We techies are responsible for "You'll own nothing, and you'll enjoy it."
This hit me while watching the latest Gamers Nexus video discussion with Wendell, and Steve recited the quote.
It's often brought up as the inevitability of modern product ownership as company executives push profit-first practices like subscriptions, licenses and anti-right-to-repair designs. However this neglects the fact that these systems don't come from nowhere - they have to be built by programmers, engineers and designers.
I don't know if those same people support right-to-repair and freedom to manipulate what you buy in their private lives (or if they have even thought about it), but it seems like every techie I speak to does support it, yet somehow these things keep getting made.
I want to try and escape my bubble about this. I don't believe the engineers are powerless against the executives - if the engineering community works together and don't backstab, I think these systems can be prevented at the technical level and never see the light of day.
What happens at these notorious companies (John Deere, Apple etc.) that I'm missing? Is the lure of money too great? Is the threat of being back stabbed too large?
I disagree - I think the problem is a combination of the Market For Lemons, and the MBA Ideology. Let me explain what that means:
The market for lemons is a concept that goes like this: if you don't know whether you're buying a good product or a bad product, then the price you're willing to pay for any given product is somewhere in the middle. This means you're underpaying for the good product and overpaying for the bad product. Over time, unless there's a good way to distinguish the two, the good products will be taken out of the market leaving an overwhelming chance that what you're buying will be crap, and thus very few people will be willing to pay good-product prices.
Now, MBA Ideology is basically where a company with a solid reputation is bought out, and the MBAs decide that the reputation is a great asset that's underexploited, so they use lower quality materials etc to go for more of the budget market - in the process, losing what made the reputation in the first place.
To be clear, anyone without the brain-rot can see that this isn't "fully utilizing an asset", it's just betraying everyone who trusted the brand-name. The point is, MBAing results in formerly-good brands becoming crap. Which is how we get our market for lemons.
I like to imagine it like all the goodwill that the company built up over the years is a piñata filled with money that the new owners are beating the ever loving crap out of.
Which is pretty much the main business cycle these days. Newcomer builds their business on quality, then sells out or is taken over by MBAs who milk it while burning the barn down around them, and the customers are the cows mooing unhappily amid the flames.
And this just keeps repeating.
Savvy consumers pay attention to whether or not a company has recently sold, or brought in new management, or otherwise had an "at the top" transition. If they have ... they're not the same company anymore. Companies aren't monoliths, they're people.
The ones that all feel the same are those MBA types we hate, all playing from the same textbook milking the dregs. The ones that we like to gravitate to are often some independent person or group that starts a company and doesn't follow that textbook. These breakaway concerns are the ones that often build their brands on quality, and then get sold or taken over to be milked.
The trick is to look for when to get out, as a consumer. The C-suite being changed out is a pretty reliable signal. If the founder(s) are gone, get ready to pull your business and look for a new option unless you're okay with getting worse shit for your dollar as the MBAs take over.
It just really sucks. Because if you want to avoid this, you have to stay fully invested in the business world to figure out who's still independent and who's now in position to be vulture food.
Somewhat similar to markets for lemons, is there an economics term for what I’ve tentatively titled markets with airfare dynamics? Namely, markets that bifurcate into overpriced dogshit and ultra first class.
My layman intuition for how such markets devolve is that the majority of customers in the market are generally unconcerned with quality and strictly optimize on price. The niche companies catering to luxury raise both the quality and price well above any reasonable value to compensate for a lack of volume. However, this leaves no realistic options for those who want to pay a slight premium for a slightly premium experience.
The philosophical question you ask was written about a lot by Edmund Burke. He was obsessed with ownership of property.
One of his quotes: If we owned the property, we will become free and prosperous. If so they regain control, we will become poor.
Product developers don't own anything they create. The company does. Ownership is control. Now apply the same idea to the SaaS products you're building and a future world in which few people own anything.
The problem is that we all must, to one degree or another, separate ourselves ideologically from our employers, or our employers will find people who do.
I know a lady that works in software anti-piracy. She begs for pirated content all the time because she can't wait for Disney+ to stream the latest episodes of Bluey.
