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The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

bayramovanar.substack.com

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Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#111

Post by HWR_14 »

gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #69
copilot_king wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If it is AGI and you have access to it, pivot from code now. You will make millions or billions on pharmaceutical products in as little as one month. Start making cures for non small cell cancers; those are untapped markets. Reverse aging. Even at $1mill a treatment over ten treatments, you would be sought after. Go! Get off HN! Rule the world.

While I disagree it's AGI, AGI is not omniscience. It just means it general and able to address the same wide range of problems as human intelligence.

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#112

Post by HWR_14 »

jjmarr wrote: post #100
HWR_14 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if, instead of having to reach out to the big players, the economics of having a software developer or 2 on staff make it such that you could build custom-tailored, bespoke software to work "with" your company and not against? It's probably risk and liability and not development costs that keep things from moving in house. Not things AI is great at mitigating.

Hospitals are huge liability sinks. Doctors are constantly sued for killing, injuring, or traumatizing patients, because it's impossible to consistently save everyone.

Which is why they don't food liability when they can. Is it worth saving $100,000 a year if it allows the lawyer to say "if they had used industry standard software would the medical error have happened?"

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#113

Post by jakubmazanec »

Bayramovanar wrote: post #78
jakubmazanec wrote: post #53

I'm not arguing against the core arguments of the article (I agree with most of the points), but on the other hand, software development is (at least currently) an essentially iterative process - one that differs greatly from other production processes (e.g. buildings, cars). We all know how difficult it is to estimate how much development time something takes. Planning is hard and outcomes have therefore greater var…

I generally agree with you, but if you look deeper, cars, buildings, and the underlying know-how didn’t appear in a day either. Those were also iterative processes: first tires and mud houses, then horse carriages and brick houses, and eventually cars and buildings. In that sense, it’s not fundamentally different from engineering today. Working on core engineering functionality of a company is essentially the same ki…

I'm talking about how a single product is produced, not about its evolution through centuries. Anyway, the point wasn't to compare specific details, it's just an analogy.

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#114

Post by dangus »

stego-tech wrote: post #94
dangus wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you need some kind of source to back up the idea that IT or the software industry as a whole isn’t efficient. Software companies have much higher profit margins than companies that ship physical products. There really aren’t many industries that do better margins than software. To sell software, you don’t need a production facility, warehouse, nor do you even need an office building if you don’t want one. htt…

…bruh. Literally the very first line : > I will add some commentary from my subjective POV in IT: Subjective is doing the carrying, there. I am admitting up front that this is specific to me, my career, and the specific life experiences I’ve had with it thus far. Like…I won’t even entertain the rest of your comment if you’re not even going to read the entirety of mine before vomiting out an “UhM aHkShUaLlY” retort.

Well, from my subjective POV, the earth is flat.

The point of my comment is that a subjective anecdote from a very limited perspective isn’t telling a good story about why the industry is the way it is. You said these businesses aren’t efficient but they have extremely high profit margins, which objectively paints a different picture: they are sufficiently efficient. They are more efficient than most other businesses.

All this financial risk in the industry where employees are over-hired and low interest rate VC funds are thrown around haphazardly is accepted because even a modestly successful software business has high profit margins.

The investors that funded less than $10 million to Airbnb’s series A ended up a significant shareholder of a company that has the same market cap as PNC Financial Services in less than 20 years. PNC spent 180 years getting to that size.

Software-driven products have huge profit potential and they can grow fast.

If you think I’m being some kind of pedantic loser, fine, so be it. You can put the blindfolds on and ignore a data-supported viewpoint.

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#115

Post by bluescrn »

oytis wrote: post #24

Anecdotally, I didn't see more safety for engineers working on cash cows. Quite the contrary, if a product is already bringing revenue, it is an easy decision for the business to squeeze a bit more margin by letting people go. Stable, cash-generating projects are often first to be put into efficiency/maintenance mode.

