Elizabeth AyerSep 14, 2025

Talking to friends in software orgs recently, I've been struck by commonalities across countries and sectors:

Executives are driving "efficiency," by which they mean maximizing time spent on direct value-creation activities.

BUT there's a tacit, industry-wide assumption that writing code is the only value-creating activity and that all coding generates value.

It's like everyone has prioritized instantaneous boat speed and abandoned navigation and maintenance.

Such a reckoning coming...

Show threadsmeg
@elizayer shows how poorly tech leaders understand their business. We should seriously replace all management with AI: the communication can't get any worse, AI might actually make data driven decisions, and it will be much cheaper than bloated executive salaries.
Sep 14, 2025 at 4:41pmWeb
Show threadElizabeth AyerSep 14, 2025

@smeg I'm assuming that companies led like this will go out of business when the inevitable shocks hit.

I've been trying to gaze into the crystal ball to see how to be best positioned for that future, but given everything else going on in the world, the future is so damned cloudy 😞

Show threadGarrett WollmanSep 14, 2025
@elizayer @smeg Looking at it from the standpoint of investors: companies are disposable. Nobody cares about the decade of technical debt except the greater fools left holding shares when the company starts to wheeze and stutter and eventually gets parted out at fire-sale prices. The ones in control today, the current investors, will be long gone and don't care. The firm only has to look good for long enough to make it to the next stock sale.
Show threadMatt PalmerSep 15, 2025
@smeg I recently heard a report about a group trying to quantify the impact of LLMs on various jobs, and the torturous logic they had to use in their analysis to not have their funding terminated by having the outcome be "management is doomed" was truly awe-inspiring.