Tech companies are irrational pop cultures

The thing about churn (of developers&#x2F;contributors) rings <i>so true</i> to me from my career, and I think is really under-appreciated. In &quot;the industry&quot;, or just among &quot;people who make things in teams&quot; (including open source).<p>&gt; Constant churn in a software development team, both among the programmers and designers, is absolutely devastating. It is the death knell for a software project. Makes deadlines meaningless. It turns software into a disposable, single-use product like a paper towel. Anything that increases team member churn threatens the very viability of the project and the software it’s creating.<p>From an essay that is worth reading in full, &quot;Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.baldurbjarnason.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;theory-building&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.baldurbjarnason.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;theory-building&#x2F;</a><p>I think it&#x27;s exactly right about the importance of &quot;mental models&quot; and &quot;theory building&quot;, and if we could keep that in mind we could build better more maintainable software. (&quot;More maintainable&quot; over the long-term I think is almost synonymous with &quot;has easy to grasp mental models that are sufficient to guide your work with the system&quot;)

&gt; The symptoms of pop culture: A “disdain for history”. Pop cultures believe history doesn’t have anything to teach them.<p>This almost completely falls to pieces in the framing ... how does one explain the pop culture of 80s nostalgia that is prevalent in a lot of media? An 80&#x27;s casio watch is, in some circles, the pinacle of timepiece fashion. Of course there are times where pop culture is a rejection of the prior art, but also there are times when current pop culture icons show deference to the past and their influences.

I think some programmers need to hear the advice &quot;don&#x27;t assume that newer is necessarily better&quot;, and others need to hear &quot;don&#x27;t dismiss new things as being created by a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers&quot;.<p>Maybe the author of this article is meeting more of the first kind, but it&#x27;s dangerous to issue advice that amounts to &quot;wherever you are on this balance, move further East&quot;.

This article has a broad title but focuses on layoffs. I&#x27;ve seen the theory thrown around that it&#x27;s a form of big tech collusion: They can&#x27;t collude openly, but if one huge player makes a move like layoffs, it sends a signal to the others. Pandemic and work-from-home gave employees a lot more bargaining power, with the ability to get competing job offers without leaving their desks, so companies want to take that back.<p>I don&#x27;t see enough evidence to call it, but I wouldn&#x27;t put it past them, given how several big players including AAPL and GOOG were caught and fined for making no-cold-call agreements several years ago. And it does seem like the tech scene has been less competitive lately on the consumer side.

This article echoes a few of my most unpopular opinions.<p>* The current generation could not invent the internet. They don&#x27;t have the attention span or the culture for it.<p>* People who spurn well thought out technologies like SQL or relational databases, are doomed to re-invent them, badly.

It&#x27;s a shame that this has negative connotations. There is a case that this is essential.<p>It seems like we are overcoming an AI winter, using the same technologies that was deemed infeasible 20 years ago.<p>When I did competitive programming 20 years ago. I would somewhat jokingly say that I would want to write and AI to solve all the problems. Our mentor laughed it of clearly not considering it even feasible – today ChatGPT would like outperform a highschool competitive programming competition.<p>We probably needed to look away from that generations presumptions in order to leap frog on some of these technologies.

I agree with some of what he is saying, but don&#x27;t really get the &quot;pop culture&quot; framing. Isn&#x27;t pop culture just popular cultural artifacts? I&#x27;m under the impression they are mostly looked down upon for class reasons more so than any of the intrinsic problems stated.

<i>&gt; older is inherently inferior.</i><p>As an “older,” I’ve encountered this exact attitude.<p>Really uplifting.<p>As a positive, it pissed me off enough, to “drop out,” and lean into early retirement.<p>I spent the majority of my career at the antithesis of “pop culture,” which was a 100-year-old Japanese company.<p>I am grateful for the lessons and habits I got, there.<p>Plenty of stuff that they did wrong, but they also did a lot of stuff right.

