alt Hacker News> companies took on debt to fund bloated engineering teams because no one noticed the engineering was done
ZIRP allowed a lot of "businesses" to exist that wouldn't in a conventional, competitive capitalistic environment. Businesses in quotes because there was never any reasonable potential for profitability, but it didn't matter because VC money was cheap. Building a sustainable business is hard, playing "startup founder" and having that lifestyle subsidized by VCs is easier.
In that case, (over)engineering was part of the performance art that was required to keep your only revenue source: the next funding round. There was never any incentive to "finish" the product because doing that would put your business model (or lack thereof) to the test and stop the music. On the other hand, as long as cheap money is around you could endlessly "engineer" and pivot and bullshit around, chasing the next funding round and using that to pay yourself/your friends decent salaries.
During the ZIRP era it was all about "engagement" and DAUs/MAUs, then it was blockchain, and now it's all about AI. For those that have run out of grifts, they fold or "incredible journey" and get sold for pennies on the dollar to entities like Bending Spoons that do notice there are bloated engineering teams that can be cut.
You hold ZIRP caused this, then cite crypto and AI as continuations, both post-ZIRP. Which is it?
> as long as cheap money is around you could endlessly "engineer" and pivot and bullshit around
I lived this in a particular industry firmly inside the ZIRP era. It doesn't begin to describe how things actually worked. Even if ZIRP is synonymous with endless money to you, on their end, they still had to choose how to allocate it, and it was finite. You're not going to a bank for a loan, you beg people with experience in software to believe you're trending up.
> During the ZIRP era it was all about "engagement" and DAUs/MAUs, then it was blockchain, and now it's all about AI.
Do you genuinely believe DAUs/MAUs stopped mattering once crpyto, then AI, arrived?
Your argument requires believing that engineers collectively ran a con that no investor, board member, or executive noticed for a decade, and the only people who figured it out were PE firms after 2022. That's conspiracy theory dressed in finance vocabulary.
The leveraged buyout model you're praising as "normal capitalism" is itself subsidized by cheap debt. You've correctly identified that cheap money distorts incentives. You've just misidentified which side of the transaction is the distortion.