Another similar example: Since it's tax time, I had to call a us gov office with a question. The first rep claimed "their system was down" and couldn't help me. I hung up and called back. The second rep was just nasty and stonewalled me by inundating me with security questions and refusing to "verify" my identity, so I eventually hung up and called back a third time. The third rep answered my question within a few minutes, and was a thorough pleasure to deal with.

I mean, I get that these guys might not be getting paid, with the government shutdown tomfoolery, but come on!

> From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.

Not meaningful pressure, though, at least for large organizations. This is a variant of the flawed "vote with your wallet" argument: One wallet changes nothing. Even 100 or 1000 wallets change nothing.

These huge businesses and huge governments are too big for one person at the bottom of the totem pole to make a difference. Sure, they may share 1/N of the culpability for what their organization is doing, but if they rage quit, they will be immediately replaced with another body. The organization won't even notice it.

Individual human beings acting individually are totally irrelevant when it comes to the behavior of large organizations.

I kind of hate how the www has become this lowest common denominator software SDK. Web applications are almost always inferior to what you could get if you had an actual native application built just for your platform. But we end up with web apps because web is more convenient for software developers and it's easier to distribute. Everything is about developer convenience. We're also quickly running out of software developers who even know how to develop and distribute native apps.

And when, for whatever reason, having a "desktop application" becomes a priority to developers, what do they do? Write it in Electron and ship a browser engine with their app. Yuuuuuuck!

> The last 10 years in the software industry in particular seems full of meta-work. Building new frameworks, new tools, new virtualization layers, new distributed systems, new dev tooling, new org charts. All to build... what exactly?

Don't forget App Stores. Everyone's still trying to build app stores, even if they have nothing to sell in them.

It's almost as if every major company's actual product is their stock price. Every other thing they do is a side quest or some strategic thing they think might convince analysts to make their stock price to move.

It's not worth 100 bucks a month for me to have my own shopping app, but maybe it's worth 100 bucks a month to have ready access to a software garden hose that I can use if I want to spew out whatever stupid app comes to my mind this morning.

I'd rather not pay monthly for something (like water) that I'm turning on and off and may not even need for weeks. But paying per-liter is currently more expensive so that's what we currently do.

I think the future is going to be local models running on powerful GPUs that you have on-prem or in your homelab, so you don't need your wallet perpetually tethered to a company just to turn the hose on for a few minutes.