9 ms·

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining e

Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.

pavel_lishin 15d ago
Were they ever well run?
ChrisRR 15d ago
It's not a new phenomenon. Companies have been dying for as long as companies have existed
dfxm12 15d ago
I don't go back quite to the 90s, but this has been true across my entire experience working in a few big multinationals (including one in tech). Companies will do what Wall Street wants (Wall Street likes layoffs), and at a certain level, they don't want unemployment to get too low, lest their workers gain too much leverage.
anonreeeeplor 15d ago
[dead]
martythemaniak 15d ago
I'll give you my diagnosis, which is derived from this: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t... The thing to realize about the SV executive class is that they have constructed a closed ecosystem around them where they only talk amongst themselves and a small number of supporting actors who say what the execs need to hear. A CEO will talk to other CEOs he will not talk to his skip reports. Alternative viewpoints or dissent are not part of this social circle, and despite their 'conterarian' self-image, there's an immense amount of social pressure to conform. You can can see hints of this outside - for example this site used to see YC folks as regular commenters, but no more. Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies. These people certainly do not encounter normal people in their day-to-day lives. In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA, etc. One guy starts yapping about some snake oil, they all yap about snake oil. There no negative feedback loop there.
- dalyons 15d ago
  I find this a correct and astute observation, and I don’t think you’re getting enough credit for it. I started noticing this SV C level groupthink a few years ago too. It’s just so _weird_ how lockstep everyone is, it’s like there isn’t a single original thought amongst today’s leaders. Just copy, mimic, converge, repeat. Same ideas, same moves (layoffs of exactly 10-20%) same org structures (flattening!) same team structures (smaller teams with AI!) same same . It’s almost creepy, and if I was more of a conspiracy theorist it would be easy to believe in shadowy leadership cabals orchestrating everything. It didn’t used to be this way - say circa 2006-2015 you had so much more diversity in the style and ideas of leadership. Eg early Dorsey, early zuck, all these other ceos at that time trying all kinds of wild and whacky ideas of how to run their companies. I’m not sure why this convergence happened, but now everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet, it’s anti-innovation, and I hate it.
- tstrimple 15d ago
  And thus microservices were spread across the unsuspecting world.
- mschuster91 15d ago
  > In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA As for the layoffs, that one was to be expected, a correction after the insane hiring sprees during the ZIRP phase. As for MAGA... well, Trump made it clear. Either you walk the line with him, or you get screwed.
  - simonuv 15d ago
    [dead]
  - martythemaniak 15d ago
    Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance. You see breathless claims of AI doing all the work one year, tokenmaxxing, then less than a year later everybody says don't spend so much on AI, progress wasn't as far as we expected. You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actually jobs are gonna be ok". My point is that its hard to ignore just how in-tune and well-coordinated all these people are, and I don't think it's a coincidence. If CEOs were responding to actual political, economic and company developments, you'd see far more diversity of opinion. Some you see their companies are growing and profitable and wouldn't jump on the layoff bandwagon. Others may ask "Don't we need rule of law? What happens when the other party gets in power?" and fight the administration in courts etc.
louthy 15d ago
> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? If you mean the games industry, it was always poorly run. I worked in games in the 90s and 00s it was a cottage industry of nerds, many of whom had success with an 8bit game in the 80s (where they did everything: a one person team), to then have to run large teams of devs/artists/designers/etc without any leadership experience and more complex hardware. Happy days :D
- lobf 15d ago
  This is one of my favorite eras / subjects in tech history. I was just recently reading about the history of the Ultima series and you’re describing Richard Garriott. As games were pressured to be bigger and prettier and use 3D graphics, suddenly the lack of managerial experience (partly) caused the later games to spin out of control and they were forced to release a series of bad titles that brought the whole franchise down. It’s busy really interesting how fast that industry changed, and the massive scale involved compared to just 10-15 years prior, depending on where you measure from.
  - ethbr1 15d ago
    > As games were pressured to be bigger and prettier and use 3D graphics, suddenly the lack of managerial experience (partly) caused the later games to spin out of control This generalizes to the industry, not just Origin. Corporate game dev uniquely seems to attract incompetent middle and upper management with extreme egos. I guess because the people who scramble to the top of the pile in an industry with an endless incoming supply of naive new workers tend to be those who spend most of their time networking and sharpening their knives.
  - jijijijij 15d ago
    Have you seen Halt and Catch Fire? It's really, really good television and may be your kinda thing thematically. Excellent soundtrack too.
  - louthy 15d ago
    If you find this stuff interesting, you can read about the failure of the first game I worked on here [1]. I replied in the comments [2] It says 1997, but dev started in ‘95, I joined in ‘96. I was pretty gutted at the time, I was just 21 years old and had the big dreams of working in games. It soon becomes clear that very few titles succeed. Luckily I had a few wins on the way, but the lack of professionalism really did get tiring. [1] https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainment-cancelled/ https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainme... [2] https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainment-cancelled/#comment-377406 https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainme...
