jgeada

| - Have leaders skilled in whatever their direct reports are doing. Use them as coaches normally and as spare workers in times of high demand.

I think this is the biggest hurdle for US style management produced from the MBA cookie factories. Their only skill sets are MBA speak, assigning blame, taking credit and granting themselves the largest bonuses possible while telling all the actual workers generating value that "due to current financial conditions, your raise is limited to 2%"

Not the "West", obsessive single minded individualism is a US characteristic. All other western nations (read: Europe) realize that there is significant value to society and that to achieve things we need to work as a group.

Well, those committed the only crime that matters in the US: they stole from the rich.

And don't forget retroactive claw backs on any profits taken; otherwise they'd make sure the assets to be seized are of absolutely no value (and canonically, negative value: all the environmental disaster and other collateral damage is offloaded to the public)

I think their problem is that very few countries have refinery capacity to deal with crude oil, which is what these ships contain. So the crew have limited choices. It is a "someone else's problem", to quote the Hitchhiker's Guide.

This seems like one of those problems that arise when we let rich people and corporations arbitrage for the lowest possible legal consequences, in this case flags of convenience that have no standards.

There is always some poor or corrupt country willing to ignore consequences as long as they can make a buck. The profits are private, but costs and consequences always laid onto the public. Miserable way to run things.

Big scale fraud like this always has its origin and motive force in the executive suite and board.

However, the consequences are always applied to everyone but the executives and board.

At a previous company we used to joke that most of management was a "problem admiration society":

They'd love to talk about problems, investigate them from all angles, make plans on how to plan to solve the problem, identify who caused it or how to blame for it, quantify how much it costs us or how much money we could make from solving it, everything and anything except actually doing something about it.

It was never about doing the thing.

We own the consequences of our actions, our votes. Yes, we as a country, for whatever reasons, voted for someone who very clearly telegraphed he would be doing exactly what he's been doing. FAFO, and we're not even close to the full spectrum of what the FO part implies.

We the people are responsible for the government we get.

Don't like the consequences? Make better voting choices next time.

All you did was changing the programming language from (say) Python to English. One is designed to be a programming language, with few ambiguities etc. The other is, well, English.

Speed of typing code is not all that different than the speed of typing English, even accounting for the volume expansion of English -> <favorite programming language>. And then, of course, there is the new extra cost of then reading and understanding whatever code the AI wrote.

All empirical evidence shows that single payer systems work better, producing far better outcomes at lower cost, than the US system. In fact, so much better that a single payer system is what Congress has chosen for itself!

But seems some prefer to believe a theoretical argument with no evidence to back it up.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Markets can remain irrational, or colluding, far longer than you can stay solvent (or even alive).

For example, while the Phoebus cartel only really lasted from 1925 through to 1939, 1000hr incandescent light bulbs remain the standard offering till present day. Profitable market manipulations are sticky.

The whole notion that markets are efficient is just a mathematical construct that has become very dogmatic for people. But if you look into the details, markets are efficient under the assumptions of perfect information and infinite time. Neither of those conditions are present in the real world: we neither have perfect information nor infinite time.

Because when you're dying you have no bargaining position. You can't just wait it out. And you're just a single client, whether you personally die or not does not meaningfully change their bottom line.

So it is a highly asymmetric bargaining situation where all the incentives are poorly aligned. Of course it is exploitative.

Why does everyone immediately pivot to EVs on this subject, instead of (looks around) gargantuan SUVs and trucks everywhere, due to peculiarities of US policies regulating SUVs more leniently than cars on fuel efficiency?

Articles like this seem to keep highlighting a fundamental disconnect between what software teams really do vs what the people "managing" software teams a couple of layers above think those teams actually do.

The people up in the clouds think they have a full understanding of what the software is supposed to be, that they "own" the entire intent and specification in a few ambiguously worded requirements and some loose constraints and, being generous, a very incomplete understanding of the system dependencies. They see software teams as an expensive cost center, not as true the source of all their wealth and power.

The art of turning that into an actual software product is what good software teams do; I haven't yet seen anything that can automate that process away or even help all that much.

Word of mouth. If you make happy customers, they'll readily tell others.

But the truth is most modern products aren't good enough to earn word of mouth.

