I kept pushing for my vision, which would have taken a bit of patience, but the shareholders kept pushing for faster returns within unreasonable time frames. The other founder was CEO at the time and he didn’t dare resist the shareholders impatience.

The other founder kept changing the company strategy after pretty much every prospect he talked with, because he wanted to make a faster return, which, against my constant back-pressure to get stuff properly done, made us move in all directions without ever really committing to a single strategy or even properly finishing work. We had a period of fast growth for a while, mostly due to a smart sales strategy and a slick story (based on my vision), but then all the unfinished loose ends kept creeping back and we lost a lot of customers to quality issues and an inability to deliver on our promises. Every customer wanted something else and since we were building a platform we could in theory do everything, but in practice we had only a certain amount of developers, so we just couldn’t make them all happy. There was also a real pressure from sales to make prospects and POCs work, but there was very little pressure to make actual production systems produce value, so it seemed we were never really working on the things that our customers actually wanted, but always on features that prospects like and may sell well.

After years of fighting to get the company aligned on a single product strategy, the other founder and I finally got it to that point, but we had lost a lot of business and had to fire nearly 30 people (half the company size). A relatively new power hungry product manager basically did a bunch of shareholder ass kissing behind closed doors. He then got elected as the new CEO, when the old CEO (who really wasn’t very good) got demoted. His true narcisistic/sociopathic nature was then revealed. At that point I couldn’t handle it anymore. The company still exists and I wish them well, but I am so happy to not be involved with it anymore.

It all got started with a lofty vision, but greed for money, status and power basically fucked it over from all sides.

I was a founder once and I had a very lofty vision for the future. I was very surprised when people started asking me for my exit strategy. What the hell, yo? I am trying to make the world a nicer place, not just fill my pockets.

Which LLM are you running on your macbook?

And while you say this, this thread is full of people claiming it is actually very simple. sigh

Feast your heart on this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling

100% agreed.

I am actually a vegan activist, so I am somewhat used to shaming people. Although that is never the purpose. The purpose is to stop people from exploiting animals (killing, breeding, enslaving, using for testing and entertainment) when in today’s world 99% of it is unnecessary. It is very cruel and also is a major factor of climate change.

I digress, what I wanted to say is that this thing that you and I are talking about should have activists too. Money grubbing needs to be shamed endlessly. I just don’t know exactly how. I feel like going onto the streets with thousands of activists like I do with veganism, but I lack a clear movement, message and organization.

I honestly don’t have a systemic solution, like with veganism, which may be the crux of the problem. I just believe people need to be held accountable for what they are or are not bringing to the world.

Do you know of a movement? Perhaps degrowth?

I cringe everytime money grubbing is normalized. Bloomberg is now building an AI like chatGPT to do their forecasting. They are super proud of that, but instead they should be deeply ashamed. What value are they providing? People are just lining their pockets and other people applaud these people. This is a serious culture flaw.

Sure, but even so you’re nudging people in a direction that may or may not be the right direction. Some justification for advice is in order, right? I don’t know, perhaps @[email protected] is a social psychologist who has spent years researching this topic?

I don’t know. Some justification for your advice maybe? I know you intend well, but I am genuinely wondering how you know whether your advice is right and why you feel qualified to give advice.

Just one thing, you can say dating apps all suck, but I found my wife on a dating app, so maybe weave that into your story as well if possible :)

I couldn’t really find scientific research to back this claim up. Can you elaborate and back your claims up?

That seems like super generic advice. Why would you give it to anyone? Are you more qualified somehow than the people you give it to?

Every HP printer I owned over the last two decades was a huge pile of crap. I hate printers now and will never buy one ever again. I go to the library to print.

I have had to tell software engineers time and time again that is is totally okay to make error strings beyond one sentence or one word. It almost seems to me that they never realized that strings can hold multiple sentences and and don’t have relevant memory constraints.

One way my code improves is by thinking what I need to comment. Then I refactor some and the comments become somewhat redundant.

Have you ever considered asking a question or are you only just interested in misrepresenting what I said?

My work is a hobby, so there’s that

We don’t need to be compatible for the point to stand

I don’t tend to think about the amount of work available nor the demand for the fruits of work to be fixed.

I agree with the issues you are raising.

I’ll have a look when that type system is there. I am too dumb to program without a type system.

Scala 3 is such a nice language. People should really give that a fair trial, not looking back at Scala’s ugly past.