When the post came out, for the first time in a long time I found myself nodding my head with Graham, because I feel like basically everyone who has worked in a company that has found some form of product/market fit and started staffing and and delegating has had the experience of watching pasteurized process cheese food faceplant trying to understand and further a sane goal a founding team got some traction with when it was smaller. Everyone has. There was something to it. But now, as usual, everyone has overindexed on everything, so we're sitting here comparing Aaron Swartz to Sam Altman as if either of them would be successful parachuted into the median immediate-post-PMF company.
As is so often the case, these stories are just vectors along which we recapitulate our existing beliefs. Woz vs. Jobs! We'll be talking about this 50 years from now, as if there was anything to learn from it.
Of course, this means the original post, the "founder mode" post, was bad. The first cut of most things is bad! I've talked to 2 people now who saw the AirBNB talk that prompted it, and both said the talk was way better than the "founder mode" post, which left both scratching their heads. Maybe someone (maybe Graham) will find a better way to distill the talk? Neither of my friends will go into more detail about that talk, so I hope someone does.
In the meantime: this all feels like drama for its own sake. Certainly, if we're talking about business and invoking aaronsw, it seems safe to guess there isn't much trenchant in this particular story. "Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz". For fuck's sake.
I wonder if we really will be talking about Woz vs. Jobs in 50 years? It has already been about 50 years. I don’t think that many people still talk about Rockefeller vs. Carnegie. Really the way Carnegie is still talked about is for his philanthropy and building 2500 libraries, etc. Those things remain.
“everyone overindexing on everything” is the kind of glib linguistic failure mode that gives powerful nerds a bad name: people who read it got dumber thereby because it’s got a hip sound and some pseudo-technical vibe and means nothing. And deploying that to hand-wave over the difference between Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman is pretty offensive to anything like the better angels of hacker culture.
One of those people actually died directly downstream of an act of civil disobedience with the issue being the commons of scientific knowledge. One of those people is on the shortest of lists around blurring the line between train and validation sets for personal financial gain so callously and so effectively that we’ll be years if not decades recovering.
People listen to you. I listen to you.
Aaron Swartz is nothing to do with this perverse contemporary thing. Far more recently than intuitive, our role models would sacrifice everything they have to take a stand. Today influential people take a stand on their own narrow self-interest even if it requires the sacrifice of what everyone has.
It’s broadcasting that Y Combinator is a founder friendly investor. That comes with costs, e.g. if LPs think YC would have doubled down on the next Neumann or Bankman-Fried, or that its leadership is going full Ackman. But it will work at the margins for deal-finding partners, particularly with young founders.
The hilarious part is this obviously wasn’t a message they trusted their partners to deliver. An army with precision weapons and intelligence doesn’t carpet bomb; YC is carpet bombing.
> But now, as usual, everyone has overindexed on everything, so we're sitting here comparing Aaron Swartz to Sam Altman as if either of them would be successful parachuted into the median immediate-post-PMF company.
Yeah, my take was that the AirBNB guy said, "I was told A, so I did B. C happened, which was terrible. So I did D, and E happened, which was better."
Paul said, "Huh, lots of people seem to have a similar issue with A. There's a general pattern here we should figure out."
But basically all the subsequent discussions have been about A, without knowing even what B, C, D, and E were; much less knowing what all the other similar experiences were that prompted Paul's post. Maybe Paul's an idiot or maybe he's a genius, but without that data there's no way to tell.
I think another way to explain "being bored" (and a bunch of other features that this post describes). These people are getting old: Andreessen is 53, Graham is 59, the author is in his fifties; I am too. Nothing too surprising about having older people be the supposed "blowhard" voices of an industry -- except during the golden age that these posts harken back too, all of these pundits were twenty or so years younger.
I'm prompted to think about this after watching the last Apple event livestream, and thinking to myself "these people all seem so /old/". Steve Jobs seemed ancient to me when he returned to Apple in 1997: he was 42.