altairprime 15d ago
Previously on “companies just aren’t run that well anymore”, HN considered this analysis of Boeing’s collapse following a reverse-takeover by an acquired, collapsing, competitor that ended up kicking out the quality-focused management in favor of profits: (6 years ago, 281 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971040 I assume a similar analysis exists somewhere for the big names in gaming that financial engineers have similarly destroyed other formerly-great companies; ZA/UM comes to mind as one example.
- protocolture 15d ago
  Todd Howard gets a lot of flak from the bethesda fanbase, but I reckon whoever replaces Todd Howard is guaranteed to be worse.
  - tstrimple 15d ago
    I don't know that we want to resort to comparing which sellout is worse.
    - altairprime 15d ago
      They’re all bad bosses, Brant.
    - protocolture 15d ago
      Todd might be a sellout, but he still seems to act with a certain level of regard to the properties he helped bring up when the business was just some weird dudes. Whoever replaces him will likely be a microsoft bean counter with zero attachment.
- reactordev 15d ago
  Ubisoft, Bungie, id software… Blizzard
  - tstrimple 15d ago
neutronicus 15d ago
I think they just want, broadly, to divest from the American tech work force, whether that's via AI or outsourcing. If "the remaining employees just collapse" it's a data point in support of the thesis that developing software in HCOL markets is unsustainable, and if they don't, margins are better! So I think decision-makers are seeing layoffs as win/win.
- teamonkey 15d ago
  Yes, absolutely. US games developers are paid a lot more than elsewhere. There has been a growing trend over the past couple of decades to outsource more and more game development to cheaper parts of the world, trending towards keeping only a small core team in the home country, supported by for-hire remote developers in Eastern Europe and Asia. The other big advantage to work for hire is not needing to keep a large team of specialists employed throughout development, when they may not be required for all of that time. Keeping everyone fully utilised has always been one of the big challenges for game studios. Ironically, AI may actually reduce the amount of outsourcing that a core team needs to do (though a lot of it is content and AI is still pretty bad at generating content).
  - floro 15d ago
    Keeping a small core team local and outsourcing the bulk of workers, that's exactly what every company I know of seems to do these days. Not just in game development but generally. It's the biggest reason for layoffs today. It's honestly disgusting that governments don't protect their citizens from this. Companies do this because it saves them money. Tax the hell out of them for every outsourced worker and this will all go away.
cyberax 15d ago
It seems like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all switched into "extract max profit" mode. They don't care about quality or even features anymore. And it comes from the top: the CEOs are not caring anymore, so their lieutenants are not interested in doing any work either. So the companies get turned into fiefdoms without any central guiding direction.
not_the_fda 15d ago
Companies haven't been well run in decades, if ever, especially American ones. I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business. I do design services now, and have worked with dozens of companies through that, and the pattern continues. We don't have leaders, or people that can make hard decisions, or think for themselves. They all follow the same book of the day business trends. If you do think outside the box you aren't a team player and are rocking the boat.
- ethbr1 15d ago
  > I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business I did tech consulting early in my career, so got to see a large number of companies as I was working for them. Some good, some bad. There were a few reliable characteristics about the good ones though: - Distilled corporate culture into learnable points, ensured everyone learned those, and then reliably used and referenced them in the context of everyday business decisions - Centralized strategy, decentralized tactics. Execs cane up with strategic targets, then implementers were free to design their own solutions to deliver those - Had an expectation of employee-initiated internal mobility (team switching) and used it as a management evaluation signal - Had a strong internal process for recognizing when they promoted / hired a bad manager (i.e. they made sure a bad manager with a good team didn't look good)
  - HDThoreaun 14d ago
    Amazon?
    - ethbr1 14d ago
      I'm not sure about the last two, but Amazon nails the first two in spades. Bezos made it abundantly clear the company was about efficiency and scale... and fuck anything else (employees included).
- badpun 15d ago
  Most follow the herd, but there are often noticeable exceptions. See e.g. how Toyota refused to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon and stuck to hybrid engines. Or Mazda, which didn't even do hybrid.
hluska 15d ago
In the 1990s, the adage in game development was that you knew you were a game developer when you had sat at the same desk, had seven different positions with three different companies over 30 months, brought in all your own equipment and still hadn’t gotten paid. So, the game development industry really hasn’t changed that much. But the way we talk about things certainly has changed. Generation X had a lot of bad things written about us, but we could write and we could think. We were also significantly tougher than the modern generation. Things weren’t easy and running companies had always been hard. We didn’t think in terms of ‘employees just collapse’ because we were tough enough that that would have been silly. A few may collapse and that sucked for them, but for the most part we did our shit and lived our lives. We didn’t expect lives of leisure or for companies to speak to our personal missions. We had jobs and we had lives. There were massive layoffs back in the day too. They sucked. But employees didn’t collapse, the world kept spinning and honestly, having been through those years it’s very very hard to relate to the young now. Younger generations do not have a monopoly on struggling or on shitty bosses, but you sure talk about them too much.
BiscuitBadger 15d ago
