Enshittification as Overproduction in Software | Hacker News Reader

Enshittification as Overproduction in Software

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4 pointsakkartik5 comments

Perhaps she will get into this in part 2, but a key part of the problem here is that of bad incentives, wherein a software company is punished (by the stock market or if they're not public yet, by investors who want it to go public. Most software products cannot grow beyond a certain size (whether measured as users or features or revenue), which is not a problem unless you think you have to be making a billion-user infinite growth machine. But if the people paying the salaries would rather make 1,000 bets on the Next Big Thing, and if 999 of them fail but one succeeds that is far better than 100 who fail and 900 which become medium-sized, profitable companies, then overproduction is what you get.

If everyone rationally responding to their incentives, produces an irrational behavior in aggregate, you have a systemic problem. We have a systemic problem.

Ok she does touch on it in part 2, but it doesn't seem to be her main focus, but maybe I should read it again.

Wondering what would happen if a company recognizes their core product is no longer a business differentiator. What if it decides to spin out the common pieces to vendors and spins up a skunkworks team to build a similar, competing product?

Team A analyzes SaaS solutions and tries to replace existing systems with turnkey services.

Team B makes a cleanroom implementation mirroring the original product. This could confuse sales, though.

Team C is the skeleton crew that fixes bugs and still delivers new features, but at a reduced pace.

Would this be too costly? Too much duplicated work?

Maybe even having to choose only one team is an executive decision and determines the rest of the roadmap for the whole company.

Each team would need a vertical slice of each department, from marketing to QA. But there would be cross-pollination, because each business sponsor fields requests from different aspects of the same thing.

Some observations from other domains. The military has special forces, airborne, and frontline soldiers. Another is F1 technologies being adapted in consumer vehicles (if one car company manages the whole stack).

I have over time come to believe that quite a lot of high-level decisions are made, not in order to make the company run better, but rather in order to make the Powerpoint slides look tidier. Team A, B, and C would confuse and annoy the typical person making decisions.

> if the people paying the salaries would rather make 1,000 bets on the Next Big Thing, and if 999 of them fail but one succeeds that is far better than 100 who fail and 900 which become medium-sized, profitable companies, then overproduction is what you get.

I think we are getting this equation wrong as a society.

We need figure out how to spin out the 900 that become medium-sized profitable companies. In a sense, companies like bending spoons are doing just that. We haven't found yet how to make 1000 bets, have one be the Next Big Thing, and profit from the 900 that are still profitable enterprises in their own but fail in the overproduction environment that we think we need for the Next Big Thing.

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