by mrandish | 2025-04-23 17:14:35+00:00
That this effect and related 'enshittification' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) is now prevalent everywhere is really depressing to me. Here's why. I recently retired somewhat early from a career spent entirely in high tech creating new kinds of products and services. Often, products that made life better for users by empowering them to do things they couldn't do before and sometimes solving old problems better, faster and cheaper.

That whole time, I had an underlying belief that those of us in "the industry" (high tech entrepreneurial startups) were generally making the world better, whether in large ways like personal empowerment or small ways like making daily life easier, more efficient or, sometimes, even more delightful. In some sense, I felt like I was a small part of a larger march toward the kind of better future which so inspired me in the sci-fi books I read as a kid.

Over the last five years I've increasingly seen mainstream tech products and services adopting dark patterns or abusing customer's time or trust in other ways. Of course, there were always a few companies that sucked, either due to incompetence or just being unethical but most everyone agreed they were bad. But now using dark patterns, or just taking steps to actively make the product experience worse for users, is no longer an aberration or regression - it's apparently accepted as normal. High tech leaders from FAANG on down are ALL knowingly doing this shit. It's on KPIs. Teams of competent professional technologists are collecting bonuses for intentionally making their product or service worse for millions of users.

Right before I retired I actually saw this starting to happen in the company I was at. I was in meetings where some of my coworkers seriously proposed doing obviously wrong things, arguing it would boost "the metrics". Being a senior exec, I was mostly able to correct this by pointing out customer satisfaction, loyalty and confidence in our brand were the most important metrics, but it did feel 'off'. At first I dismissed it as a handful of employees with mis-calibrated values but it kept happening. Eventually, the CEO overruled me on one of these "values"-based product decisions. It really bothered me because, even though it was dressed up in polite language, it was clearly just about burning customer goodwill to boost a short-term metric. At the time, I assumed the company was just slowly losing its way. Most of my fellow execs hadn't ever shipped a 1.0 or been through winning over customers one at a time. Frankly, this change in ethos factored into my decision to retire. It's not like I expected every product decision to go my way but these weren't subjective judgements. And over the years I'd certainly made my share of product mistakes which negatively impacted customer's (oops!) but I fixed them and learned to do better. But it just felt weird (and really bad) to be doing the wrong thing on purpose. Sure, some of these things would boost metrics and revenue, at least in the short-term, but I found I couldn't get myself to stop believing the best way to increase revenue was to keep making our product experiences even better.

When I was in my late 20s and flying off to yet another trade show like Comdex, I sat next to a guy who worked for Marlboro cigarettes. It was fascinating talking with him and hearing the careful rationalizations about creating a product which obviously was bad for their customers and addictive to boot. I remember telling my coworkers at dinner that night about how weird it was to meet someone like that - and how lucky we were to be in high tech, where we got paid to build products that just kept getting better and generally helped make the world better - at least in some small way. Sure, I knew that progress would sometimes be two steps forward, one step back, but I guess I was naive to have never even imagined this future.