Look at Strange Scaffold for a game dev company built around being a sustainable business where there aren’t any single ambitious “Bet the business” releases.
noduerme 15d ago
I was working at a web shop in San Francisco when the Web 1.0 bubble burst. The period leading up to that was characterized by company execs buying themselves all kinds of expensive new cars and toys, and a kind of hysteria on the part of clients that their brick and mortar businesses were being left behind if they didn't spend gobs of money on websites that had all kinds of gizmos and information but were, essentially, just brochures with a contact form. The FOMO of "AI", whatever that means to individual decisionmakers, feels similar to that time. As does the grift. Every plumbing company and real estate agency back then wanted to say their business was online. Not being online was being left behind. Now they all want to say they're AI powered. Well, business owners and managers need to sound like they know what they're talking about, and brag about whatever they think they've gotten for their spending, especially when they don't have a clue whether it pencils out or not. That's why they were happier back then with a website they could say they paid $30k for than if they'd somehow gotten it done for a tenth of that.
- wil421 15d ago
  A former professor went through startups to acquisition with 7 or so startups during this era. He said one VC kept funding them. The VC visited their new office and said this is why we love you guys everyone else we are funding drive brand new Mercedes.
  - noduerme 15d ago
    I had the displeasure of working for a new crop of the same kind of people for web 2.0. There's something amazing about people who never build anything but come into the world sure that they can tell other people how to do it, and happy to take 90% of the money for making the sale. Takes a lotta chutzpah, in the original derogatory sense. What I learned from this industry is that there are more of them in the world than us, and far more of them than there are positions for them, so theirs is a vicious and dark dog-eat-dog reality where concepts like "act as if" and "fake it till you make it" are genuine currency, as opposed to stuff like idk working hard and shipping something.
vkou 15d ago
> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? They've never been well-ran, but the laws of physics and economics put hard limits on the amount of stupid bullshit that they could produce. Now that those limits have been largely removed, an exec at the head of a company in the post-AI age is a chimp with a machinegun. Anything they ask for can and will be built.
jmyeet 15d ago
Companies under a capitalist mode of production are funddamentally incompatible with creative output because companies want a reproducible formula that they can scale. This is why we get endless sequels, annual FIFA, CoD, etc releases, adaptations of successful IP and so on. Creative output, be it music, movies, TV, games or books, doesn't scale. There is an insatiable appetite for increasing profits. Eventually that means raising prices and/or cutting costs and the most significant cost is labor. Game studios can only sruvive and keep excelling as long as they can maintain their culture and key talent and avoid getting finance people and accountants in charge. This is one reason why acquisitions usually mark the beginning of the end. We're coming up on the much-ancitipcated release of GTA6. People might say that Rockstar has thus far avoided this rot but I kinda disagree. What made GTA magic for me was the social commentary and satire. I personally thought GTA5 lost its soul. Every previous GTA game I'd replay just to have fun, even if it's to do dumb stuff like causing mass pileups and explosions on the freeway in GTA:SA. I can honestly say that I never once played GTA5 again after finishing the main story and I also almost quit before I did. I have zero interest in the online crap but it's a huge cash cow for Rockstar. So I imagine GTA6 is going to be visually stunning and I'm sure many will enjoy the new era of online gameply but I am fearful it will be even more soulless. So, back to your point, I think the real problem is that the game devs need to own the studio. That's the only sustainable model. One could even call that the workers owning the means of production.
hn_acc1 15d ago
I've worked for a few companies from 2000-2026 (2 startups, 2 medium companies), and overall, I would say they all had decent to great leadership. None of them were out to only maximize next quarter, all stressed being 100% honest with the customer, even if it meant disappointing them (i.e. we can't quite make that target, here's what we can do - this was for a consulting company), etc., and they were all trying to make the company grow AND be sustainable. One startup didn't go too far (folded after 3 years), one grew to ~20 people, lasted for maybe 20 years total, I left after 2 years during the dot com crash. Both of the medium companies are bigger now (I'm still working for one), and have generally positive outlook. I mean, you can't consistently be #1 in your industry when there are 2 companies with combined > 50 or 60% market share and roughly equal - some quarters, your competitor's 2-3 year plan will finish and deliver better for that quarter than your previous (now "old") product that is in the middle of a 2-3 plan, etc.. So they are out there, but it's RARELY in the "high profile" (FAANG/whatever) "move fast, break things" companies that you hear about a lot or that everyone wants to work for. A friend said <ride sharing company> was like Game of Thrones come to life in a corporate setting, for example. Yet, some people got rich off it, I'm sure.
lubujackson 15d ago
Companies are on purpose poorly run during the "gold rush" phase, which is where AI is right now. Everyone wants to not be left behind and velocity is placed ahead of profitability and especially ahead of quality. What happens next (eventually...) is the bubble popping, which for AI will mostly look like established companies pulling back on AI hiring and especially cutting AI SaaS solutions unless they are clearly providing value and improving the bottom line. What we think of as quality will come in the next phase, once the infrastructure woes get sorted out. Web 1.0 was pre-cloud and websites crashed all the time, no one could handle traffic spikes, etc. After a crash, stability becomes a market advantage, i.e. why Facebook won and Friendster died.