A good example of how to work it right is Steam: while it is not perfect, most discussions give them benefit of doubt because most of the time they do work for the best interest of their customers, not just themselves.

And what's happened since 1995 (30 years ago!) ?

Because all the trends seem to indicate that to make a living people are working longer hours, holding multiple concurrent jobs (eg https://gameofjobs.org/are-americans-now-more-likely-than-ev...), and holding off retirement.

The Big Dig has been an enormous success though, it has completely revitalized Boston.

Fundamentally this is not a statement about programming or software. It is a statement that management at almost all companies is abysmally inept and are hardly ever held to account.

Most sizeable software projects require understanding, in detail, what is needed by the business, what is essential and what is not, and whether any of that is changing over the lifetime of the project. I don't think I've ever been on a project where any of that was known, it was all guess work.

This type of idea is never popular with the people that have large stores of the prior government backed currency. The rich never want to have their wealth in any way threatened, and they have the reach and influence to make the government protect their assets, even if it comes at the cost of causing misery to pretty much everyone else.

There ought to be a better balance, and the US found it in the period between the end of WWII and the 1970s. High marginal taxes on extreme wealth, high inheritance taxes and zealous antitrust and anti-monopoly enforcement all kept people's wealth and power disparity somewhat in check.

Would be interesting to see the historical trends for operating margins.

These days it seems that 30%+ operating margins are what VCs and stock market are expecting now, which seems unsustainable. Software and similar businesses can easily do it because cost of manufacturing one more unit is close to zero, all the costs are primarily NRE. Not all business fit that model and but yet they all aspire to the same margins.

The odd thing is that in the US we we deliberately do not differentiate free speech from other things such as dollars, lies, propaganda and outright manipulation. This is a relatively new thing, forced upon us in the last few decades, and it is causing a spectacular crash in trust towards all our institutions.

But billionaires are making and keeping ever more money than before, so it isn't a problem.

For reference, TSMC's yearly capital investment budget is about $50B/year (https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2025/03/07/200...)

This business is expensive, making and running fabs is way way more expensive than most anybody thinks. There are very few companies able to do it profitably.

Piddling sum in this domain, that amount won't even buy you enough for 1 production line, let alone where to put in, staff it and get all the necessary collateral to allow people to design to it.

And no amount of money will get you one of ASML EUV machines any time soon as the entire production line for the next handful of years has already been spoken for.

Right, because the guy earning a normal salary has as much influence as the billionaire that is rubbing shoulders with and paying bribes to the decision makers, and also controls the editorial policy, salary and employment of the newspaper in question.

Sometimes quantity of money has a quality all of its own.

They're words with consequences, backed by law and the freedom of companies doing all they're permitted to do; but fundamentally just words. Contracts are just words, but words with meaning and power, because we all agree to play by those rules.

Most people in the western world are more frequently harmed by words than by physical violence. Way more frequently.

You're fired is just words, your health insurance is denied is just words, we don't accept your type here is words, you're being sued by someone with effectively infinite means is just words. But those words that will drastically change the course of your life.

While I abhor physical violence, I do also realize some words are also a type of violence in and of themselves.

I think this might be a misinterpretation of the word "responsible".

If a platform lies or spread malicious content, it seems people want the platform to have the liability and consequences for the malfeasance. That is what most people mean by "responsible".

Government sets the rules, and if someone fail to comply, there are consequences against those responsible. Government isn't responsible, it is holding them responsible.

I know it is hearsay, but it seems many times interviews try to get free work from candidates. Here, have a look at this real problem, see if you can solve it in whatever the interview time frame is.

When there are too many candidates and not so many jobs, and absolutely no regulation, employers are free to exploit applicants without consequences. Employers will do this even when there is no actual job being offered, so they can use the availability of applicants to apply downward pressure on the salaries of the workers they already have.

It is the usual complexity rule of software: solving 80% of the problem is usually pretty easy at only takes about 50% of the estimated effort, it is the remaining 20% that takes up the remaining 90% of estimated effort (thus the usual schedule overruns).

The interesting thing is that there are problems for which this rule applies recursively. Of the remaining 20%, most of it is easier than the remaining 20% of what is left.

Most software ships without dealing with that remaining 20%, and largely that is OK; it is not OK for safety critical systems though.