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netcan | 7 months ago

The hyperbole and cliche (corporate greed) makes this trashy, but let me fix it...

Big Tech firms with blockbuster products like adwords, aws, iPhone and whatnot... they are extremely profitable. So profitable that the basic business logic of "invest more in the money-maker" reaches reductio ad absurdum.

So yeah. A lot of talent is locked up where the salaries are highest. These have so much resources and talent thrown at them that it can start to get wonky.

If you are actually hiring up to the point where the marginal 300k engineer causes a net loss of output (not just profit)... you are well into territory that just sucks.

That kind of thing happens... and thats also where some of the highest salaries and best talent is.

That said... I think AI projects have been a steam valve. This was worse 5 years ago.

discuss

bluetomcat|7 months ago

Big Tech drove us towards techno-feudalism. It's a wider social phenomenon and their hiring patterns for programmers are only one aspect of the problem. Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their rules, or else they go bust. Programmers are forced to learn their APIs, so that their "app" can live in their walled gardens. They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines. This is a huge opportunity cost to society - that talent could be doing great creative stuff for small and medium-sized businesses instead.

gruez|7 months ago

>Small businesses are forced to do business on their platforms according to their rules, or else they go bust. Programmers are forced to learn their APIs, so that their "app" can live in their walled gardens.

???

What are you talking about? For a typical fullstack app the proprietary bits probably account for less than 5% of the codebase.

>They soaked a huge amount of talent to optimise their ad and recommendation engines.

That's just PR/advertising/sales. If the companies didn't exist it's not like those job or efforts will disappear, they'll be allocated elsewhere, classified ads in newspapers for instance.