I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
> I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.
Also don't discount the pressure exerted by employers to explicitly encourage mediocrity. So often, there's a huge amount of pressure to implement a half-working kludge and never pursue a more appropriate/complete fix. IMHO, it's all due to the focus on short-term financial results and ever present budget pressures that encourage kicking the can down the road.
If your employer is explicitly discouraging you from doing a good job, what are you supposed to do? Some people will resist, but they're definitely swimming against the current.
If we want better outcomes, employers must provide the necessary comp, benefits, and work life balance to arrive at those outcomes. Otherwise, we get slop because that's what is paid for.
So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die. Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.
Results now are way better than results later.
That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior.
> So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die.
So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?
> Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.
Maybe if you're in some startup, but that's not the usual case.
> Results now are way better than results later.
So be "very proud [for taking] home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans."?
The opposite seems far more obvious to me. Short-term results aren't going to last. Planning for the long-term - whether that's a career, family, or whatever - is critical to a fulfilling and healthy life.
> Results now are way better than results later.
I don't see why you can't have both.
There's nothing new about that. It's always been true.
Any company with more than five employees had to be run as a worker-run coop. The board and execs were elected by the workers. Companies still competed on the market.
This would solve for the problem of alienation while still having an environment of competition.
I've heard that my whole life. If that were generally true, company stocks would be going steadily downwards.
There are so many things where short-term only thinking is counter-productive. It swallows money, creates frustration and leaves an overall net-negative to society and the world.
Just one example would be city planning. Repairing a road? What else is there like fiber cables, maybe some tram tracks, and so on, long term planning would be to acquire a holistic picture and to plan one timespan where everything is done fast but with quality. It’s a few months construction, after that everything is fine for years or even a few decades to come. But what you see instead is one part of the state that manages fiber cables doing there own thing, another part that manages street quality do their own thing. So the street has a construction site for a year (for just improving one part) then a few months nothing then another year of construction again, nothing, construction and soon you have over a decade of constant on and off construction work on this one street. Something that could’ve been done in 6-12 months once and be done, if planned correctly and with long term and holistic picture in mind.
And this is just one example. The world is full of stuff like this. Short term might be a good thing for very specific types of projects, but I hard disagree that short term is overall better in any way.
In my opinion this shortterm thinking is a huge negative factor of modern societies. Because not everything is a tech startup where things change super fast.
You seem to miss that companies that think quarter to quarter behave just like this.
>So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?
You mean like the current administration that's trying to get rid of the EPA?
[1] Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric - >>44102034 - May 2025
[2] Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed - https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/boeing-corporate-... - April 9th, 2024
[3] HN Search: Boeing - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I agree that I think this is a big chunk of it. There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is. Doing good work is only rewarded with more work without the extra pay or benefits.
A ton of large employers have removed any and all incentive to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.
i think a prerequisite for being proud of your work is that you have enough autonomy so that the final product is truly the result of your decisions and mastery.
Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the company makes record profits. And the CEO may do a town hall claiming how great business is and then lay off people two weeks later. Or DOGE. In theory this is a good idea but instead of improving processes so government workers can do a good job they just laid off people and let the people who are left deal with the mess.
No wonder people become cynical.
Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.
It's not about prioritizing short term results.
> You seem to miss that companies that think quarter to quarter behave just like this.
Did I miss that, or was I commenting on that exact thing?
>> So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?
> You mean like the current administration that's trying to get rid of the EPA?
What's your point with that political derail? It's honestly baffling.
Loyalty actually gets punished. The only way to get a decent raise is to change companies. Your car insurance will keep going up until you change companies. With cable the best deals are available only for new customers and existing customers see their cost go up.
It seems companies hate their employees and customers
Because that's now employees behave, now employers won't offer anything else - but without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change.
I think strong unions are the only way forward
> Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE.
The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that.
It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fat and happy for a season, then you and your family will certainly starve to death next year. You'd most likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term decision.
> Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.
And how often are the "life cycles" really just the accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with the company?
