I’ve said it quite regularly and it falls on deaf ears every time. The team is there to make a product, and there is a product feature roadmap, but the team hasn’t taken any steps down that road towards the new features in quite some time. It’s all distractions about connectivity with LLMs, data cleansing, re-inventions of wheels, and other weird shit that we don’t need because we don’t yet have a viable product.
I start a new job next week anyway so it really doesn’t matter in this instance, but the issue with how to deal with this ultimately unproductive mentality is difficult because I’m not in charge but I’m focused on delivering actual product results, which hardly any cunt in the tech industry in my experience seems to agree with. They just want to hear fancy words that make them sound clever, and do as little as possible in the most complicated way, to make people say “wow” about their big white palace made of sugar that dissolves in the rain.
Ultimately, how other people choose to act (or not act) is up to them, but I feel a responsibility when there are people in the company whose livelihoods depend on this shit and if they aren’t on the product team then they have no control or say over it either, they have to trust that stuff is being done and it isn’t.
It’s like in motorsport, if you watch and listen carefully, if a driver is taking risks, they’ll get a radio comment something along the lines of “remember why we go racing”. I wonder how many people actually understand what that means, I suspect not many.
