act? Are they happy and seem to be doing useful work? Are they downcast and depressed looking?
Sometimes it’s the local manager staving off corporate bullshit, but company culture mostly rolls down from the CEO. They saying, “Shit rolls downhill.”, works both ways.
The CEO and C Suite are the least important people in a company. They can be changed out with relatively little interruption and it takes a lot longer to see the effects. However, you have an on the ground workforce stop producing and the effects are immediate and long lasting.
It’s utterly bizarre. The customers lose out by receiving an inferior product at the same cost. The workers lose out by having their employment terminated. And even the company loses out by having its reputation squandered. The only people who gain are the executives and the ownership.
This is absolutely by design. The corporate raider playbook is well-read. See: Sears, Fluke, DeWalt, Boeing, HP, Intel, Anker, any company purchased by Vista (RIP Smartsheet, we barely knew ye), and so on. Find a brand with an excellent reputation, gut it, strip mine that goodwill, abandon the husk on a golden parachute, and make sure to not be the one holding the bag.
They were acquired by Opta Group in 2023. Since then, the quality has declined while prices increased. And around the time of their acquisition, they started doing some shady stuff when claiming USB-IF compliance. The cables were blatantly not USB-IF compliant.
Another example: I personally love my Anker GaN Prime power bricks and 737. Unfortunately, among my friends and peers, I am the exception. The Prime chargers are known for incorrectly reading cable eMarkers and then failing to deliver the correct power. This has so far been an issue for me twice, but was able to be worked around.
On a more generic scale (whatever that means), we went from coding serious stuff in Ada with contracts and designs and architectures, to throwing everything in the trash while forgetting any kind of pride and responsibility in less than 50 years. AI is the next step in that global engineering enshittification (I hate that word but it’s appropriate).
Whether AI has a future or not, no one can deny that SWE is an absolute mess of shitty practices. If AI stays as it is, we’re going down with it.
It’s hard for people who haven’t experienced the loss of experts to understand. Not a programmer but I worked in aerospace engineering for 35 years. The drive to transfer value to execs and other stakeholders by reducing the cost of those who literally make that value always ends costing more.
those executives act like parasites. They bring no value and just leech the life from the companies.
WE MAED TEH PROFITZ!!!1!!1
which is ironical since without them the profits would likely soar. Doing bad shit 101 is to pin the consequences of your actions on others and falsely claim any benefits others have managed to do as your own achievements.
IMO without execs, employees would get paid for a greater percentage of their labor and profits would go down.
what profits? the ones that end up in the pockets of the executives?
Yes
Executives think they are the most important part of the company. They are high level managers, that is all.
I’d argue the CEO is the most important person, usually. We see dipshits like Musk and turn around and bag on all of them.
Think of a business, doesn’t matter if it’s local or national. How do the employees act? Are they happy and seem to be doing useful work? Are they downcast and depressed looking?
Sometimes it’s the local manager staving off corporate bullshit, but company culture mostly rolls down from the CEO. They saying, “Shit rolls downhill.”, works both ways.
The CEO and C Suite are the least important people in a company. They can be changed out with relatively little interruption and it takes a lot longer to see the effects. However, you have an on the ground workforce stop producing and the effects are immediate and long lasting.
Well, yeah, but those costs are for tomorrow’s executive to figure out, we need those profits NOW
It’s utterly bizarre. The customers lose out by receiving an inferior product at the same cost. The workers lose out by having their employment terminated. And even the company loses out by having its reputation squandered. The only people who gain are the executives and the ownership.
This is absolutely by design. The corporate raider playbook is well-read. See: Sears, Fluke, DeWalt, Boeing, HP, Intel, Anker, any company purchased by Vista (RIP Smartsheet, we barely knew ye), and so on. Find a brand with an excellent reputation, gut it, strip mine that goodwill, abandon the husk on a golden parachute, and make sure to not be the one holding the bag.
What happened to ankor?
They were acquired by Opta Group in 2023. Since then, the quality has declined while prices increased. And around the time of their acquisition, they started doing some shady stuff when claiming USB-IF compliance. The cables were blatantly not USB-IF compliant.
Another example: I personally love my Anker GaN Prime power bricks and 737. Unfortunately, among my friends and peers, I am the exception. The Prime chargers are known for incorrectly reading cable eMarkers and then failing to deliver the correct power. This has so far been an issue for me twice, but was able to be worked around.
On a more generic scale (whatever that means), we went from coding serious stuff in Ada with contracts and designs and architectures, to throwing everything in the trash while forgetting any kind of pride and responsibility in less than 50 years. AI is the next step in that global engineering enshittification (I hate that word but it’s appropriate).
Whether AI has a future or not, no one can deny that SWE is an absolute mess of shitty practices. If AI stays as it is, we’re going down with it.
<cough>Boeing<cough>
Everyone. But Boeing did a pretty fucked up job of it.