I agree with your sentiment, but not with the conclusion.
Sure, technical decisions ultimately depend on a cost-benefit analysis, but the companies who follow this mentality will cut corners at every opportunity, build poor quality products, and defraud their customers. The unfortunate reality is that in the startup culture "move fast and break things" is the accepted motto. Companies can be quickly started on empty promises to attract investors, they can coast for months or years on hype and broken products, and when the company fails, they can rebrand or pivot, and do it all over again.
So making uninformed bets can still be profitable. This law of averages you mention just doesn't matter. There will always be those looking to turn a quick buck, and those who are in it for the long haul, and actually care about their product and customers. LLMs are more appealing to the former group. It's up to each software developer to choose the companies they wish to support and be associated with.
Tech and product are just small components in what makes the business profitable. And often not as central as we in our industry might _like_ to believe. From my perspective, building software is the easy, the fun part. Many bets made have nothing to do with the software.
And yes, there is enshittification, there is immoral actors. The market doesn't solve these problems, if anything, it causes them.
What can solve them? I have only two ideas:
1. Regulation. To a large degree this stops some of the worst behaviour of companies, but the reality in most countries I can think of is that it's too slow, and too corrupt (not necessarily by accepting bribes, also by wanting to be "an AI hub" or stuff like that) to be truly effective.
2. Professional ethics. This appears to work reasonably well in medicine and some other fields, but I have little hope our field is going to make strides here any time soon. People who have professional ethics either learn to turn it off selectively, or burn out. If you're a shady company, as long as you have money, you will find competent developers. If you're not a shady company, you're playing with a handicap.
It's not all so black and white for sure, so I agree with you that there's _some_ power in choosing who to work for. They'll always find talent if they pay enough, but no need to make it all too easy for them.
To play devils advocate for a second, the law of averages states nobody should ever found a startup. Or any business for that matter.
It’s rare that startups gain traction because they have the highest quality product and not because they have the best ability to package, position, and market it while scaling all other things needed to mane a company.
They might get acqui-hired for that reason, but rarely do they stand the test of time. And when they do, it almost always because founders stepped aside and let suits run all or most of the show.
Sure, technical decisions ultimately depend on a cost-benefit analysis, but the companies who follow this mentality will cut corners at every opportunity, build poor quality products, and defraud their customers. The unfortunate reality is that in the startup culture "move fast and break things" is the accepted motto. Companies can be quickly started on empty promises to attract investors, they can coast for months or years on hype and broken products, and when the company fails, they can rebrand or pivot, and do it all over again.
So making uninformed bets can still be profitable. This law of averages you mention just doesn't matter. There will always be those looking to turn a quick buck, and those who are in it for the long haul, and actually care about their product and customers. LLMs are more appealing to the former group. It's up to each software developer to choose the companies they wish to support and be associated with.