The argument against this is that shovelware has a distinctly different distribution model now.
App stores have quality hurdles that didn’t exist in the diskette days. The types of people making low quality software now can self publish (and in fact do, often), but they get drowned out by established big dogs or the ever-shifting firehose of our social zeitgeist if you are not where they are.
Anyone who has been on Reddit this year in any software adjacent sub has seen hundreds (at minimum) of posts about “feedback on my app” or slop posts doing a god awful job of digging for market insights on pain points.
The core problem with this guy’s argument is that he’s looking in the wrong places - where a SWE would distribute their stuff, not a normie - and then drawing the wrong conclusions. And I am telling you, normies are out there, right now, upchucking some of the sloppiest of slop software you could ever imagine with wanton abandon.
I use my $20/mo plan with Claude Code pretty happily, regularly hitting the limits through the day at a good pace, with nice cool-downs in between while I wait.
I promise I’m not being snarky here - I don’t understand how people are burning through their $200/mo plan usage so quickly. Are they spamming prompts? Not using planning mode? I’ve seen a few folks running multiple instances at once… is that more common than I think?
Indeed. But keep in mind they weren't just buying the tooling - they get the team, the brand, and the positional authority as well. OpenAI could have spun up a team to build an agent code IDE, and they would have been starting on the back foot with users, would have been compared to Cursor/Windsurf...
The price tag is hefty but I figure it'll work out for them on the backside because they won't have to fight so hard to capture TAM.
I'll take a whack at this since I have some relative experience from playing at a functional exec in my last role
we used Lattice in an organization of ~150 people. We had roughly 10 leaders (exec and non-exec), responsible for various functions. The most any one leader had in their reporting tree was ~40 (one of the Eng leaders)
For Lattice, at least from what I was exposed to, the surveys ARE anonymous. They know who has and hasn't submitted a survey because everyone gets a personalized link, but that is not aggregated up into some dashboard where UUIDs are mapped back to respondents. It's something like "Bill in finance has 4 directs, and 2 of those haven't pressed submit on their unique survey." But as you can figure, that does not matter AT ALL. Anyone with a modicum of attention can figure out who wrote what when you have a reporting tree that small. You will see the responses broken out by leader, by function (say, Sales for example), and then division, whole company. The only people who had access to all the results AFAIK were the CEO, the head of IT, and HR.
In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers.
> In short, it's anonymity theater if your leadership has any inkling of how you communicate. I knew exactly who wrote what from my teams, and so did my leadership peers.
You might be able to identify your direct reports based on communication style alone, but I don't really find it believable that this is a property that naturally transfers to your leadership, and from them up the chain to executives.
If that is true, then the "anonymity theater" only really extends to direct leadership, and not much further. This means that you, as a leader, would have to be complicit in any attempts to deanonymize any specific respondents.
So to rephrase: your ability to deanonymize your direct reports' responses does not extrapolate to the entire exercise being "anonymity theater", because your ability to deanonymize any given respondent only extends as far as your direct reports and maybe a free others. This becomes increasingly less true the larger the set of total employees surveyed.
> You might be able to identify your direct reports based on communication style alone, but I don't really find it believable that this is a property that naturally transfers to your leadership, and from them up the chain to executives.
And when your leadership says that we should help whoever "isn't a good fit" to exit the company, will you use your knowledge of who wrote what to make the right choice of who to fire?
I mean, why wouldn't I? It would be an important part of my job to find a competent set of individuals who are aligned with the company's overall goals and direction. A competent individual who is misaligned is often more damaging to a team than an incompetent aligned individual. The same is true of the individual's satisfaction with their work (i.e. `s/aligned/satisfied/g` in the above).
So my decision would necessarily require considering all of these factors: competence, satisfaction, and alignment. If their answers to an employee satisfaction survey tell me they're dissatisfied, and I can't or won't do what it takes to make them satisfied, I would be doing us both a disservice by not helping them exit the company.
At the end of the day, a company is a group of people dedicated towards some common goal. Everyone may have a different picture of how to get to that goal, but everyone should be trying to push things in the same general direction. Someone who is obviously pushing in the wrong direction or causing unnecessary friction should either be convinced to align more with the rest, convince others to push in the alternate direction, or asked to leave.
Now obviously companies should be encouraged to follow social norms in some respects, to make it clear that certain ways that they act are not tolerated by the society they exist within. However, this is still an inherently social problem, and requires social solutions.
If you feel like you're the odd one out, and that the majority of people in the company--or maybe just "the leadership"--are wrong, consider that at the end of the day, the reason usually comes down to "other people don't think like you". There are two things you can do about this:
1) change other people's minds. You generally can't do this by actively fighting against them, so you should at least make it clear you align with them in some way that matters to the company, first.
2) you can find a different group of people to work with, people who think more like you.
Consider that if the second option doesn't exist, you always have the option of doing it yourself.
I love this. I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to steal it for when I am back in the saddle interviewing folks. We need much more of this and a lot less of the adversarial BS.
Yes. It works really well. You can do a WHOLE LOTTA ARB(tm)(circle R), buying the crap placements at super low CPMs and selling the performance difference to clients. This is mitigated by those clients who ONLY WANT THE BEST (but of course, sir, right this way) - but there are ways around that, too - like the MFA (made for advertising) domains of all the big-name sites you can think of that solely exist for your RTB machine to pump ads stacked on top of each other, and only visible to bots and crawlers. It doesn't help that on one side, you have folks astute with math (Data Scientists et al.) and on the other, a metric shit ton of Media Planners/Buyers who are just handed a budget and are often pretty naive about the intricacies of how it all works. But it all sort of goes back to the original point - people put on blinders. They just wanna see the metric get hit, the numbers go up. Most of the time they don't care how any of that works as long as they look good to their boss, and the industry mostly obliges.
> They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.
I worked in the adtech space for almost 10 years and can confirm this is where we landed, too.
>The short story is that they didn’t want a better algorithm. They wanted an upsell feature.
This is why I got out. No one cares about getting the right ad to the right person. There's layers upon layers of hand-waving, fraud, and grift. Adtech is a true embodiment of "The Emperor's New Clothes."
Is there a solution? Obviously those companies are not going to change, so what can everyone else do about it - besides already being very rich, starting a competing ad-tech without funding, managing to get market share, and managing to remain one of the good guys.
The only thing I can think of is to use things like influencer ads on places like Instagram or Youtube which ironically sound like much better value for money as you actually know what you're getting for the money.
App stores have quality hurdles that didn’t exist in the diskette days. The types of people making low quality software now can self publish (and in fact do, often), but they get drowned out by established big dogs or the ever-shifting firehose of our social zeitgeist if you are not where they are.
Anyone who has been on Reddit this year in any software adjacent sub has seen hundreds (at minimum) of posts about “feedback on my app” or slop posts doing a god awful job of digging for market insights on pain points.
The core problem with this guy’s argument is that he’s looking in the wrong places - where a SWE would distribute their stuff, not a normie - and then drawing the wrong conclusions. And I am telling you, normies are out there, right now, upchucking some of the sloppiest of slop software you could ever imagine with wanton abandon.