It's because companies are no longer run by engineers. The MBAs and accountants are in charge and they could care less about making good products.

At Microsoft, Satya Nadella has an engineering background, but it seems like he didn't spend much time as an engineer before getting an MBA and playing the management advancement game.

Our industry isn't what it used to be and I'm not sure it ever could.

▲ linguae 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I feel a major shift happened in the 2010s. The tech industry became less about making the world a better place through technology, and more about how to best leverage power to make as much money as possible, making a world a better place be damned.

This also came at a time when tech went from being considered a nerdy obsession to tech being a prestigious career choice much like how law and medicine are viewed.

Tech went from being a sideshow to the main show. The problem is once tech became the main show, this attracts the money- and career-driven rather than the ones passionate about technology. It’s bad enough working with mercenary coworkers, but when mercenaries become managers and executives, they are now the boss, and if the passionate don’t meet their bosses’ expectations, they are fired.

I left the industry and I am now a tenure-track community college professor, though I do research during my winter and summer breaks. I think there are still niches where a deep love for computing without being overly concerned about “stock line go up” metrics can still lead to good products and sustainable, if small, businesses.

▲ jack_tripper 8 hours ago | parent [-]

>The tech industry became less about making the world a better place through technology

When the hell was even that?

▲ vjvjvjvjghv 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In the 80s and 90s there was much more idealism than now. There were also more low hanging fruit to develop software that makes people’s lives better. There was also less investor money floating around so it was more important to appeal to end users. To me it seems tech has devolved into a big money making scheme with only the minimum necessary actual technology and innovation.

▲ andrekandre 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

  > In the 80s and 90s there was much more idealism than now.

that idealism was already fading by then, which had started much earlier in the preceding decades (see, memex/hypertext etc)

  > tech has devolved into a big money making scheme with only the minimum necessary actual technology and innovation

in the end, they are businesses, so it could be assumed that such orientation would take over in the end eventually though, no?

its the system of incentives we all live under (make more money or die)

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ryandrake 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> make more money or die

This is not true for the vast majority of people making these things. At some point, most businesses go from “make money or die” to financial security: “make line go up forever for no reason”.

	▲	throwaway894345 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		i discovered the meaning of life and its name is “increasing shareholder value”

▲ lo_zamoyski 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would agree that it was different, but I also think this may be history viewed through rose-tinted glasses somewhat.

> There were also more low hanging fruit to develop software that makes people’s lives better.

In principle, maybe. In practice, you had to pay for everything. Open source or free software was not widely available. So, the profit motive was there. The conditions didn’t exist yet for the profit model we have today to really take off, or for the appreciation of it to exist. Still, if there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, that means the maturity of software was generally lower, so it’s a bit like pining for the days when people lived on the farm.

> There was also less investor money floating around so it was more important to appeal to end users.

I’m not so sure this appeal was so important (and investors do care about appeal!). If you had market dominance like Microsoft did, you could rest on your laurels quite a bit (and that they did). The software ecosystem you needed to use also determined your choices for you.

> To me it seems tech has devolved into a big money making scheme with only the minimum necessary actual technology and innovation.

As I said earlier, the profit motive was always there. It was just expressed differently. But I will grant you that the image is different. In a way, the mask has been dropped. When facebook was new, no one thought of it as a vulgar engine for monetizing people either (I even recall offending a Facebook employee years ago when I mentioned this, what should frankly have been obvious), but it was just that. It was all just that, because the basic blueprint of the revenue model was there from day one.

	▲	gldrk 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>In practice, you had to pay for everything. As a private individual, you didn't actually have to pay for anything once you got an Internet connection. Most countries never even tried enforcing copyright laws against small fish. DRM was barely a thing and was easily broken within days by l33t teenagers.

▲ mc32 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Things like hypertext, search, email and early social networks (chat networks connecting disparate people) and also the paperless office (finally). Images and video corrupted everything as they now became that which addicted eyeballs.

	▲	lo_zamoyski 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> chat networks I think you may be looking at history through rose-tinted glasses. Sure, social media today is not the same, so the comparison isn’t quite sensible, but IRC was an unpleasant place full of petty egos and nasty people.

▲ corysama 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A trope in the first season of HBO’s Silicon Valley is literally every company other than the main characters professing their mission statement to be “Making the world a better place through (technobabble)”

The subtle running joke was that while the main characters technobabble was fake, every other background SV startup was “Making the world a better place through Paxos-based distributed consensus” and other real world serious tech.

▲ vjvjvjvjghv 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have heard a big factor is that a lot of the newer devs don’t really use desktop OS outside of work. So for them developing a desktop OS is more of an abstract project like for me developing software for medical devices which I never use myself.

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ryandrake 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I’ve never understood the idea of a software developer who doesn’t use a computer outside of development. Who are these people?

	▲	Telaneo 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		People who got into software development not because they enjoy working with computers, but rather because it pays well. Outside of work, they're the same as any other casual who's got a phone as their primary computing device.

▲ Normal_gaussian 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's great to hear from someone who thinks these people still care! It has rarely been my experience, but I haven't been everywhere yet.