You can kludge and kludge and kludge, but eventually that makes the app unmaintainable. Then you're in "total rewrite" or go under territory.
I'm kind of tired of being an economic powerhouse where most people live in misery.
I don’t think this is much different now than in the past, arguably less so. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
But given the high levels of dysfunction/conflict that led to the breakup of the country, I doubt they'd meet whatever bar you set for "economic powerhouse".
Do you prefer living in a mud hut to a house with air conditioning, central heat, hot and cold running water, electric lighting and flush toilets? All courtesy of economic powerhouses.
Maybe you'd prefer spending your free time spinning thread with your spinning wheel, making cloth, and sewing all your clothes? (The first industrial target was textiles.)
Doesn't sound like Yugoslavia had a successful model.
No company goes up forever. They all eventually strangle themselves with bureaucratic inefficiency.
There used to be an intrinsic motivator of "well, my kids are going to suffer if I don't push for long-term relationships", but now we aren't having kids, so that carrot doesn't work, and that attitude is bubbling up into the corporate world.
We have relationships with other individuals, but we also have relationships with groups as a whole. And the way we tend to those relationships depends on how we believe the other party tends to us.
If you have a relationship with someone who treats you with trust, kindness, conscientiousness, and care, you will naturally reciprocate and feel good about doing so. But if the partner is thoughtless, callous, or cruel, only a fool would put effort into that relationship.
So it is with our relationships with all of the various organizations that make up society. If the company I work for is giving me the fewest possible benefits and is happy to fire me if they get the chance, why should I do anything but the bare minimum? If my government is being used as a tool for enrichment by cronies and oligarchs, why shouldn't I do everything I can to skirt paying taxes? If the giant store chain I buy my groceries from keeps jacking up prices and shrinkflating products, why shouldn't I slip a few extra apples in the bag without paying?
In my lived experience, unions permanently cement the anti-employer (and often anti-customer) attitude present in some employees. Once in place, they don't produce a massive change of heart where employees are willing to rise above and beyond the exact terms of their collective bargaining agreements, but instead result in a rejection of the traditional work ethic and the embrace of minimal output and often malicious compliance across the board.
It's one reason many of us have had such bad experience working with unions in the past. The customer suffers along with the employer, and worse the customer often pays a higher price for this privilege.
So they should act to strangle themselves faster? It feels like your reasoning is equivalent to, "Eventually you'll die, so there's no point taking care of your health. Go save money by avoiding the doctor, take up smoking, and eat junk food all the time."
Boeing was forced by courts bolster safety, compliance, and quality programs as well as admitting to conspiracy to thwart FAA oversight. I don’t know about you, but my experience is that when companies undermine those types of oversight, it’s almost always due to schedule and price pressure (ie short term results). (Not to mention, the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer).
The supermassive corporate structures that have accreted together in the modern world are beyond the scale of imagining. We are familiar with a vastly smaller % of the org chart, as the size of that chart balloons.
I tend to think there used to be a connection within and across the corporate entity, more shared purposes, shared cause/alignment, and perhaps sometimes at successful places ability for the good ideas to rise. Large companies sometimes love to preach "intrapreneurial" spirit, encourage the individual will & ownership, all while refusing to acknowledge the constraints & impositions of corporate hierarchy, the lack of freedom, that the large organizational structure imposes.
I think there's a real muting of the human will at most large companies, and that caring and trying is only permitted in very narrow scopes. That only some folks are able to maintain will and drive, while fitting themselves into the particular shapes demanded by the org chart around them. At the smaller scale we are not individually abutted by so many others to whom a concern may be charged.
(The impacts of what behaviors we see around us are also bounded by these forces, dimish our spirit collectively too. We grow up & adult in a world where everyone is buried deep in an org chart.)
I suspect this is true to a certain extent, but IMO this narrative has been exaggerated to the point where it is completely useless. If Boeing execs were only focused on "short term profits," how did commercial aviation deaths decrease despite there being significantly more flights?
https://www.statista.com/chart/4854/commercial-aviation-deat...
