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.
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.
But that doesn't imply that every project that does not ship was a poor investment of time and resources.
Instead we had a corporate jobs program that benefited no one outside of Meta's offices.
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.
Waste at all levels. I've worked at insurance companies that spent $100million on development where only 200 customers signed up (estimated to be 20,000 at start). I've worked at telecoms that spent $25 million developing internal tools that no one used. I've worked at big tech where entire teams sole purpose is to control a single widget on a UI page.
This isn't even on the procurement side. Recently left a company where a single org was paying $10,000 a month on licenses when only 12 devs existed. I've seen organizations waste tens of millions of salesforce licenses that no one uses.
I'm sorry but the waste is rampant. SMB's can afford to waste tens of millions of failures, but modern US corporations can because there is no real competition in US markets. Just monopolies abusing each other.
I'm sure scientists would love the chance to have stupid budgets and make stupid things.
So no not the same at all.
Depend, depending on the licenses in question, this could be a fantastic deal
"It only got 200 users" is the business version of the null hypothesis.
But there will still necessarily be things that you build that don't ship, and that's inherent to the problem domain.
In fact, most people don't have that knowledge, because they're busy with existing or "local" problems , or because they didn't know to ask Davis the DBA or Kris the Kafka Cluster Manger or Alex from accounting if we have <resource> our team can plug into and use. "Oh, yeah, El has one under their desk they kick occasionally, ask them to hook you up!"
If you solve this problem in a turnkey way Fortune 500 companies will write you very large checks to help them prevent such duplicate waste, and will in turn become the 15th system they need to integrate....
That XKCD joke about "how 14 standards becomes 15 standards" also applies to the class of "one system to integrate with and report from all other systems"
