(2023-11-01) What The Goddamn Hell Is Going On In The Tech Industry

Nikhil Suresh: What The Goddamn Hell Is Going On In The Tech Industry? I. We're Just Wasting Like 30-90% Of All Technical Productivity

I am near absolutely convinced that the vast majority of our species' ability to produce things of value for the human race is just utterly squandered at large companies (BigCo). I suspected we were wasting about 50%, but the volume of stories I got, frequently from serious companies, including some of the FAANG places that mere normal engineers like me look up at in awe while we worship at the altar of StackOverflow, just blew my mind.

There were some others, with a handful genuinely seeming to possibly add up to billions of dollars saved industry-wide.

I guess we already know what's going on out there - keeping a large company efficient is actually an unsolvable problem. I suspect that if you want to build a modern GPU, you just have to be able to sustain all that inefficiency or... you don't get to have anything that takes more than 50 people (or something in that range) to make. It's just all so much worse than I thought.

In fact, while a lot of those stories were bad, most of them probably weren't the worst places because most of the readers here are actually super talented engineers

The worst places wouldn't have any talented engineers.

II. The Other Side

there were three kinds of respondents

The first type, my favourite commenters, whose grim-faced no-nonsense corporate visages grace standups across the world. (theater)

The second type, the vast majority, who read this stuff and immediately suffer flashbacks.

And the mythical third type, who aren't sure whether my stories are real.

if only I could toggle my brain back to that sweet pre-employment state

Before I realized that wasting ten years of someone's career on a task that doesn't need to be done is actually a rounding error for many companies, and that some absolute clowns would spend all their time trying to gaslight their peers into believing the work was accomplishing anything.

Some of the third type are obviously actually also working at really stupid companies, but just accept the social fiction.

The places doing things right tend to be characterized by being small, not being obsessed with growth, and having calm, compassionate founders who still keep a hand on the wheel. And the people that work there tend not to know the people that work elsewhere.

What I'm saying is, hold out hope. I'm aiming to keep a few conversations going with people via email that have made the jump, and I'm hoping to write up a guide on how to most effectively follow suit.