Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Man, I’ve thought about this for years. So I think it’s like I have to book the flight anyway. I know there’s a route that they take and I need to book, for example, Qatar Airlines and I need to get through this process. And with hotels, similar. You need a hotel anyway. So do you have time to figure out the best one? Not really. You kind of just need to get the place booked and you need to get the flight and you’ll go through the pain of this process. And that’s why this process always sucks so much with hotels and airline websites and stuff because they don’t have an incentive to improve it because generally only for a super upper segment of the market I think like super high luxury, it affects the actual booking. I don’t know. I think that’s an interesting theory. I think that must be a different theory. My theory would be that great software engineers are not allowed to make changes. Basically there’s some kind of bureaucracy,. There’s way too many managers. There’s a lot of bureaucracy and great engineers show up, they try to work there and they’re not allowed to really make any contributions and then they leave. And so they have a lot of mediocre software engineers. They’re not really interested in improving any other thing. And literally they would like to improve the stuff, but the bureaucracy of the place, plus all the bosses, all the high up people are not technical people probably. They don’t know much about web development. They don’t know much about programming, so they just don’t give any respect. You have to give the freedom and the respect to great engineers as they try to do great things. That feels like an explanation. If you were a great programmer, would you want to work at America Airlines or… No. No.…

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