pavel_lishin 15d ago

Were they ever well run?

ChrisRR 15d ago

It's not a new phenomenon. Companies have been dying for as long as companies have existed

dfxm12 15d ago

I don't go back quite to the 90s, but this has been true across my entire experience working in a few big multinationals (including one in tech). Companies will do what Wall Street wants (Wall Street likes layoffs), and at a certain level, they don't want unemployment to get too low, lest their workers gain too much leverage.

anonreeeeplor 15d ago

[dead]

martythemaniak 15d ago

I'll give you my diagnosis, which is derived from this: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t... The thing to realize about the SV executive class is that they have constructed a closed ecosystem around them where they only talk amongst themselves and a small number of supporting actors who say what the execs need to hear. A CEO will talk to other CEOs he will not talk to his skip reports. Alternative viewpoints or dissent are not part of this social circle, and despite their 'conterarian' self-image, there's an immense amount of social pressure to conform. You can can see hints of this outside - for example this site used to see YC folks as regular commenters, but no more. Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies. These people certainly do not encounter normal people in their day-to-day lives. In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA, etc. One guy starts yapping about some snake oil, they all yap about snake oil. There no negative feedback loop there.

dalyons 15d ago
I find this a correct and astute observation, and I don’t think you’re getting enough credit for it. I started noticing this SV C level groupthink a few years ago too. It’s just so _weird_ how lockstep everyone is, it’s like there isn’t a single original thought amongst today’s leaders. Just copy, mimic, converge, repeat. Same ideas, same moves (layoffs of exactly 10-20%) same org structures (flattening!) same team structures (smaller teams with AI!) same same . It’s almost creepy, and if I was more of a conspiracy theorist it would be easy to believe in shadowy leadership cabals orchestrating everything. It didn’t used to be this way - say circa 2006-2015 you had so much more diversity in the style and ideas of leadership. Eg early Dorsey, early zuck, all these other ceos at that time trying all kinds of wild and whacky ideas of how to run their companies. I’m not sure why this convergence happened, but now everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet, it’s anti-innovation, and I hate it.
tstrimple 15d ago
And thus microservices were spread across the unsuspecting world.
mschuster91 15d ago
> In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA As for the layoffs, that one was to be expected, a correction after the insane hiring sprees during the ZIRP phase. As for MAGA... well, Trump made it clear. Either you walk the line with him, or you get screwed.
- simonuv 15d ago
  [dead]
- martythemaniak 15d ago
  Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance. You see breathless claims of AI doing all the work one year, tokenmaxxing, then less than a year later everybody says don't spend so much on AI, progress wasn't as far as we expected. You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actually jobs are gonna be ok". My point is that its hard to ignore just how in-tune and well-coordinated all these people are, and I don't think it's a coincidence. If CEOs were responding to actual political, economic and company developments, you'd see far more diversity of opinion. Some you see their companies are growing and profitable and wouldn't jump on the layoff bandwagon. Others may ask "Don't we need rule of law? What happens when the other party gets in power?" and fight the administration in courts etc.

