akaahduofjdr

Thats because FAANGMULA is mostly composed of media companies pretending to be tech companies. The business model is 100% a media and entertainment buisness model for most of the companies on that list.

I don't think it is even controversial to argue this so long as we can agree that a company cannot call itself a tech company simply because they hired a lot of programmers and are paying them decent salaries.

A tech company is a company that makes most of their money selling computer hardware and software products (and to a lesser extent, services and support for software and hardware products although it could be argued that is a different classification but with substantial overlap).

Notably, it has to be computers, not entertainment delivered via computers, or ads delivered through computers, and not industrials or pharmaceuticals or any number of other "technical but not 'tech' as in computers" industries. Tech is and has always meant IT, as in companies that are in the information and computers businesses. Where programmers happen to work, make the highest salary, or be the most highly concentrated has never mattered.

There's no fixing it because there isn't anything fundamentally broken , rather an aversion and active resistance to a process that is objectively bad in many respects, and largely the result of the massive waves of outsourcing that were promoted and allowed to happen by choice. This wasn't a law of nature or of logic , there are a lot of ways in which it is less than desirable.

I don't think there is a 2nd law of thermodynamics for social and economic processes, and I think that it is provably the case that specific decisions were made by specific people that allowed all of the things you described to happen, and that there are easily conceivable alternative paths we might have taken.

In some sense, IBM is idealistic in the true sense of the word. That ideology is certainly not HackerNews' ideology, but it is more complicated than the simple "capitalist company doing capitalist things" explanation.

This is a good summary of a cultural change to the industry that I have a very hard time describing to young people and those just getting started.

The pre-internet / big web tech days were vastly different. Tell a student today that you and everyone you were working around at the time got the chance to work at a computer company. Most don't even have a framework that would allow them to conceptualize what a computer company that isn't Apple and doesn't sell phones or throwaway junk at Best buy actually does. And especially they can't understand what it's like when there isn't a single, incredibly low margin, cheap, and slave labor supported supply chain ready to ship you parts at a moments notice, and those parts will be for a hardware architecture and small number of very similar operating systems that happen to also account for 90%+ of all the serious computing capacity supporting the world economy.

The fact that all the computer companies died and/or were outsourced, and the technologies were all turned into commodities, is something we don't really talk about all that much.

I agree with you about this but have an even darker take in that I see the exact same lack of vision in every single large tech company out there today. I mean, IBM does actually sell hardware and software ...that's a lot more than you can say about some of the other big names out there.

I have a theory that the death of the traditional computer company and it's buisness model, in the sense a company like an Oxide or IBM or Sun would understand the term "computer company", as well as the transition to the cloud for all new infrastructure, fundamentally changed the landscape in tech in a very negative way culturally speaking.

The hyperspecialization of the industry and consolidation of hardware into a single dominant platform for most serious buisness computing needs, obviated the need for traditional engineering cultures. It's hardly any wonder that this same transition also was a transition towards Agile development methods (or rather a cheap imitation of them, if it was ever even intended to be some paradigm shift at all).

The industry and the vibes I got were radically different and better even during ostensibly difficult times like right after dotcom.