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A general rule: the further a software product is away from "engineering candy", the worse it is.
Software engineers are some of the most entitled, overpaid people on the planet. (I should know!) They have lots of career options.
To get good engineers you need to either pay an outrageous salary or have an interesting product like a video game. Want to find engineers to work on your compliance software? Good luck. Hell, even Google engineers making 400k/year can't be bothered to work on essential but boring products, preferring instead to chase shiny baubles.
No one wants to do the dirty work where good job means not messing up.
I think the problem is that "good job" doesn't mean "not messing up" in the context of these compliance-as-a-service or security-blanket-as-a-service companies. Instead, "good job" is "implement as many features as possible to a level where it's not literally fraud to claim your product has thay feature, and then have a longer checklist of supported features in your product than the competition has so the MBA types choose your product".
CrowdStrike's stock price is only down by about 10% today on one of the highest-impact and highest-profile incidents of this type I've seen. I'm pretty sure their culture of "ship it even if it's janky and broken" has netted them more than a 10% increase in net revenue, so it's probably net positive to have that kind of culture.
Their net revenue is under a billion a year. The total economic damage caused by this single bug is almost certainly larger than the total net income of the entire history of the company. In fact, it is almost certainly larger than the total gross income of the entire history of the company. I do not know where the valuation is coming from, but it certainly isn't from their revenue figures.
Lol P/E of 644.
But it's a hyper-growth company bro, surely they'll be able to pivot to making money once they've captured the full market bro.
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Yeah but if they're not liable what relevance does that have to their share price?
I don't know if they're liable or not. I doubt Crowdstrike knows if they're liable or not.
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I mean, you could get good engineers with a video game project, but for that you have to be willing to also pay them the outrageous salary. Video game projects are more art than engineering, requiring more designers than engineers. And the brilliant engineers won't work for that much below market rate; if that were their goal they'd go into research or try to get into an early-stage startup, not join a project that's just the application of an existing engine to a new gameplay design. The game projects that appeal to engineers don't sell enough for AAA development, they're nerd games like Factorio or RimWorld (sorry friends).
Not that game companies don't capitalize on the appeal of their projects to talent. They just capitalize by taking lower-tier but motivated engineers/artists/designers and running them into the ground.
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