It’s utterly bizarre. The customers lose out by receiving an inferior product at the same cost. The workers lose out by having their employment terminated. And even the company loses out by having its reputation squandered. The only people who gain are the executives and the ownership.
This is absolutely by design. The corporate raider playbook is well-read. See: Sears, Fluke, DeWalt, Boeing, HP, Intel, Anker, any company purchased by Vista (RIP Smartsheet, we barely knew ye), and so on. Find a brand with an excellent reputation, gut it, strip mine that goodwill, abandon the husk on a golden parachute, and make sure to not be the one holding the bag.
They were acquired by Opta Group in 2023. Since then, the quality has declined while prices increased. And around the time of their acquisition, they started doing some shady stuff when claiming USB-IF compliance. The cables were blatantly not USB-IF compliant.
Another example: I personally love my Anker GaN Prime power bricks and 737. Unfortunately, among my friends and peers, I am the exception. The Prime chargers are known for incorrectly reading cable eMarkers and then failing to deliver the correct power. This has so far been an issue for me twice, but was able to be worked around.
On a more generic scale (whatever that means), we went from coding serious stuff in Ada with contracts and designs and architectures, to throwing everything in the trash while forgetting any kind of pride and responsibility in less than 50 years. AI is the next step in that global engineering enshittification (I hate that word but it’s appropriate).
Whether AI has a future or not, no one can deny that SWE is an absolute mess of shitty practices. If AI stays as it is, we’re going down with it.
It’s utterly bizarre. The customers lose out by receiving an inferior product at the same cost. The workers lose out by having their employment terminated. And even the company loses out by having its reputation squandered. The only people who gain are the executives and the ownership.
This is absolutely by design. The corporate raider playbook is well-read. See: Sears, Fluke, DeWalt, Boeing, HP, Intel, Anker, any company purchased by Vista (RIP Smartsheet, we barely knew ye), and so on. Find a brand with an excellent reputation, gut it, strip mine that goodwill, abandon the husk on a golden parachute, and make sure to not be the one holding the bag.
What happened to ankor?
They were acquired by Opta Group in 2023. Since then, the quality has declined while prices increased. And around the time of their acquisition, they started doing some shady stuff when claiming USB-IF compliance. The cables were blatantly not USB-IF compliant.
Another example: I personally love my Anker GaN Prime power bricks and 737. Unfortunately, among my friends and peers, I am the exception. The Prime chargers are known for incorrectly reading cable eMarkers and then failing to deliver the correct power. This has so far been an issue for me twice, but was able to be worked around.
On a more generic scale (whatever that means), we went from coding serious stuff in Ada with contracts and designs and architectures, to throwing everything in the trash while forgetting any kind of pride and responsibility in less than 50 years. AI is the next step in that global engineering enshittification (I hate that word but it’s appropriate).
Whether AI has a future or not, no one can deny that SWE is an absolute mess of shitty practices. If AI stays as it is, we’re going down with it.