Yeah this matches up with my experience when I was working as a consultant and trying to get large organizations to buy into managed and structured changes to their enterprise IT environment. It is not an easy job and it is very necessary for enterprises to coordinate their systems development. I've seen the messes first hand, the frustration from "the business" at how "long" everything takes. I've seen tech teams struggling to communicate the complexity of certain requirements in a way leadership can understand too.
After 5 years I was done with that type of work. Way too frustrating to try and get buy-in from development teams, leadership, IT etc. to make changes necessary to support the business at the enterprise level.
I do think SaaS has relieved form pain for organizations. Hopefully legacy Peoplesoft and Lawson systems are being replaced by things like Workday etc. It does open up a new set of problems (and expenses) but these seem way more manageable than the problems and challenges with working with on-prem ERPs.
It's when a major fund(s), bank(s) or lender(s) blows up and is followed up a successive string of failures until the "big one".
Every financial crisis or recession from the last 30 years or so has had a string of failures leading up a crash.
Late 1980s S&L Crash - You had a string of larger S&Ls failing (and a ton of smaller ones). This was a contributing factor in the 1990 recession. Note that S&Ls started failing in the mid 1980s.
2000 Crash - Long Term Capital Management blew up in 1998 and had to be rescued due to fears of contagion. Note the market hit all time highs after this fund failed.
2008 Crash - In early 2007 - New Century blows up ... starting a cascading series of failures. The S&P hits new highs throughout 2007 after New Century, until it finally starts to crash in late 2007 leading into the 2008 recession.
And now we have Archegos, which failed earlier this year and new highs in the stock market this week.
I am watching for more failures. One of the major contributing factors to Archegos' failure was WAY too much leverage. There is a ton of money sloshing around the system right now, and margin debt has hitting all time highs.
Crypto is also going blow up and take a lot of retail with it. If you get a stock crash and folks get margin called you could see a lot of crypto selling to cover that margin.
Yep - I've ignored the many many Amazon recruiting emails I have received over the years. I have absolutely no desire to deal with their shitty employment practices and idc if it is "team dependent". I am not taking that risk.
Recently left a company with an ex-Amazon Director who was VP of Engineering. He was an absolute snake who had only really worked at Amazon for his entire career. He did his expected round of firings/PIPs at the 2 year mark, then quit himself. Many experienced engineers left around the same time since we all were tired of the shitty Amazon culture he was breeding.
The point is that now you have to watch out for who the Directory/VPs are at your current organization. If they bring in someone from Amazon expect the company culture to go downhill fast.
Whistleblowers have plenty of protections and can be exempted. Libel can be stated such that they only apply to private matters between individuals, where accusations that do not reach the felony level - which is exactly what is going on here. I have no doubt we could protect all interests, while limiting the power of the wealthy and powerful.
Yes - and it's driving people further into tribes where the only way they feel "safe" is in and around their own "kind". This isn't civilization, but a regression and if it goes on for a few more generations it could be very damaging to our social fabric.
I just hope it's a weird early-21st century "intellectual" movement that eventually dies out.
> I was stunned at how someone with zero evidence and an obvious axe to grind could rally such disdain for someone else with little more than a few unsubstantiated social media posts.
I feel that this is due to the weird place victimization occupies in our culture combined with how anti-social social media is.
It's extremely easy to issue accusations and threats and have them be read by literally millions of people. You would never dare vocalize these same threats and and accusations publically - and even if you did, in the pre-internet days, it would reach far far fewer people.
At some point we to start thinking about strengthening our libel laws to act as a deterrent to this type of online behaviors. It's depressing to consider MORE litigation as the solution here, but I don't think we can depend on the good nature of people and rationality to ultimately prevail.
Ha! I kinda stopped paying attention to most consumer-oriented startups a few years back when some kooky poetry delivery service got a few million in funding. (I am trying to find a link to it). Then there was that "pizza robot" company ...
I get that VCs will fund stupid things like that to grow entrepreneurs and build a portfolio of companies that maybe grow enough to get acquired and produce some profit. But funds/corps dumping $250 million+ annually into self-driving seems crazy. The opportunity costs of that alone are outrageous especially when there are ample and ripe opportunities to disrupt "traditional" businesses and business models across all kinds of market verticals.
> I do think it's different from 5 years ago. Yes, some researchers were throwing cold water on the idea then but they were seen as contrarians. And, on boards like this one, you'd have no shortage of people going but Waymo is going to have a taxi service next year! Today, it's closer to being accepted wisdom.
Yes, and this has always been perplexing. I work at an AI startup which actually uses it to accomplish rather straightforward tasks - and it's really hard to perfect with the minimal tolerances for error that we have to adhere to. When you start to scale the problem up to self driving it becomes evident quickly that it will take a looong time to get the level 5; yet people in this business were still insisting it was around the corner.
Articles like this have been written for 5 years now, but the money keeps flowing into these projects. Argo, Aurora and Aptiv etc. are all still burning mountains of cash.
I am shocked the industry didn't take Uber/Lyft selling off their self-driving divisions as the signal to stop funding these efforts.
My family moved into our newly built home in the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh in Oct. of last year. We were part of the first group of buyers in a relatively new plan of higher-end homes.
Since Oct. of last year, the base price of our model has gone up $215,000 and every lot in this phase (phase 1) has now sold. I suspect at least half of that increase is materials, and the rest is due to market demand.
The market is just crazy and in talking to my builder he has said supply shortages could last through EOY and into next.
It is for a lot of executives, especially ones which are clueless about technology or who do not have a technology background but were promoted and told to "fix the TPS submission and reporting system!". These characters are typically corporate politicians who are great at talking but couldn't manage a team of 3 to boil a pot of water.
They love consultancies. It's a total roll of the dice if their projects are successful or not. I've seen it go both ways.
> Everybody considers themselves a designer, but it is baseless optimism that is supported by little data or precedent. Good designers are unique. Design ability is a 'talent'. Being able to conceive a complex system that maintains "conceptual integrity" is not an ability that everyone has, nor is it show (yet) that is even teachable!
It's also talent that is hard to recognize and can be valued very differently from one organization to the next. I've been in the room with developers and management looking cross-eyed at me as I walk them through a top down business/problem decomposition and system design questioning the value of the entire exercise. Not surprising, these are organizations which have extremely brittle systems full of overlapping and "hard to reason about" abstractions.
After 5 years I was done with that type of work. Way too frustrating to try and get buy-in from development teams, leadership, IT etc. to make changes necessary to support the business at the enterprise level.
I do think SaaS has relieved form pain for organizations. Hopefully legacy Peoplesoft and Lawson systems are being replaced by things like Workday etc. It does open up a new set of problems (and expenses) but these seem way more manageable than the problems and challenges with working with on-prem ERPs.