by godelski | 2025-04-24 22:22:28+00:00
> a devil’s advocate/hypothetical question.

Can I suggest you not do this? It's not a good way to communicate and more often than not causes arguing. I think it is the first sentence which does the framing, making it less clear that the second is a legitimate question and not a rhetorical one. (It very much reads as rhetorical)

I'm not saying "don't ask questions." We should all be asking questions! If anything, we should be asking more! But we're in a thread that's contextualized about a division of people. It is only natural for people to interpret as a continuation of what came before.

But to address your point more directly, my answer is that the scenario you presented would be a surefire way to kill a company. Yes, there are big companies that do this, but you'll recognize that they're also monopolies or close it. A company with competition (big or small) is unable to pull off such shortsightedness. What you do for the company is the same thing you do for society: invest in the future. Sure, you wanna be lean and cost efficient but that has to be balanced with security. You don't want your company to go under just because an employee got hit by a truck. You don't want your company to go under just because an employee decides to retire. You're not doing a good job if you have these vulnerabilities. These are things only small startups should be doing and only because they have no choice.

This isn't "dead weight" and I think it is really bad to frame things this way. Most of the time my firewall isn't doing anything, is it "dead weight"? I often buy stocks while markets are low or falling, are these "dead weight"? I went to school to get an education, was this "dead weight"? It would be silly to call any of those things "dead weight", yet they're identical. A "dead weight" employee is one who has the ability to do but does not. It is the person who gets promoted by being performative, by being close to the manager, by looking like they are doing work more than they are. There's a lot of dead weight in companies, and they stick around because they look like they're useful. And conversely, some of your best workers often look like your worst[0].

It is literally Goodhart's Law in action and what I'm pissed about is we as a society have identified this issue and decided "it is a feature, not a bug" despite all the evidence to the contrary. We've dropped so many sayings and cliques that were common and were warnings of enshitification. When was the last time you heard someone say "you get what you pay for"? Or "if you're gonna do something, do it right"? We normalized the work environment of a fucking Dilbert Comic. And here we are, in this thread, defending our Dilbert world. We could have a lot of nice things, but the inescapable truth is that nice things require work. Worse, I'm tired of living in an environment where all the little issues I face in daily life that can easily be fixed are causally brushed away because "it doesn't create value" while we dump billions into the next vaporware. It is deadly irony and I cannot stand this double speak. I just want to make things that work... You'll say "I'm not stopping you" but every person that frames things like above creates a system that does prevent me (and many others). While it isn't a zero sum game, we sure have limited resources and we're all too happy to light them on fire when promised some magic beans. I don't understand why no matter how many times we watch it happen we still do not learn.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43452649