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A better example: What is a smart phone? It does hundred things for which there were special tools for each those usecases. But the phone killed all those super-simple, opinionated, single-purpose tools.
No, they get shitty because businesses need to move the needle. Product people and engineers want to put things that "show" they did that on their resume.
Want to get to market rate? Then do a project that will get you your next job. That isnt going to be exclusively for the company, thats going to be as much for you as it is for them.
The fundamental problem is that if you aren't upping your staff's salary to market rates, you're forcing them to do the above. Without the money, your interests DO NOT ALIGN.
This results in some people having very strange opinions about work (clock punching) and doing the minimum to get by. It results in strange corporate polices where incompetence starts to blend in with the furniture and no one knows how to get them "unstuck".
Point of order: "enshittification" does not mean what the author's using it to mean. It does not just mean "the product got worse". It means "the product was purposefully made worse in order to capture additional value from the customer," i.e. a rug pull. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd hate to see such a useful term for corporate malfeasance diluted.
Point of order: "enshittification" does not mean what the author's using it to mean. It does not just mean "the product got worse". It means "the product was purposefully made worse in order to capture additional value from the customer," i.e. a rug pull. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'd hate to see such a useful term for corporate malfeasance diluted.
Yep. The irony being that "enshittification," properly deployed, can actually lead a company to even more success. Product people always think "having the best product" wins the day, but there are billions of dollars made through a perfectly baked enshittified pie.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is specifically what I've written on the subject (I quote this in the book): https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/14/pearl-clutching/#this-toi... > The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply…
... argument withdrawn. I suppose if I want to use the word to mean the original sense, I need to include clarification that that's what I'm doing. I'll have to think of how best to do that without coming across as judgy or condescending, since that's sort of police-y (and also just unpleasant).
Entropy in action, eh?!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down. This reads more like some corporate-aimed PR than earnest words that left the mouth of a human
It is actually true. If you have an option to defraud people and dont take it, then you actually have "not defrauding" as a value. If you take bigger salary in exchange of defrauding people, say by denying insurance payment to people who should have it, you dont have "not defrauding" as a value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You show what your values really are by the opportunities you turn down. This reads more like some corporate-aimed PR than earnest words that left the mouth of a human
It is actually true. If you have an option to defraud people and dont take it, then you actually have "not defrauding" as a value. If you take bigger salary in exchange of defrauding people, say by denying insurance payment to people who should have it, you dont have "not defrauding" as a value.
Every US president since FDR would have “not killing everyone” as a value by not hitting the big red button. Almost nobody else will get to be tested in that way. Is that actually a value?
There is also a private information problem. If it never occurred to me to defraud investors, but it was retroactively discovered I could have (and gotten away with it?), do I get the “doesn’t defraud” value? Does the more evil version of me get the value, as long as they thought of it but didn’t act on it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is actually true. If you have an option to defraud people and dont take it, then you actually have "not defrauding" as a value. If you take bigger salary in exchange of defrauding people, say by denying insurance payment to people who should have it, you dont have "not defrauding" as a value.
While it’s true it also seems kinda worthless through broad applicability and ties moral values to power or money, which I don’t think many people would agree with. Every US president since FDR would have “not killing everyone” as a value by not hitting the big red button. Almost nobody else will get to be tested in that way. Is that actually a value? There is also a private information problem. If it never occurred…
This doesn't apply, your morals are only tested once you have to sacrifice something that you find valuable in order to uphold your morals, whether that is money, power, or something else.