It’s almost like there’s an entire management philosophy our economy pushes that’s categorically suboptimal for and often at odds with making a solid, sustainable, and engineering-first organization.
The only thing “classical” business experts are good at is trying to find the quickest route to monetization. This pretty much never yields a product that actual helps people in a meaningful and consistent fashion in the long term.
Make a thing, and make it well, and it will sell itself. Boeing did this until they acquihired McDonnell Douglass leadership and transitioned their entire business model towards being “investor-first”… and that gave us delights like the 737 MCAS debacle (exacerbated, of course, by deregulation and poor auditing). They used to be one of the true paragons of American engineering. Now they’re just another profit über alles corporation.
Engineering-centric organizations need to focus a whole hell of a lot more on engineering ethics. These days, it’s mostly an afterthought.
That philosophy might hold water if we weren’t living in a world where products have to be designed to a price point for consumers. The highest quality engineered lamp will be outsold by orders of magnitude by the okay lamp that costs less than half as much. Not everyone makes airplanes.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not universally anti-capitalist. Someone who makes a useful thing is absolutely justified in trying to make it efficiently as possible, both in terms of capital as well as environmental considerations (edit: addendum here), as well as some compensation for their expertise, time, and effort, according to which and/or how many customers use it.
What I object to is the constant drive towards short-term benefit over long-term investment, almost always at the cost of user experience - or these days, more broadly the constant march towards enshitification.
Our current system of unbounded amoral, and largely unregulated capitalism is very obviously harmful and parasitic to our society in a holistic sense. Milton Friedman’s “shareholder value first” philosophy (which has become standard practice for most of the western world’s corporate governance) has been a cancer on our societies since the moment those words left his mouth.
Also, fuck the entire concept of omnipresent advertisements with a rusty pipe.
It’s almost like there’s an entire management philosophy our economy pushes that’s categorically suboptimal for and often at odds with making a solid, sustainable, and engineering-first organization.
The only thing “classical” business experts are good at is trying to find the quickest route to monetization. This pretty much never yields a product that actual helps people in a meaningful and consistent fashion in the long term.
Make a thing, and make it well, and it will sell itself. Boeing did this until they acquihired McDonnell Douglass leadership and transitioned their entire business model towards being “investor-first”… and that gave us delights like the 737 MCAS debacle (exacerbated, of course, by deregulation and poor auditing). They used to be one of the true paragons of American engineering. Now they’re just another profit über alles corporation.
Engineering-centric organizations need to focus a whole hell of a lot more on engineering ethics. These days, it’s mostly an afterthought.
That philosophy might hold water if we weren’t living in a world where products have to be designed to a price point for consumers. The highest quality engineered lamp will be outsold by orders of magnitude by the okay lamp that costs less than half as much. Not everyone makes airplanes.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not universally anti-capitalist. Someone who makes a useful thing is absolutely justified in trying to make it efficiently as possible, both in terms of capital as well as environmental considerations (edit: addendum here), as well as some compensation for their expertise, time, and effort, according to which and/or how many customers use it.
What I object to is the constant drive towards short-term benefit over long-term investment, almost always at the cost of user experience - or these days, more broadly the constant march towards enshitification.
Our current system of unbounded amoral, and largely unregulated capitalism is very obviously harmful and parasitic to our society in a holistic sense. Milton Friedman’s “shareholder value first” philosophy (which has become standard practice for most of the western world’s corporate governance) has been a cancer on our societies since the moment those words left his mouth.
Also, fuck the entire concept of omnipresent advertisements with a rusty pipe.