"Doc Burford contends that the true danger facing teams today isn’t competition, disruption, or lack of capital—it’s leadership devoid of expertise, decision-making dominated by superficial metrics, and a culture that values appearances more than actual value creation. Sustainable success comes from building things people want, not engineering facades to appease investors or the market. Relying solely on executive titles or data without understanding the craft or customer rapidly leads to collapse."
Have to agree and think this encapsulates alot of what we have been living through in the US over last few decades.
The Bungie grenade example was funny because I've seen this exact same ignorant data fuckery. Blizzard does this with World of Warcraft now because they're tuning talents that classes have based on how much they're used, which ignores how often people just copy builds and how some abilities are just inherently fun (as the grenades apparently were). The net result is they just keep nerfing anything people like.
When he was talking about Valve and Steam and EA and sports exclusivity, he may as well have just said "enclosures" (in the capitalist) sense because that's exactly what he means.
Every modern corporation is just looking for a formula that they can repeat ad nauseum. He talks about this with media properties and the Marvel and Star Wars slop (my word, not his) that we get as a result. This is fundamentally incompatible with creative projects, be it movies or games.
One of the most destructive ideas to come out of the 20th century is this idea that a good business leader can manage anything. So we get a lot of "leaders" who end up running things they know nothing about and in large companies, "leaders" get shuffled around every 6-12 months on purpose, to avoid them ever failing because they're never anywhere long enough to see the consequences of their actions.
You see that with the VP shuffle at any large tech company.
I also appreciate that he was anti-NFTs as I was for the exact same reasons: it doesn't actually solve any problems or give consumers anything they actually want.
But indeed I feel like at some level there's been a pendulum swing from, let's say "stories" to "data" - indeed he touches on sabermetrics/McNamara. I like how he torches this: data is important but it's not enough (the map is not the territory) -- I started wondering about this a lot for example with Windows. "Oh, we removed this feature because telemetry showed it wasn't used." Well, why? Because it wasn't useful? Because it wasn't discoverable? Because it wasn't intuitive?
And that assumes the numbers are even any good: I remember from one of Sinofsky's Windows engineering blog posts, in which he talked about some feature and the percent of sessions in which it was used. And I thought, well, hold up. I hibernate and rarely restart, whereas many less sophisticated users shut down their computer entirely. So does that mean they effectively are counting those non-power users a lot more than me because they have more sessions?
And then there are other second order effects. If you lose your power users, do they then stop recommending your product, and what then? I see your net promoter score and raise you Goodhart's law (once a measure becomes a target it ceases to become a useful measure)
https://docseuss.medium.com/the-biggest-threat-facing-your-t...