Boeing 737 Max: The troubled history of fatal crashes and 346 deaths in 7 years - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/busi... - July 8th, 2024
As Boeing looks to buy a key 737 supplier [Spirit AeroSystems], a whistleblower says the problems run deep - https://www.npr.org/2024/06/16/nx-s1-4998520/boeing-737-spir... - June 16th, 2024
Boeing’s Decline Traced to Decades of Catering to Shareholders Above All Others - https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/quick-take/boeings-decline-traced-... - April 8th, 2024
Boeing’s long fall, and how it might recover - https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein... - April 7th, 2024
> the whole impetus for MCAS was to rush the design to market so they wouldn’t lose out on AA as a customer
The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like the previous 737 model to reduce the expense of retraining the pilots.
In general, flying is safer when pilots do not need to "code switch" when switching airplane models. Many crashes result from a pilot reflexively doing the right thing for the previous airplane they flew, rather than the one they are flying at the moment.
I.e. they've been reinventing the business. They were probably burned to the ground in WW2 and had to rebuild the business from scratch.
We probably agree that the stock will eventually reflect value. I think we’d quibble about how long that takes. As the saying goes, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. In other words, don’t bet on the market always reflecting reality.
I’m not sure what you intend to convey with this statement. If price reflects reality, the current price should reflect the current reality, no? Whether the White Sox were the best team 100 years ago has little bearing on my prediction about their chances this year. I fail to see how Boeing’s prior culture prevents them from succumbing to short term incentives. I know your point is the downfall is a bureaucratic one, but the evidence does not point to that (they actually cut corners on bureaucratic requirements).
>The impetus for MCAS was to make the MAX behave like the previous 737 model to reduce the expense of retraining the pilots.
Go deeper. Why was this considered necessary?
(Hint: it’s because they wanted to rush the design to market with a less expensive (and lower quality) product. Ie cost and schedule pressure. You stopped at the proximate cause.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Feder...
High unemployment, billions in US foreign aid, etc.
I'm not sure we're reading the same article then.
Here's some archive footage from 60's Yugoslavia for your reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXr5aKZ8mps
Sure doesn't look like people living in squalor in their mud huts.
But why?
Seems self evident that increasing pace of change of society tilts the rational strategy towards short-term over long-term gain.
Do people disagree that the pace of change is increasing? Do people disagree that short termism is rationally appropriate in a highly changeable situation? Long term planning requires a stable backdrop. I agree with you.
The value of a stock is all pure speculation about how much you can sell it for later.
https://news.mit.edu/2024/study-flying-keeps-getting-safer-0...
In retrospect, it was exactly as unlikely as Madoff's numbers.
They do! Imagine the profits if they could keep making the same money without the customers or employees! Those pesky humans really get in the way of maximizing the profit
In a way it is, its logically a machine that makes money. The actual business doesn't matter if it's making money.
It's a long form rug pull, where you make money until the company no longer can and you hope you're not holding the bag.
When a group of people get together to do something, the most visible effect will be that of GCD(each person's motivations).
If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest, everything else, while it may exist, contributes with an arbitrarily smaller intensity.
In my mind, there are various links from this to the financialization-led practice of securitizing and "cutting up" everything into an "optimal" number of pieces, without stopping to think if the objective function truly captures the desired end result. However, these links are not clear enough yet for me to expand further on.
It should be clear that is not what I meant. This reinforces my view that popular criticism towards Boeing is unhelpful and ironically is relevant to the posted essay. People care more about gotchas more than deep discussion.
If the 737 Max incidents were due to negligence on Boeing's part, the many of the incidents in the 70s were also due to negligence. You can't have it both ways.
Microsoft, for instance... or in more modern times, Tesla.
I wouldn't put Boeing into that category, though -- it took more than just a lack of good competition to accomplish what they did, back in the day.
Your point more generally, that squeaky wheels get the grease, does seem to be typical.
