Facebook was once legitimately appealing to users! That's the only way to kick off the enshittification cycle. Meta didn't even try to pull that off a second time. Whatever Threads was marketed as, it's clear that its conceptual model is "more features for Instagram users."
Capturing a new generation of users you can lock in and exploit is hard work and risky. Better to just push Threads on every Instagram user and then say "look how many millions we have on our platform, Bluesky who?" to investors and execs. No value was created but that was never the point.
This kind of dovetails into another thread: shipping features that show up on dashboards is the surest path to looking good internally, and the bigger a company becomes, the more that becomes the overriding concern of everyone working there.
@iris-meredith.bsky.social talks more about project management as a control tool here, and how the logic of Scrum migrated into politics alongside the tech bro takeover.
I honestly don’t think the methodology really matters. I don’t especially like daily stand ups but they can be useful in teams that don’t communicate enough. And the end of a sprint should never be considered a deadline. The point is to get a handle on how long things take to help plan.
In my experience a two week release cycle seems about as good as you can get unless you have the scale to be doing AB testing and continuous delivery. Any longer and you get people trying to push stuff in half baked because they don’t want to wait another 3 or 4 weeks to see it deployed.
They don’t even have to show up on dashboards necessarily. I was exhorted by a manager to come up with a “shiny thing” in 2009, and I’m a back end developer.
I am screaming internally
These are excellent points. Most organizations are not set up to think about their products in terms of the value they deliver, only in terms of being the receptacle of more work.
It was eye-opening like 10 years ago when I realized that in Big Tech you get promo for *convincing* people that you did something, not that you actually did something. Folks good at the promo game are almost always "ship it, move to a new team, and let someone else figure out why it's garbage."