Story time. small business. less than 30 people.
ceo had invested £1 million to build a data analytics platform. "democratising data analytics" in a very specific domain. essentially, competing with someone like databricks in a niche. although they had never heard of databricks before i showed up.
For that million pounds they got a job scheduler written in pure django with a halfway finished react frontend. the whole thing was constantly broken. there were multiple race conditions throughout the product. i joined well after the million pounds was all gone. three years after i joined i had fixed the worst of the problems by rewriting massive swathes of the thing.
i eventually convinced the ceo they'd been doing the wrong thing all this time -- they should focus on analytics + specific domain consultancy services instead of software products.
the major failure was no-one ever moved on from idea V1. they never moved to idea V2. which meant they never got to idea V3. instead, everyone spent a hell of a lot of time talking about how great V1 was going to be, and how they planned to build V1 and what V1 would look like, check out this status update about our progress on V1, check out this mock up on what V1 is going to look like etc. they had an agile consultant come in to tell them how to be more agile. a scrum-master to tell them how to scrum.
3 months after joining was the first time i mentioned apache airflow. they literally could have just stuck a nice frontend on top of it and written a backend data transfer library. job done. very cheap idea V1. unfortunately, the previous team of django developers could only see their trusty django hammer. edit -- and i should add their big £1 million budget too.
multiply the budget by 10x or more. exact same thing at some big corpo. bigger budget = room for more bullshit.
Yes, thanks for the story. This is what I was trying to say. The idea that it's completely okay for companies to misallocate billions of dollars across the industry while people are legitimately suffering do to myriad of reasons is just bonkers level of selfishness.
I worked at a company that had an $80,000 monthly AWS spend when the total users in question was less than 100,000. The most concurrent users was <500.
This obscene waste actually isn't health for society nor the economy.
Software engineering projects expand to fill the deadlines you set for them (usually going over). Same thing for budget. You'll waste a bunch of a million pound budget. People are forced to get creative and thrifty with a £20k budget.
constraints can be useful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies
> The idea that it's completely okay for companies to misallocate billions of dollars across the industry while people are legitimately suffering do to myriad of reasons is just bonkers level of selfishness.
Yes. The metaverse bullshit comes to mind. Something no-one wanted or needed, and exorbitant amounts of money spent on it.
Ah I see the point you're making now. Yes, sometimes (often) businesses make very bad decisions.
But that doesn't imply that every project that does not ship was a poor investment of time and resources.
I disagree, especially if we are talking about potentially hundreds of billions in waste. How much better would say software be if instead of Meta wasting $100billion on Reality Labs we gave one time $100,000 grants to open source developers? That would be helping over 1,000,000 open source developers that are actually writing useful helpful software for others.
Instead we had a corporate jobs program that benefited no one outside of Meta's offices.