I'm old enough to have been around this bush twice already.
In the 70s your argument was made against emerging Japanese makers. Unknowns like Toyota, Datsun (now Nissan), Honda etc.
Then in the 90s it was Koreans entering the market. Daihatsu, Hyundai, Kia etc.
Now it's the Chinese brands arriving as well. The incumbents will talk about "quality" all day long, but in truth European quality was always a bit of a myth (British Leyland anyone?) And the heyday of BMW or Mercedes quality is long gone.
The gold standard for quality today? Probably Toyota or Honda.
So yeah, laugh off the Chinese options as low-quality.
The problem is China is taking the different strategy.
All of the products they are making actually have two lines, one for the oversea, one for the nation. The oversea line would be high quality at first. But once they eat up all the market share, the story would start to change. The oversea buyer would happily to see they are been treated the same as Chinese.
>> But once they eat up all the market share, the story would start to change.
You may be right. But at the moment this is just speculation. Just like happened from Japan and Korea, the quality ramped up quickly. And yes, companies age, and as they do so quality drops off. And another rises in it's place. That's literally the issue you're seeing now with US and European goods.
The Chinese can make cheap rubbish and also very good quality depending on the incentives. Most of the Apple stuff is still made there.
I used to have a Chinese made imitation Yamaha and the quality was awful as you'd expect from a counterfeit knock off manufacturer but I imagine the BYD stuff is pretty good.
A few years ago this was true, but quality has improved massively since then. Was in China recently, got to ride in a bunch of Chinese EVs including several BYDs. Really impressed with them, and came away wishing I could buy one myself, but that seems unlikely to be an option for now in the US unfortunately.
Sorry but reading Volkswagen and "crappy products" in the same sentence means either you never drove one or you've got very high standards, but then you're happy with BYD...
These new Chinese cars are literally flooding the market with the usual way we are used nowadays to think: buy cheap, change again in 2 years. (Which we didn't do before this cheap manufacturing existed.)
In this context it makes totally sense.
Cars, though, at least how we're used to think, are made to last. A car is not just a bunch of features, it's also a lot about the quality of the components, and there are videos showing how poor BYD quality is. If you're happy with that, that's OK.
Having driven an Audi A3 for a while... and that's the "premium" VW, it was not really great at all.
And having been to China and sitting in plenty of BYDs... they're on par. Decent.
The cars can be obviously cheaper, and yet aren't. Chinese market may be subsidized, but international? Not really. Coming back to VW, ID3 in China was half the price compared to the one in Europe, so there were even people trying to import them back and sell for less than official distribution - that effort was shut down thanks to VW's lobby.
I've worked on car infotainment, I know VW's is crap, but serious question: why give a shit? It's not what cars are for and all of them are good enough to play some music or listen to the radio while driving. You can use a phone holder for navigation.
Because, thanks to removing buttons and such, it's an integral part of operating the car.
In my Renault Megane e-Tech, if my windshield suddenly fogs up I can hit a physical button[1] to max the heater and blower. In the ID.4 it goes via the touch screen.
So, you press the "button" on the screen, nothing happens, so you press it again, except it turns out the system registered the first time it was just slow and so now you've turned it back off again. Or, you press it and nothing happens and you press another 5x times and still nothing because your finger is too dry...
I see the 2024 variant[2] kept the all-touch approach, but I haven't tried it so perhaps it works better in practice.
> We pay tax like first world countries but get services like poorest of the poor countries.
I asked chatgpt to give a comparison, and I am not sure which country you're comparing against, but it seems people in India pay significantly less than in EU for example. (20% vs 40%, etc...)
EDIT: as cliché as it might sound, how about blaming it on the really high level of corruption spread across all layers? Corruption is a disease for a country, especially when you can bribe authorities for very small money.
You don't always need to blame corruption. Inefficiencies of all kinds (due to lack of education, lack of infrastructure, etc) also cause most 3rd world countries to have this kind of situation where services are paid for at least twice, once in the form of taxes, and then again to private companies that compensate the lack of quality of the public ones (education, health, security, transportation, etc).
The only "advantage" these countries have, is that labor is cheaper, so some kinds of labor-intensive activities could in theory be as good as, or even better, than first-world ones (other than climate-related activities such as farming, which naturally benefit from better sun/weather). But the overhead leads to overall worse outcomes.
Corruption does make it worse, but even in a corruption-less environment, the other inefficiencies might still lead to a scenario similar to "pay tax like first world countries but get services like poorest of the poor countries".
Of course, if only all of these privacy-destroying technologies and surveillance-state apparatus could be used to detect corruption, maybe one could have a technological corruption-less dystopia where every figure of power is tracked all the time, as is in a reality show? (In the worst case, we might see some privacy-restoring contraptions emerge from the dynamics of such systems.)
