The allure of enterprise SaaS solutions like Snowflake – commanding market caps in the tens of billions despite solving highly specialized problems – often masks a far uglier reality within the organizations buying them. According to Nik Suresh, a software engineer and managing director of a tech consultancy, these purchases frequently represent a desperate, misguided attempt by leadership to paper over a fundamental crisis: rampant institutional incompetence in software engineering and technical operations.

"Most enterprise SaaS purchases are simply a distraction – total wishful thinking – for leaders that hope waving a credit card is going to absolve them of the need to understand and manage the true crisis in software engineering," Suresh asserts, characterizing the trend as "settling for totally conservative failure."

The true crisis, he argues, isn't a lack of tools, but a culture where technical teams can operate with astonishingly low output for years, shielded by the abstract nature of code and ineffective management. Unlike tangible projects where progress is visible, software development allows for indefinite claims of being "90% done" without verifiable results for non-technical stakeholders. Suresh details alarming firsthand experiences:

  • Years of Zero Output: Leading a data science team that produced no deployable models in two years, yet received an innovation award and continued drawing high salaries.
  • The Never-Launched Website: Inheriting a supposedly "almost done" internal data entry website that had languished for years. Despite Suresh completing it quickly, the organization still failed to deploy it five years later – a task he estimates competent IT could handle in days or weeks.
  • Costly Ignorance: Discovering teams wasting hundreds of thousands on Snowflake due to easily correctable configuration oversights, highlighting a widespread lack of basic technical diligence.

This dysfunction isn't isolated. Suresh cites software engineer Emmanuel Maggiore's 2023 observation: "I have come to the conclusion that most people in tech don’t work... And when we do get to do some work, it often brings low added value to the company and its customers." While top-tier engineering organizations (like Netflix) escape this fate, Suresh contends this inefficiency is the overwhelming norm within the large enterprises that are prime targets for massive SaaS sales.

The consequence? Billions are spent annually on software solutions that cannot address the core problem: a deficit of genuine systems thinking, domain understanding, and competent engineering practices. SaaS becomes a convenient, expensive fig leaf for leaders seeking the appearance of innovation while avoiding the hard work of fixing their technical foundations. The rot, as Suresh bluntly frames it, is enabled by "incompetents cosplaying as software engineers" and consultants selling lies to desperate leaders. Solving it requires confronting uncomfortable truths about talent, process, and accountability, not just signing another vendor contract.

Source: Nik Suresh guest post on Where's Your Ed At (https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-remarkable-incompetence-at-the-heart-of-tech/)