louthy 15d ago

> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? If you mean the games industry, it was always poorly run. I worked in games in the 90s and 00s it was a cottage industry of nerds, many of whom had success with an 8bit game in the 80s (where they did everything: a one person team), to then have to run large teams of devs/artists/designers/etc without any leadership experience and more complex hardware. Happy days :D

lobf 15d ago
This is one of my favorite eras / subjects in tech history. I was just recently reading about the history of the Ultima series and you’re describing Richard Garriott. As games were pressured to be bigger and prettier and use 3D graphics, suddenly the lack of managerial experience (partly) caused the later games to spin out of control and they were forced to release a series of bad titles that brought the whole franchise down. It’s busy really interesting how fast that industry changed, and the massive scale involved compared to just 10-15 years prior, depending on where you measure from.
- ethbr1 15d ago
  > As games were pressured to be bigger and prettier and use 3D graphics, suddenly the lack of managerial experience (partly) caused the later games to spin out of control This generalizes to the industry, not just Origin. Corporate game dev uniquely seems to attract incompetent middle and upper management with extreme egos. I guess because the people who scramble to the top of the pile in an industry with an endless incoming supply of naive new workers tend to be those who spend most of their time networking and sharpening their knives.
- jijijijij 15d ago
  Have you seen Halt and Catch Fire? It's really, really good television and may be your kinda thing thematically. Excellent soundtrack too.
- louthy 15d ago
  If you find this stuff interesting, you can read about the failure of the first game I worked on here [1]. I replied in the comments [2] It says 1997, but dev started in ‘95, I joined in ‘96. I was pretty gutted at the time, I was just 21 years old and had the big dreams of working in games. It soon becomes clear that very few titles succeed. Luckily I had a few wins on the way, but the lack of professionalism really did get tiring. [1] https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainment-cancelled/ https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainme... [2] https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainment-cancelled/#comment-377406 https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainme...

altairprime 15d ago

Previously on “companies just aren’t run that well anymore”, HN considered this analysis of Boeing’s collapse following a reverse-takeover by an acquired, collapsing, competitor that ended up kicking out the quality-focused management in favor of profits: (6 years ago, 281 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971040 I assume a similar analysis exists somewhere for the big names in gaming that financial engineers have similarly destroyed other formerly-great companies; ZA/UM comes to mind as one example.

protocolture 15d ago
Todd Howard gets a lot of flak from the bethesda fanbase, but I reckon whoever replaces Todd Howard is guaranteed to be worse.
- tstrimple 15d ago
  I don't know that we want to resort to comparing which sellout is worse.
  - altairprime 15d ago
    They’re all bad bosses, Brant.
  - protocolture 15d ago
    Todd might be a sellout, but he still seems to act with a certain level of regard to the properties he helped bring up when the business was just some weird dudes. Whoever replaces him will likely be a microsoft bean counter with zero attachment.
reactordev 15d ago
Ubisoft, Bungie, id software… Blizzard
- tstrimple 15d ago

neutronicus 15d ago

I think they just want, broadly, to divest from the American tech work force, whether that's via AI or outsourcing. If "the remaining employees just collapse" it's a data point in support of the thesis that developing software in HCOL markets is unsustainable, and if they don't, margins are better! So I think decision-makers are seeing layoffs as win/win.