(GE also took substantial time to fall apart, but with no deaths to my knowledge)
You seem to think the assumption "all companies die" means you can simplify away their journey, but it matters if they get there faster or slower (at least to society, if not the decision-makers to maximize their personal profit while hoping to not being the ones left holding the bag).
I think most people want to have security and some predictability for their lives. One way to achieve this is by having money but there are other ways too. Reducing humans to purely economical beings who always want to maximize profit is a gross simplification that appeals to economists and bankers but it doesn’t reflect reality.
Surely, there is some amount of income that a business’s owner is allowed to pocket without bad intentions, which may or may not come at the cost of long term investments. Especially in stable/declining businesses.
(1) consider how many stocks are delisted and/or go out of business. We might be thinking with survivorship bias. A cook google gave this headline "America has lost 43% of listed companies since 1996" (though, more research would be needed to really be sure that's accurate and to determine any more nuances that might be important).
(2) If there are an ever-present amount of short term rewards/results, then we would get growth. A series of short term growth would be hard to distinguish from long term growth.
(3) Long term and short term growth can be mixed, and the strategy does not have to be static. A company could hop back and forth between them. This point contradicts the premise a bit, at the same time we can't discount long term from the noise that we see (it could be signal).
(4) Stock price is not necessarily always tied to financial results. It's supposed to be the sum of all future revenue divided by the number of shares (or something like that), thus, stock price is in part also the expectation of revenue and not actual revenue. Tesla is a notable example, the price of their stock is still very high, with anticipation of amazing revenue gains, but recently their revenue has not been growing by a ton.
This. What's the point of being an economic powerhouse when most people end up living poor quality lives?
Some fight it off longer than others.
People live in unimaginable luxury compared with what people had in Yugoslavia.
I didn't. Please read the multiple qualifiers I added to that phrase.
>> If you collect enough people, with sufficient heterogeneity, you will find that the GCD is always financial self-interest.
What that means is that if you scale groups of people too much, the only common interest you'll find among _all_ of them will be financial self interest. Hence GCD - "greatest common divisor". Of course people do things without monetary incentives. But these interests don't overlap within a sufficiently large and diverse group of people, as much as financial self-interest does.
That exactly what will happen. In the best case, if you lacky enough, you will be live in a mud hut. The rest will envy those who can afford to live in a mud hut.
Workers can start running companies at any time, no one restricts them from running their companies. The only reason they don't do this is that this will be worse for workers.
So you are being hypocritical. You don't want workers to run companies (they can do that now), you want workers to have no alternative.
Usually the sign of the fairest and most humane systems of government and economy is when people get shot in the back by border guards if they try to escape.
In practice, financial results are driven by transactions, and so any mediocrity that doesn’t lead to the customer going elsewhere isn’t going to show up in the financial results. You need an actual competitor to risk losing money to sucking. But I’ll note that in cases where there is an actual competitor to sclerotic old industries, one that actually does care, the investors in the competitor tend to become fabulously wealthy and the investors in the old industry go broke.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskra_Delta
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iskradata_1680
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ei_Ni%C5%A1
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorenje_Dialog
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_systems_from_...
This is absolutely not true. In absolute numbers, the cost of starting a business is quite low, and workers have a lot of money, much more than their employers. And if workers collectively stop spending their salaries on unnecessary things, and instead organize a fund - on average, in 2 years they will have enough money to buy out the entire company they work for, or organize a comparable one.
There are no problems with capitalism, capitalism just allows you not to do all of this, not to suffer 2 years of poverty for the sake of living in a mud hut (if you're lucky enough).
A lot of these people were once starry-eyed highschoolers and college students who got burned too many times. They put in the time, the effort, the blood, sweat and tears, and what did they get? No thank you, just more work. Eventually they can't live up to the standard they themselves set, and they're let go. Meanwhile, bozos show up late and half-ass everything and then that becomes their expectation.
Nobody wants to be Atlas.
PS. You're arguing with people who lived there. How can you be so certain you know better than those of us who saw it first hand? And I'm in no way saying it was a perfect system, btw.
