The Remarkable Incompetence At The Heart Of Tech

2026-07-31 22:45 UTC

Ed asked me to write about why leaders around the world are constantly buying software they don’t need. He probably had a few high-profile companies in mind, like Snowflake. Put aside whether Snowflake is a good product – most people don’t know what a database is, so why on earth does a specialized and very expensive database have a market cap of $71B? That’s a fair question – and being both a software engineer and the managing director at a tech consultancy, I can talk about what’s happening on the ground. And yes, people are buying software that they don’t need. I wish that was the extent of our problems.

Replies (1)

@diz@awful.systems 2026-08-01 03:00

As a software engineer, all of the free portion of the article is 100% correct about software engineering dysfunction. There’s another reason why it is that way, though. A software engineer who is competent and productive and working under competent leadership making an useful product, would make a very large multiple of their salary in profits. That permits all sorts of utter dysfunction while still breaking even on the average. You can have incompetent leadership in 90% of projects, you can saddle your developers with any kind of bad practices, you can impose all sorts of productivity damaging nonsense and yet still break even. The dysfunction can be presented as relentless innovation and pursuit of new, uncertain opportunities, as a shrewd strategy. If you fall below break-even, the consequences will not be visible for many years, and on the technical level it is piss easy to recover (it’s easier to do nothing than to convert your OS’s start menu to React). This also relates to using AI to write code. You already can have a human write your code and pay them $1 for $10 you would make from it - or $0 if you fucked up. You want it to become $0.5 with AI coding tools? Then you’re multiplying your probability of success by what’s left after the probability that you get some unmaintainable slop . It’s simply not worth it.

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