This is not to say that techs, hackers, etc, have grown old -- but the distribution of ages has definitely widened, and its center may have shifted a little right too. That leaves plenty of room for much younger people to look at much older people and wonder at their strange, blowhard opinions. It also leads to older types feeling tired and bored with tech : and projecting that as the dominant tone to those of any age.
> it’s difficult to look at people like Graham — people who aren’t as bright as they think they are
Graham’s (alleged) arrogance about his brightness isn’t really the issue here. Let’s face it, he is bright. That’s not what is causing this boredom/dismay, though.
The issue is that somehow the rest of us became entranced by the “cult of Graham” and his thinking about startups/founders, and collectively we made his way into the way, ostracizing those that lived their life outside the idealized startup paradigm that Graham crafted. Creation of this dismay isn’t on him alone, it’s on all of us.
The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is.
There are interesting things going on:
* Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top.
* Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now.
* Electric cars. For new car sales, 10% in US are electric. 20% worldwide. 50% in China. US is way behind.
* Flying cars. The scaled-up drone flying cars actually work. First commercial deployment in China. Range is limited, but good enough to get VIPs around congested cities.
* Batteries. Solid-state batteries still are not available in quantity, because the manufacturing process is hard.
At least five major companies are working on it. Somebody will crack that. They will not be in the US.
* Metals. Lots of sources found for rare earths. Electric powered basic steel has been demonstrated.
* Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured.
> * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now.
How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Roombas came out 20 years ago then there's been basically nothing but tiny increments on the same idea since.
Seems to me like an area that could make use the sensor/3d tech from self driving, but wouldn't need to be anywhere near as reliable to still be a useful product. You could probably charge Apple margins if you cracked it first. I'd pay $5-10k for something that would last a few years and could passively clean a bathroom or kitchen to a reasonable degree.
> Electric cars. For new car sales … 50% in China.
This seems to be incorrect unless you lure in Plugin-Hybrids into the "electric cars" category. Also, the real driver of this "electric cars" market share growth in China seems to be PHEVs ("electric cars" with a combustion engine in it) while BEVs growth seems to be stalling. [1]
Except of AIDS, none of the items on your list are things we really need but just a naive attempt of masking the problems of modern society life.
Worse still: most of these problems were caused by the psychopaths who wanted nothing but money and power and found in the "techno-optimism" the perfect excuse to justify their actions.
>Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured.
Would disagree, we have possibly regressed. We have more gizmos (like diabetes monitors) and diagnostics, but no real cures and a significantly more sick people.
I'm having a hard time putting this into words. Apologies if this isn't terribly clear.
As easy as it is to dismiss tech hype - nothing wrong with doing that honestly - autonomous city driving is inching closer to the ubiquity it promised a decade ago. And come on ChatGPT is pretty amazing even if it is over hyped.
Hackers are everywhere, they're just doing work and not writing hype posts.
Tech news is all jobs.
I love this article just don't fully agree with it. Love the convo in this post too! Keep it coming.
> If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager.
> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz.
If the expectation for your average Woz is to handle seasoned bullshitters, how can you expect them to also be hackers?
It's true that VCs and an ossified economy contribute more to the blandness of new companies, but ignoring the problems with the hiring market leaves you with half a picture. I'm not blaming employees for doing what's best for them, but it feels naive and unempathetic to put the blame of aligning incentives to founders, when the problems are systemic.
Actually, as a hacker, I find I have less need for the Jobs types these since I can do more myself.
VC have a distorted view of the world because they look for unicorns in a world where most companies just aren't. Most companies don't start out using VC money and finance their operations with revenue the company makes. It's easier than ever to get started building a company. All you need is time. And even that is getting better.
The web and cloud removed most of the cost over the last thirty years. And with LLMs we can remove a lot of people and time from the equation as well. It's gotten to the point where you can outsource a lot of things to specialized service providers instead of doing them in house.
I think it is entirely fair to say that there probably isnt just one primary way to run a large organization. That’s really the main takeaway I found useful from Paul Graham’s blog post.
He obviously didnt specify at all what other ways are and what this nebulous “founder mode” means. But I think just pointing out hiring an army of consultants and mbas might not be the only way to do it is an important statement to make that I don’t think most people in the corporate world would readily admit to.
> hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
This sounds like someone who is looking for someone to blame. If founder after founder is having this problem what are the odds that there is something else going on and perhaps the reports are doing exactly what the founder is rewarding?
I see in a lot of tech companies is a system where all the incentives are about getting promoted. IC's are trying to build things that look big and complex and "hard". Future maintenance burden, product impact, etc are difficult to measure and also super easy to game. All that matters is that they might get promoted so they can jump teams and do it again. Managers are promoted based on headcount and do everything they can to keep reports and grow like weeds. A dysfunctional org? Yes please, let me triple it in size to solve the problem, we have the money and this org is important, and I become important in the process. Sure some (not all) might need to grow the top line by X%, but in a growing industry/product category/company that might be the default so the focus is again on growing their career. They spend all their time on hiring and annual reviews and promo committees and almost no time on actual strategy. And getting rid of under performers was difficult and as long of a process as possible because there was no incentive to make that simple.
As long at the tide rises all boats and the CEO rewards this behavior everyone plays this game. When the water starts flowing out suddenly you have a CEO looking around going wtf when everyone did exactly what they incentivized.
Let's not forget that people themselves changed and what is popular. Look at any top show hn post and you'll see all this talk about the market fit, the competitors, and how much money that product can make.
The hackers have disappeared and we're apart of the prohlem.
Should really have a tag rule to prevent any boring business start up bogus discussions when the poster wants.
I've been avoiding the business threads on HN for about 10 years now[1], and the frontpage still has enough stuff to keep me coming back, and the comments on those threads are fine as well. There are fewer comments on those threads, and that too is a good thing.
HN is 3 distinct sub-communities, to my mind: startup news, hacker news and what I think of as "the human condition" news which encompasses humanities posts like lithub and so on. I participate in 2 of them.
I agree with you that we hackers are part of the problem. But it's not a systemic problem. We can still choose what we attend to. We're not lacking for options.
Indeed. There are not too many people that are both bright and willing to look up to the current crop of tech billionaires.
Ideals count, certainly for hackers. If you have billions in the bank you might start to look to work on some real pressing problems instead of looking to get a share of the next Privacy Suck.
Erosion of democratic societies via algorithmically boosted disinformation campaigns, climate change, healthcare, you name it. Tech is not neutral in the societal sense, far from it.
Also, I doubt if AI (now even more widgets), with those tech leaders pressing for it, is compatible with being a tech enthusiast. Techies like tech first, results second.
If software engineering becomes chess, it will be preserved as tournaments, not business.
Because it's a lot more true than most tech people want to admit.
I am continuously amazed at how many brilliant people there are, that do fantastic things, that do not bring in anywhere near what their value is. Look no further than open source, there's people that write important software begging for scraps while flashy startups get showered with money if they yammer the right buzzwords.
There are certain people that don't want to hear this, but being a leader and visionary is, in practice, a more valuable asset than the cumulative technical skills.
I would completely agree with this if it said "All Cook and no Woz". I say this because I think it is unfair to label Jobs along the line of all the other MBA spreadsheet CEO's. Jobs actually had a talent for products. Woz and other brilliant engineers may have build these things, but Jobs had a talent for picking the right products, the right packages and the right timing that I don't think anyone else in Tech has ever really been capable of copying. I think that tech will always be full of Woz type people, but without Jobs it's going to be hard to get those products out there. I see a lot of it in Solar energy and Farming tech where a lot of brilliant things are being build, but a lot of it remains relatively small scale because nobody knows how to sell it.
I think you could also make the case for saying that the industry is full of Zuckerbergs (maybe Sam Altmans in a few years), but I'm not sure the advertisement industry is really all that related to tech. I know it may not be the most popular thing to say, but is there really that much of a difference between selling Tobacco, Coca Cola, Search Engines or Social Media? All are popular products which haven't really changed the world for the better.
My hypothesis is that it reflects the shift away from consumer and SMB products to Silicon Valley mostly funding enterprise software.
