DeepSeek is a Wake-Up Call for Silicon Valley
An example of "The Tortoise and the Hare". For far too long, software development has grown increasingly bureaucratic, weighed down by endless unnecessary and often ridiculous processes.
Following DeepSeek's appearance in global tech news headlines, its impact was swiftly felt across the financial markets.
If OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) were a publicly traded company, its stock price drop would likely be far more severe. DeepSeek’s API costs are roughly 1/30th of ChatGPT while delivering on-par (if not better) quality.
If this news doesn’t sound alarming, let me recap the recent developments that highlight China’s rapidly advancing software capabilities over the past few months.
“TikTok-ban-if-not-sold” dominated the news over the last week.
TikTok claimed to have 170 million American users. Why has Silicon Valley failed to produce a viable competitor to TikTok?Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) are disrupting the Western auto industry.
Nissan is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and Germany’s auto sector is facing significant job cuts.
Software has become a critical component in the evolution of EVs.“Black Myth: Wukong”, the first 3-A Game by China, was a huge success.
This shouldn’t be underestimated, especially considering how much time young people spend playing video games.
Frankly, like many software professionals, I did not view China as a major software powerhouse. However, my perspective has shifted. The quality of their software, including the latest advancements like DeepSeek, is objectively impressive.
Setting aside political factors (I don’t like communism and dictatorship regimes), technical advancement and competition are good. That said, it raises the question: What have Western tech giants been doing in recent years despite amassing enormous wealth (primarily from advertising)?
Lack of Innovation
During a recent interview, Mark Zuckerberg criticized Apple for its lack of innovation following the era of Steve Jobs.
His comment may hold some truth, but has Facebook truly been innovative? In my opinion, definitely not. Despite the massive ad revenue Facebook generates from people spending countless hours on its platforms, can you name any groundbreaking technical innovations from them that impact your daily life? Probably not. The Meta Universe, for instance, is an expensive joke.
There was, however, one Facebook product I genuinely needed at one point (though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, as it was Facebook exclusive): the Facebook Sandcastle CT server. Unaware of its existence (until watching this video), I have already created my own, open-source and publicly-available solution—BuildWise—which won the Ruby International Award in 2018.
Software development is becoming increasingly bureaucratic, bogged down by countless unnecessary and often absurd processes
For a start, I don’t understand why React and JavaScript became the dominant web framework. Oh, there is also TypeScript, a never-ending debate among some web developers.
Clearly, Ruby on Rails is a far superior framework for web development. I’ve witnessed how a successful product built with Ruby on Rails was forced to rewrite its codebase in Java, only to falter and eventually get acquired—not for its technology, but solely for its customer base. Meanwhile, a competitor in the same space uses Ruby on Rails, Airbnb, thrives.
A former colleague, who worked there, told me that when the decision to switch from Ruby to Java was announced, many team members were in tears. The reasoning behind this misguided move? Ruby on Rails’ architecture is simple and offers exceptional productivity. However, for those accustomed to complexity and drawn to processes that take unnecessarily long, such simplicity can be seen as a threat.
Does this sound absurd? Let me give you an example. I’ve participated in several proof-of-concept (POC) projects for end-to-end (E2E) test automation, which were typically planned to span three months. In most cases, I was able to complete the majority of the testing tasks within just 3 to 5 days. Since E2E test automation produces objectively verifiable results, the success was clear. I achieved this using raw Selenium WebDriver + with RSpec—both free and open-source. In short, it was a definitive success.
Yet, at nearly every medium or large organization, this clearly superior solution was rejected under a variety of excuses. The most common one: “Our codebase is in Java/JavaScript, so we prefer test scripts in those languages.” However, E2E test automation scripts (black box testing) are 100% independent from the code.
Along the way, I came to realize that most software companies are overloaded with managers and non-coding software architects—people who are quite comfortable in their roles. The last thing they want is disruption or change. And yes, technical innovation and high productivity are exactly the kinds of changes they tend to resist.
At Meta’s Gen-AI division, according to this post, a single ‘leader’ earns over $5 million annually—equivalent to the training cost of DeepSeek—and there are dozens of such ‘leaders.’ If a creative Meta software engineer were to come up with a groundbreaking idea like DeepSeek, it would likely be smothered by one of these high-paid executives, at its early stage.
They prefer processes to real engineering. That’s why so many fake Agile Coaches and fake Scrum masters were hired. Why? They introduced various processes, such as
Digital User Stories (in Jira)
and other so-called ‘agile ceremonies’
I was in South Africa, at Agile Africa, and somebody came up to me and said “Well, we want to do software development, but we just can’t stand all this ceremony and Agile stuff. We just want to write some programs.” And tears came into my eyes…like…how can it be that we who set out to refocus development on essentials and get rid of stuff that didn’t matter, how can it be that we’re right back where we were 20 years ago? Like how can it be that “this is too much ceremony”? … No, this is wrong. I don’t know what to do about it.
–Kent Beck (2019–10–15), Father of Agile.
When it comes to real progress from genuine software engineering practices like Automated End-to-End (UI) Regression Testing, those managers and architects suddenly spring into action— to stifle any potential advancements that might disrupt the status quo.
Software development is a form of engineering, and like any engineering discipline, the most critical aspect is a reliable and repeatable quality-checking process, that is Automated End-to-End (UI) Regression Testing (daily execution) in software development. Yet, surprisingly, most software companies lack this essential practice. Once you embrace this practice, software development becomes a lot simpler, easier and much more efficient.
Related reading:
Be aware of the “fake it until you make it” mindset in Test Automation and CI/CD
Benefits of Real E2E Test Automation and Continuous Testing series: Executives, Managers, Business Analysts, Developers, Testers and Customers.
Reflections on China's Transformation of the Car Industry series.