They put on a good front for the public investor meetings, but behind the scenes I have decided that every company is just running one day at a time.

I think as a civilization we’re much more like ants than a troop of smart chimps. In that our civilization is a kind of a proverbial emergent anthill. And most likely the relative individual understanding of our respective anthills doesn’t differ too much between ants and us.

And it’s kind of freeing. You just move your proverbial bit of earth that you’re just compelled to put somewhere else, and don’t stress the rest. Emergence will take care of it.

And not many organization are willing to pay thousands of people to do paperwork to help other departments do their paperwork more effectively and so on.

Or somehow they found a group of extremely trustworthy and reliable employees who will never fudge the truth even at the cost of their jobs/reputation/etc...

Finding a hobby that provides a little of that helped me. What I also noticed, having spent far too much time in front of a screen and programming, that I began to think of the world as a giant program that is really really buggy. Trying to fix those bugs got me down ... just gotta live with those bugs.

I think this is an excellent way to phrase the experience of "programmer brain" and I will be blatantly ripping it off in the future. It's definitely an occupational hazard, and something we should be wary of, but it's only a small symptom of the larger technologized worldview that permeates Western thought (and via export, a lot of global thought). There are definite upsides to technology and programming, but: "we shape our tools, our tools shape us". I think we technologists think a lot about the former, and rarely about the latter (that's for those squishy humanities types!) -- at our own peril.

> at our own peril.

I always like to quote the frog in water. As the water is heated to boiling point, apparently the frog doesn't spring out. That is, in fact, an urban legend - the frog does spring out. However we are the frogs that don't spring out.

The example often given is Japan vs the West.

Especially people in the West laud how great Japan its collectivist society is, how streets are clean, relatively little gets stolen, personal responsibility is still a thing, etc; But they completely skip over the other side of the coin: collectivist societies crush much of the independence out of a person.

So, in this one sense, you can trade independence for social “efficiency”. I imagine it is much the same for humanity. We could become more harmonized, at the cost of becoming more drone-like.

An interesting book that deals with this exact dilemma (among other things) is “A Deepness In the Sky” by Vernor Vinge. Worth a read!

I’ve come to accept this after years of fighting “the system”.

The system doesn’t care about you or what you want. It is a ruthlessly collective thing and it makes short term mistakes you will pay for but long term builds foundations you benefit from.

Also over and over efficiency in many cases proves to be maladaptive as it kills flexibility.

For me, it's a good argument against conspiracy theories. There's no way there could be secretive organisations running for years and controlling the world without screwing up in stupid and obvious ways.

This take makes sense to me. It's not the org as a whole that is accomplishing secret aims, but a sub-org within a chaotic org, or spread across multiple chaotic orgs, that is able to do so since no one is paying close attention to anything.

I like the meta conspiracy theory that the only organizations running without chaos are covert ones though.

There are also natural long term aligned players who conspire in ways that they can use their energy for their benefit. “Market makers”

There are also random alignments that appear to be conspiracies ex post facto.

The end result is software that puts postal workers in jail and doors that fall off planes.

As for democracy, it's great, much better than any alternative. It's inconvenient (to the powers of the day), however, that it tries (at least the functional ones) to prevent the widening of the chasm between the haves and the have nots. One thing any functional democracy must aggressively prevent is the acquisition of power from any means other than popular vote.

Wonder if this concept could also be Moloch.

Moloch is sometimes used to represent how humans just consume.

And, what do ants do, expand and consume.

More and More I think the ant-human analogy is best.

We are organizing, we form structures, but it isn't a plan, it's just twitching on our feedbacks. We have some loose internal functions to respond to inputs. That when stacked up by millions form some pattern.

Ant's don't have an 'anthill plan' and humans don't have a 'city/town plan'.

Like ants, we just kind of group together and follow the chemical paths laid down by others (coffee, beer).

The way I see it is that emergence is not an agent. More like some basic law of nature. Think about planned gardens and suburbs versus natural forests and medieval city centers.

You can mow your lawn every week, expend obscene amounts of water during the summer, pour everything with herbicides in a misguided effort to have the perfect lawn, but the moment you stop doing it, nature takes over and introduces a fractal amount of complexity in just a few seasons.

In my opinion an old forest where nature has been let alone for some time is much more beautiful and interesting than any planned garden, and a medieval city centre much more beautiful and interesting than any planned neighborhood.

And then, emergence explaining our civilization doesn’t necessarily imply that you don’t have agency as an individual. It just says that the total of whatever we collectively do, irrespective of if we’re compelled to do it, or have free will, results in more than just the sum of individual parts.

