I agree - grow or die. “Do one thing well” might work well for open source Unix CLI tools, but not for companies with shareholders expecting dividends. I wish it wasn’t that way, but that is how it is.
That's the issue with taking too much funding or going public. You become beholden to the profit margin and the quality of the product is completely irrelevant if it still prints money. You turn your company into a metastasis, demanding exponential growth, market share, and profit as the only metrics of success.
What ever happened to just doing well enough to pay the bills, your employees, and a touch saved for a rainy day? Thousands of companies operate like this: restaurants, shops, trades, nothing you'd find on the NYSE of course. Why do you need to double in value every few years? Expand exponentially like a cancer? As your company grows and you wrangle more engineering talent into your directionless product, how much innovation are you stifling in the process? These engineers could be founding their own private companies instead of working for your public monstrosity, they could be working on products that are good on merit and bad on profit. We could be years ahead if corporatism didn't invade engineering and silo the best talent into contracts of secrecy, shattering open communication on technology in the process.
Take self driving cars. Quite a few companies are working on the same goal, repeating the same work. In an ideal world these engineers would all be in the same building, sharing notes, running joint experiments, and the end product would be sponsored by all the companies funding the endeavor. But instead we live in a world that values getting there first and 'beating' your colleagues in other companies, even if it takes longer than if everyone was collaborating. We value the dollar more than the technology.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I think with the self driving car example having diverse competing approaches helps avoid stagnating on a local optimum.
Right, but whats the point if you can never learn about these different approaches and freely discuss them and improve them? I mean there could be two people in an apartment building in the valley banging their head on their desk over the same issue and they could never talk to each other about it due to NDA.
We all learn about collaborating and helping people with their issues——really just teaching each other, the best way to learn imo——with capstone projects in engineering schools, then we forget it all when we enter the workforce and sign our NDAs and suddenly gag ourselves from talking about our work to other people in the field.
The open source world really kills your argument. Red Hat is on the stock exchange and it is fairly happy to work on a product for long time periods (rhel and related products) without it turning into a gigantic blob. I feel it just depends on the industry. Some industries want rapid development while others (like the enterprise) value stability.
