First: we may have gone too far toward anti-pollution. China has more naval vessels than the US. Everything changes when peace isn't a foregone conclusion, as it has been for the past 30? 50? years.
Second: it's not the regulations per se, but the difficulty of dealing with the bureaucracy, particularly (a) long delays and (b) uncertainty.
I run an electrical contractor, so this is not the least bit theoretical to me. The hassle of dealing with local government and PG&E for what should be routine things adds tremendous cost to doing business. Recent concrete example: it cost over $1,000 and two months to process a minor change to an electrical permit set, in Alameda (City). The actual change was moving some panels outside, a small revision to a plan that had already been checked and permitted. This required $1,400 in engineering fees, plus a ~$200 application fee to the City, and then the actual plan check and review charge of $650-700. It was probably one hour of actual work. The worst part was that Alameda outsources its plan check to a third party and I'm pretty sure the plans sat for two weeks on someone's desk at the City, before I asked for status, and then, an hour later, by "complete coincidence", it was sent to the outsourced plan checker.
If we could put a precise price on pollution, it would be a different story. It's a collateral damage of all the (even well-intentioned, good) regulation that drives business away.
Vincent - nice work on this, there's clearly a good kernel of insight here, and I can tell you've been at this a couple years.
I completed a (rather large) contract to reverse-engineer, and eventually rebuild, a hotel chain's property management system from scratch from 2015-2018. We did it all: keycard integration, booking channel sync, credit cards, group bookings, yield management, front-desk GUI, supply management, taking rooms into/out of service, reservation migration from old system to new...you name it, we probably touched it. Dozens of small lessons about the lodging (and broader hospitality i.e. restaurants, country clubs, bars) business domain.
One thing is that hotel = brand (flag) + real estate + operations. You can remix those things in a lot of different ways, e.g. a single ownership group might have two properties on opposite sides of a street, one Hyatt the other Hilton, and they might look different but share staff, or procurement.
The industry's term for brand -- "flag" -- says a lot about how they view Hilton/Hyatt. They come and go, even if the staff running the property stays the same. The main reason hotels choose to flag vs. stay independent, is access to the chain's booking flow.
One of the more interesting consequences of this setup, is that small, independent hotels, are kind of a shit show in terms of technology. Chains generally require a lot of standardization of their member properties, including what software they run to manage the property. Many properties that don't affiliate with a chain don't have any property management system at all. It's basically 10-20 rooms run directly off the moral equivalent of an Excel sheet at the front desk. And why wouldn't it be--small boutique hotels often gross $1-2 million/year; there isn't budget for expensive enterprise software, or maybe more critically, the people who know how to deploy and operate it.
A significant value-add of Expedia and booking.com, especially with independent properties, is getting the supply (hotel) side of the market organized. Many of these hotels outsource their entire reservation tracking system to a single channel (e.g. booking.com) because trying to keep track of bookings across phone, direct web, Expedia, booking.com, and others, is just too hard without specialist software that requires more IT muscle to deploy than a single non-chain hotel can muster.
I mention this because I go to church every Sunday and was thinking about how much real estate churches have (event halls) that sit unused, and what a schlep it would be -- although good for everyone -- to expose the collective supply of the world's churches, HOAs, park districts, and other nonprofits, to the kind of events you're trying to do. It would indeed be a tremendous pain in the ass to get all the physical access (keys), contract terms, payment systems, availability, etc ironed out, but it's a massively underused class of real estate and many of these organizations could really use the cash.
Hard agree with both points--this feels way closer to reality than most of what I've read.
On recession: cost of living is becoming crisis-level. I read recently that 67% of Americans are paycheck-to-paycheck. 150k/yr is 12k/month. If groceries go from 500 to 1000/month, a 150k wage-earner save less for retirement. For someone making 30-40k (basically minimum wage), it's a huge hit. Then consider it's the same story for cars, housing, medical care...it goes on and on. It doesn't look "recessionary" because GDP keeps going up. But we're getting so much less for it with every passing year.
I also agree that we need to consider what brownfield dev looks like. It's where the vast majority of my time has gone over 15+ years in software and I'm not convinced all the coordination / sequencing / thinking will be assisted with LLMs. Particularly because they aren't trained on large proprietary codebases.
What we might both be missing, is that for most people, writing the actual code is hard. LLMs help with that a lot. That's what a lot of junior/entry-level work, actually is (not as much planning/thinking as seniors do).
You're right and I'd like to add, from firsthand accounts of friends who workthere, facebook seems like an incredibly well-managed company. They have good process, measure what matters, focus on impact, and seem to keep their employees happy.
Most places aren't at their level of alignment or clarity; it's a huge jumble of poorly-prioritized tasks and dysfunction.
There's another facet to this story that's not getting discussed: that of path dependence.
The OP is Silicon Valley royalty. This matters. His site is pretty humble, but this guy was like, employee #10 at facebook and is probably worth high 8/low 9 figures. He is respected in a way most people aren't.
Boz can come in and start making these changes. Most people can't. We need to talk about this more. We labor under this bizarre illusion of non-hierarchical workplaces in Silicon Valley, when the reality is and always has been, some people have more influence than others.
I find it helpful to keep in mind the circumstances about the advice-giver as much as the advice itself. I'm not saying there aren't good nuggets of advice to glean. But who you are and your track record really matter in Silicon Valley and we should acknowledge that. It's not as much of a pure idea meritocracy as people think/pretend.
I know this was half in jest but it speaks to a larger point, that of the "implementation ghetto".
I'm going to get a lot of pushback for saying this, but there are basically three roles in any company: (a) people who do the work, (b) people who make sure the work gets done, and (c) people who decide what work to do.
If you follow the strategy outlined above, you will never rise beyond a pure implementer of someone else's vision.
Empirically, understanding more about the business domain and industry seem to be important if you want to do (b) or (c). If anyone has more tips, I'd love to hear them.
EDIT: When I say "above", I'm talking about in the comment two levels up, not the article.
You're correct that the marginal value of great code vs. good code is...marginal, MOST of the time. But I think the 1% cases are where the big (200k+) comp packages are for ICs. Stuff like perf optimizations at big scale, 1% adwords CTR improvements, optimizing JS runtimes, etc.
I agree that for most organizations management is the highest-leverage (ergo, highest-paid) path.
A better way to frame the problem is to think about the organization's economics and how your contribution fits into it. Figure out the 2-3 key metrics for success at the org and figure out whether you can move those, and if so, how. And realize that in a lot of job roles, you won't move the key metrics, and won't be paid as such.
First: we may have gone too far toward anti-pollution. China has more naval vessels than the US. Everything changes when peace isn't a foregone conclusion, as it has been for the past 30? 50? years.
Second: it's not the regulations per se, but the difficulty of dealing with the bureaucracy, particularly (a) long delays and (b) uncertainty.
I run an electrical contractor, so this is not the least bit theoretical to me. The hassle of dealing with local government and PG&E for what should be routine things adds tremendous cost to doing business. Recent concrete example: it cost over $1,000 and two months to process a minor change to an electrical permit set, in Alameda (City). The actual change was moving some panels outside, a small revision to a plan that had already been checked and permitted. This required $1,400 in engineering fees, plus a ~$200 application fee to the City, and then the actual plan check and review charge of $650-700. It was probably one hour of actual work. The worst part was that Alameda outsources its plan check to a third party and I'm pretty sure the plans sat for two weeks on someone's desk at the City, before I asked for status, and then, an hour later, by "complete coincidence", it was sent to the outsourced plan checker.
If we could put a precise price on pollution, it would be a different story. It's a collateral damage of all the (even well-intentioned, good) regulation that drives business away.