You don’t say!

GM is a finance company, not an engineering company. Even buying the engineering doesn’t work.

Their last great innovation was Saturn, and they killed that too.

The code may be gone but not the impact.

A gas station sells gas that is gone within weeks. But someone fills their car, and drives to Mountain View and gets a job that changes your life.

Helping a business grow by 10% more each year because they were an early adopter to websites is something you impacted, even if your code isn’t there to remind people why.

“All we are is dust in the wind.” (Kansas and Ecclesiastes)

That feels true, but a single gas station disappears and people fill up somewhere else.

The world isn’t a static place. The impact is often closer to saving X thousands of people a few seconds than anything more meaningful. Perhaps the indirect result is someone finds the love of their life but it could just as easily be a life changing STD or getting run over and impacting many people means many such indirect changes both positive and negative.

I think “a cloud never dies” is more apt for this sentiment

Exactly.

What a tarnished legacy. They used to be the model for Silicon Valley.

They have no internal realization of what happens when they turn off large enterprises. They accidentally turned off a $10bln retailer that I’m aware of too. Whoops!

That wasn’t the case here. They had a horrible bug and no checks and balances when their automation ran on the account.

This version is much better, and captures the juvinality of it all.

Is anyone surprised that part of the problem was MongoDB? (Or that replacing it wasn’t hard?)

I recall seeing the super of my building mixing the trash and recycling. Really turned me off to the impact of separating our refuse.

Why did it do that? It would make me annoyed at the super, not annoyed at the environment. ;)

It told me that things were going to the same place no matter what. :-)