Look at Tesla. They're doing extremely poorly right now and have been for about a year, and if you look at their stock price you wouldn't think that. They're valued more than, like, every other auto manufacturer combined. Looking at that you'd expect them to hold 50% of the market in all markets they're in. But they don't get anywhere close to that.
The stock market is just gambling. You can't see the other person's hand.
What made 99% of things run in the 20th century. Things like plants, foundries and what have you.
> It's not about prioritizing short term results.
Why did they need to grow in the first place though? If a company is already profitable, and growing will end up making them less functional and eventually erode profits, that sounds like it's due to prioritizing short-term results over long-term stable profits.
They don’t necessarily have to be classified as the same contributing factors. The de Haviland Comet may have failed due to our lack of understanding of metal fatigue with a pressurized cabin. That was engineering ignorance. If a manufacturer did the same today, it’s negligence because those are known engineering principles.
Boeing was knowingly not following their own procedures for safety critical design. They also admitted to conspiracy to circumvent FAA oversight. Which of the above categories would you put those in?
I do think technical debt is a real problem, but to play devils advocate, the “life-cycle” is often a pivot from “innovation” to “maintenance”. Companies rightly begin to focus on the aspects of business that make them money and will often cannibalize R&D to focus on high-margin areas. That’s why “mature” companies often focus on innovation via acquisition.
There's at least a clear relationship if the dividend is reinvested.
If the dividend is spent, though, eg by someone in retirement, then they're different. Under buybacks, the retiree would have to sell some shares to get cash, and would eventually run out. Under dividends, the retiree would be able to continuously pocket money.
And no, you didn’t have to live in a mud hut for it. In fact, it was more affordable for the regular worker to build a house than it is now. Those houses were/are comparable to what you see in Germany today. Go check out the real estate market in Slovenia if you don’t believe me, look for houses built 1950-1990.
I honestly don't think this is true. Finances are a tool to get security and comfort in our society but it's still just a tool to achieve the real goal. I bet if we had viable UBI that gives people their basic needs, most people wouldn't worry about finances.
Part of that is probably embedded in the environment. The market favors risk-taking. Everyone is dipping into their seed corn, hoping they can use the extra energy they have now to secure some new corn and cover for the surplus. Sometimes they can't, and they starve. More importantly though, anyone who didn't dip into their seed corn is no longer there - risking a bit gives you a competitive advantage over those who risk less.
This dynamics plays at multiple levels in large companies, and arguably is deeply embedded in the overall business culture.
It's not totally irrational either - "eating your seed corn" sounds stupid in isolation, but the calculus changes when every village around you is at war with you and everyone else, all while the whole region gets hammered by natural disasters. Saving the seed corn to survive the next year may end up killing you next week.
We have CEOs and prominent figureheads making openly hostile statements about replacing their software workforce with LLMs, and coming out with bold proclamations about whatever models are going to be better than whatever title of developer in $TIME.
How there can be any loyalty or long-term thinking from employees at all in such circumstances is beyond me.
I can't even think of an analogous scenario at any time in my life. Open worker hostility.
You should change your name to Walter Dim.
I don't think you're wrong that hard work is also no longer rewarded the way it used to be, but I think there are a lot more factors in play here.
Hard work is also a bit of a commons problem. If you're the only hard worker in a group, it's easy to be taken advantage of. If everyone's a hard worker, they probably all understand the value of hard work, and are more likely to reward it accordingly.
I think another social issue affecting this is people's measure of what makes hard work "hard". Social media shows is a parade of very talented people doing impressive things, while rarely giving us insight into the amount of effort that goes into those accomplishments. To anyone who hasn't put in the level of effort required to be "really good" at something, it's very easy to underestimate how much effort is truly involved. And when someone consistently underestimates how much effort is involved in doing "hard" things, they'll also consistently overestimate the amount of effort they're putting in relative to the results they're achieving. This will lead them to believe they're doing "hard work", when in reality their level of effort is closer to "mediocre".
Therefore, the greatest common denominator for an arbitrarily large and heterogenous group of employees at the company is the paycheck.