Inefficiencies are often the consequence of corruption or a mindset/culture that fosters favoritism vs merit, because not everyone is either smart enough to want to improve their companies or is willing to do what it takes to do so. Which could mean not hiring that friend that is not good, or that brother in law that shouldn't be doing this job, etc. Every action has a reaction, even a small one. You just have to live fine with it and accept it. Not saying we need to become machines, just saying we shouldn't complain if only friends of friends work in a hospital and maybe 1-2 doctors are good... And no, I am not talking about "I referred him, and he is good for that position". I am talking about people who have no clue and are hired nonetheless, just because of family or friends.
I come from a country where all these issues exist and one thing I learnt: it has nothing to do with taxes. On the contrary, the more you raise them, the more tax evasion will be. And the more you'll need to bribe or cheat the system.
> Software estimation is a joke because there's no penalty for underestimating.
In my experience, while this might be true in some companies, I noticed that most of the time the issue with estimations is the lack of clarity (=what do I really want?) and enough context (what's the impact in terms of scope to reach what I want?).
Most of commercial software, for whatever weird reason, keeps on being compared to other industries and repeatedly this fails.
It's not like building a car, it's not like building a house, it's not like shooting a movie, etc.
> I noticed that most of the time the issue with estimations is the lack of clarity (=what do I really want?) and enough context (what's the impact in terms of scope to reach what I want?).
From what I've seen, this up front design ends up being a good portion of the design time. The cheat is that people don't include this upfront design in the time estimate. They say "the specs are still being set, we can't start yet" rather than "we're delayed in setting these new specs", even though the end date moves similarly.
This is because of the way most software is built. If you are using event modeling, it's very easy to estimate feature costs. The only exception is when you are truly innovating new algorithms so there is not a historical precedent you can refer to. This is not common work in the industry however, most software projects are variations of previous themes.
Sorry but I don't buy that a specific process can solve that problem. DDD can actually add quite some unnecessary complexity, not only because it requires that everyone is skilled to know how to apply it, but also because sometimes you really feel you're overenginerring things just to follow ... a model.
I know for certain that a specific way of doing things can and will improve a process. Nothing to say there. But "solving" a problem? Not sure about it.
Plus, sometimes you as a company don't know really what decision to make. PMs try to figure it out, get stuck, unstuck, and then suddenly a big company comes up with something new and your market is shaken. So again "what do I want?" which has an impact over everyone in the chain, because you must design something but keeping in mind that "it might be different in 6 months". So extensible, scalable, but hell please don't overengineer it, and yet I want it to run on K8s, but if a customer needs it in their data centers, we need to find a way to make it work there too, in a way that scales, but we can't give them a k8s cluster. It has to be easy to install, offer great UX and also be Fedramp and super secure, which most of the time means "either ... or".
Some industries are brutal.
Sorry I don't believe that a process can solve that problem.
Maybe in some specific industries where you have a lot of time, very well defined and predictable roadmaps it can work too.
That's because they have a budget which is planned ahead (e.g., 2024 for 2025) for everything.
Typically if the company is really in financial trouble, they will also NOT use the pre-allocated budget which was not yet spent (=200k for company events, although the budget for such things was planned and approved last year).
I have seen companies actually taking care of finances (both firing people AND blocking useless events) and I have seen companies doing what you said, which creates pure hatred.
Right, which is more indicative of how yearly budgets which don’t factor in continual employment of staff lead to the morale decline I mentioned. Perhaps the manager isn’t actually capable of doing much about it, and can only spend or not spend their budget. But that indicates a failure in the company as a whole; at least if keeping employee morale high is a goal (which it definitely isn’t at many companies.)
Even then, the mismanagement of funds just communicates a level of incompetence that is more demotivating than cuts from an actual lack of funds, IMO.
“Sorry, the market has shifted and we can’t afford this,” is at least somewhat understandable when you have trust in management’s ability. When you don’t, it comes unpredictable and chaotic - never a recipe for getting good work done.
Playing devil's advocate: Firing people has a huge financial impact - around $100,000 per person per year. The event only cost $50,000 once. So it might not be that significant, and at least the staff gets to enjoy a nice event. Why eliminate both when the event's cost is equivalent to just half a position?
This one's easy. Because you value your people more than the parties they can throw. The cost/benefit are not just monetary. If they were, the event would have no reason to happen under any circumstance.
You fire someone because they are hurting the company? That feels like a company that cares about doing well. Event seems more okay, and there's no reason to question the financial cost if the org seems to be doing well. You layoff someone off because you're tight on cash? Tell everyone you only hire top performers but had to let a top performer go because of budgetary reasons? Feels gross to throw more money away when you're already making "hard" decisions about letting quality people go.
I think it has more to do with the psychological effect than with money itself.
We're used to think that in difficult situations you cut the useless "fun" expenses.
When that doesn't happen in a company, people blame it on management that already "moved on".
It has to do with how people perceive a company and with all that culture that has been pushed down our throats for years, with "We're a family" and things like that. It has also to do somehow with showing some respect...
These cars are garbage, people are happy because they are cheap, shiny and have all multimedia and can do 400KM... why not.
reply