this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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This is the handiwork of highly paid executives.
It's always the executives. But how exactly? Have they ordered their employees to develop sub-par and crashing CPUs?
The same way boeing executives are to blame. They did not order employees to do sub-par cpus, but they did not care about the quality of what was produced either. Good hardware (and software) its always the product of a process that involves QA, HR, Operations, R&D and many other departments. These departments fall under the supervision/control of the executive suite.
Well run cost center departments don't boost quarterly results, ergo they are deprioritized.
They are looking out for themselves rather then the company, because of the incentives in place.
We are living in weird times where stock price doesn't really correspond with company health, so their actions reflect against that metric against all others.
I think it was a mindset shift. Right now short term stock value is more important because the shareholder profile also shifted from someone that holded the stock to someone who wants just to turn a quick profit.
I am sure it falls under the category of cost cutting. Death by a thousand self inflicted cuts.
I can answer this!
There's a term in tech called "empire building" where middle management looks for promotion up the chain towards directorships or VP roles. If, for example, you have a CEO that's nuts for AI all you'll want to do to get on their good side is to build a team around AI for some random service you already have (e.g. AI in Google Search) and you'll get a ton of funding and HC. Suddenly you run a huge division and get a fancy important title because you can shit some metrics about how well you're performing while customers say "wait, search is shit now". That's the search team's problem, your AI stuff performs great!
It's everywhere in big tech, and it's why so many big tech companies seemingly work extremely hard and have nothing to show for it.
The IC's at the bottom of the ladder are just minding their own business, trying to do the best work that they can, while the leader of the empire sets ridiculous timelines and goals because they're trying to cement a legacy, rather than build the right thing. Naturally, the product flops, the director gets moved to a new division to protect them, and the IC's are laid off - with the CEO saying that they didn't meet expectations or cost too much.