Thread

1. torben-friis · 1790026444 · focus · HN ↗

   Here's my constant question:

   Everyone's going so fast that they keep hitting walls. Review, CI, product asking for things, whatever.

   Why have we not seen an improvements in products?

   While every post and thread feels like a 90's wall street office, the new android and iphone ship with fewer features than usual. No indie guys come up with a linux-sized alternative OS. Switch 2 remains unhacked. Windows takes 3 seconds to show the right click menu.

   Is everyone just running full speed in circles or something?

   1. ehnto · 1790043062 · focus · HN ↗

      Probably for the same reason that SV companies hiring thousands of developers struggled to improve their product much past the original product, that was built by a handful of people.

      Scale in headcount was a tactic to get investment, then you had to find stuff for everyone to work on. Suddenly people have the time to engineer so hard that we get runtime JSON defined CSS rendering engines to produce the same buttons we've had since 1995, instead of just writing a stylesheet and html.

      Code output velocity from AI threatens to be useful, except it's also prone to over-engineering and burning tokens on the unnecessary. It's learned from the best after all. My suspicion is there is a lot getting done, but it's just not that impactful to flagship products.

      As others have noted, there is a lot of new work going into passion projects that would have never happened otherwise, and that is cool. But I wouldn't hold my breath for SV tech to become super pragmatic and effective.

      1. moomoo11 · 1790043848 · focus · HN ↗

         those thousands of developers aren't working on the FB feed or whatever...

         they're working on the ad tech business and other business-related systems involved including internal tools.

         and all the other platform engineering shit under the hood that makes much of the web scaleable... and lots of it is open source and contributed to by various engineers from these companies.

         end of the day, these are businesses. they're not charities or whatever casual shit.

         nobody is stopping you from building a competing product that's lean or whatever.

         why don't you do something like that? i'm sure you're a genius.

         1. ehnto · 1790047035 · focus · HN ↗

            No seriously, companies hired developers just to starve the competition of talent, raise more investment etc. It was a genuine thing, that left a lot of developers doing pretty meaningless work. A similar thing happens for managers in big orgs, who want bigger headcounts to inflate their power in the org. You get thumb twiddling and initiatives to justify the headcount.

            It's probably changing now as VC cash floods into AI instead of web app startups, but I am not talking out of my ass, it's a well known phenomenon.

            The industry does not incentivise or reward lean software, the software input for a lot of "software" companies doesn't require it, that's fine. Exactly as you said they're businesses, they do what makes money and go where incentives take them. That cuts both ways, they are not disincentived to have a lot of wasted dev hours, at least not historically.

            1. antupis · 1790057172 · focus · HN ↗

               I think it's more about money and scaling, bus factor is pretty big if run very lean organization eg whatsapp 2014 and that point all those developers are kinda your cofounders and probably start asking much bigger piece of pie. With small teams you kinda trade scaling and availability to velocity. It's much easier to ship but running oncall 24/7 with small team is just nightmare.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.