> Stable, cash-generating projects are often first to be put into efficiency/maintenance mode

Or they're actively enshittified, aiming to extract more short-term revenue at the cost of a long-term future...

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#116

Post by OfflineSergio »

Bayramovanar wrote: post #78
jakubmazanec wrote: post #53

I'm not arguing against the core arguments of the article (I agree with most of the points), but on the other hand, software development is (at least currently) an essentially iterative process - one that differs greatly from other production processes (e.g. buildings, cars). We all know how difficult it is to estimate how much development time something takes. Planning is hard and outcomes have therefore greater var…

I generally agree with you, but if you look deeper, cars, buildings, and the underlying know-how didn’t appear in a day either. Those were also iterative processes: first tires and mud houses, then horse carriages and brick houses, and eventually cars and buildings. In that sense, it’s not fundamentally different from engineering today. Working on core engineering functionality of a company is essentially the same ki…

When it comes to cost rebuilding, we can't compare the software engineering with other industries(like cards or buildings). I think this makes it much more iterative compared to them. Living in North America, if feel like 99% of aparatments and houses can be grouped into 5-10 floor plans. I think thats because when you are designing a new building or house you really can't do much risk. You do what has already worked. Software also have trends, but they change so often. You also can't do A/B testing or targeting or measure every single interaction potential customer has with your product. The nature of building "Software" really brings so many options to the table which increases the number of iterations by order of magnitude.

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#117

Post by _dark_matter_ »

Denzel wrote: post #107
billy99k wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Consulting/contractor becomes default - Full-time employment becomes rare; most devs work project-to-project like other creative industries" I'm in the tech industry and have been doing this for 12+ years now. In the beginning, it was because I wanted to live overseas for a few years, without a break in my career. Now, it's about survival. I buy my own health insurance (me and my family) in the marketplace every yea…

Are you a one-person shop? How do you find clients?

Almost always they start by having connections that hire them (old colleagues, former friends, etc.), building out those connections (conference talks, doing really good work, writing high quality blogs), and then if you're lucky, some word of mouth.

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#118

Post by _heimdall »

>In traditional industries like manufacturing you don’t hire 500 factory workers unless you have a production line that needs them. You don’t over-hire based on a guess.

This is interesting, in my experience its seemed to be the opposite.

In manufacturing, its must easier to come up with a specific number of employees you need for a given project or contract.

If the contract is expected to sign you may hire early to get ahead of it.

If the contract falls through, or an existing contract is cancelled, you know exactly how many people you need to cut to balance labor with your current commitments.

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#119

Post by silvestrov »

thunky wrote: post #99
Bayramovanar wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will avoid getting into a “who understands economics better” debate. But factory workers usually require specialized machinery, tooling, and physical capacity, which makes overhiring slower, harder and more constrained. Those investments force more deliberate planning. By contrast, engineers mostly require a laptop and company hoodie... That low marginal cost makes it far easier to hire aggressively on expectations…

This, and I would also assume it's easier to spot idle factory employees, where idle devs (especially remote ones) can be easier to miss. And, (assumption again) the factory boss doesn't have an incentive to increase idle worker numbers, where a dev manager often benefits from being in charge of a larger number of hardly working people.

It is a lot easier for a software engineer to overcomplicate things.

All of a sudden it is no longer enough with a few shell scripts. No, we need a full kubernetes cluster to run a service used by 10 secretaries.

No, we can't just use PostgreSQL as a queue, we definitely need Apache Kafka for 1 msg per second.

Re: The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat

#120

Post by Havoc »

Don’t think it needs to be either or.

ZIRP, AI, over hiring, and a wave of boot camp labour supply I suspect all contribute.

Plus we’re also likely approaching saturation on a lot of fronts with attention and ad density saturation. Things like YouTube seem to be on the edge of how much ads they can force feed without people just not using yt because it’s unusable. Enshitification isn’t a cycle, it’s a one way trip. Combine that with over hiring and it’s bound to hit a wall

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