101 North into San Francisco was an exciting drive in the 2000s. I t the 2010s it slowly started to change with billboards one by one changing towards soulless enterprise software.
That drive now doesn’t have a single product anyone should be excited about.
And enterprise software is truly boring. And that an understatement. I got very bored and disenchanted with software because it all sort of sucked.
My other hypothesis is that there will be a resurgence of indie consumer and SMB software that’s not so soulless. And I hate to mention AI but I think it’s the enabler of these apps being viable for very small teams to not go after funding and keep their soul.
No, tech has become no Woz and no Jobs either. You don’t get enshittification with Jobs, but the opposite. Also he would abhorre modern day process driven product management: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE
To me, the boredom comes from seeing technology inevitably get corrupted. Self-driving cars turn into self-driving ads, and AI is used to displace jobs or track people. Everything we’re promised eventually falls apart, and I’m tired of where it all leads.
The utopia would be an equitable society, where we work far less than our ancestors did, allowing us to focus on pursuing our interests and desires—not just buying security. But not only does that seem unattainable, it's pursuit is considered laziness or opting-out of a social contract whereby 99% of people fight to make 1% rich with the delusion being that maybe it's me that's the 1% and that with the riches I can score I can ride off into the sunset, and get off this foul ride forever.
Companies are, by their very nature, designed to maximize profit (fiduciary duty laws), not benefit humanity. Governments are what we're meant to guide this in the right direction, but globalization and unfathomable wealth broke the system.
Technology has become so powerful and integrated into our society that the companies that drive it have become as powerful as governments, and our political systems cannot keep up.
I see this in how the EU suddenly is stepping up to regulate American tech companies, something it was never designed or meant to do. They are suddenly the only organization with enough regulatory power to do so properly, as the American government seems to have given up trying themselves.
I don't think this is unsolvable. I'd love to see "fiduciary duty laws" disbanded for one, and America being less of a pushover for lobbying would go a long way as well. By time, we will figure out what works and what doesn't.
There's still fun hacker spaces out there. The Playdate community is a really fun space because it's mostly non commercial and people just making stuff for the love of it. [0]
The raspberry pi community is also in the hacker space, I think the shortages and the price of the newer products hurt it some but I'm sure the spirit will come back. [1]
Overall I'd say that people spend too much time on the internet and it's effectively a full time job form them but with no breaks, which of course leads to burn out/disappointment. [2]
I'm rambling at this point but maybe there needs to be a hobbiest hackernews or something.
[0] When most stuff is priced $10 at most and they're are onyl at most 100k devices on the market, there is not much money to be made.
[1] I'm still disappointed there is not much of a gamedev/creative software community around the raspberry pi.
[2] And when you read about angry sad things all day because that's how Merchants of Despair keep you on their sites. Well it's hard not to feel angry and sad.
> A good sign that it may be time for a re-shifting of voices in tech
Yes, it would be good to get some domain experts in, rather than people who are comfortable re-hashing press releases with an "trust me, the physics of this perpetual motion machine check out" or "lol they are shit" overlay.
Especially as tech now is moving from a "oh thats a simple idea, just needs executing" to actual "shiut the physics of this make it super hard" (ie AR)
When the industry is all about the myth of the trendy tech founder, of course the ones who succeed are the con-men and fabulists. All jobs and no woz indeed
It's a good post but for some reason he decided to end it with a random attack on Paul Graham, which seems weird. It's not really necessary to say this and actually the accusation is slightly ridiculous (how does he know how bright Paul Graham thinks Paul Graham is?). Not good judgment to include this in the post, and undermines the rest of it for me a bit.
Agreed. Also citing Graham's "lack of experience in this area".
Even in the steelman case of the Hollywood celebrity promoting a cause they are clearly not qualified to evaluate, I think we ought not belittle the speech act itself. Better to just present your counter-arguments if you disagree.
If everyone felt free to share their opinions, the better the quantity and quality of ideas that surface after due examination.
