alt Hacker NewsIf you read the footnote, they follow up to say they've rejected 100% of the AI projects brought to them.
Go to their home page and one of their consulting selling points is recovering struggling projects.
One of their front-page selling points is that they use "ancient techniques" from books written prior to the year 2000, because presumably everything newer than that is bad?
> For non-executive management who might be struggling to deliver things that feel beyond their control, we have ancient techniques (see: books written between 1986 and 1999) to turn your team into the envy of the organisation, and we can drop in directly to get your team the resources it needs to save a struggling project.
This is entirely a selection bias issue that they've created for themselves: Advertise a consulting service for saving failing projects to companies that don't have internal expertise to handle it, then write blog posts that 100% of the projects you see are failing. Also refuse to help them, to guarantee they can't be converted to successful projects to keep the success number at 0%.
Replies
To be completely fair, most software projects fail, AI or not, and we've known that since before the 2000s. I'm not saying everything post-2000s is bad, but just that the core is unchanged: most software projects fail, you should expect failure, and there is no magic silver-bullet process to either anticipate or prevent failure. Agile (big A) is certainly not that process.
it's not surprising as LLM's will generally fail you when you yourself don't know what you want. it's surprising how many people and organizations just blunder around scribbling code without clear goals in mind - for such people LLM's are a net negative as they will just end up with even more scribbles and no hope to make sense of it all.
Supposedly 70% of software projects failed even before AI. So are AI projects better or worse than that?
Also like people have asked about the 70% failure rate, how do you define failure/success.
https://medium.com/@trienpont/why-do-over-70-of-software-pro...
There’s some selection bias involved especially based on their marking, but you’re misreading what they are saying.
> even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work.
The kind of companies with failing projects seem to be very bad at using AI. That’s different from the normal mix of success and failures at most large companies.
I mean, that line regarding ancient techniques is very obviously written as satirical. I read it as „we are serious professionals, not young trend following folks“
The prominent "Business Owners" link on this company's website is broken. "Not Found".
Perhaps this will get downvoted but I personally take with a grain of salt anything written/stated by a company that can't even get the most basic functions (like running a simple website) correct.
And the even bigger irony here is that the author has a ranty blog post in which he claims he saved his employer $500,000 by clicking a button. "[It] is fucking wild that an inefficiency that took me five minutes to solve in a GUI configuration panel was allowed to persist," he wrote.
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-...
> One of their front-page selling points is that they use "ancient techniques" from books written prior to the year 2000, because presumably everything newer than that is bad?
I get what you are saying here.
At the same time, was reading Deming's last book [0] and there is a great line that I have never seen in any recent business books:
"The organizational chart is usually a pyramid. The main benefit of this style of chart is to clarify who reports to whom. Notably absent from this chart: the customer."
I've also worked at firms filled with very smart people who had no concept (or were not incentivized) to think about the Theory of Constraints, Total Quality Management or that the firm is supposed to work as a team and not a collection of fiefdoms.
What I'm saying is: just because a book was written before 2000 doesn't make it irrelevant.
0 - https://amzn.to/4waEjA2