Look at Richard Stallman for another example. He's a relatively poor eccentric compared to his peers...because he decided to double down on ideology rather than selling out and becoming a billionaire.
I deliberately chose to remain employed in academia in part because I believe in the mission of educating everyone to the best of our ability. I could easily make double in the private sector, but that means further compromising my ideology for money (that in itself also compromising my morals).
I'm definitely fortunate to work in an industry (cybersecurity) where the ideological disconnect is small. I'm never going to be asked to build something that makes people less secure.
The one aspect that I've justified in my mind is using behavioural analytics to distinguish bad actors from legitimate users. It is a form of surveillance, which I'm not happy about, but distributing that analysis to executives is unlikely to be greenlit as a project because it's not a security concern.
I'm of similar mind. My professional career, other than a brief 16mo job, has been in non-profit. I actually have a job offer on the table in with the government. I don't think I'll ever work for-profit again.
While my brief for-profit foray wasn't terrible and my boss and owner were great to me, some of things we did and charged clients for felt real scummy. Charging full price for used goods or even things we got free. Going on-site to fix things that could easily be fixed remote, because the revenue structure in-place meant in-person visits were billable. Taking on clients that we had no business taking on—usually because the client wasn't a good match and/or we didn't have all the info we needed to properly support them—because our company owner made some kind of deal with that client for, for example, a hefty discount on a new RV for himself. Which meant me and my co-workers had to deal with the BS. I remember one client who had a chronic printer issue. Instead of us fixing it permanently, they would call-in everyday around lunch for the fix. While I often handled it remote (so it wasn't billable), that doesn't mean we didn't occasionally get sent out there to fix it, which of course was billable.
I got paid well, don't get me wrong. The owner certainly shared the wealth with the team. But I didn't like the way that wealth was being generated. So when my previous non-profit employer came knocking, I jumped. I had to take a $5000 pay cut, though the benefits more than make up for it. Plus, we're not doing shady stuff. Yes, a non-profit is a business like any other, and profit (or rather, revenue-over-expenses) is important, it isn't our primary motivator. Member service and satisfaction is far more important to us.
Programmers, engineers, and designers are just people. They will not all have the same views or scruples just because of their job title or interest in tech. Like most people, they will do what their employer asks of them, even if it's shitty, because they need to put food on the table. It would be great if tech people all banded together to stop these shitty companies, but when it comes down to it, if employees are unwilling to do things the company wants, they can be replaced with someone who will.
Totally this. The broader issue is about following principles and ethics, technology is just one dimension here. Shouldn't scientists and pharmacists have ethical reflections when they pursue careers in a cynical big pharma industry that sells overly costly medicines and indulges in other shady practices? Shouldn't creative writers and journalists have ethical reflections when they write pieces that are filled with just vicious political agendas and nothing else? Shouldn't accountants have ethical reflections when they allow malpractices right under their noses and let things like 2008 Home Loan crisis and Sam Bankman Fried crypto scam happen?
This has always happened throughout history and will probably continue to happen because human nature is like that. Greed and Capitalism through shady means is right inside human DNA, it's only a matter of how much the evolution of ethics and compassion is able to keep the evolution of greed and capitalism in check, and that balance is always very delicate and fragile.
So there's no way to stop it? That seems kinda defeatist. Maybe changing our purchasing decisions to favour companies that support true ownership and RTR would be a step in the right direction?
Buying DRM-free media or tech by companies like Framework allows those companies to hire more people who also care about those things, and it's a virtuous cycle instead of a downward one...
There's lots of ways to stop it, but "everyone behave" has routinely been proven time and time again to not work for large enough numbers.
This is the frustrating gap I see, in that people who are ideological or have some goal are often very naive about how to accomplish those. Engineers just not doing it is never ever going to work.
It might work, unions manage to exist after all.
I wouldn't necessarily count on it though.
People deify unions and I think miss that they are worker focused not ethics focused. A union helps you keep your job not change the way it’s done or how it affects people.
In fact they do almost the opposite since changes can lead to less jobs
A focus on job creation instead of job preservation or improving working conditions is, IMO, one of the biggest reasons for working class anti-union attitudes. Many people just want to get the job done and go home rather than wait for the union-certified electrician to arrive.