teamonkey 15d ago
Yes, absolutely. US games developers are paid a lot more than elsewhere. There has been a growing trend over the past couple of decades to outsource more and more game development to cheaper parts of the world, trending towards keeping only a small core team in the home country, supported by for-hire remote developers in Eastern Europe and Asia. The other big advantage to work for hire is not needing to keep a large team of specialists employed throughout development, when they may not be required for all of that time. Keeping everyone fully utilised has always been one of the big challenges for game studios. Ironically, AI may actually reduce the amount of outsourcing that a core team needs to do (though a lot of it is content and AI is still pretty bad at generating content).
- floro 15d ago
  Keeping a small core team local and outsourcing the bulk of workers, that's exactly what every company I know of seems to do these days. Not just in game development but generally. It's the biggest reason for layoffs today. It's honestly disgusting that governments don't protect their citizens from this. Companies do this because it saves them money. Tax the hell out of them for every outsourced worker and this will all go away.

cyberax 15d ago

It seems like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all switched into "extract max profit" mode. They don't care about quality or even features anymore. And it comes from the top: the CEOs are not caring anymore, so their lieutenants are not interested in doing any work either. So the companies get turned into fiefdoms without any central guiding direction.

not_the_fda 15d ago

Companies haven't been well run in decades, if ever, especially American ones. I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business. I do design services now, and have worked with dozens of companies through that, and the pattern continues. We don't have leaders, or people that can make hard decisions, or think for themselves. They all follow the same book of the day business trends. If you do think outside the box you aren't a team player and are rocking the boat.

ethbr1 15d ago
> I've worked for about a dozen companies in my 30+ year career. None have been well run, most are out of business I did tech consulting early in my career, so got to see a large number of companies as I was working for them. Some good, some bad. There were a few reliable characteristics about the good ones though: - Distilled corporate culture into learnable points, ensured everyone learned those, and then reliably used and referenced them in the context of everyday business decisions - Centralized strategy, decentralized tactics. Execs cane up with strategic targets, then implementers were free to design their own solutions to deliver those - Had an expectation of employee-initiated internal mobility (team switching) and used it as a management evaluation signal - Had a strong internal process for recognizing when they promoted / hired a bad manager (i.e. they made sure a bad manager with a good team didn't look good)
- HDThoreaun 14d ago
  Amazon?
  - ethbr1 14d ago
    I'm not sure about the last two, but Amazon nails the first two in spades. Bezos made it abundantly clear the company was about efficiency and scale... and fuck anything else (employees included).
badpun 15d ago
Most follow the herd, but there are often noticeable exceptions. See e.g. how Toyota refused to jump on the electric vehicle bandwagon and stuck to hybrid engines. Or Mazda, which didn't even do hybrid.

hluska 15d ago

In the 1990s, the adage in game development was that you knew you were a game developer when you had sat at the same desk, had seven different positions with three different companies over 30 months, brought in all your own equipment and still hadn’t gotten paid. So, the game development industry really hasn’t changed that much. But the way we talk about things certainly has changed. Generation X had a lot of bad things written about us, but we could write and we could think. We were also significantly tougher than the modern generation. Things weren’t easy and running companies had always been hard. We didn’t think in terms of ‘employees just collapse’ because we were tough enough that that would have been silly. A few may collapse and that sucked for them, but for the most part we did our shit and lived our lives. We didn’t expect lives of leisure or for companies to speak to our personal missions. We had jobs and we had lives. There were massive layoffs back in the day too. They sucked. But employees didn’t collapse, the world kept spinning and honestly, having been through those years it’s very very hard to relate to the young now. Younger generations do not have a monopoly on struggling or on shitty bosses, but you sure talk about them too much.

BiscuitBadger 15d ago

Look at Strange Scaffold for a game dev company built around being a sustainable business where there aren’t any single ambitious “Bet the business” releases.

noduerme 15d ago

I was working at a web shop in San Francisco when the Web 1.0 bubble burst. The period leading up to that was characterized by company execs buying themselves all kinds of expensive new cars and toys, and a kind of hysteria on the part of clients that their brick and mortar businesses were being left behind if they didn't spend gobs of money on websites that had all kinds of gizmos and information but were, essentially, just brochures with a contact form. The FOMO of "AI", whatever that means to individual decisionmakers, feels similar to that time. As does the grift. Every plumbing company and real estate agency back then wanted to say their business was online. Not being online was being left behind. Now they all want to say they're AI powered. Well, business owners and managers need to sound like they know what they're talking about, and brag about whatever they think they've gotten for their spending, especially when they don't have a clue whether it pencils out or not. That's why they were happier back then with a website they could say they paid $30k for than if they'd somehow gotten it done for a tenth of that.

