The Remarkable Incompetence At The Heart Of Tech

Source: Where’s Your Ed At Date: 2025-07-18 URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-remarkable-incompetence-at-the-heart-of-tech/

Summary

Guest writer Nik Suresh argues that enterprise software purchases function primarily as displacement activity — buying expensive SaaS tools to avoid confronting structural management and engineering failures. The evidence is anecdotal but concrete: a six-figure data science team producing nothing for two years, a website project requiring years to ship. The thesis is that software’s abstract nature makes non-productivity indefinitely reportable as progress (“90% done in meetings for years”), creating a systemic accountability vacuum that purchasing decisions cannot address.

Implications

• AI tooling as the new displacement activity. The argument applies cleanly to enterprise AI adoption: organizations can buy Copilot licenses, stand up LLM APIs, and commission AI strategies without addressing the underlying management and engineering capability gaps. AI spend can function the same way SaaS spend did — as evidence of action rather than action itself.
• Technical leadership gap. The incompetence framing points to a specific structural problem: organizations where technical leaders lack domain credibility can’t evaluate engineering output, which means no feedback loop to correct performance. AI makes this worse by adding another layer of abstraction that’s hard to audit from the outside.
• Accountability tooling. There’s a market implied in this piece for tooling that makes software progress legible — build telemetry, deployment frequency, outcome measurement. These are the things that expose the 90%-done-in-meetings pattern. AI-assisted engineering telemetry sits in this space.