Big Tech is still paying huge salaries, for skills that may have stopped trending
I gotta say, we live in some truly rarified space when fucking Python, possibly the best programming language developed in my lifetime, stops “trending”. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean from a business perspective. Its not like you just get to stop supporting a legacy language. Just ask someone who spent seven years, fresh out of college, supporting archaic old school ASP pages and Perl scripts.
But also you’re not just supporting the language. You’re supporting an entire suite of libraries, applications, and interfaces built for the particular environment.
Elon Musk learned this the hard way when he started trying to tear the wiring out of the walls and sell it for scrape at Twitter.
Also, the story of Boeing’s planes-that-don’t-fly-good.
This has been tech workers life cycle for at least 30 years, and I don’t see it changing
Longer than 30, to be sure. But its the sort of thing that comes at the expense of end users, rather than business execs. That’s the dirty secret behind these business decisions. Making the product worse only ever seems to benefit the firm’s bottom line when a business is in a secure cartel.
huginn@feddit.it 6 months ago
You’re missing the whole “growth starts to plateau so management looks for ways to cut costs”
And
“Product comparatively stable so it gets hired out to contractors who inevitably fuck it up because they’re cheap and there was 0 knowledge transfer but it’s too late you laid off the entire original team”