An example would be a recommendation system who’s recommendations are ignored by downstream systems. And yet, 30 people in an org work on that engine.
Right. Maybe Elon's approach is correct, and all these layoffs are a chance for companies to trim the fat and focus on what matters.
We're only now realizing the bubble the tech industry was in, and that pursuing endless growth is not sustainable.
> But when risk appetite is high and the company can afford to throw money at experiments, it makes sense to still pay for the rest of the 80%.
Does it, though? You're paying for full-time engineers to work on bets that might be completely misaligned even if they succeed, which also might be unlikely. And this makes up the majority of your company? It sounds ludicrous in any market.
This type of thing goes on all over the company. Another example, a complex “data provider platform”. Which is actually just spinning up spark clusters, joining data, and making it available to downstream consumers. There’s a lot of bells and whistles, notifications built on top. Strip away the details, it’s just doing a join. Ten engineers, two senior engineers making 500k, long hours.
That’s Amazon.
Requiring everything to move KPIs is psychotic, but if your effort should have moved a KPI, and didn't, then you'd better have a damn good story about how it delivered value elsewhere instead.