Yep, and most unions i've dealt with have a lot of "legacy" baggage or people jumping through unwritten rules/hoops to do things. That's before you get into the questionable bureaucracy they often add. I don't think enough people really get that a corporate environment and a union have mostly the same methods and different goals.
My point was just that not working can work in certain situations, especially if organized
A good union would help quite a lot. You can't just fire people until you find someone willing to sell out the users if the union contract says you can't, and the union can negotiate broadly with the company to find a strategy to make money that the workers actually like.
I didn't say there was no way to stop it, I just explained why these people do things like this. Although I generally think regulation is a more effective way of curtailing bad behavior by companies, it's very difficult to change things just by changing our consumption habits. Still worth doing of course, if only for the benefits of getting DRM free media etc.
I'd say that choosing to spend money on alternatives is more likely to have an impact than trying to get software engineers to put ethics over their financial goals en masse. That's just too big an ask.
Given the size of most of the corporations driving these trends, it's hard to imagine anything derailing the train besides regulation. The EU has made some recent progress there.
When you're up against organizations with the financial power of a small to medium nation state, and everything that goes with that, regulation by larger nations is the only thing that works.
As a techie who works for a company whose product line includes software subscriptions, I'll take a stab at this.
Money is important to me. Pretty much everything I do and enjoy costs money. It would be nice if it didn't, but that's just how it is. I also want to retire someday which will cost a lot. My employer pays me very well to do my job. And I know that if I refuse to do my job, someone else will step up to do it in the blink of an eye. Nothing will change, except I'll be jobless and poor.
This is not to say that I'm void of all morals and I've sold my soul to the devil. If I felt that my company was hurting people, that would be a different story. Subscriptions might unideal for consumers and better for corporations, but I personally don't think that they actually hurt people.
That all being said, I don't actually buy my company's version of the product that I'm talking about. I buy a competitor's that has no subscription. It's really not as good, but it's good enough for my personal use, especially for the price. So I still vote with my wallet at the end of the day when it comes to this issue.
What kind of software company doesn't give their software to their employees for free...that's a bonkers waste of free QA testers.
Anecdotally, I have been at a company that offered free use of their subscription software and very intentionally not used it.
I have no interest in doing work outside of work hours, and submitting a detailed bug report to my coworkers definitely qualifies as work to me. I will happily submit detailed bug reports to other people for other software, but there is a weird line there when it ends up back in your queue that it becomes unpaid work.
I also don't want my coworkers to be able to track what I do off hours. I don't know why they would but they absolutely could. Anonymity is nice.
Finally, I dislike subscription software. If I can make the FOSS version better, I will do what I can to help as long as it isn't blatant code theft. Being a power user submitting good bug reports is very useful, as you mentioned, and I felt it a better use of my time helping the FOSS community.
I don't disagree with your assessment tbh. It just strikes me as odd that they exist.
Also depends on what software the company is selling. If they're selling me a backup solution damn well every one of their employees better be using it. Otherwise I'll have 0 trust that my backups are actually secure.
MBAs, non-technical executives, and investors are the fault, not techies.
Right to repair, and full ownership of purchased goods are two areas I've been happy to see at least some successful push back in the last few years. I don't think we'll ever return to the good ol' days of (insert preferred decade), but if products like the nothing phone and framework laptop sell well and start to attract a meaningful market share, then I suspect we'll start to see more similar products in the future.
We've been going through a revolution in accessibility which I believe (hope) is coming to its end. Now your grandma has a smartphone she can use as well as your ten year old. In my industry, education, we're nearing what feels like peak accessibility. State and federal (US, FL) laws require me to publish class materials months before the start of the term, in formats accessible to the blind and deaf, for all three major operating systems. It's honestly nuts, and it feels like this is to give students absolutely no excuse for not doing their god damned work, but that's another matter all together.
If there's any meaningful fraction of users who will refuse to buy a product which they cannot repair on their own, then a market for those folks will emerge and flourish. The question is whether that market exists. I think it does and that it's under-served. Time may show otherwise, but that's my hope at least.
Basically, a large segment of the population got reeeeeeaaaal lazy (imo) over the last couple decades, and since that's unsustainable I hope that we're going to see a change.
