[HN Gopher] Misaligned Incentives in Dev Tool Businesses
___________________________________________________________________
Misaligned Incentives in Dev Tool Businesses
Author : adamgordonbell
Score : 29 points
Date : 2023-04-27 12:56 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (earthly.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (earthly.dev)
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Author here. This is me thinking out this thing I see happening a
| lot where incentives of some dev tool end up leading to things
| going sideways over time.
|
| TLDR: Aligned incentives lead to good outcomes. Everything else
| is a problem waiting to happen.
|
| What do you think?
|
| I don't think a VC-based dev tool company is necessarily a
| problem, as long as they thought through how it will play out. I
| wish companies would talk about this more explicitly.
| hugs wrote:
| I wish the Selenium (and Appium) projects would get mentioned
| in these kinds of conversations more. When starting these
| projects, I was very intentional that we set things up to not
| screw over users down the road _and_ that we set things up so
| that multiple commercial vendors running SaaS services (not
| just my own: Sauce Labs and Tapster) could succeed, too. And,
| yet, the success of the Selenium ecosystem to thrive for 19(!?)
| years is basically invisible in most discussions about open
| source funding and incentives.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| One more reason for open-source: no lost revenue from
| improvements, and if you don't make the improvement someone else
| will.
| rektide wrote:
| Computing has such a bad challenge in general. We sell so much
| software by saying, gee it's a so hard, pick this tool & you'll
| never have to think about things again, everything will be easy &
| amazing!
|
| It sells on fear. It sells on telling you things are hard.
|
| Engelbartian software defies this. It says, this isn't easy, but
| we can grasp it together. We can see & learn better. I can help
| you Augment Human Intellect so we all can gain real expertise.
|
| The industry has grown enormously selling tricycles and training
| wheels. It's changed the world. It's been amazing. But we really
| need to also be helping build better real bicycles for the mind,
| that we can push off under our own power with.
| entrepy123 wrote:
| >> But we really need to also be helping build better real
| bicycles for the mind, that we can push off under our own power
| with.
|
| Ok, suppose I have a nice, shiny real bicycle for the mind. Who
| or where are the potential buyers?
| rektide wrote:
| Very real question, especially considering the two decades of
| trained helplessness that has been so successful.
|
| Most software is resistant to understanding. Most software
| obfuscates & conceals.
|
| Getting out of this trap requires more than business acumen &
| buyers. A sea change has to happen. We neglect the field,
| neglect our own involvement. Individual products can try to
| have healthier stances, but the system is diseased, the
| system enabled this rot. The remedy is more focus on General
| Systems Research, is on finding universal resonances &
| capabilities in computing & highlighting them & raising them
| up.
|
| Whats needed now is an appeal to cool, an appeal to being
| competent & capable. The alpha geeks need to lead again, need
| to show their prowess, in a way that makes the paths of
| ignorance & ease look stupid. The home cloud people are, in
| my mind, the furthest forward at making these routes. But I
| also think there's huge universes of possibility at higher
| levels, for node based/flow based systems to radically
| reempower folks.
|
| It's a hard ask. Building a healthy hopeful org can't happen
| in a vacuum, it has to be part of & parcel to already
| beneficial "open" currents. It's place by place, opportunity
| by opportunity figuring out how to play contribute without
| domineering, without consumerizing. There's no big playbool,
| but I think these ecosystems as they gain mass create buyers
| in volume, as participation & openness achieve critical mass.
| JustLurking2022 wrote:
| I'm sure there's some truth to this but, working at a
| particular FAANG that seems to embrace and reward complexity,
| that's a far worse situation. The tools are often infinitely
| capable with numerous configuration options but the only way
| you'll figure out how to make it do what you want is by doing a
| code review of it an the entire stack of things it's built on.
| thadt wrote:
| It depends.
|
| In some cases, that can definitely be a problem. If I'm buying
| a product because 'X is hard and I don't want to have to think'
| then there are plenty of vendors that will sell me on an
| overcomplicated solution to X that induces so much parasitic
| draw on my system that it collapses, and I am enslaved to them
| because I have no idea how to cope without.
|
| In other cases, I might very well know how to do X - but
| someone else already has a fantastic solution that I can just
| buy, trading a significant portion of my time for a relatively
| small amount of money.
|
| Wisdom is knowing whether you're buying a bicycle - or a
| stationary bike.
| rektide wrote:
| You're talking about specific cases, but I think the problem
| is cultural, has metastatized into a place where radical
| change in wide ways looms, has to blow away a corrupt fallen
| shitty & malignant way of thinking that has taken over &
| which poisons society at large. Consumerism lowers us.
|
| Finding higher paths is not going to be trivial, but there
| are promising signs we approach the local shitty maxima that
| consumeristic communicative-Capitalism has bound us inside
| of.
| glenjamin wrote:
| I used to work at CircleCI. It was often suggested to us that
| because of the usage-based pricing we were not incentivized to
| make builds faster.
|
| In reality the opposite was true - experience had shown us that
| every time builds got faster, people ran more builds (likely
| because faster feedback means more iterations).
| hinkley wrote:
| Jevon's Paradox. You're not imagining things.
|
| I can't always manage making things feel 'free' to my users in
| my dev tools but when you do, it changes the sorts of
| expectations you have on your coworkers. Look, it's basically
| free, you should just do it and stop making excuses.
| anotherhue wrote:
| No Dev tool will make up for sub-par engineering. No matter how
| much we wish it were otherwise.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-04-28 23:00 UTC)