this, by the way, is why a bunch of people got mad at my uber thread https://twitter.com/mountain_ghosts/status/1340277080983040000

especially this bit: https://twitter.com/mountain_ghosts/status/1337553045694115841

if I could elaborate a bit on this: part of the purpose of these stories is to present what uber does as "high tech", implying a notion of "progress", of advancing the state of the art, etc

that is the image "silicon valley" constructs for itself, that its companies are doing "advanced" things with technology, pushing the boundaries of knowledge, things of that nature

and yeah, they do stuff that's *challenging* -- software architecture, scaling, etc are challenging problems -- but they're not novel; most of the stuff that "silicon valley" companies do with computers is stuff 1000s of other orgs do

it's the normal boring everyday work of making software, it happens all over the world. what silicon valley wants you to believe is that it's doing something rarified and especially advanced vis-a-vis computers, when for the most part it isn't

it trades on the "silicon valley" name to make you think that what these companies derive value from is technology, per se, that what they principally deliver is "new technology", when that's not really the case

what these companies mostly derive value from is the networked power of the web to drive economies of scale, plus regulatory bypasses and huge capital investment to try to buy their way to monopoly positions in whatever markets they enter

one of the things most of the "unicorns" of the last decade -- in particular gig work companies like uber -- go after is using the internet to drive "efficiency" in the labour market, by making as easy and cheap as possible to commission piecework

uber does not produce "technology" any more than any other company with a phone app does. what it produces is a marketplace that completely atomises the workforce, decimates its bargaining power, undermines its workplace rights, and pushes prices towards zero

a lot of the stuff the valley wants you to think of as "technology" is really massive networked *and* centralised leverage over the labour market

but! that's not who "works" for these companies. cab drivers aren't employed by uber, they simply "participate in the marketplace" that uber "created" (aka inserted itself as a market-maker into)

who does "work" for uber? software developers. it is critical to the maintenance of the image of a company like uber that you think of it as a "technology company", and part of the function of it employing large numbers of well-paid engineers is to maintain that myth

also stuff like headcount is treated as a growth metric by investors so there are other perverse incentives for maximising it

but the point is they need to maintain the idea that what they're delivering is ~novel technology~, which is hard and expensive and necessitates thousands of engineers pushing the state of the art, when what they actually do could be accomplished with a tenth of the staff

it's not about whether the swift compiler is production ready or whether FRP is good or hard to use or any question of the merit of any particular technology -- the thing is to make it sound hard, advanced, novel, so on

so when I talk about the point of stories like that being that these companies literally pay programmers to entertain themselves with manufactured problems, that's what's happening

it's not that the work they do isn't hard, it's just no harder than what thousands of other extremely boring organisations that aren't funded by softbank do, it's not ~special~

whereas it's extremely in the interests of these companies and their owners for you to *believe* that it is special, and the way their engineering departments present their work is part of that narrative

just please be more critical when you read and share these stories and think about the purpose they serve and who benefits from them

this is also why you should unionise your workplace and why these companies resist it so forcefully -- they principally derive value from decimating any leverage that workers have

it is capitalism by sheer overwhelming force and I don't want to hear another word about the valley being "left wing"

it is possible that the point of many of these companies is not to generate value directly but to destroy labour unions and public infrastructure so that capital can reap the rewards

e.g. one condition for uber to be profitable is literally for public transit to cease operation