Where's Your Ed At

Software engineer and IT consultancy director Nik Suresh argues that most enterprise software purchases are distractions from deeper organizational problems. He describes widespread incompetence in corporate software teams, where engineers can deliver nothing of value for years while being paid six-figure salaries. Through personal anecdotes, he illustrates how teams burn hundreds of thousands on tools like Snowflake due to basic configuration errors, and how simple projects take years to complete. The real crisis isn't solved by buying more SaaS products, but requires understanding the fundamental dysfunction in how most companies approach software development and management.

The Remarkable Incompetence At The Heart Of Tech

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# I. The Industry is Sick in a Way That Can’t Be Solved by SaaS Spend

In the last few projects - and I kid you not - my biggest successes were removing code, cutting off unnecessary SaaS that could be replaced with code written in few days (most companies use like one or two basic features) and optimizing AWS to lower the costs, where by “optimizing” I mean removing stuff that someone has been using - idk - because of laziness (if not incompetence). I just realized that “my brand” in most recent projects I was working with was not exactly producing (building) “value” but making savings many times greater than my salary by noticing unnecessary expenses on shit that was at best overkill and at worst completely unnecessary.
The worst part is that the people that are the hardest to convince that sometimes they don’t need a toy at the scale they have are experienced architects who are often so proud about their picture made in <a href="http://draw.io" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">draw.io</a> that they don’t want to hear that this picture is just stupid.
Saved dozens of thousands of USD a month and those systems work flawlessly for toward now.

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I know small squads of data scientists with salaries totaling millions that haven’t deployed working models for twice that long.
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If you think that’s crazy, you should look at modern scientific research.
What the author says is absolutely true, but the thing is, we — the software engineers — don’t want this to be known. It’s like revealing the secret of a magic trick. And we are magicians that transform no work to millions of dollars.
And that is the greatest trick of all.