I think the bean counters get a bad rap for this a bit unfairly. The past century has seen more progress in knowledge and technology than the rest of human history combined. The world and business environment are changing too rapidly to make longtermist thinking practical.

Few care if you have a lifetime warranty and excellent service or replacement parts if the majority will upgrade in a few years! Mature technologies increasingly become cheaply available as services, eg. laundry, food, transportation. That further reduces demand on production, as many can get by with the bare minimum and don't need the highest quality, longest lasting appliances. Software is even more ephemeral and specialized.

Developing education and training pipelines is wasting money if the skills you need are constantly changing! There is plenty of "slack" in the workforce so this works just fine in most cases - somebody will learn what they need to get paid. There are very few fields where qualified worker shortages are a real problem.

R&D can be outsourced or bought and subsidized by the government in universities, so why do everything yourself? Open source software has even further muddied the waters. Applications have only a limited lifetime before being replicated and becoming free products (this has only been intensified by the introduction of AI), so companies develop services instead.

Technology and knowledge deepening and rapidly becoming more specialized makes the monolithic corporation much less practical, so companies also need to specialize in order to effectively compete. Going too far in the name of efficiency can destroy core competencies, but moving away from the old model was necessary and rational.

> Which in turn means, in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time

Not just that, you have to be always doing less for more gains. Real work is bad work. Shrinkflation good. I don't know what it is if it wasn't a pure scammer mindset.

I haven't read this book but I see it often mentionedin contexts like this. it was written in 2001 and I think its synopsis still stands.

Slack by Tom Demarco (2001)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack

I’ll note at the end of the last century I worked at IBM research which had a budget of 6 Billion dollars. Management was trying very hard to get better return on that investment. Even today IBM though often ridiculed in the tech space (sometimes they do deserve it) spends a lot on R&D.

> When bean-counters took over the ecosystem [...] in their mind, every part of the system needs to be firing at 100% all the time.

This is only fair, because they themselves are firing at 100% all the time IYKWIM ;)

They also took out all the quality, though in pure business terms one can argue that's a kind of "slack" by itself.

The beancounters have cut all the corners on physical products that they could find. Now even design and manufacturing is outsourced to the lowest bidder, a bunch of monkeys paid peanuts to do a job they're woefully unqualified for.

And the end result is just a market for lemons. Nobody trusts products to be good anymore, so they just buy the cheapest garbage.

Which, inevitably, is the stuff sold directly by Chinese manufacturers. And so the beancounters are hoisted by their own petard.

We've seen it happen to small electronics and general goods.

We're seeing it happen right now to cars. Manufacturers clinging on to combustion engines and cutting corners. Why spend twice the money on a western brand when their quality is rapidly declining to meet BYD models half the price.

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And we're seeing it happen to software. It was already kind of happening before AI; So much of software was enshittifying rapidly. But AI is just taking a sledgehammer to quality. (Setting aside whether this is an AI problem or a "beancounters push everyone into vibecoding" problem)

E.g. Desktop Linux has always been kind of a joke. It hasn't gotten better, the problems are all still there. Windows is just going down in flames. People are jumping ship now.

SaaS is quickly going that way as well. If it's all garbage, why pay for it. Either stop using it or just slop something together yourself.

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And in the background of this something ominous: Companies can't just pivot back to higher quality after they've destroyed all their inhouse knowledge. So much manufacturing knowledge is just gone, starting a new manufacturing firm in the west is a staffing nightmare. Same story with cars, China has the EV knowledge. And software's going the same way. These beancounters are all chomping at the bit to fire all their devs and replace them with teenagers in the developing world spitting out prompts. They can't move back upmarket after that's done.

Even when the knowledge still lives, when the people with the skills requires have simply moved to other industries and jobs, who's going to come back? Why leave your established job for the former field, when all it takes is the management or executive in charge being replaced by another dipshit beancounter for everyone to be laid off again.

I think it's an important property of a system to be documentable not just documented. What I mean essentially, is the system was designed with sound principles, and said principles were written down and followed.

I have seen this work only once in my life, and it was so nice to see, but yeah, most code is just a ball of twine, and even if there was a guiding principle beneath, it has been long abandoned, and overruled, and the only way to understand the system is to take it all in at once.

<< [belief that] knowledge can be replaced with documentation, tools, and processes. [It] cannot. << volume of documentation that I would have to write would be insane

I am not sure those are mutually exclusive. We all know if situations where a person knows of tiny and typically undocumented system quirks. We even have a corporate name for it: institutional knowledge. The issue is that executives think it can ALL somehow be done, when even cursory real life project lift will quickly teach one how insane average gap between documented and undocumented tends to be. Add to that near constant changes to API, versions, systems, people and I can't help but wonder at executives, who really do think this way.

