It feels like every few months there’s a new tech “revolution” being hyped up as the future. Besides AI, what’s the most overhyped trend in tech right now? For me, it’s the constant buzz around the metaverse.

  • audaxdreik@pawb.social
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    2 months ago

    1000% this. Without giving away too much information, I work(ed) for a cloud provider (not one of the big ones, there are a surprising number of smaller ones in the field you’ve probably never heard of before). I quit this week to take a position in local government with some quaint, on-prem setup.

    1. We were always understaffed for what we promised. Two guys per shift and if one of us took vacation; oops, lol. No extra coverage, just deal.
    2. Everyone was super smart but we didn’t have time to work the tickets. Between crashes, outages, maintenance, and horrendous tickets that took way too much work to dig into, there was just never enough time. If you had a serious problem that took lengthy troubleshooting, good luck!
    3. We over-promised on support we could provide, often taking tickets that were outside of infrastructure scope (guest OS shit, you broke your own server, what do you want me to do about it?) and working them anyway to please the customer or forwarding them directly to one of our vendors and chaining their support until they caught wise and often pushed back.
    4. AI is going to ruin Support. To be clear, there will always be support and escalation engineers who have to work real problems outside the scope of AI. However without naming names, there’s a big push (it’ll be everyone before too long, mark it) for FREE tier support to only chat with AI bots. If you need to talk to a real human being, you gotta start dishing out that enterprise cash.

    Mix all that together and then put the remaining pressure on the human aspect still holding things up and there’s a collapse coming. Once businesses get so big they’re no longer “obligated” to provide support, they’ll start charging you for it. This has always been a thing of course, anyone who’s worked enterprise agreements knows that. But in classic corpo values, they’re closing the gap. Pay more for support, get less in return. They’ll keep turning that dial until something breaks catastrophically, that’s capitalism baby.

    • InvertedParallax@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      Basically you save money on tech/support because of scale.

      So you triple and quadruple your sales and marketing spend to get more business.

      In the end it just doesn’t work, except the smaller guys and a lot of them are just hanging on as the stacks get more complicated.

      Aws and gcloud are thickening the stack and driving everyone else out of business.

    • Tja@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      And that’s why you go with the big guys (and pay a premium for it).

      I work for a SaaS company that offers a cloud version as well as a software license. We only support the big 3 because everyone else is just keeping their systems up with chewing gum and duct tape, and it’s infuriatingly inconsistent. No way of offering a reasonable SLA or for our support guys to dig into an infra problem. And this includes relatively big players like Ali, Tencent, Yandex, DO or OVH.

      In the end, 95% of customers pay less if they choose the cloud version, only if you have 24/7 steady load (and a high one) will it be cheaper to pay for infra, SREs, licenses and support.