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Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

joanwestenberg.medium.com

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Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#231

Post by anchochilis »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #204

I worked for 27 years, for a company (Japanese) that is over 100 years old. It is world-renowned, and one of the top brands in the world; a synonym for "Quality." I won't name it, because I don't want them to have to deal with my random stuff (although I won't say bad things about them). It's easy to figure out, if you care enough to look at my profile. Although I often had fierce disagreements with their management…

While this is an admirable approach in theory, I noticed you don't mention how much time (i.e., money) it takes you to implement a high-quality platform relative to people with lower quality standards.

There are massive economic benefits to shipping something early but a little buggy or even incomplete. Does it take some of the artistry out of being a programmer? Sure! In fact the ability to compromise on quality, to tolerate a little technical debt, is a sign of maturity I look for when interviewing senior engineers. In software it's possible to waste months and months of engineering time endlessly iterating on the implementation in the name of "quality" while realizing minimal value to the business. For example, obsessively aiming for 100% test coverage, rewriting working code in accordance with a new fad style or framework, adding a new abstraction layer where it isn't required, etc. An engineer who refuses to fix a minor bug in a "crufty" part of the codebase without spending a month rewriting it from scratch is not the kind of engineer I want on my team -- it usually goes hand in hand with a lot of nitpicking on pull requests, overambitious designs, derailing of technical discussions. In other words, ego.

It's not that I don't care about quality. It's just that I've worked with lots of people who equate quality with their own tastes, and they can be really unpleasant to work with.

(Note: none of this is meant as a criticism of you, OP, more a general rant about the flip-side of "quality" in software engineering.)

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#234

Post by julianlam »

I have a feeling that historically, we've always put high-growth companies on a pedestal. It's not something that is unique or novel to this particular time. The way which companies GET there (via VC) is novel, yes, but companies have stood the test of time and toiled quietly building great products before, and they continue to do so now.

The only reason you don't hear much about them isn't because we hype on high growth companies, but because slow careful growth isn't sexy, that's all.

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#235

Post by tomatotomato37 »

_qulr wrote: post #150
qazpot wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX is trying to solve the finite environment problem.

Is it? Earth is, or was, extremely hospitable to humans. Mars is, and will be for a very long time, extremely inhospitable to humans. If we can't even take care of the Earth, what hope is there of taking care of Mars? The more likely scenario is that greedy Martians destroy their own Martian environment very quickly and make themselves extinct. It's much easier to destroy Mars (for human life) than it is to destroy E…

Your mistake is thinking that the plan is to move humanity away into space, instead of bringing space (or more accurately mineral-rich asteroids and solar energy) to humanity. That way we can just externalize all industry & pollution to a lagrange point somewhere and let the earth take care of healing itself.

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#237

Post by smcg »

Shareholders and worker are always in direct conflict. Shareholders are always prioritized first. If your company takes money from investors, their wishes are always going to take precedent over everything else. And they want money. (Not that being self-funded is immune to wage theft. What we really need is more employee-owned cooperatives.)

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#238

Post by dukeyukey »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #208
belval wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote always bugged me because it disregards that our economic growth is not really tethered to natural resources. Sure a company like Coca-Cola can only grow so much before it effectively covers the entire planet, but they can still reduce costs to improve their profit margins and displace existing drinks from other companies with a new product. The cloud as a business is mostly about building products that add…

> There are no environmental restrictions here you could grow for as long as user needs grow. All this demand for software and ever changing needs, and more cloud computing environment is coming from somewhere. You want to know where? Merely 2 decades ago, the average household had one computer in the house, and it was typically a desktop, and the adults and teenagers had had cellphones. Now, almost everyone that is…

That kind of economic growth requires more resources, but not all does. When Google tweaks a caching algorithm to enable 10% more with the same hardware/energy input, that contributes to economic growth with less resources. Same as if we discovered a new steel smelting technique that uses 10% less coking coal for the same quality steel.

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#239

Post by js8 »

vidarh wrote: post #210
dm319 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a growing body of thought that capitalism and, more specifically, continued growth, is unsustainable. A lot of the literature focuses around the environment [1], but we should also think about businesses that perform a useful community service or product to their community - must they always grow? If not, must their competitor? [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1558/jocr.v5i2.197

That thought that continued growth is eventually unsustainable has been there since at least the 1840's. The core of Marxism is the idea that capitalism is the most effective method of increasing productive capacity, and that this is fantastic (the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto is fanboy-level praise for capitalism), until it runs out of room to grow into. Whether or not you agree with the analysis, the co…

I agree with a lot of what you just said, I think Marx was correct about the idea that capitalism requires the growth. I would state his thesis as follows: If you reward continued production of goods (which requires investment) with property, eventually you will run out of property to give away.

I believe in the 20th century, this conundrum was resolved in enormous growth of what we consider to be property assets. We have not only reached the limit of exploitation of natural resources on the planet, but also added intelectual property, military-industrial complexes, various financial instruments, healthcare, and as of late, we have monetized human attention and behavioral data. On top of that, we monetized human servitude, now lot of well-off people are in debt (at least with mortgages and student loans).

Re: Businesses should try to be the best, not the biggest

#240

Post by js8 »

indymike wrote: post #183
dm319 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a growing body of thought that capitalism and, more specifically, continued growth, is unsustainable. A lot of the literature focuses around the environment [1], but we should also think about businesses that perform a useful community service or product to their community - must they always grow? If not, must their competitor? [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1558/jocr.v5i2.197

I think capitalism is being misused in this sentence, and that is making it hard for people to make sense of. Capitalism is simply an economic system where the means of production are privately owned. Growth is not a requirement or even feature of capitalism. Being able to own companies, property and hold currency are all features of capitalism. If you are trying to say "infinite growth is unsustainable" that stands…

> Capitalism is simply an economic system where the means of production are privately owned.

Just a nitpick, there is another condition, which is that the labor is traded on the free market under capitalism. I can imagine a society where everything is done in cooperatives where the workers are also the owners (they have shared private ownership).

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