There are certain things that are too obvious to some person at a given time. Hence they would not consider it's worth documenting. Some of those things are important bits and pieces of the theory[1] of the program.

[1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

It’s way easier (for this type of scenarios) and far more effective to learn by doing than to learn by reading (even tens of thousands of pages of) documentation, that is the crust of it.

> doesn't generate any for later.

"any" is quite an assumption.

> If there were known "make more software, make more money" opportunities available, they would have already done them.

Sometimes they're available, but not palatable, when the opportunity could threaten their existing investments or patterns. That might mean "self-cannibalism", or changing the ecology so that the main product niche is threatened.

Then those opportunities are ignored, or actively worked-against via lobbying, embrace-extend-extinguish, etc.

I always think that’s the failure of citizens, not just the officials. Eventually history is going to blame us for not taking action, not pushing back, and pretty much sleep tightly when things fall apart around us.

> In the west, government is optimizing for "loads and loads of moooney"

More appropriately, government is optimizing for 4 year electoral terms. No one cares about longer timescales necessary to tackle hard problems.

This is where autocracies like China, or monarchies for example, win over democracies.

We see this in our open-source community. We've had a community channel for over two decades, where community members help newcomers and each other solve problems and answer questions.

Increasingly we have people join who tell us they've been struggling with a problem "for days". Per routine, we ask for their configuration, and it turns out they've been asking ChatGPT, Claude or some other LLM for assistance and their configuration is a total mess.

Something about this feels really broken, when a channel full of domain experts are willing to lend a hand (within reason) for free. But instead, people increasingly turn to the machines which are well-known to hallucinate. They just don't think it will hallucinate for them.

In fact I see this pattern a lot. People use LLMs for stuff within their domain of expertise, or just ask them questions about washing cars, and they laugh at how incompetent and illogical they are. Then, hours later, they will happily query ChatGPT for mortgage advice, or whatever. If they don't have the knowledge to verify it themselves then they seem more willing to believe it is accurate, where in fact they should be even more careful.

There is a lot of wisdom in this.

At the end of the day chatgpt won't be there to hold our hands in the hospital, have a laugh over failing to pick up a date, get invited to a bbq, groan over the state of the code in utils.c, or recommend us for our next job/promotion. They say software is social for a different reason than most of these examples.

It's good to be efficient, whatever that means, but there are no metrics on the gains that get made by talking to people. In a lot of ways those gains are what life is about.

You could have done this with Google search or Wikipedia or reading through books though

> if I’m asking the AI a question, that’s replacing a human interaction I would have had with a coworker.

Importantly, you're removing a signal: If I'm not asked things anymore, I don't know which aspects of our domain are causing the most confusion/misunderstandings and would as such benefit most from simplifying the boundaries of.

I think you are right, but it also makes sense. Human communication is inherently inefficient. Points of view, miscommunication, interpretation... It's the obvious point to automate. Not defending it, just my thoughts

i see what you did there :)

> Why would anyone have a sight longer than a quarter? I mean how does long term thinking help the execs get their compensation this quarter?

Vesting schedules, conditional grants, contractual equity ownership requirements

Would be interesting to get a law that says that all positions supposed to take long-term decision should be paid with X% of their salary in (non-redeemable until Y years?) stocks.

> ...any actual product RD and support is a real annoying cost that just cuts into the profits...

Worse, it might not generate a return. If you have enough profits, you just buy anyone who successfully produced something innovative. Let them take the risks. As Cisco used to say, "Silicon Valley is our R&D lab."

It is a very difficult mindset to argue against.

Perhaps US companies should invest more in their employees then? Advancement, promotions beyond %1-3% COLAs, career paths, etc would go along way to keep employees interested in seeing their employers succeed instead of jumping ship every couple of years. The would require some effort from the C-suite however and since they jump ship every few years as well, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Wut?

The point of the beer game is that buffering in the supply chain makes the bullwhip effect worse.

Personally my experience has been that once I manage to describe a problem in good enough detail that a junior engineer would be able to solve it, it's good enough for an LLM as well.

Which creates incentives I'm not wholly comfortable with, but the fact is that I'm more productive now alone, than I used to be in a team.

That sounds right, but it can be superbly wrong because that presupposes that you can debug what the AI gets very confidently wrong.

There are three legs to the stool: specification, implementation, and verification. Implementation and verification both take low-level knowledge and sophisticated knowledge of how things break.

> this would shift the job of a software engineer into a more formal engineering role

If only you knew how the civil engineering sausage was made.

The amount of yolo'ing stuff based on vibes goes up when testing is expensive/impractical. They just paper over it all with disclaimers of the sort that would get laughed at for being non-starters in the software industry.

