Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse?

Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

Previously on “companies just aren’t run that well anymore”, HN considered this analysis of Boeing’s collapse following a reverse-takeover by an acquired, collapsing, competitor that ended up kicking out the quality-focused management in favor of profits: (6 years ago, 281 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971040

I assume a similar analysis exists somewhere for the big names in gaming that financial engineers have similarly destroyed other formerly-great companies; ZA/UM comes to mind as one example.

> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore?

If you mean the games industry, it was always poorly run. I worked in games in the 90s and 00s it was a cottage industry of nerds, many of whom had success with an 8bit game in the 80s (where they did everything: a one person team), to then have to run large teams of devs/artists/designers/etc without any leadership experience and more complex hardware.

Happy days :D

Companies haven't been well run in decades, if ever, especially American ones. I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business. I do design services now, and have worked with dozens of companies through that, and the pattern continues.

We don't have leaders, or people that can make hard decisions, or think for themselves. They all follow the same book of the day business trends. If you do think outside the box you aren't a team player and are rocking the boat.

I was working at a web shop in San Francisco when the Web 1.0 bubble burst. The period leading up to that was characterized by company execs buying themselves all kinds of expensive new cars and toys, and a kind of hysteria on the part of clients that their brick and mortar businesses were being left behind if they didn't spend gobs of money on websites that had all kinds of gizmos and information but were, essentially, just brochures with a contact form. The FOMO of "AI", whatever that means to individual decisionmakers, feels similar to that time. As does the grift. Every plumbing company and real estate agency back then wanted to say their business was online. Not being online was being left behind. Now they all want to say they're AI powered. Well, business owners and managers need to sound like they know what they're talking about, and brag about whatever they think they've gotten for their spending, especially when they don't have a clue whether it pencils out or not. That's why they were happier back then with a website they could say they paid $30k for than if they'd somehow gotten it done for a tenth of that.

Were they ever well run?

Look at Strange Scaffold for a game dev company built around being a sustainable business where there aren’t any single ambitious “Bet the business” releases.

> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore?

They've never been well-ran, but the laws of physics and economics put hard limits on the amount of stupid bullshit that they could produce.

Now that those limits have been largely removed, an exec at the head of a company in the post-AI age is a chimp with a machinegun.

Anything they ask for can and will be built.

Companies under a capitalist mode of production are funddamentally incompatible with creative output because companies want a reproducible formula that they can scale. This is why we get endless sequels, annual FIFA, CoD, etc releases, adaptations of successful IP and so on. Creative output, be it music, movies, TV, games or books, doesn't scale.

There is an insatiable appetite for increasing profits. Eventually that means raising prices and/or cutting costs and the most significant cost is labor.

Game studios can only sruvive and keep excelling as long as they can maintain their culture and key talent and avoid getting finance people and accountants in charge. This is one reason why acquisitions usually mark the beginning of the end.

We're coming up on the much-ancitipcated release of GTA6. People might say that Rockstar has thus far avoided this rot but I kinda disagree. What made GTA magic for me was the social commentary and satire. I personally thought GTA5 lost its soul. Every previous GTA game I'd replay just to have fun, even if it's to do dumb stuff like causing mass pileups and explosions on the freeway in GTA:SA. I can honestly say that I never once played GTA5 again after finishing the main story and I also almost quit before I did. I have zero interest in the online crap but it's a huge cash cow for Rockstar.

So I imagine GTA6 is going to be visually stunning and I'm sure many will enjoy the new era of online gameply but I am fearful it will be even more soulless.

So, back to your point, I think the real problem is that the game devs need to own the studio. That's the only sustainable model. One could even call that the workers owning the means of production.

It seems like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all switched into "extract max profit" mode. They don't care about quality or even features anymore.

And it comes from the top: the CEOs are not caring anymore, so their lieutenants are not interested in doing any work either. So the companies get turned into fiefdoms without any central guiding direction.

I'll give you my diagnosis, which is derived from this: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t...

The thing to realize about the SV executive class is that they have constructed a closed ecosystem around them where they only talk amongst themselves and a small number of supporting actors who say what the execs need to hear. A CEO will talk to other CEOs he will not talk to his skip reports. Alternative viewpoints or dissent are not part of this social circle, and despite their 'conterarian' self-image, there's an immense amount of social pressure to conform.

You can can see hints of this outside - for example this site used to see YC folks as regular commenters, but no more. Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies. These people certainly do not encounter normal people in their day-to-day lives.

In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA, etc. One guy starts yapping about some snake oil, they all yap about snake oil. There no negative feedback loop there.

I don't go back quite to the 90s, but this has been true across my entire experience working in a few big multinationals (including one in tech).

Companies will do what Wall Street wants (Wall Street likes layoffs), and at a certain level, they don't want unemployment to get too low, lest their workers gain too much leverage.

In the 1990s, the adage in game development was that you knew you were a game developer when you had sat at the same desk, had seven different positions with three different companies over 30 months, brought in all your own equipment and still hadn’t gotten paid.

So, the game development industry really hasn’t changed that much. But the way we talk about things certainly has changed.

Generation X had a lot of bad things written about us, but we could write and we could think. We were also significantly tougher than the modern generation.

Things weren’t easy and running companies had always been hard. We didn’t think in terms of ‘employees just collapse’ because we were tough enough that that would have been silly. A few may collapse and that sucked for them, but for the most part we did our shit and lived our lives. We didn’t expect lives of leisure or for companies to speak to our personal missions. We had jobs and we had lives.

There were massive layoffs back in the day too. They sucked. But employees didn’t collapse, the world kept spinning and honestly, having been through those years it’s very very hard to relate to the young now. Younger generations do not have a monopoly on struggling or on shitty bosses, but you sure talk about them too much.

I think they just want, broadly, to divest from the American tech work force, whether that's via AI or outsourcing. If "the remaining employees just collapse" it's a data point in support of the thesis that developing software in HCOL markets is unsustainable, and if they don't, margins are better!

So I think decision-makers are seeing layoffs as win/win.

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