wil421 15d ago
A former professor went through startups to acquisition with 7 or so startups during this era. He said one VC kept funding them. The VC visited their new office and said this is why we love you guys everyone else we are funding drive brand new Mercedes.
- noduerme 15d ago
  I had the displeasure of working for a new crop of the same kind of people for web 2.0. There's something amazing about people who never build anything but come into the world sure that they can tell other people how to do it, and happy to take 90% of the money for making the sale. Takes a lotta chutzpah, in the original derogatory sense. What I learned from this industry is that there are more of them in the world than us, and far more of them than there are positions for them, so theirs is a vicious and dark dog-eat-dog reality where concepts like "act as if" and "fake it till you make it" are genuine currency, as opposed to stuff like idk working hard and shipping something.

vkou 15d ago

> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? They've never been well-ran, but the laws of physics and economics put hard limits on the amount of stupid bullshit that they could produce. Now that those limits have been largely removed, an exec at the head of a company in the post-AI age is a chimp with a machinegun. Anything they ask for can and will be built.

jmyeet 15d ago

Companies under a capitalist mode of production are funddamentally incompatible with creative output because companies want a reproducible formula that they can scale. This is why we get endless sequels, annual FIFA, CoD, etc releases, adaptations of successful IP and so on. Creative output, be it music, movies, TV, games or books, doesn't scale. There is an insatiable appetite for increasing profits. Eventually that means raising prices and/or cutting costs and the most significant cost is labor. Game studios can only sruvive and keep excelling as long as they can maintain their culture and key talent and avoid getting finance people and accountants in charge. This is one reason why acquisitions usually mark the beginning of the end. We're coming up on the much-ancitipcated release of GTA6. People might say that Rockstar has thus far avoided this rot but I kinda disagree. What made GTA magic for me was the social commentary and satire. I personally thought GTA5 lost its soul. Every previous GTA game I'd replay just to have fun, even if it's to do dumb stuff like causing mass pileups and explosions on the freeway in GTA:SA. I can honestly say that I never once played GTA5 again after finishing the main story and I also almost quit before I did. I have zero interest in the online crap but it's a huge cash cow for Rockstar. So I imagine GTA6 is going to be visually stunning and I'm sure many will enjoy the new era of online gameply but I am fearful it will be even more soulless. So, back to your point, I think the real problem is that the game devs need to own the studio. That's the only sustainable model. One could even call that the workers owning the means of production.

hn_acc1 15d ago

I've worked for a few companies from 2000-2026 (2 startups, 2 medium companies), and overall, I would say they all had decent to great leadership. None of them were out to only maximize next quarter, all stressed being 100% honest with the customer, even if it meant disappointing them (i.e. we can't quite make that target, here's what we can do - this was for a consulting company), etc., and they were all trying to make the company grow AND be sustainable. One startup didn't go too far (folded after 3 years), one grew to ~20 people, lasted for maybe 20 years total, I left after 2 years during the dot com crash. Both of the medium companies are bigger now (I'm still working for one), and have generally positive outlook. I mean, you can't consistently be #1 in your industry when there are 2 companies with combined > 50 or 60% market share and roughly equal - some quarters, your competitor's 2-3 year plan will finish and deliver better for that quarter than your previous (now "old") product that is in the middle of a 2-3 plan, etc.. So they are out there, but it's RARELY in the "high profile" (FAANG/whatever) "move fast, break things" companies that you hear about a lot or that everyone wants to work for. A friend said <ride sharing company> was like Game of Thrones come to life in a corporate setting, for example. Yet, some people got rich off it, I'm sure.

lubujackson 15d ago

Companies are on purpose poorly run during the "gold rush" phase, which is where AI is right now. Everyone wants to not be left behind and velocity is placed ahead of profitability and especially ahead of quality. What happens next (eventually...) is the bubble popping, which for AI will mostly look like established companies pulling back on AI hiring and especially cutting AI SaaS solutions unless they are clearly providing value and improving the bottom line. What we think of as quality will come in the next phase, once the infrastructure woes get sorted out. Web 1.0 was pre-cloud and websites crashed all the time, no one could handle traffic spikes, etc. After a crash, stability becomes a market advantage, i.e. why Facebook won and Friendster died.