HACKER Q&A
📣 PaulHoule

Are other people seeing a spike in IT problems with businesses?


In the last month it seems like I've experienced a surge in businesses having IT screwups. For instance my wife paid my homeowner's insurance bill but they referred my bill to a lawyer for collections and canceled my policy. (To her credit when my agent was notified she got my policy reinstated) Now I have a UPS package that seems to have been stuck in Montana for a week but what I am seeing on the tracker doesn't make complete sense.

Have I just had bad luck or are other people seeing this? Can we blame vibe coding? Are we living in Gas Town now?

  👤 Imustaskforhelp Accepted Answer ✓
I think this makes up for an interesting question.

my interpretation is similar to mitchell's that there are influential people within tech (jobs,influencers and just about anything) who are genuinely and utterly convinced with AI psychosis.

If you create a non-deterministic tech that is so powerful to psychosis people (who well should know better) then, it creates for problems down the line and you are just a side-effect of that. Especially, lately it seems that most AI is directed towards investors and not consumers (There is HN post trending about it essentially)

So well, you are just side-product of a larger psychosis. I believe that the tech is cool and it has genuine use-cases and many things but there has to be nuanced opinions about it but we as humans are similar to computers in this one thing that we want either 1 and 0 and can't capture this particular nuance perhaps.

👤 toomuchtodo
If you push systems to failure by squeezing workers, continually rolling layoffs, and disregarding quality (because consumers are sticky and will put up with a lot, especially if there are no other options), systems eventually fail. Money is expensive now [1], labor supply will decline into the future [2], its a fight for profits and growth versus labor in an unfavorable macro. "Productivity."

(also seeing similar failures, both as a consumer and inside clients pushing their organizations as systems to failure, "how few people or inexpensive talent can we operate this business with?")

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680794 (citations)