alt Hacker NewsAlmost every problem a modern corpo has can be solved with an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people, and that's why none of them get solved.
The processes suck because of decades of corner cutting and "fat" trimming while the executives congratulate themselves for only making the product a biiiit worse in exchange for a 0.0005% cost reduction, before then offsetting any gains by giving themselves all the money that would've gone to whatever is now dead.
Repeat this process for 30 years and you have companies like Microsoft that can barely ship anything that works anymore, and our 4 Big Websites frequently just fail to load pages for no explicable reason, Amazon goes down and takes 1/3 of the internet with it, and AI companies are now going to devour the carcass of our internet and shit it back to us in LLM waffle while charging us money for the privilege to eat it.
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Honestly, I don't know if throwing people at a problem is the way to go. Doubly so given that a good chunk of the projects lately for me deal with third party vendors and those are so .. embedded that even getting basic requirements, documentation is an uphill battle ( which -- to me -- seems insane ). I have zero pull so I do what I can, notate the insanity for cya and move on.
I do agree on execs congratulating themselves afterwards though. It was obscene last year. This year it was mildly muted.
It's The Mythical Man Month idea. Programming software is a different thing than working on an assembly line, or a call center, or in retail sales. You're much better off having four programmers who are worth paying $200k a year than ten programmers who are worth paying $75k a year.
> Almost every problem a modern corpo has can be solved with an appropriate head-count of appropriately trained/educated people
Not really, because solving those problems with headcount defeats the point. Part of the definition of those kinds of problems is that solutions involving headcount are invalid.