When can we just profit and chill?

$34.6 billion times four divided by 221,000 is a lot of money, the rise of the ChadGPT, and more links to make you's thinks.

Real quick: I’m giving a talk tomorrow on how to run a developer platform group in large organizations, based on real world stories over the past seven years. You can watch it free tomorrow or just catch the recording: just register for it, free, and you’ll get all taken care of.

Share Price = (Revenue X Story)

Important: those are just profits for three months. Multiple them by four, friend. From Ves.

The answer to this kind of thing is “yes, but that is all put into the share price already. The shareholders don’t care about those numbers, they cares about those numbers getting bigger. Now the shareholders think those numbers won’t grow faster enough, so the price of the share goes down.” Or something like that. It comes up a lot on Software Defined Talk.

It’s at moments like these that you identify the problem with the stock-based system: when can we just profit and chill?

Sure, you’d have to defend against the company’s valuation going down so much and so fast that raiders come in a bit it for scrap-synergies. But, I feel like that’s saying “we have to keep doing this weird thing because if we don’t these other people will do the weird thing to us instead.”

And then I see things like Tesla stock halving (is that the right amount?) in value, and I think: if that much “money” can be lost so quickly, I don’t think it was ever there in the first place.

I mean, what if each of those companies took those billions in profits and just paid them out to employees instead? I’m bad at match, but: Microsoft has about 221,000 employees. So if you took a quarters worth of profit times four to get a year, you’ve got something like ($34.6 billion X 4) / 221,000…which seems like it’d be a nice annual bonus. ($624,434.38, right?)

I mean, that’s kind of absurd…but…as opposed to what? It’s one of those ideas that falls in the bucket of “yeah, but, I mean, we could all just decide it’s normal. You know: at some point, people were like ‘actually, kings and queens aren’t appointed by God. We should, like, elect people instead…?”

Meanwhile, my asset mix is well allocated to meet my retirement goals.

And that’s this week’s column from the #VisualizeWhirledPeas, “what if Hokey Pokey really is what it’s all about,” Cory Doctorow Endowment Chair.

My content

Related to the above, here’s an excerpt from my predictions piece I pointed at yesterday:

Smart organizations will invest in closing the talent and skills gap: With all the gloom and doom about "The Economy," if organizations aren't careful they're going to fall into a totally predictable trap. In order to cut costs, organizations are freezing hiring. However, in a few years they'll face the ramifications of those decisions: a very thin staff of IT ops and developer staff, and a broader struggle with hiring the right people with the right skills. You see this with organizations who "optimized" their balance sheets (and probably got better EBITA, or whatever) by outsourcing too much of their IT. Now those organizations find it difficult to innovate with software. Organizations need to realize that their investments in IT and line-of-business apps are products that run their business and require ongoing management, support, and upkeep. If there's some stressing about economic conditions in 2023, I predict that the most successful organizations will be the ones that understand that macro-headwinds come and go, but the software needs to run your business are constant. Amidst tightening budgets, hiring freezes and a labor shortage, organizations should invest in training and upskilling to close talent and skills gaps, and in turn, help better equip the business to operate with a lean team in a down economy. Training can even be done on the job - pair programming, for example, is a proven methodology that can help experienced and junior developers learn from each other - even in a remote setting.

Check out the rest to see my commentary on finally getting to work above kubernetes.

Wastebook

• We should drop the “layoff” euphemism and just got back to “fired.” It seems more honest. (We can retain “fired with cause” when we need that extra detail.)

• Maximum Doctorow.

• Is it too much of an asshat comment to say that they best thing about the Ivory app is that you can easily create a filter to get rid of people talking about the Ivory all? Asking for a friend. Also, this, uh, “friend” of mine suggests creating a filter that excludes farts that have the words “Mastodon” and “fediverse.”

• “Lipstick may be recession proof, but what about yoga pants?” Here.

• “hipster antitrust” Here.

• “It needed a lot of work, but everything does. I do!” Rodrick.

• Rich people have a lot of advice about how everything is actually OK and you just need to relax.

Relevant to your interests

• VMware Tanzu Update Tackles Dev Toil, Security - SDxCentral - will write-up soon.

• The State of Spring 2021 - same.

• AI corner: summarize.tech summary for: VMware Explore 2022 - Platform-as-a-Superpower with Bryan Ross - Not too great. If it broke down into smaller parts, at least you could use the summaries as a table of content to search around. This one is kind of better. There’s a few points where I’d want to go in and see the actual talk for the details, e.g.: “The discussion focuses on the importance of the line functions owning the transition, and the correlation between the operational backbone and the value chain.”

• As egg prices soar, the deadliest bird flu outbreak in US history drags on - Oh, I see why there’s all that American egg-talk. // “Since highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5N1) was first detected in US birds in January 2022, the price of a carton of a dozen eggs has shot up from an average of about $1.79 in December 2021 to $4.25 in December 2022, a 137 percent increase, according to data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

• Internal Developer Portal: What It Is and Why You Need One - Another whack at explaining it all.

• Comments on low code from Ric - “lo/no-code seems great for disposable solutions, but not for maintainable/long-term; vendor lock-in because of closed formats rather than open standards (there are SOME products that import/export BPMN2); and lack of discoverability - you could find that multiple teams have created multiple “solutions” to the same problem”

• “ChadGPT” - ‘A “ChadGPT” is the Chad who’s always using Chat-GPT to think for him and always swears it was his idea. ChadGPT always uses ChatGPT to sound smart in conversations, but in reality, he has no real intelligence or original thoughts of his own.’ // So good.

Logoff

I like to send these in the morning - inevitably, I’m scrambling to wrap up at the end of the day and will skip things like assembling and sending out a newsletter. Like yesterday! Today I have our SpringOne watch party in Amsterdam to get to - you can still register and come!

So, I haven’t had enough time to digest and comment on the announcements at our SpringOne conference. Hopefully I’ll do that today and get back to that for tomorrow’s episode. In the meantime, here is a brief overview and a deep dive from Denise.

There’s even more going on today, tomorrow, and then ongoing. Register and watch for free :)