In the beginning, the industry was dominated by nerds and hackers who were passionate about tech. Then those with business acumen noticed that this could make them very rich, and swooped in to "help out" those hackers, who, being fair, probably wouldn't be able to run a successful business on their own. But there are also examples of hackers themselves getting business savvy, and business people becoming tech oriented, and many combinations in between.
While the Silicon Valley, VC funded, hypergrowth mentality is incredibly toxic, I think you'll find many examples in the industry across this spectrum. What we're seeing with crypto, AI, etc. is just the usual hype cycle. This will inevitably be flocked by all types of characters, but we've always had these. Remember the buzz around the early web, the "information superhighway", and the inevitable dot-com bubble? Or the video game crash in the 80s? The same will happen with modern tech. We'll eventually reach the plateau of productivity of these technologies, or they will lose our interest and we'll move on to something else.
[+] [-] tptacek|1 year ago|reply
As is so often the case, these stories are just vectors along which we recapitulate our existing beliefs. Woz vs. Jobs! We'll be talking about this 50 years from now, as if there was anything to learn from it.
Of course, this means the original post, the "founder mode" post, was bad. The first cut of most things is bad! I've talked to 2 people now who saw the AirBNB talk that prompted it, and both said the talk was way better than the "founder mode" post, which left both scratching their heads. Maybe someone (maybe Graham) will find a better way to distill the talk? Neither of my friends will go into more detail about that talk, so I hope someone does.
In the meantime: this all feels like drama for its own sake. Certainly, if we're talking about business and invoking aaronsw, it seems safe to guess there isn't much trenchant in this particular story. "Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz". For fuck's sake.
[+] [-] Mistletoe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] benreesman|1 year ago|reply
One of those people actually died directly downstream of an act of civil disobedience with the issue being the commons of scientific knowledge. One of those people is on the shortest of lists around blurring the line between train and validation sets for personal financial gain so callously and so effectively that we’ll be years if not decades recovering.
People listen to you. I listen to you.
Aaron Swartz is nothing to do with this perverse contemporary thing. Far more recently than intuitive, our role models would sacrifice everything they have to take a stand. Today influential people take a stand on their own narrow self-interest even if it requires the sacrifice of what everyone has.
[+] [-] tptacek|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|1 year ago|reply
It’s broadcasting that Y Combinator is a founder friendly investor. That comes with costs, e.g. if LPs think YC would have doubled down on the next Neumann or Bankman-Fried, or that its leadership is going full Ackman. But it will work at the margins for deal-finding partners, particularly with young founders.
The hilarious part is this obviously wasn’t a message they trusted their partners to deliver. An army with precision weapons and intelligence doesn’t carpet bomb; YC is carpet bombing.
[+] [-] nazka|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gwd|1 year ago|reply
Yeah, my take was that the AirBNB guy said, "I was told A, so I did B. C happened, which was terrible. So I did D, and E happened, which was better."
Paul said, "Huh, lots of people seem to have a similar issue with A. There's a general pattern here we should figure out."
But basically all the subsequent discussions have been about A, without knowing even what B, C, D, and E were; much less knowing what all the other similar experiences were that prompted Paul's post. Maybe Paul's an idiot or maybe he's a genius, but without that data there's no way to tell.
[+] [-] dannyobrien|1 year ago|reply
I'm prompted to think about this after watching the last Apple event livestream, and thinking to myself "these people all seem so /old/". Steve Jobs seemed ancient to me when he returned to Apple in 1997: he was 42.
This is not to say that techs, hackers, etc, have grown old -- but the distribution of ages has definitely widened, and its center may have shifted a little right too. That leaves plenty of room for much younger people to look at much older people and wonder at their strange, blowhard opinions. It also leads to older types feeling tired and bored with tech : and projecting that as the dominant tone to those of any age.
[+] [-] andrew311|1 year ago|reply
Graham’s (alleged) arrogance about his brightness isn’t really the issue here. Let’s face it, he is bright. That’s not what is causing this boredom/dismay, though.
The issue is that somehow the rest of us became entranced by the “cult of Graham” and his thinking about startups/founders, and collectively we made his way into the way, ostracizing those that lived their life outside the idealized startup paradigm that Graham crafted. Creation of this dismay isn’t on him alone, it’s on all of us.
