Technology

Technology is all about cutting costs

Phat Nguyen

Mar 8, 2024 — 3 min read

“Technology is a mindset” or “Technology is an art” are terms that I usually hear from a large body of engineers and technical executives as excuses for pursuing superficial technology implementation without being aware of any practical uses of such technology.

Barking up the wrong tree

”This company only wants to do AI just to cut costs, and have no fun! They do not even pay me well” - One of my senior leads at the C company (let’s call it that way), once told me. At the time I sided with him, an employee could not help but choose to do fancy stuff, have fun with tech, and bring home the bacon - over making good money for the company and cutting costs (which was perceived by a lot of engineers, at the time, uncool.)He usually whined about doing state-of-the-art and honorable research he did for the company with dissatisfaction for “cutting cost” reasons and low paychecks, which was at the time, to him - was inhonorable.

But now as I started working on my own start-up: Well, the C company actually paid him pretty high! (for his impact). I realize that we’re not doing AI because it looks cool, we do AI because it helps our clients cut costs. And not just for the clients, we cut costs for ourselves - the company too.

A hypothesis, which I myself develop every day to insist on thinking it as the ultimate truth, is that his research was of no real use. The research is not only .. not cutting the cost but adding more cost to the business, to use it, and maintain it, correctly, the output wasn’t as near as … usable.

It’s basically fancy-sounding tech with terrible UX and application capability.No wonder the company fired a lot of researchers recently. They hired only the engineers … Frankly, it made sense, economically.Technology is about cutting costs. It sounds obvious… but a lot of people seem not to know that.

The empty suit

Spending my time observing the world, I was confronted with so many other cases where technology was pursued for the sake of looking cool, without any practical application. Naive tech enthusiasts would develop groundbreaking technologies but fail to bring them to the market.

Additionally, there was a significant amount of scientific research that was unproducible and lacked real-world application, because the data was nitpicked to fit the paper author‘s hypothesis, and experimental environments in the lab.A lot of engineers want to build large & scalable systems, doing over-engineering jobs.. where what we need is an MVP to test the product.

Was I that kind of engineer? Yes I was, it’s tempting not to be.Recently, I was joining a full-stack conference (hosted by DF). 90% of the content of the conference was about what features this or that technology/framework has, but not so much about which problem it solves.

Is the problem that it solves that big? Questionable.It became clear to me that even in the most prestigious places in the world, like universities and institutions, among the most knowledgeable people on earth (the researchers, the IT, the “next-gen innovators”), a lot of people are pursuing glitz and glamour without much awareness of the true value of their technical craft.It’s okay to pursue the shiny, but please don’t ask why no one thinks your work is useful.

Material world

Our capitalist economy works because we’re incentivized individuals, nothing was done just for fun … and looking cool. Everything was an exchange:

You helped the company produce a $ 3,000 net profit a month, the company paid you in return $1500 in salary
Celebrities bought luxuries in exchange for a sense of importance
Donors and charities exchange money for fame and a sense of achievement.
“But you forgot the part that they want to give back to the community, Patrick!” - Exactly, they do!…in exchange for a sense of purpose and spiritual accomplishment.

Otherwise… it would not make sense for anyone to spend such resources (time & money) in exchange for negative gains.Want companies to pay you because you do cool-looking superficial tech but no real use? Good luck.

Disclaimers

While I agree that technology is all about cutting costs, I do not mean that we shouldn’t have fun with technology. Thinking and contemplation are crucial parts of making impactful technology, as the author must be happy and proud of his craft. Just like Oppenheimer's aha-moment when he finally found the ingredient for the atomic bomb.

While I believe a lot of academic research was bullshit, I cannot deny that a lot of innovation and breakthroughs come from academic research. But at the same time, I’m asking myself why only a portion of scientific research was useful.

While useful and successful tech might look cool, say ChatGPT, “looking cool” is hardly ever the cause of success. ChatGPT helps cut costs. - How? It made personalized assistants, once a luxury, now really affordable. What happens if it just looks cool but does not cut any cost? Try “NFT” 😂