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Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

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Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#431

Post by zitterbewegung »

Scoundreller wrote: post #423
pclmulqdq wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of outsourcing decisions seem to be made on the premise of "what if it breaks?" It's a terrible fallacy. Your wafer saw (or server) that is utilized 1% of the time is going to need a lot less maintenance than a shared wafer saw that is used 16 hours a day. You will actually experience a lot less downtime by investing in your own wafer saw (or your own servers) rather than outsourcing (to a foundry or a cloud pr…

At work, I wanted to use google sheets for our schedule because it just works: can have view only links, and it handles multiple editors at the same time gracefully. Got asked “well what if google goes down?”, so back to our problematic system of excel sheets it is :(

I experienced the opposite when Google actually went down and all of our email, docs and information went away for the day. Then one day our Internet went down and then the company bought a Microwave internet link and an off site server.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#432

Post by Radim »

Scoundreller wrote: post #423
pclmulqdq wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of outsourcing decisions seem to be made on the premise of "what if it breaks?" It's a terrible fallacy. Your wafer saw (or server) that is utilized 1% of the time is going to need a lot less maintenance than a shared wafer saw that is used 16 hours a day. You will actually experience a lot less downtime by investing in your own wafer saw (or your own servers) rather than outsourcing (to a foundry or a cloud pr…

At work, I wanted to use google sheets for our schedule because it just works: can have view only links, and it handles multiple editors at the same time gracefully. Got asked “well what if google goes down?”, so back to our problematic system of excel sheets it is :(

That may have been a wise person! "What if Google takes us down" (rather than goes down itself) is a valid business risk to at least consider.

Google & co are doing their best to remove themselves from a rational person's critical path. They're too big, you're too small; they're full of AI and politics, you have no recourse.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#434

Post by thaeli »

hamsamrma wrote: post #339
ownagefool wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the saw breaks, what if the person who knows how to use the saw leaves? There are good answers to these problems, but I find folks who find comfort in outsourcing assume it's easier for the downstream org solve them. Personal experience suggests it's often a false sense of security, and you often have to have your own experts anyway. Saw the same in software. We won't get budget to patch so let's outsource. T…

ime the primary reason to outsource is to get rid of the responsibility and the long-tail due-diligence that comes with it.

Also the blame. On prem outage? IT management is in the hot seat for a fix. AWS outage? Well, major us-east-1 outages make the news so the blame is more diffuse. And even outside of that, it's much harder for anyone internally to blame IT management for the outsourcing, so long as they were smart and got the CFO to take credit for the cost savings of going cloud or something.

HN often underestimates how much of enterprise IT, and large business generally, is about making sure that upsides are concentrated enough your management chain can take responsibility, and downsides are either diffuse enough or deflectable enough that your management chain can avoid responsibility.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#435

Post by mschuster91 »

> Amazon knew that the courier service they were using didn't really even try to deliver packages4 promptly and the only short-term mitigation available to them was to tell support to tell people that they shouldn't expect that packages have arrived when they've been marked as delivered.

Well, that's partially the fault of Amazon for paying absolute shit on parcel contracts that literally cannot support a parcel business. When the incentive for the parcel delivery service is to mark a package as delivered to get money from Amazon and at the same time hold the packages for one to three days to group them by recipient, of course this is what will result!

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#436

Post by chalst »

solveit wrote: post #233
DannyBee wrote: post #110

The problem here is actually very basic - markets do not enforce efficiency. Period. The efficient market hypothesis is simply wrong. Strong form efficiency was already formally disproven quite a while ago. Weak form efficiency has been show to only true if P=NP. There is not really a strong need to go into why inefficiencies can persist, etc, because at a baseline, it turns out there is no provable theory that marke…

Sure, sure, you can encode difficult computational problems into markets in convoluted ways, but this is uninteresting unless you're into that kind of thing. When people usually say that markets aren't efficient, they don't mean that optimal resource allocation is a computationally intractable problem. They're saying that they see, clear as day, obvious inefficiencies that aren't being corrected. They're saying that…

Inexploitability is not efficiency. Back in the 2000s, plenty of financiers knew the subprime market was overpricing assets for years before anyone figured out how to profitably short the market.

Hard to deflate asset-price bubbles are a fact of finance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#437

Post by tetsusaiga »

silisili wrote: post #239
solveit wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how I feel about an anon account presumably created for the sole purpose of denigrating someone's ability.

A kid showing their age. When I started at a company, I listened to stand-ups of 'yeah 4 weeks' and whined I could do it -today-. And I could. I was a rockstar, everyone else was an old lump. FF to today and I realize how much I didn't know. Mostly business relations, relations with product, proper testing and pipeline integration, and honestly...just thinking. I used to be prolific and just write and write. Today I…

Really trying to keep this in mind lately. The code is the easy part.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#438

Post by cosmojg »

impalallama wrote: post #419

> [It] involve companies being efficient and/or products being basically as good as possible because, if it were possible for them to be better, someone would've outcompeted them and done it already. Must be a generational thing but I don't think anyone i know (ie under 30) genuinely believes this anymore.

I think the more correct statement is that products are as good as profitably possible and no better. If the margins on a better product aren't large enough to justify spinning up a new business just to sell it, the existing product will remain as it is indefinitely. To top it all off, consumer expectations can be surprisingly low. It's often the case that no one even wants or knows to want a better product, let alone being willing to pay for one.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#439

Post by Psyladine »

samgtx wrote: post #83
massysett wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of stuff that works remarkably well even though it’s cheap. I just came from a supermarket. It’s filled with items from around the world, of which most are very inexpensive. The consistent quality of these products is astounding—a bag of potato chips or a box of crackers tastes exactly the same, anywhere in the country where I buy it, year-round. A can of Coca-Cola tastes exactly the same even though th…

A bit of a woo-woo aside but I've been trying to practice more gratitude thinking in my daily life and the grocery store is an easy place to be reminded of how good we have it.

I'm a believer that the largest part of what led Yeltsin to fundamentally change what it was, and thus cause the dissolution of the USSR, was his impromptu grocery store visit in the US.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#440

Post by bjterry »

> Amazon eventually solved this problem by having their own delivery people (and Apple has done this as well for same-day delivery). At scale, there's no commercial service you can pay for that will reliably attempt to deliver packages.

It's funny, I have actually observed the phenomenon he described in the same company. Safeway in San Francisco either uses their own delivery drivers, or they subcontract to DoorDash depending on the time of day of delivery. If I order with Safeway delivery drivers, they will happily deliver all the way to my apartment door inside the building. If I get a DoorDash driver, the intercom will magically be broken 100% of the time. It's a perfect comparison.

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