[+] [-] Animats|1 year ago|reply
There are interesting things going on:
* Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top.
* Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now.
* Electric cars. For new car sales, 10% in US are electric. 20% worldwide. 50% in China. US is way behind.
* Flying cars. The scaled-up drone flying cars actually work. First commercial deployment in China. Range is limited, but good enough to get VIPs around congested cities.
* Batteries. Solid-state batteries still are not available in quantity, because the manufacturing process is hard. At least five major companies are working on it. Somebody will crack that. They will not be in the US.
* Metals. Lots of sources found for rare earths. Electric powered basic steel has been demonstrated.
* Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured.
[+] [-] BigJono|1 year ago|reply
How has this space not seen more action on the consumer side? Roombas came out 20 years ago then there's been basically nothing but tiny increments on the same idea since.
Seems to me like an area that could make use the sensor/3d tech from self driving, but wouldn't need to be anywhere near as reliable to still be a useful product. You could probably charge Apple margins if you cracked it first. I'd pay $5-10k for something that would last a few years and could passively clean a bathroom or kitchen to a reasonable degree.
[+] [-] woodpanel|1 year ago|reply
This seems to be incorrect unless you lure in Plugin-Hybrids into the "electric cars" category. Also, the real driver of this "electric cars" market share growth in China seems to be PHEVs ("electric cars" with a combustion engine in it) while BEVs growth seems to be stalling. [1]
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/02/47-plugin-vehicle-marke...
[+] [-] rglullis|1 year ago|reply
Worse still: most of these problems were caused by the psychopaths who wanted nothing but money and power and found in the "techno-optimism" the perfect excuse to justify their actions.
[+] [-] jen729w|1 year ago|reply
Norway: hold my beer. 94%.
https://electriccarsreport.com/2024/09/norways-ev-sales-set-...
[+] [-] DidYaWipe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Gooblebrai|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] iamacyborg|1 year ago|reply
Eating less isn’t all that much of a breakthrough, but it certainly highlights how hard it is to get people to do something they don’t want to do.
[+] [-] wg0|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dennis_jeeves2|1 year ago|reply
Would disagree, we have possibly regressed. We have more gizmos (like diabetes monitors) and diagnostics, but no real cures and a significantly more sick people.
[+] [-] tired_and_awake|1 year ago|reply
As easy as it is to dismiss tech hype - nothing wrong with doing that honestly - autonomous city driving is inching closer to the ubiquity it promised a decade ago. And come on ChatGPT is pretty amazing even if it is over hyped.
Hackers are everywhere, they're just doing work and not writing hype posts.
Tech news is all jobs.
I love this article just don't fully agree with it. Love the convo in this post too! Keep it coming.
[+] [-] mihaic|1 year ago|reply
If the expectation for your average Woz is to handle seasoned bullshitters, how can you expect them to also be hackers?
It's true that VCs and an ossified economy contribute more to the blandness of new companies, but ignoring the problems with the hiring market leaves you with half a picture. I'm not blaming employees for doing what's best for them, but it feels naive and unempathetic to put the blame of aligning incentives to founders, when the problems are systemic.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|1 year ago|reply
VC have a distorted view of the world because they look for unicorns in a world where most companies just aren't. Most companies don't start out using VC money and finance their operations with revenue the company makes. It's easier than ever to get started building a company. All you need is time. And even that is getting better.
The web and cloud removed most of the cost over the last thirty years. And with LLMs we can remove a lot of people and time from the equation as well. It's gotten to the point where you can outsource a lot of things to specialized service providers instead of doing them in house.
[+] [-] daemonk|1 year ago|reply
He obviously didnt specify at all what other ways are and what this nebulous “founder mode” means. But I think just pointing out hiring an army of consultants and mbas might not be the only way to do it is an important statement to make that I don’t think most people in the corporate world would readily admit to.
