We need to start teaching everything in Anglo-Saxon:
"Some of the higher samesteads are splitly. That is, when a neitherbit strikes the kernel of one, as for a showdeal ymirstuff-235, it bursts into lesser kernels and free neitherbits; the latter can then split more ymirstuff-235. When this happens, weight shifts into work. It is not much of the whole, but nevertheless it is awesome."
With me on the older side of things, believe it when I tell you that things actually used to, for the most part, Just Work.
"Simple mistakes" and "process breakdowns" were uncommon, notable, and dealt with quickly. Even the cheap stuff tended to last for quite some time, and was often repairable when it failed.
Enshittification is not only real, it is accelerating.
A substantial portion of software engineering -- and the fundamental jobs of a proper Product Owner and UX Designer -- is to turn "vague ideas about what we need to do" into "this widget, on this page, it should work like this"
It's not a pipeline, it's an ongoing conversation within any functional team, but this requires buy-in from management, who is often selected for "line must go up this quarter no matter the cost" over "hey, wouldn't it be cool if this company was still a going concern in twenty years?"
Honestly, that is just bad management. It can make sense if it's your company, but even then, the risk profile is just off the charts. What happens if your only developer leaves or gets sick?
Real engineers think about handling things when stuff goes wrong, not "everything will be on the happy path forever".
Yes, there are constraints, but to me this sounds like an unacceptable level of exposure.
As a manager, I will quite literally ding people for working when they are supposed to be off.
Work during work time, don't work during not-work time. Good practices mean that everyone is important, but nobody is irreplaceable, the team and the work will move along a little slower, but that's fine.
You’ve also had to flip the disk halfway through a movie, it couldn’t do two hours of continuous video, unlike a VHS tape.
The lack of recording was also a killer, if you went with VHS you could record and watch home movies if you had a camera, read videos at the video store, record from broadcast TV, it was much more versatile.
My first job-job got hit by the dotcom crash, but was fortunately a real business with actual revenue, and the CEO was an absolute class act.
He reduced pay, the higher on the food chain you were, the bigger your cut. His cut was the biggest of all, and thanks to him, pretty much everybody at the company kept their jobs, and the company made it through while competitors folded.
That's what leadership looks like, and I can't tell you the kind of loyalty people had to him afterwards.
Our political/ruling class wanted more of the pie for themselves, dropped the trade barriers protecting American industry, and gorged themselves on the arbitrage as manufacturing flowed to our chief geopolitcal rival, who was quite happy to accept such a generous gift.
I mentioned this to Claude and this was the response:
Ha! The irony is not lost on anyone.
"We've built the world's most advanced AI coding assistant. It can refactor entire codebases, debug complex issues, and ship production features autonomously. Anyway, here's a terminal bug that makes your screen look like a slot machine. We'll get to it eventually."