I was in the IT industry for about 20 years until I finally had enough a couple of years ago, so none of this is a shock to me 😅 “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”
Smaller companies can still manake to make quality stuff more often than the giants, but the moment they actually make it into the bigger leagues (if they make it), they have to bring in a a lot of your average MBA types and business “intelligence” folks, and that’s when things go down the shitter. They might be making more money but now everything is suddenly about “KPIs” - ie. usually badly defined and/or incorrectly calculated metrics about the service that supposedly reflect how good it is, but at best measure how addictive it is and how much money it makes you, but not how enjoyable it is or if it’s actually even a good thing for your users. Not to mention how often those metrics are literal garbage based on such creative abuses of basic statistics that they aren’t even wrong. It’s astonishing how much trust people put in numbers some BI moron churned out, when the reality very often is that not only was the data collected wrong, but they made completely wrong conclusions about what their data represents (“I’ll call the interval between these events the session length”) and then applied some statistical methods on them that basically destroyed any information there could possibly have been (like taking the average of averages when the original populations have very different sizes). The CEO may not always understand the tech, but by gawd they do understand numbers, and all these KPIs just seem so convincing. When this line goes up it means that were doing good and on the right path, it’s math right?
And now the C-suite is mostly made up of MBA types, the founders probably either left or were stuck in some dark corner where they won’t bother anyone too much with their day drinking.
And now the internet service, or TV, or car, or washing machine, or whatever your company has been making is no longer really a service for the users, but more of a machine designed to bleed money out of them as efficiently as possible and that’s run according to the tenets of what’s essentially modern numerology in a suit and tie (and barely any better at describing anything you could call objective reality).
Yep, it’s all about selling features now and not caring about the actual product itself at all anymore. Nearsightedness took over the whole industry: boost this quarter’s metrics, heck, boost this week’s numbers above anything else.
I was in the IT industry for about 20 years until I finally had enough a couple of years ago, so none of this is a shock to me 😅 “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”
Smaller companies can still manake to make quality stuff more often than the giants, but the moment they actually make it into the bigger leagues (if they make it), they have to bring in a a lot of your average MBA types and business “intelligence” folks, and that’s when things go down the shitter. They might be making more money but now everything is suddenly about “KPIs” - ie. usually badly defined and/or incorrectly calculated metrics about the service that supposedly reflect how good it is, but at best measure how addictive it is and how much money it makes you, but not how enjoyable it is or if it’s actually even a good thing for your users. Not to mention how often those metrics are literal garbage based on such creative abuses of basic statistics that they aren’t even wrong. It’s astonishing how much trust people put in numbers some BI moron churned out, when the reality very often is that not only was the data collected wrong, but they made completely wrong conclusions about what their data represents (“I’ll call the interval between these events the session length”) and then applied some statistical methods on them that basically destroyed any information there could possibly have been (like taking the average of averages when the original populations have very different sizes). The CEO may not always understand the tech, but by gawd they do understand numbers, and all these KPIs just seem so convincing. When this line goes up it means that were doing good and on the right path, it’s math right?
And now the C-suite is mostly made up of MBA types, the founders probably either left or were stuck in some dark corner where they won’t bother anyone too much with their day drinking.
And now the internet service, or TV, or car, or washing machine, or whatever your company has been making is no longer really a service for the users, but more of a machine designed to bleed money out of them as efficiently as possible and that’s run according to the tenets of what’s essentially modern numerology in a suit and tie (and barely any better at describing anything you could call objective reality).
</rant>Yep, it’s all about selling features now and not caring about the actual product itself at all anymore. Nearsightedness took over the whole industry: boost this quarter’s metrics, heck, boost this week’s numbers above anything else.