NFTs lost because they didn't do anything useful for their proponents, not because people were critical of them. They would've fizzled out even without detractors for that reason.
On the other hand, normal cryptocurrencies continue to exist because their proponents find them useful, even if many others are critical of their existence.
Technology lives and dies by the value it provides, and both proponents and detractors are generally ill-prepared to determine such value.
Okay, but during the NFT period, HN was trying to convince me that they were The Future. Same with metaverses, same with Bitcoin. I mean, okay, it is Different this time, so we are told. But there’s a boy who cried wolf aspect to all this, y’know?
Baseline assumption: HN is full of people who assume that the current fad is the future. It is kind of ground zero for that. My HN account is about 20 years old and the zeitgeist has been right like once.
Where I work, there have been a lot of pushback where that BS doesn't make a lick of sense (the crown jewel of BS request atm: "let's put AI in the bootloader").
Good governance "should" also mean that those kinds of pushback are encouraged.
As a point of data for your statement, Jassy has repeatedly said that teams that have higher AI adoption are safe from layoffs. Use AI or lose your job is the blunt message
What a wild business metric. Apparently not measuring productivity, profit, or even vague "impact." Just "AI adoption." Imagine your boss said that your job was safe if you switched over to using Python instead of whatever language you're currently developing in.
For sure, my org adopted KPIs for 95% AI usage measured weekly, and it was reviewed. Not 95% rolling weekly average, 95% each and every single week. I personally witness managers being called out why their team of 8 one week suddenly had only 7 people using AI that week. Take a vacation and your manager had to answer for it. Use an AI tool that they couldn't track, well, your manager had to answer for that too and probably had to harass you to use a measurable tool.
It was complete nonsense. Wound up leaving, partly over it. Nobody wanted to hear the emporor had no clothes and it made more sense to get out before that made my a layoff or URA target.
Something I've noticed is that companies don't really promote intelligent people up the chain of command. Socialism failed because it was a less effective economic system than capitalism, and lots of its issues are neatly replicated within capitalist companies:
- having friends is more important than making output, which means that people above certain level just play politics instead of actually managing the company
- managers who miss targets get more people assigned which makes them climb the hierarchy, which means all levels below top level have the incentive to be inefficient
- saying "no" to the ruling party, no matter how stupid the idea is, is the second-easiest way to get replaced. The easiest is to offend the wrong person
- planning periods misaligned with the economic reality
An intelligent person will either be optimized out of the system, or will learn how to game it to their own advantage.
It could have been both for sure. I'm just going off the public info here though and it doesn't seem like the employees failed to do what they were told to do.
In a company as large as MS, I'd never really expect a culture of encouraging pushback from below. They'd just never get anything done and the team culture and morale would likely end up in the tank.
It's just that I don't vibe with the sentiment that company culture are a one-way street from management.
Anyway I do see that after a while the people who would have said no would all be gone. So maybe this is not the start of the decline but actually closer to the end of Microslop.
I'd say it's also to stop people from doing dumb things (i.e. proactive defense).
Say, if the org runs Postgres in-house, there's a mighty chance that an intern somewhere might decide to ...test things out in a creative way.
Perhaps the idea of outsourcing that to Oracle is that Oracle has the processes/controls to rein in such interns. As opposed to e.g. a hospital having to create such processes/controls.
(Oracle is still a bad idea IMHO, just slightly less so comparatively)