The emergent agent isn't a harmonious oak old growth. It's a ravenous, homogenizing beast, primally unable to die; accelerating forever in the red queen race; killing everything that isn't itself, fundamentally unaware and uncaring of the individuals it's made of.

I do care about my cells. Like, not individually, but I do care that they are in as good an environment for them as I can muster. I don’t think they have any concept of me. Or if they do, I don’t think they can reason about how murderous am I.

I’ve had a few brief spells at companies in their “golden days”, where it just sings. Every once in a while there’s plenty of budget because the product market fit is hand-in-glove, and the first people set an aggressive but achievable bar for quality, and a mentoring culture emerged, and leadership still knew their trade.

That’s a quarter of my career at best, but it’s the stuff you remember.

I guess it's some combo of the Efficient Market Hypothesis and "Every complex system is always running in a broken state" (https://how.complexsystems.fail/#5)

> …are usually predicated on naïve notions of system performance

30 years ago, when I started my first business from a converted garage, I used to think about all of the chaos I had to deal with. I'd look at the big companies with their shiny, mirror glass windows and think "when we're that size, we'll have it all figured out".

Then we started working for these large companies. We were supplying IT solutions to try help them deal with their chaos. I realised then that the only difference between them and us was the shiny windows and the scale of their chaos.

I apply this on a human level too. There's not one of us that has it all figured out, despite outward appearances.

They also seem to have zero organizational understanding of modern requirements engineering even though they talk a big buzzword game with "Design Thinking".

Suffice it to say, I didn't stay long.

Kinda the opposite of some of my experiences in big blue - in some of the software sides of things, productivity expectations were so low as to be really kinda funny.

You could (and people did) coast along producing not very much for years at a time. Which is probably why entire business areas just got shitcanned every so often. One office in particular operated more like an old-fashioned university campus. There was a yearly release cadence, with 3-5 months of that dedicated purely to merging together the work that the teams had produced over the past 7-9.

And every day, one decision at a time, it is the quality, skills, and integrity of the people that make an organisation's culture, capabililty, and sustainability.

An organisation without a culture that attracts talent and maintains integrity in its decisions is nothing but a licence to burn money squatting in a building.

So true. I have been involved in some projects where we had to figure out how certain processes. Every time it turned out that things are run on a mix of SAP, printed Excel sheets and some E-mails. Somehow it all (mostly) works out but nobody really knows how the company works.

Conferences about high performance teams and practices are wet dreams.

If I'm wrong then I want to meet these teams.

I think small, lucrative, focused companies can enjoy work-life balance and strong employee and customer loyalty. You need a niche that is big enough to support a 90th percentile team, but small and esoteric enough to avoid attention of giant firms. It is a delicate balance. I think the German Mittelstand model is similar, except translate this to software.

- how did you find your team mates

- how do you plan the work (fully self organized ? xp ? agile ? another method ?)

- how do you resolve human issues (intra or inter teams frictions, loss of motivation)

- do you assess per employee performance or not ? (have you ever run into a situation where someone was faking, or faking too much, but nobody checked ? or is you group tight enough so that any such case will be detected and fixed rapidly)

- do you have allocated time for team performance improvements ? remove friction, adjust processes

- do you allow creative attempts (if someone thinks he could chase a new idea for a day or two)

also, i didn't ask, how do you define high performance ? i have my own definition in a way: ability to understand most parts of your system in a few minutes with high confidence, ability to try new ideas, ability to split work between people for parallelism so that integrating is nearly guaranteed and lastly people who can generate new ideas multiple times per day

The horrors we see in any corporate-grade software-intensive company where development is a cost would drive H. P. Lovecraft to madness.

I guess you never worked for a Large Drug Company. I have a relative working for one (low-level employee) and pretty much on the way home, you pick up your bag of money bonus leaving every day :)

The benefits are 100x better that anything I have ever had in tech. Plus everyone gets stock bonuses and money bonuses when a new product is successful. And working from home, sure, why not.

I've seen and been in enough situations where a quite moderate changes could had improved QoL of the company people and conseq. the company itself.

How many times I was paid for that? Zero.

Add to that 'yes, we see it would be better for us, but [bullshit reason]'.

They were pretty well organised. They had relatively low productivity expectations for developers because they had nailed eveything down in terms of network security and legal compliance, but they accounted for that and expected it.

It may come from them having no shortage of funds, I suppose, and as a result no shortage of staff, skills and time to throw at things.

In general I would agree it’s not great to compete in a commodity segment if you can focus on differentiated products. You can make the same amount of cash from high-volume low-margin product or a low-volume high-margin product, with the latter generating sizeable IP you can also generate money from.

