Software is eating the world, all right (2024)

I resonate with Dubray's sentiments. Maybe it's because I just turned 50 and am more contemplative at the half-century mark, but I feel anymore like I'm playing a part in peddling schlock and snake oil. Our industry is increasingly selling products that are extractive and zero-sum as opposed to being the tide that lifts all boats. Was I always living a lie in a way, or have things truly become qualitatively worse over the past 10 or 15 years?

I'm going to sound like an elitist ahole but this all worked so much better when it was a small, self selecting group of users.

But the most disenfranchising part of all this is how quickly/how willing tech people were to allow/promote/encourage awfulness and destructiveness for $$$. I had such a different view of that scene in the 90s/early 2000s. But the good news is we are self reflecting and not happy with the current status quo. Hopefully we don't settle for the 'hide in our gated community' discord model but come up with something better.

I think software engineering is inherently a management job. When you write code, you write company policy, but that policy isn't followed by human employees, it's followed by electronic employees - computers.

These electronic employees are very good at following very simple instructions. They enable the business to handle enormous numbers of customers concurrently, but those customers can only be handled in the way that the software engineers planned for.

The author complains about businesses that operate two-sided markets, which is an economic function traditionally handled by governments. Governments imposed lots of regulations, but Uber, DoorDash and their ilk decided to do away with all that. This resulted in litanies of scandals, and the businesses rapidly putting these poorly-implemented policies in place. It turns out that all those regulations, accumulated over centuries, were actually necessary to ensure that the markets functioned properly. The wunderkind founders made their billions by burning Chesterton's fences.

Generation Z, I understand, is increasingly abandoning dating apps, because the apps aren't optimised for connecting their users with compatible partners. If all the cool kids are finding their relationships offline, then eventually it'll just be the uncool looking for love on the internet (just like in the dial-up days).

In a similar way, if it's too much of a pain in the arse to deal with a delivery app, then some restaurants will stop dealing with them, and rely on word of mouth. If every other restaurant is on the delivery apps, then the restaurant that isn't on the apps suddenly becomes the 'hidden gem', the place you hear about from that colleague who likes to drop names to show everyone that they're cool.

(On the other hand, if you're running the slightly-below-average pizza place that people call when they can't be bothered to cook, then you should probably be on the apps. This is a matter of market positioning.)

Great post! “The “digital revolution” is financially corrupt, morally bankrupt, and appears more and more every day like a parasite on its way to killing its host. Yep, Software is eating the world, all right.” Applies to a lot of AI develpments too imho. Only a same that this post is on the closed medium platform….

When Marc said this quote, the undercurrent was "We are taking control." This aligns with what the write describes. The goal is to maximize economic gains while providing as little as possible using automation and technology.

Edit: economic gains == wealth == control for the purposes of this discussion imho.

> My best advice to a hiring manager is to check the reviews written by your future hires, you will have direct visibility into how they will perform in your organization and how toxic or emphatic they will be.

Brilliant. Have any hiring managers done this and uncovered red flags?

Author is Jean-Jacques Dubray, creator of State Action Model (SAM) [1], since retired as of this post.

[1] http://sam.js.org/

It's a downward spiral. The only question is whether it's going to destroy our society, or if people will have the will to forcibly stop it before then. (I mean with, like, robustly enforced laws that result in ruinous financial penalties against companies that are built around creating harmful "disruption", and against the individuals who run them.)

The author totally lost me at: 1. examples of the Yelp reviews. Nothing wrong with complimenting someone using the word "sweet". If that's the worst example he came up with, then I am skeptical about the fairness of his overall analysis. 2. complaining about tipping. Your kind of greedy business owners who are not paying their workers living wages and are trying to put social pressure on innocent customers are displaying the exact same behavior that is eating the world, Jean-Jacques.

The curse of growing up during good times is that when things slightly change for the worse, it's the worst you've ever seen in your life. Yes. Some things suck. But other things are amazing. Chill out. It's going to be fine. Personally, I think that the eshittification of the internet will lead to renaissance of offline life, just wait for it.

Although I have some skepticism at the author once he got to the Yelp rant- I don't know what he expected when he used services that subsidize consistent demand.

I regularly patronize a cash only business off the grid for take out, and I talk to the owner and they are content with their business being small as it is. He makes great food, I pay for and eat it, simple as.

If he wanted to make a restaurant concept that prioritized slow, thoughtful eating. He could very well have done so.

The one thing that I will agree with him wholeheartedly however is the fact that many products like DoorDash or Uber Eats are staffed by engineers/PMs who don't care to do anything except to follow the data. To them, as they turn a knob too far in one direction, they tend to crush people in the process. It's very hard to build a product for users you can't really empathize with.

Best of luck to the author, there is a reason why the restaurant business chews as many people out as it lets in.

The problem must be in impenetrable nature of software to regular people, in conjunction with that software automation affects everyone.

