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Comment by thyrsus | Hacker News Reader

I work within an organization resembling this, and yet it has remained profitable for multiple decades. I forever wonder when the technical naked short options[0] will get called, but they never have in a serious way. My suspicion is that the chaos is S.O.P. among peer companies, so the market has never experienced a competitor not so hobbled. It may also be that controlling chaos is so expensive it's a non-obvious competitive advantage not to do so.

[0] technical debt is when you have a plan to pay it down. A technical naked short option is when your plan is to hope the subsystem goes away before its deficiencies have catastrophic effects.

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I think the underlying reason for why IT companies are so chaotic and inefficient, is because they simply don't need enough people, if they are well structured, do quality work and use simple and powerful tools/solutions.

You could run a super high valued company on just a handful of people, and society is just not ready for that. It's a case of technology advancing faster than human organisation and economic system, and the multiples are just too large, it's a big challenge for society to handle the impact.

So it's better for the organisations to be less efficient and chaotic, and to use dumbed down tools, overcomplicated solutions etc. This will fill the void created by the advancement in technology, so that the organisation can continue to function by at least resembling the traditional model.

You would need to significantly shorten the working hours in order to enable more efficient companies. Otherwise you'd get even more hyper concentration of wealth in a very short time.

> You could run a super high valued company on just a handful of people, and society is just not ready for that.

Here is the hidden truth. So much of the current information sector is just daycare for grownups. Then there's a secret nucleus of people who actually do the real work. The secret to happy employment rests on being able to determine who's actually cutting lumber versus who's just playing dress-up.

If we want to gradually move towards a system of universal basic income, maybe we could help sell it by funneling larger sections of society into IT, and just give them a bullshit job where they can fingerpaint all day to get their paycheck. Eventually you can let them stop fingerpainting and just give them the paycheck.

> The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.

> You could run a super high valued company on just a handful of people, and society is just not ready for that.

My version of this is that those handful of people become critical to the organization, which must be avoided at all costs. Every place I've been that's weighed down by huge IT staffs, undervalues tech, absolutely hates to give coders raises, and sees tech as a cost center, even while preaching how important technology is.

Sadly, this seems to be the case so often that the only companies that really succeed with good tech have builders in the founder's chair who _still code_, at least until the model is firmly established (but even after is good too). Pretty much everybody else resents software devs and thinks they're overpaid.

Weirdly a smaller, better paid team can often be resented _more_ (because of course, you can't see all the money that's being _saved_ by having a small highly-powered team).

I think badly run tech organisations still work fine. Most of the time it doesn’t matter whether your problem is solved with spaghetti and 300 hours, or 1 hour and a fantastic design, since the gains are still orders of magnitude higher than the cost.

It’s just that such an organisation is unpleasant to work for.

> I forever wonder when the technical naked short options[0] will get called, but they never have in a serious way.

What does «called» mean in this analogy? That the subsystem doesn’t go away?

So your experience is that: Stuff tends to stick around? That’s my experience. I have never encountered a throw-away MVP that was actually thrown away if the product continued in the same direction (and didn’t pivot).

In the analogy to the naked short, the option is "called" when the known deficiency causes catastrophic consequences. Example: The file system is so large it takes 60 days for the backup to finish, and thus the "call" would be a multiple drive failure requiring a full restore. Example: NFSv3 with "system" security, i.e., whatever the client says it's uid and gids are, we accept that, and thus the "call" would be a malicious client declaring arbitrary unauthenticated uid/gids. See, e.g., possible publicity stunt for the movie "hackers". These are naked shorts because there are no plans to fix them.

How long have you stuck around at a company? Maybe your company or business type is different, but I have certainly seen apps get rewritten or replaced over the course of 10 years. Some are built solely for some migration period. Some have been redesigned as part of a different system after a few years. Some major systems get rewritten after the continuous addition of integrations over 10 years demands a better architecture.

Complexity never really goes away, it can merely be transformed from one type to another. This organization has apparently decided it rather deals with the complexity of not having processes rather than the complexity of maintaining them. Which is a valid choice: look at India. A society totally chaotic to a stranger but one that has stuck around for millenia.

> Complexity never really goes away

This is only true if the complexity comes from the underlying problem that must be solved or goal that must be achieved.

Complexity that exists for historical reasons, derived from technology or platform choices, solves a problem you don’t really have or don’t need to have, relates to the structure of the organisation, etc. etc. can of course all be made to go away completely.

In my experience a small fraction of the complexity in most organisations and software is truly, fundamentally unavoidable.

I don't know why you are bringing references to a country ? A country is not a company, running a country is vastly more complex than any organisation.

> the complexity of not having processes rather than the complexity of maintaining them

There are always processes. Sometimes they are explicit and well-understood; sometimes they are hidden, and not open to improvement because nobody knows what they are. Implicit processes tend to disadvantage newcomers, as well as reinforcing social assumptions and conventions (that tend to disadvantage those that are already disadvantaged).

Explicit processes don't have to be heavyweight and bureaucratic.

There was a good essay on the problems caused by informal/implicit processes, from about 20 years ago. I've spent 45 minutes searching for it, but I'm afraid I can't find it.

Was the essay you were seeking https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm?

Yes, it absolutely was! Thank you!

Is India still the same society from millenia ago when they have been conquered since?

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