The split between HP and HPE is one example: HP gets the high-volume no-added-value segment and HPE tries to rebuild what was systematically killed by its descent into generic x86 hardware. They have very little headroom there, as HP/UX is on life-support and their high end has been stagnant for years.

Unfortunately, the people who know better rarely are the same people who signs the checks.

That's the key to IBM success and longevity. Despite blatant incompetence, they have been pretty good at riding every single high margin fad in the industry.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000

The section "Origin of name"

There used to be a convention among engineering students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois to name their student projects "HAL" because it was one letter off from IBM. "HAL Communications" was founded by alumni.

Arthur C Clarke claimed he put the "HAL" plant in Illinois only because he had a friend who was a professor there. He also claimed he didn't know about the student connection.

Of course that was almost 20 years ago, I'm sure everything has gone to shit by now lol

100x100: https://youtube.com/watch?v=atjPROSOSDs

They Were There: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MmVCePfMXAU

I think They Were There is incredible in that it features the actual rank-and-file employees who did the work… insofar as Mandelbrot may be considered a rank-and-file employee.

*not sure if 100x100 was by Errol Morris, or if that was just my assumption.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

i.e

  Ever onward! ever onward!
  that's the spirit that has brought us fame.
  we're big but bigger we will be,
  we can't fail for all can see,
  that to serve humanity has been our aim.
  our products now are known
  in every zone.
  our reputation sparkles like a gem.
  we've fought our way through
  and new fields we're sure to conquer, too,
  for the ever onward IBM!

A lot of the good IBM did came in the early 2000s when they were still powerful but flailing wildly, almost accidentally going all in on open source, and creating truly amazing ads around it. Look at how good this ad was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJgo3BBgWDA

Prev HN discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25227824

Some select lines that I found particularly amusing:

    We don't pretend we're gay.
    We always feel that way,
    Because we're filling the world with sunshine.
    With I.B.M. machines,
    We've got the finest means,
    For brightly painting the clouds with sunshine.

    —from "Painting the Clouds with Sunshine"

  Thomas Watson is our inspiration,
  Head and soul of our splendid I.B.M.
  We are pledged to him in every nation,
  Our President and most beloved man.
  His wisdom has guided each division
  In service to all humanity
  We have grown and broadened with his vision,
  None can match him or our great company.
  T. J. Watson, we all honor you,
  You're so big and so square and so true,
  We will follow and serve with you forever,
  All the world must know what I. B. M. can do.

  —from "To Thos. J. Watson, President, I.B.M. Our Inspiration"

In 1993 IMB was converted into one more consulting companies, like McKinsey, Accenture or Deloitte. Nowadays IBM "tech" part is mostly PR, as most of the "tech" was sold, with a notable exception which is IBM Z Series.

And IBM Cloud, which is quite niche.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8VhNF_0I5c (hand tool rescue)

[1] https://newsroom.ibm.com/2023-12-04-IBM-Debuts-Next-Generati...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_M...

But I'm curious if this was the real origin behind Apple's infamous "Think Different" campaign. IBM was the big competitor at the time and Steve Jobs didn't have a high opinion of them. Was he familiar with this slogan and decided to play on it while also backhanded criticize it with the "Think Different" slogan for his own company?

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different

2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance

Edit: It’s a bit confusing because ARM the architecture is older than ARM the company. But yes, both precede AIM/PowerPC.

My main point was that mobile made RISC ubiquitous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag

TJ Watson was personally awarded the Iron Cross by Hitler for his contribution to their efforts at a "final solution". He gave it back reluctantly after the US declared war.

It's still pretty shameful, but details are important too.

We got a cupcake, some badges and some sort of stock grant - the company would do something like put aside $1k worth of stock at 2011 prices for each employee, and anyone who was there 10 years later would actually receive the shares.

I'm not aware of a single person who received that grant because the development lab I worked in back then got shut down a few years after I had moved on. And looking at the stock price movements in that time, $1600 bucks is not a lot for ten years loyalty!

So, granted Dehomag[0] was only an IBM subsidiary, there is some evidence that IBM's US-headquarter was well informed and decided do not forgo the excellent business relationship and thus large profits (funneled through Switzerland).[1][2]

However the case might be here, it is nevertheless a cautionary tale how the ease of mass data collection can immensely leverage (bad) intent.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.hig...

[2]https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0609607995/theameric...

http://zoobab.wikidot.com/ibm-turbohercules-patent-threat-le...

When I heard this on NPR, I couldn't believe the city used them as a vendor for authentication instead of like AWS, Google Cloud, Auth0, etc.

People probably will get fired for choosing IBM, contrary to the old tagline.