Things I repaired this month with a screwdriver, pliers, glue/tape, and a soldering iron. Diagnosis was mostly visual or with a multimeter:
Childs toy, battery terminal was poorly soldered.
Childs toy, defective switch, caniballized out of another toy.
Child's sound book, replaced a wire that broke when kid tore board book page out.
Temperature probe: fried capacitor.
Christmas lights: slight wire break in one segment of wire
Pair of $100 headphones: line break. Replaced the wire it came with with a 3.5 mm socket and now can just replace with any male-male wire. Might canabalize an old microphone off another broken headset and convert them to a full headset.
Pair of $50 wireless earbuds...pinched them apart with some pliers and fixed a wire connection that got loose. I'll admit this one is not my best work because I've got trembly giant hands.
It's amazing what you can accomplish with just a tiny bit of training and an hour of free time.
The problem, as the Luddites identified, is that if machines are used to churn out low-quality goods at ever-decreasing prices, you kill off the market for high-quality goods. You also kill off the market to be able to repair goods. If a new dishwasher can be had for $400, but it's gonna cost $100 for a diagnosis, potentially plus parts and labor to repair, very few will roll those dice.
Sure, you can buy a quality pair of socks for $25 still today. But the market for that is exponentially smaller than the one that buys the 20-pack for $10.
You are approaching a systemic problem with an individualistic solution.
Yes, we people have the power to change the system, but we need to be organized. It is not an isolated problem, it is a capitalism problem.
Capitalism ran it's course and we are in a (late) stage that the old have died, but the new isn't read to be born.
There is something called reserve army of labour. There is unemployment enough that if a bunch of programmers decide to go against the big tech, there are enough people who would do anything to work there.
Actually, there are techies of the other mindset also. Open minded techies who believe in the open source ideology of Apache Foundation, or the open minded techies who believe in the commons ideology of Richard Stallman and the GPL. They are millions in number and contribute greatly to the ecosystem. As long as these humble folks keep doing their good work, my faith in humanity and information technology as field stands resolute.
I wouldn't blame the people who actually make the stuff that gets put on the market in these ways. They are employees; they have to do what their boss tells them because they are economically dependant on it. Sure, there's some room to protest on an individual level, but that only means sacrificing economic potential, possibly being fired, and having someone else with lesser morals do it instead.
At one time I heard that GPL and other "copyleft" licenses were a loophole; a way to subvert the way that law works to allow greater freedom. But if you think about it, every license does the same thing, except instead of granting rights to the users, it restricts them. The alternative is actual ownership: you buy the thing and you can do whatever you want with it. From there, copyright is supposed to prevent people from distributing copies to their friends.
I've talked about this before, but it's kind of insane how many contracts people sign without thinking these days. They are all full of insane clauses like ones that waive your legal right to a trial. Social media sites generally give the platforms so many rights that they practically co-own your content. Pretty much everything on the web gives them license to spy on you or to sell your private information. Rather than having one body of law that governs the entire populace, people are bound by millions of different licenses that have questionable enforcability.
I'd guess the question is less often whether someone supports right to repair and more permissive ownership rights in a vacuum and more often whether they are willing to give up their income for that principle. Right to repair is great, but there probably aren't many who would give up their jobs for it. Unless you can get everyone to unite under this banner at the same time, that's the decision each person will need to make.
This is probably something that needs to be legislated rather than depend on that level of grassroots organization.
I'm not a techie, but I would say people who care about this could look at the history available of successful campaigns to mobilize the public against something abhorrent.
The boycott of apartheid South Africa would be one example.
South Africa never ran out of police, prison guards and enforcers,
But the campaign was successful.
Most people quietly resent paying license fees but are unaware of alternatives
Someone will always build something for you if you are offering enough money
I just want to buy a good pair of gloves. Where can you do that anymore
Why would they? They would be hurting their own income.
I own an IDE from a small company. Visual Slickedit. My copy/license is over 15 years old. It is made so well I never had a reason to buy a new version. I think the company survives because of fans who will buy each new version, whether they need it or not. Additionally, they have a subscription model they went to years ago.