I always thought that the fact that no judges and/or law makers and/or enforcement officials can realistically read software is extremely dangerous, and will, long term, completely remove rules of law from societies. If an engineer decides a judge can be deplatformed, they can, and while the platform company would have internal consistency processes, ultimately it's up to good will of members of the same exclusionary in-group of software engineers to undo it(unless JDAM is going to be an option).

I don't think there are many such impactful yet (although for technical reasons rather than favoritism) as exclusionary fields as the field of software. That must be why and how software is eating the world - not software becoming a first class citizen of a modern society.

> sure enough, they had closed us

This is the one that got me. We get takeout from a local restaurant (not delivery: we live too far outside town for that) and recently when I try to order online, it randomly tells me that it's too late and tries to schedule my pickup for the next day, even though the restaurant is still open for at least an hour.

But if I call to place the order, they happily take it and usually tell me that it'll be ready in 10-15 minutes.

Now I'm wondering if this is what's happening. It's weird, because they don't seem to get a lot of takeout orders. Every time I go there, the dining room is packed and usually my order is the only one waiting for pickup.

What I'm not sure about is whether the problems that author mentioned were intrinsic to the software systems, or they were fixable. Many of the problems were caused by incompetent product managers, per the author's speculation. I was wondering if such incompetence (or malice for the sake of argument) is rooted in human nature and therefore can't be fixed, or companies can still iteratively remove such pains. If such problems are part of the human nature, then wouldn't they manifest themselves in other systems even if we don't use software?

We need to start going into the real world by delivering products and technologies that we envisioned working in the actual real world. People don't care that much about the Internet and how much it all costs if you don't actually spend money because money is a human construct and if no exchanges happen then it doesn't exist. Spending money on building that next real future seems like a good step forward.

Way I understand Andersen by software eating the world - you either become a software company so people pay you or you pay to software companies. So author is right basically that’s extraction or in case of review systems even extortion I would say. It sucks just like article describes.

The interesting thing here is that he gets exactly what was written in the article he argues with. The software will eat as much of your margin as it can. There should be a small font remark, "regardless of its quality".

I agree with the author's sentiments, but it makes no sense that it is directed at Marc Andreessen. He doesn't run any of the companies mentioned, and he is not some emperor of the software industry.

The author lost me when he ranted about Google and Yelp reviews. Like, completely. There's nothing wrong with reviews saying servers are "sweet". This has nothing to do with candy and is a synonym for kind and/or attentive. Also, when customers 'use words like “clueless and absent” when talking about a twenty-year-old African-American women', it is the author of the article, not the author of the review, who needlessly and bizarrely brought race into the conversation. Is this guy kidding on both counts or what's his deal there, I genuinely don't know.

Perhaps the author's businesses aren't rated as highly as competitors in the neighbourhood, which must be because of sociopath reviewers, platform-related Reasons, and not (for example) a difference in customer service and/or quality.

Just the tiniest tip of a megalithic iceberg.

A pointless rant about business policies: nothing in the article was specific to software.

Complaints in order: subscription pricing; automatically preventing orders to minimize cancelled orders; an algorithm that will make the [door]dashers angry at the business owners; the geniuses at Google and Yelp [with a] review system designed to encourage any sociopath to smash businesses at will.

The whole article tries to blame software, however the article is actually about how businesses design poor interactions and how businesses sometimes make poor tradeoffs.

He even mentions a few examples when businesses fix the problems - as though that is a bad thing. 20/20 hindsight of the perfect armchair critic.

Old man yells at cloud vibes. If these services were so devoid of value, competitors will spring up and eat their lunch. Capitalism still works. Silicon valley startups have made their money disrupting broken customer experiences in basically every single vertical. They are not immune from the same disruption.

Don't run a restaurant. Especially don't run a kitchen which exists to fill orders controlled by someone else.

Nobody seems to want to start a dry cleaning shop. That's a business with good margins, not too much capital investment, and a low failure rate.

The author needs medicine for his soul. (The medicine is humility)

It's just the typical story of the person who is successful in his/her field and then decides to "retire" into the hospitality business. And when he fails he blames everybody else and twists himself into confused insinuations about racism and sexism thrown out against the void. Or against a guy named Marc.

"I was the server that day, and even though from the height of my Ph.D. and a half, I like to be the best server I can be..."

That quote confirmed the suspicion I had about the author before I reached it.

As for hating on Google Maps: Your business has to ask to be on Google Maps and you can remove yourself from there if you want. The same with all other platforms. No restaurant is forced to have anything to do with these digital platforms.

Complaining about customers not tipping... It's your restaurant, you can pay your staff more if you want to.

The entire article bears the mark of a nervous breakdown from a hectic industry with a guy who doesn't understand his business in the middle of it. The customers aren't perverts for writing in a review that their waiter was "sweet". My grandmother is also sweet. The customers aren't mean for not being happy with their service from "a twenty-year-old African-American women" as the author puts it.

Hospitality is a cutthroat industry which demands experience and skill if you want to own your own business, just like any other occupation. If you're "retiring" into it, be prepared to loose your money and your time to live your dream. And the money you borrow from relatives and spouses.