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Comment by grues-dinner | Hacker News Reader

These are probably the same people who are "surprised" when 100 offshore agency dredgings don't magically do the app 10x faster than 10 expensive onshore workers.

To be fair, the PowerPoint they were shown at that AI Synergies retreat probably was very slick.

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It's almost like the people in charge of these businesses have no goddamn clue what they're actually selling, how it works or why it's good (or isn't).

It's almost like, and stay with me here, but it's almost like the vast majority of tech companies are now run by business graduates who do not understand tech AT ALL, have never written a single line of code in their lives, and only know how to optimize businesses by cutting costs and making the products worse until users revolt.

It's almost like that's a consequence of not enforcing anti-trust vigorously enough, allowing capital to accrete in Big Tech, and creating extremely large tech companies whose primary innovation comes from acquiring rather than building.

The reason a competitive ecosystem of tech companies is effective has less to do with market hand magic and more to do with big companies being dumb and conservative, largely as a consequence of their leader selection criteria.

Microsoft missing web and mobile.

Intel missing mobile and GPU.

Google missing productizing AI.

Cough cough kickbacks

I have tried to digest why this is done. It is not because they believe they are 10x faster.

It is because they think it will 10x their chances of getting a really good engineer for 1/10th as cheap.

At least that is my theory. maybe i am wrong. i try to be charitable.

Do you think you could do a better job than a CEO of public company [x] from a technical standpoint - in other words, omitting the connections and public-facing charisma that they typically bring as part of the package?

I genuinely do, but kind of paradoxically also suspect I'm wrong. It's simply that it's something so far outside my domain that I just can't really appreciate their skills honed over many years of practice and training, because all I get to externally see are their often ridiculous limitations, failures, and myopia.

I imagine this is, in many ways, how people who have no understanding of e.g. software, let alone software development, see software engineers. I don't think it's uncharitable, it's just human nature. Imagine if we were the ones hiring CEOs. 'That guys a total asshat, and we can get ten guys in India - hard working, smart guys, standouts in 1.4 billion people - for the same price.' Go go go.

I think there is confusion because coding is easy, software engineering is hard.

Coding was never the hardest problem. And it is hard to say why people are taking so long to realise it

People who don't know how to code know they don't know how. They can look over your shoulder and see that it looks like gibberish, and they also have no interest in understanding it even if they could.

On the other hand, designing the software or engineering a solution to the problem seems like something they could do, as far as they know, because it's not something concrete that they can look at and see is beyond their abilities.

Alternatively, when your outsourcing agency finds they have accidentally assigned you an actually good engineer, term used loosely, that you're not paying for (they know this happens when the engineer gets up to speed with your codebase at all), "your guy" is replaced with another guy who inherits the name, the email address and the SSH key.

And if the agency doesn't do that, the good engineer will figure out he's being underpaid as slop-for-hire cannon fodder and move on his own accord.

No engineer is smart and overall capable enough to be called a 10x one and yet doesn't realize their price in western value. And we still talk about corporate cogs, the truly brilliant simply start their own gigs

I never knew a single 10x. I know lots of them who say they are 10x though, but my parrot does a better job then most of them

I knew 2 at least. They could run literal circles around whole experienced team and achieved sometimes, ie if given ie a week things that would be hard for seniors to do at all.

I talk about ie taking ActiveMQ, building it on your own and tweaking various calls and internal parameters to achieve cca 10x performance boost compared to just vanilla installation. Companies bundling it as part of the product would kill and pay serious money for such distro. Guy did this in maybe 3-4 days from never touching ActiveMQ or any other similar messaging system before to have it reliably working and moving to next thing.

These folks can be dangerous though, they come up with complex solution that can be extremely hard to maintain, debug and evolve by others. So their added value on long enough time scale can be actually negative even for quite senior but not absolutely top notch brilliant team. Not something 'code ninjas' (or as I call them brilliant juniors) care about, but if you work on something long term you will see this pattern from time to time.

Also these folks are hard to keep since they get bored when things slow down and big challenges are not around, and quickly and easily move on. Making the issue above pretty serious item to consider.

I just don't understand why offshore agenies are so prevalent. Surely hiring directly would be cheaper and gives your more control when you are hiring >1000 workers

About 10 years ago I worked for Fortune 500 company that had outsourced a bunch of its technical work to offshore contractors. New CEO and CTO came in and got rid of all the contractors, replacing them with talented US-based hires. Cut the size of our tech organization down from something like 12,000 (including contractors) to maybe 3,000. Our tech generally worked a lot better after that also.

that meme with the oversized pants and penny loafers comes to mind.

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