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0 pointsbillllll2y ago0 comments

> It's as if I asked "do you want company growth, or customer happiness?" Try both!

Obviously, both are "good," but again, what's the end goal? To truly be the problem solver, you must make the hard decisions and tradeoffs. Companies trade-off growth versus customer happiness all the time. Right now, a lot of the largest companies are the ones that prioritize growth.

To loop back to the point, obviously employee morale and a good end product is "good" and can have synergy, but again, what's the end goal? At some point, you must prioritize. A lot of companies have been very successful prioritizing the end product versus making their engineers feel good, which is why I think this topic recurs.

> I disagree they're solved! Again, this is in response to a 3-part series basically saying "everything is expensive and everyone is miserable and fewer businesses are succeeding."

I some ways, I think the 3-part series and your article are basically saying the opposite. The 3-part series acknowledges the market conditions and overabundance in the past, and says that in order to get the same results, we need to be smarter moving forward. Whereas your post is (in general) saying that it use to be really good in the past when we were treated like rockstars, we should return to that.

And returning to the point, technical problems being "solved" is not mutually exclusive with a general market downturn. That is to say, you can't point at the general market downturn to say that deploying a CRUD app is not a solved problem.

And this gets to my main point (which I think the author of the 3-part series would agree with): returning to the "rockstar" era will absolutely not bring software companies back to the crazy valuations and money. The "rockstar" era was the result and not the cause of the crazy valuations of the past.

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srpablo2y ago

> I some ways, I think the 3-part series and your article are basically saying the opposite. The 3-part series acknowledges the market conditions and overabundance in the past, and says that in order to get the same results, we need to be smarter moving forward. Whereas your post is (in general) saying that it use to be really good in the past when we were treated like rockstars, we should return to that.

I like this framing, thanks for it. Typically, when something is suboptimal, there's one argument that says "go back to before we [X]-ed" and another that says "no, we need to [X] smarter."

Illustrating this, [on another post of mine, I discuss how Alex Russell effectively says "SPAs/React are terrible" and Laurie Voss has a rebuttal of "no, we need better frameworks, smarter frameworks!"][1] Another example is when FB was in trouble of Cambridge Analytica stuff, it seemed like the answer to Bad Facebook was always More Facebook.

I'll look over it again, but I didn't get a giant message from Kellan's posts of "we need to be smarter moving forward," more about "how we got here." And I certainly don't remember how we're supposed to be "smarter moving forward."

But I also don't think Kellan and I disagree too hard on anything actually concrete. From [the footnote][2]: I think we both want technical decision-making to be grounded in business reality. I think a lot of scared leaders took the "Boring Technology" slogan to mean "something that doesn't scare me," which is IMO in practice was variations of "we won't innovate" / "we'll operate like money will always be free" / "we will use the most popular things I see in the blogosphere."

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Said it in another comment, repeating here: I'm regretting that "rockstars" is in the title . It was meant to support the idea that tech was more of a "creatives" industry (because the organic use of "rockstars" to mean "great talent" is indicative of this); but I think my "break playbook and embrace creativity" is being read as "let's go back to rockstars/ninjas! Genius hackers who don't sleep and just HACKHACKHACK!!!!" which is not how I feel. What I'd like to go back to is taking some technical risk when there's a good justification for it, even if it's not what Uber did for their problems.

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> That is to say, you can't point at the general market downturn to say that deploying a CRUD app is not a solved problem.

Well, many developers who were around in the Heroku era think it's harder to deploy a simple CRUD app than it felt like it was then :-p

But I'm also not talking about CRUD apps, I was talking about building a cost-efficient technology org for a better business. That's why the examples I used (deployment pipelines that costs tons of money and entire teams of developers to build and run) tended to be expensive. Many in the industry called these things "solved," but mostly ran giant bills. Your initial comment said "you could throw money at it," and I never thought that was the way, but especially now that money isn't free.

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> And this gets to my main point (which I think the author of the 3-part series would agree with): returning to the "rockstar" era will absolutely not bring software companies back to the crazy valuations and money. The "rockstar" era was the result and not the cause of the crazy valuations of the past.

Again (and it's on me that this isn't more clear): I'm not saying "RETVRN TO ROCKSTAR," it's more "I think we should move the slider a little back to the "creatives" era." But while I don't know if it will create crazy valuations, I think it _can_ lead to happier developers, doing better work, and probably more profitable businesses, even if their market caps are lower.

  [1]: https://morepablo.com/2023/02/little-piece-on-the-great-divide-of-javascript.html
  [2]: https://morepablo.com/2023/06/creatives-industries.html#footnote1

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