Surely run by lawyers?

It's subtler than that. Europe was just constantly reminded by its big brother not to duplicate NATO structures, which are dependent on the US.

They agreed that war was a thing of the past, but still continued to push for NATO to allow new members anyway, ironically causing Russia (and China and everyone who is NOT in NATO) to suspect that war was NOT a thing of the past and therefore never quite abandoning their military completely. Unpopular opinion: the West should either NEVER have abandoned its military production (so as to maintain NATO actual preparedness for war, given that's the only reason for its existence) OR it should just have dismantled NATO and announced to the world that it strongly believes war is a thing of the past, and that other countries are advised to follow suit. But we actually chose the easy, halfway path: keep NATO, keep our militaries "looking strong" (which gives the signal our rivals should also do the same, obviously), but not actually be ready for any sort of major war and as the article points out, even lose actual capacity to become ready for war within any realistic timeframe. The worst possible outcome :(.

I have worked for companies in different countries.

I think the striking thing is how US companies tend to have no idea how to be wealthy. Record profits, so the ceos use all of their tricks to get rich quick? They are already rich! Don't fix what isn't broken. Not every company needs to expand into 10 new markets, or have 5% lay offs or double in revenue. Some of this is investor pressure, but often it's not. Some guy who made it to the top is bored, doesn't feel like he is obviously doing enough, so he keeps making decisions to justify his position.

This isn't to insight flames but the European companies I worked for knew how to be wealthy! The market took a down turn from COVID, they ate the cost to keep their people. Some flashy new vertical is trending. They decided it's not for them, they have a brand and customers that they should focus on while everyone else works out the kinks. The company decides, why go public at all, we are successful and don't need anyone else's influence over us.

People say "you cannot project beyond 1 quarter". This is true in terms of catastrophe or gambler success. But its not true, if you act in q1 like there will be a q2 or even 5 years from now or heaven forbid a second or third generation you make different moves. You value different things.

The US is stuck in this weird irony where they recognize that Soviet-style central planning is a disaster but can't recognize that it's what megacorps do when they're insulated from competition. Internal politics, perverse incentives and a system that can sustain massive inefficiencies right up until the point that it doesn't.

In general productive economic activity generates a surplus and that surplus allows for slack. Human beings intuitively understand this. Hobbies are frequently de facto training for things that aren't currently happening but might later. Family-owned and operated businesses are much less likely to try to outsource their core competency for the sake of quarterly profits.

But regulatory capture and market consolidation causes the surplus to go to the corporate bureaucracies capturing the regulators instead of human beings with self-determination and goals other than number go up, and then the system optimizes for capturing the government rather than satisfying the people. "When you legislate buying and selling the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators." You throw away the competitive market and subject yourselves to the unaccountable bureaucracy, and then try to pretend it's not the same thing because this time the central planners are wearing business suits.

West: We need profits and then we’ll try to build something useful.

China: We need to build this useful thing and then later let’s try to make profits, too.

What do you think the war in the gulf is about, the US cannot compete with China so they are destroying the global system that enabled them. There is no plan to have a peace with Iran, only perpetual war and the destruction of the middle east, starvation in East Asia and poverty and nationalist wars in Europe, potentially with Russia taking over vast swathes of Eastern Europe again. Suddenly Russia is the one in charge of the China-Russia relationship. It's such a stupid plan for the US that you might think it was designed by Putin himself.

Only in 2026 is AI the answer to everything and when the negative traits of our behaviour are amplified due to AI it clearly has nothing to do with AI even when the article exactly about that.

You can really reduce almost any problem to a “it’s a problem because of people”, so that adds very little to a discussion.

The time to solve that resource problem is before AI concentrates power, not after. It’s LESS likely to happen when a tiny elite increases their already huge amount of power.

Jobless people normally can't feed themselves in a modern world.

And uh, healthcare. Among other things.

No. It’s pure greed dominating the world. My employer is owned by bigger private company and the shitshow is the same as in big megacorporation. There are hordes of colleagues to stab one for 100€ more salary a month. Disgusting.

The company is manufacturing special computers. The initial owner/founder ordered CPU modules and memory cards always looking at the price break. His question was always „how many to buy to get best price?“. So he ordered sometimes 200-300 parts more than needed immediately. Then the follow up order came and he emptied the storage. Now new manager always orders EXACT amount memory cards as ordered computers. Price is secondary thing, most important thing to work without warehouse and get things delivered just in time. What doesn’t work at all for the while already. The high prices buying small quantities is eating up the profit, so people are getting fired to save costs. It is pure greed dominating western world. Everything is done to look accounting nicely at every cost, get whole bonus despite ruining the company long term. I see this pattern recently very often.