Today, a project I was working on with a team for about 7-8 months got canceled abruptly. I was part of a team that was making a website version of an existing mobile app the company owned, hitting the same backend as the mobilie app and shit. Nobody was using the app, so management decided to pull the plug.
Flashback to earlier this year. I was part of a team that was working on a marketing thingy for financial advisors that connects to our bread and butter app. After about a year of adding features to the thingy and refactoring horrendous code, our team was about to start working on a big addition to the thing. We got as far as setting up the environments for the microservices when management decided to cancel all future development on the marketing thingy and everyone on the team was moved to different teams.
Before all that, I was part of a team that was working on a single page application meant to fit into our bread and butter financial planning app to make the experience of interacting with some existing stuff less shitty. I don’t remember how long that went on for, but the plug got pulled on that before any of that UI could make it to production. Most of my coworkers quit.
In my somewhat over 4 year career as a professional code monkey, the only code I’ve written for my employer that has reached development have been small tweaks and refactors to software that no longer receives new features.
The original sin of my company (besides the obvious one of being a capitalist enterprise) is that all of our software is made at the behest of the financial advisors, with minimal to no input from the end users.
I know some other users here are programmers and probably understand some of what I’m talking about. I figured this vent would be interesting and discussion provoking. Fuck, I have a few other things about the company I could talk about that people might find interesting. It’s a fintech company after all, and I’m sure the ML website is gonna be full of people who understand finance capital’s role in imperialism.
If your company has totalitarian mindset and cannot adapt to the changing economy, then the firm need to be a large for-profit firm in a Capitalist system where government intervenes in the economy to ensure that the rich 1% can free ride on the fruit of the labor from the poor 99% to sustain their uncompetitive firm and convince people that the plutocratic command economy is an example of minimal government intervention. If the senior managers in your company has no connection to the Capitalist class nor to any corrupt senior government officers, then it could go bankrupted unless it gain shady connection with the corrupt elites or use the Neo-Liberal system to conduct criminal activities in poor countries. If your company is in a real free market economy which does not characterize Capitalism in practice, then it need to adapt to maintain success.
I think it succeeds by having a close to monopoly in its niche of financial planning software.