[+] [-] WhereIsTheTruth|1 year ago|reply
I have no desire to contribute to this whole circus full for fraudsters
[+] [-] sulandor|1 year ago|reply
yes, non-participation is hardly possible though
[+] [-] r0ze-at-hn|1 year ago|reply
This sounds like someone who is looking for someone to blame. If founder after founder is having this problem what are the odds that there is something else going on and perhaps the reports are doing exactly what the founder is rewarding?
I see in a lot of tech companies is a system where all the incentives are about getting promoted. IC's are trying to build things that look big and complex and "hard". Future maintenance burden, product impact, etc are difficult to measure and also super easy to game. All that matters is that they might get promoted so they can jump teams and do it again. Managers are promoted based on headcount and do everything they can to keep reports and grow like weeds. A dysfunctional org? Yes please, let me triple it in size to solve the problem, we have the money and this org is important, and I become important in the process. Sure some (not all) might need to grow the top line by X%, but in a growing industry/product category/company that might be the default so the focus is again on growing their career. They spend all their time on hiring and annual reviews and promo committees and almost no time on actual strategy. And getting rid of under performers was difficult and as long of a process as possible because there was no incentive to make that simple.
As long at the tide rises all boats and the CEO rewards this behavior everyone plays this game. When the water starts flowing out suddenly you have a CEO looking around going wtf when everyone did exactly what they incentivized.
[+] [-] lazystar|1 year ago|reply
"Organizational disaster and organizational decay: the case of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration"
http://www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/schwartz/Org%20Decay%20at...
[+] [-] gitfbensool832|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] gitfbensool832|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] langsoul-com|1 year ago|reply
The hackers have disappeared and we're apart of the prohlem.
Should really have a tag rule to prevent any boring business start up bogus discussions when the poster wants.
[+] [-] akkartik|1 year ago|reply
This isn't really true. Look at the current top Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41544969. Zero business discussion on there.
I've been avoiding the business threads on HN for about 10 years now[1], and the frontpage still has enough stuff to keep me coming back, and the comments on those threads are fine as well. There are fewer comments on those threads, and that too is a good thing.
HN is 3 distinct sub-communities, to my mind: startup news, hacker news and what I think of as "the human condition" news which encompasses humanities posts like lithub and so on. I participate in 2 of them.
I agree with you that we hackers are part of the problem. But it's not a systemic problem. We can still choose what we attend to. We're not lacking for options.
[1] I really wish that people used HN's favorites feature more, and that favorites were more organically discoverable. Here are mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=akkartik
[+] [-] exceptione|1 year ago|reply
Ideals count, certainly for hackers. If you have billions in the bank you might start to look to work on some real pressing problems instead of looking to get a share of the next Privacy Suck.
Erosion of democratic societies via algorithmically boosted disinformation campaigns, climate change, healthcare, you name it. Tech is not neutral in the societal sense, far from it.
Also, I doubt if AI (now even more widgets), with those tech leaders pressing for it, is compatible with being a tech enthusiast. Techies like tech first, results second.
If software engineering becomes chess, it will be preserved as tournaments, not business.
[+] [-] gipp|1 year ago|reply
Distills the post to a sentence, and boy does this nail it.
[+] [-] preommr|1 year ago|reply
Because it's a lot more true than most tech people want to admit.
I am continuously amazed at how many brilliant people there are, that do fantastic things, that do not bring in anywhere near what their value is. Look no further than open source, there's people that write important software begging for scraps while flashy startups get showered with money if they yammer the right buzzwords.
There are certain people that don't want to hear this, but being a leader and visionary is, in practice, a more valuable asset than the cumulative technical skills.
[+] [-] Quothling|1 year ago|reply
I think you could also make the case for saying that the industry is full of Zuckerbergs (maybe Sam Altmans in a few years), but I'm not sure the advertisement industry is really all that related to tech. I know it may not be the most popular thing to say, but is there really that much of a difference between selling Tobacco, Coca Cola, Search Engines or Social Media? All are popular products which haven't really changed the world for the better.
[+] [-] jmathai|1 year ago|reply
101 North into San Francisco was an exciting drive in the 2000s. I t the 2010s it slowly started to change with billboards one by one changing towards soulless enterprise software.
