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The Remarkable Incompetence At The Heart Of Tech
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this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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As a software engineer, all of the free portion of the article is 100% correct about software engineering dysfunction.
There's another reason why it is that way, though. A software engineer who is competent and productive and working under competent leadership making an useful product, would make a very large multiple of their salary in profits.
That permits all sorts of utter dysfunction while still breaking even on the average. You can have incompetent leadership in 90% of projects, you can saddle your developers with any kind of bad practices, you can impose all sorts of productivity damaging nonsense and yet still break even.
The dysfunction can be presented as relentless innovation and pursuit of new, uncertain opportunities, as a shrewd strategy.
If you fall below break-even, the consequences will not be visible for many years. And up until it becomes impossible to recover, on the technical level it is extremely cheap to recover: it's easier to do nothing than to convert your OS's start menu to React. Tech companies don't fail because of tech.
This also relates to using AI to write code. You already can have a human write your code and pay them $1 for $10 you would make from it - or $0 you would make if you fucked up. You want it to become $0.5 with AI coding tools? Then you're multiplying your probability of success by what's left after the probability that you get some unmaintainable slop . It's simply not worth it.
You're argument seems like Suresh's to me, in that making working software is just laughably easy for a competent engineer.
This begs the question why noone is exploiting this market gap. But there's a couple explanations...
It can be a coordination problem, in that there are just barely any competent software organisations with enough engineers. The problem can also lie in how software is bought, since customers seem completely unable to determine the competence of vendors. Perceptions on what kind of software is a safe, respectable choice may even be anti-helpful in this regard.
Well, the big issue is that there's only this much demand. How many web browsers is there genuine end user demand for, worldwide? Probably just 1. Several are made thanks to other demands by large corporations. How much value does a web browser provide, to billions of people who use it? What ever the number may be, it's orders of magnitude more than it costs to develop.
Why is software observably hard for companies? When 90% of people are working on projects that are going nowhere, that creates a situation where competence is quite rare. Because in most projects it is objectively unnecessary (would make no difference). Where majority of software engineers never seen a successful project all the way from the start to the finish line.
Then there's startups, these are (predominantly) mere vehicles for moving money from the coffers of large publicly traded corporations into pockets of VCs (who sell startups to said corporations). Whole world of pretend software engineering.
Then there's large corporations, where CEOs want to get paid more and to be able to get paid more they need to add more layers to the hierarchy underneath them, which they need to fill somehow, and they can't fill on merit because they just don't have enough stuff happening that they could measure merit in.
edit: basically the management always wants to do the equivalent of having hired a dozen heart surgeons to work on one heart and a "heart surgery architect" as well, the more layers the better because the more layers the higher is the pay their layer can get.