This isn't really disputable. Your argument doesn't really counter this fact, either. Sure, UBI might remove that common need that nearly every employee has, which could change the calculus entirely... But we don't have UBI, and the GP wasn't making an argument about some hypothetical world, they were making a point about the one we actually live in.
That's what they say, but I don't think it's true (at the high end, at least). For instance: if Boeing dies, the market will not replace it. It'll be an Airbus monopoly for large jets, and maybe the the communists will eventually build a competitor (Comac). IIRC, it's too expesnive for Embraer to make the jump into that market.
Those all come from economic powerhouses.
The steps from mud huts to modern buildings came from economic powerhouses.
Last 5 years? 10 years? Longer?
I skipped all the hard parts, like designing the chips and building a chip fab plant.
Building a computer from parts out of a catalog is commonplace.
You're using the past tense. Is that intended?
I couldn't find any statistics of Americans leaving for Yugoslavia.
People who’ve succeeded in tricking you… likely will do so again in the future.
And maybe with even less scruples.
I think a lot of people in tech are realizing how helpful unions could be right now.
Sure, but let's be clear, we shouldn't be taking any lessons from the Trump regime on how to live in virtually any aspect in one's life. If anything they're a shining example of everything not to do.
Karl Popper, himself an Austrian that saw the rise of the Nazis and had to live in exile as a result famously formulated it as the paradox of tolerance.
if the stock goes up 10%, sell 10%. The value you hold is the same.
I feel that doing my job well just leads to more externalities, more twigs on the fire that consumes the earth.
Nobody would've thought the rise of MAGA in the US was gonna be feasible two decades ago.
Maintaining ideological blinders for what is feasible is how entrenched interests prevent systemic change.
When I switch from development to running IT, I sat with people to understand how the company worked. Everyone I sat with was terrified I was going to automate away their jobs.
Eloquently put. This is what drives me nuts about Brian Chesky. He wants employees to take ownership - but doesn't give them any ownership.
If I worked for BNB and was aggressively pursuing a new idea, I could still be laid off any second because of his ego. That isn't ownership.
I doubt you work 20+ hours a day. You probably realize there are diminishing or outright negative returns on quality of life for trying to maximize productive output. I would say we should apply the same logic to the economy as a whole; focus production on the things that actually improve society instead of operating on the assumption that “more production is always better.”
A lot of companies, including mine, played this game for a long time. They were forever going on about how we're all a big family, and we all have to watch out for one another, and how's your mental health today? Do you need a hug? Here, have some free burritos.
Then COVID hit, and all that ended. They fired half of the staff in 10 hours, and since then have showed their real faces, because it's too soon for them to go back the other way. Everyone will know it's just a show.
Don't be ridiculous. They got a pizza party and $20 gift card to a mall store.
There is a top down culture of not embracing mediocrity that genuinely makes me thrive at work. My current company has a good work life balance and if I make a point that some part of the system needs improvement, my voice actually gets heard. Only place I've seen where sprint retros actually made impact. Most of my friends have no work life balance and also don't have a voice when they see half-assed work.
The numbers showcase the effect of this as well. The startup has thrived even when VC's have tightened their purses.
And the "solution" to any level of this kind of criticism is really easy: do less, eventually do nothing at all anymore. But, in truth, that's even more destructive, in fact that that's happening is what this whole thread is about.
We need a balance. There needs to be some tolerance for risk, certainly at companies like Boeing.
But all of them do it. Facebook/Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Apple. Even the non-FANG fangs like Tesla, Twitter, ... and all have stories about faking it. Most are advertising and that's easy to fake on both sides (buy your own adertising, and of course fake engagement), Amazon has zero profit so they proudly declare they're faking it for the government (but, of course, they're not cheating you), Netflix has steadily rising subscriber numbers where everyone else has failed, even Apple's growth has switched to subscriber growth, the part of their business that would be the easiest to fake.
In fact this is quite common in the whole S&P 500, including outside of the US, with numbers not quite as dramatic as the FANGs, but still going up.