That drive now doesn’t have a single product anyone should be excited about.
And enterprise software is truly boring. And that an understatement. I got very bored and disenchanted with software because it all sort of sucked.
My other hypothesis is that there will be a resurgence of indie consumer and SMB software that’s not so soulless. And I hate to mention AI but I think it’s the enabler of these apps being viable for very small teams to not go after funding and keep their soul.
[+] [-] tarsinge|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] spacecadet|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bjornsing|1 year ago|reply
I bet a young Woz today would be a hell of a lot better off in Graham’s world than in this guy’s “big companies are great” world.
[+] [-] arathis|1 year ago|reply
The utopia would be an equitable society, where we work far less than our ancestors did, allowing us to focus on pursuing our interests and desires—not just buying security. But not only does that seem unattainable, it's pursuit is considered laziness or opting-out of a social contract whereby 99% of people fight to make 1% rich with the delusion being that maybe it's me that's the 1% and that with the riches I can score I can ride off into the sunset, and get off this foul ride forever.
Makes me sick how far we don fell.
[+] [-] aDyslecticCrow|1 year ago|reply
Technology has become so powerful and integrated into our society that the companies that drive it have become as powerful as governments, and our political systems cannot keep up.
I see this in how the EU suddenly is stepping up to regulate American tech companies, something it was never designed or meant to do. They are suddenly the only organization with enough regulatory power to do so properly, as the American government seems to have given up trying themselves.
I don't think this is unsolvable. I'd love to see "fiduciary duty laws" disbanded for one, and America being less of a pushover for lobbying would go a long way as well. By time, we will figure out what works and what doesn't.
[+] [-] raytopia|1 year ago|reply
The raspberry pi community is also in the hacker space, I think the shortages and the price of the newer products hurt it some but I'm sure the spirit will come back. [1]
Overall I'd say that people spend too much time on the internet and it's effectively a full time job form them but with no breaks, which of course leads to burn out/disappointment. [2]
I'm rambling at this point but maybe there needs to be a hobbiest hackernews or something.
[0] When most stuff is priced $10 at most and they're are onyl at most 100k devices on the market, there is not much money to be made.
[1] I'm still disappointed there is not much of a gamedev/creative software community around the raspberry pi.
[2] And when you read about angry sad things all day because that's how Merchants of Despair keep you on their sites. Well it's hard not to feel angry and sad.
[+] [-] KaiserPro|1 year ago|reply
Yes, it would be good to get some domain experts in, rather than people who are comfortable re-hashing press releases with an "trust me, the physics of this perpetual motion machine check out" or "lol they are shit" overlay.
Especially as tech now is moving from a "oh thats a simple idea, just needs executing" to actual "shiut the physics of this make it super hard" (ie AR)
[+] [-] mangecoeur|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kazcaptain|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zoom6628|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fancyfredbot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dsubburam|1 year ago|reply
Even in the steelman case of the Hollywood celebrity promoting a cause they are clearly not qualified to evaluate, I think we ought not belittle the speech act itself. Better to just present your counter-arguments if you disagree.
If everyone felt free to share their opinions, the better the quantity and quality of ideas that surface after due examination.
[+] [-] imiric|1 year ago|reply
In the beginning, the industry was dominated by nerds and hackers who were passionate about tech. Then those with business acumen noticed that this could make them very rich, and swooped in to "help out" those hackers, who, being fair, probably wouldn't be able to run a successful business on their own. But there are also examples of hackers themselves getting business savvy, and business people becoming tech oriented, and many combinations in between.
While the Silicon Valley, VC funded, hypergrowth mentality is incredibly toxic, I think you'll find many examples in the industry across this spectrum. What we're seeing with crypto, AI, etc. is just the usual hype cycle. This will inevitably be flocked by all types of characters, but we've always had these. Remember the buzz around the early web, the "information superhighway", and the inevitable dot-com bubble? Or the video game crash in the 80s? The same will happen with modern tech. We'll eventually reach the plateau of productivity of these technologies, or they will lose our interest and we'll move on to something else.