&lt;&lt;A “disdain for history”&gt;&gt;<p>A common problem in contemporary culture is a disregard for history, which can be seen not only in startup companies and the technology industry, but throughout society as a whole. During times of significant change, it is common for people to believe that they are much more intelligent and advanced than previous generations, who they may view as ignorant or backward. As the consequences of the revolution inevitably become clear, when the revolution turns on its children, people often begin to appreciate the positive aspects of the past and recognize that revolutions are usually not the solution you want (for the exact same reason why you usually don&#x27;t want to rewrite a huge software project).<p>Let us hope that the current period of revolution is coming to an end.

Well I think the author got one thing right:<p>&gt; The “Pop” in “Pop Culture” stands for “popularity”. If it’s popular then it must be right.<p>And that&#x27;s social media simplified. The internet is filled with pop-seeking garbage because pop was the best metric anyone could fathom. Even now the AI&#x27;s are struggling to reach for a better version of &quot;right&quot;.<p>But more to the author&#x27;s point, yes, modern tech startups and their funders are absolutely obsessed with being trendy, even moreso than an 80&#x27;s teenager (a lot of the big players <i>were</i> 80&#x27;s teenagers, btw).

&quot;$bigcompany uses it so we must use it as well&quot; is modern-day cargo cult programming and i&#x27;ve seen it in lots of places.

If tech companies are pop cultures, then HN is Teen Beat.

&gt; <i>There are two kinds of fools. One says, &quot;This is old, therefore it is good&quot;; the other says, &quot;This is new, therefore it is better&quot;</i><p>The former is a little Lindy. The latter is ready for paradigm shifts. Ideal is if you don&#x27;t choose based on age.<p>But I&#x27;ll say something contrary: neither of these things matter in technology. The layoffs are good for the firms that 2xed in the pandemic. The kubernetes is survivable or beneficial.

They&#x27;re more like cults.<p>&quot;a system or group of people who practice excessive devotion to a figure, object, or belief system, typically following a charismatic leader&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;study.com&#x2F;learn&#x2F;lesson&#x2F;cult-characteristics-types-behavior.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;study.com&#x2F;learn&#x2F;lesson&#x2F;cult-characteristics-types-be...</a>

I expected the example at the end to be kubernetes, but instead it&#x27;s layoffs. I think the article works almost equally as well if you swap in k8s, blockchain, or a few other buzzy buzzwords, which is kind of a testament to the truthiness of the argument.

I regularly wonder how much of the &quot;tooling&quot; in modern development stems from not knowing or making an attempt to understand what GNU applications from 30+ years ago offer out of the box.

Tech is a 24&#x2F;7 popularity contest where everybody can have their 15 minutes of fame. Enjoy the ride.

Startups are pop culture cults.

Yes, tech companies are building an image of pop cultures, but they are not. For example, layoffs are never &quot;mimicking&quot; what other companies are doing. Pop culture people may think it is, but business people -- who tech CEOs really are -- always tries to make the right decisions.

I think it&#x27;s easy to mistake the concept of fads within technology with the application of arguably necessary abstractions. Most of what is new and faddish is just another abstraction around some (probably, relatively) archaic system. The abstraction is the new thing, not the technology or the language that it&#x27;s written in.

I think there&#x27;s some rationality.<p>Let&#x27;s say as a company you need money. Money comes from investors and&#x2F;or customers. Customers or (especially) investors may want you to make &quot;modern&quot; software using &quot;modern&quot; technology. Developers (especially the young talented ones you can afford) are also attracted to modern tech for rational ($£€) reasons.<p>So you can ignore that, and miss out on money and talent and thus maybe success. Or you can take the easier route and do what everyone else is doing.

A better way to state this is that the problems we&#x27;re facing today are due to the whims of capital owners and management, not labor.<p>We could have a system where companies don&#x27;t do layoffs, and workers sit on 50% of board seats, and democracy in the workplace is standard.<p>I wonder how many majority shareholders truly want the billions of dollars in stock that comes with that, knowing that their wealth deprives countless thousands&#x2F;millions of people of their opportunity. Would they be ok with a different kind of corporate structure? Something like a cooperative where management and the CEO are elected by workers, and difference in pay doesn&#x27;t exceed perhaps 10:1?