I don't think it's a lack of will. It is more an environment that is overwhelming most peoples capacity of will, as well as simply just material circumstances that make all those changes even more difficult, or impossible. Inbetween working long times, low wages, unavailability of healthy food in a lot of places, car-centred culture, you will need absolutely crazy amounts of will power.
The solutions to these problems are not individual, but systemic.
Completely agree. I think the fundamental problem, is that the public facing internet is kind of like electricity or water - it is a utility, that isn't inherently monetizeable. So the only way to make money off of it is to advertise. And then advertisement itself is a cancer upon humanity ...
When you draw the line, for both investors and owners, the unit of value is indeed dollars. The goal is to maximise the amount of money you make (subject to some constraints of course), and the use value that people derive is secondary. I think the two are even to an extend opposed in our world - you want to maximise the exchange value (i.e. the money you make) for the least amount of use value (i.e. how useful it is to the person) you can, because ultimately you do not want to permanently fulfil that persons need - you need them to come back and pay again.
Startups are constrained by the same thing, the whole "doing it to save the world" is just a bullshit story, and monetisation will always rear its ugly head eventually, or the startup will die, because what is doing is genuinely good, but cannot be monetised or ads cannot be inserted in it ...
It's interesting when you see tech people trying to reason about concepts that have been thoroughly discussed and rediscussed, without said tech people seemingly having any background in that. At least its better than MBA and business types doing it ...
I think a large organisation absolutely can be agile... but you will have to rethink what organisations are and how they work, dispense with things like orgcharts, and the way that power works and think about the underspecified parts of agile - i.e. strategy, team coordination and so on. The book Team Topologies outlines something that looks very much like it tbf...
The late David Grabber had a great book about this - Bullshit Jobs.
And when you draw the line, we do keep a lot of work and a lot of jobs around purely because if we don't a lot of people are going to have a lot of free time to ask a lot of questions about the way that the world works. And the very foundation of our system is that you have to go work, sell your labour to make someone else rich, then buy things to make someone else rich and eventually die.
The problem is that there are a loooot of ethical implication on using your own personal data in the first place, where that goes, who has access to it, how is it handled, and so on and so on. Then advertisements isn't anything but propaganda, which has its own set of implications. And then finally we have the ever present pressure to push more and more ads, thereby making the internet in general worse and worse, so the very field of ads is in itself unethical, as it is destroying the virtual environments we are building.
Also ads != recommendations. In a sense after a while these two are also at odds with each other. Cause there is again, the ever present need to sell you more stuff.
OMG, pretty much a lot of what I have personally been through. But the problem is deeper and goes beyond a company not knowing what to do with someone that does ML/Data Science ... Most of software that comes out either does not contribute to society at all or is in some form harmful to it, usually due to the need for such things to be somehow profitable. And pretty much all the senior devs I know are burned out on this in one form or another and want to quit and have a farm/bakery or whatever that actually does something
