11 ms·

Uncanny Valley (2016)

70 points by ForHackernews 9y ago

rhaps0dy 9y ago
This is intriguing and aesthetic and I've read it until the end because of that, but I didn't understand it. Is this the story of the author, who quit a startup? Why did she quit? She writes that she believed in her company's work, and was good at her own work, and liked it. However in the end she says she actually means the opposite. Why? I'm quite confused :\
- bribroder 9y ago
  The author is reflecting on opportunity costs and the dysphoria generated by an anxiety-inducing rewards system which pays out randomly huge amounts to people who don't seem to deserve it, while inflicting a lack of control and ownership on others. The title reference to the "uncanny valley" points out that working for a Silicon Valley startup is marketed as a fulfilled lifestyle, providing a sense of accomplishment in solving real problems and just about everything you could imagine if you work hard enough. But it turns out to be an illusion, eerily close to the real thing yet ultimately unsatisfying and false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley To make things worse, the startup life is so seductive and demanding that it excludes a lot of other potentially rewarding life choices which the author's peers enjoy. The author feels that startup workers are victims of operant conditioning and lack real independent agency in their lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning It's been pointed out that unpredictable rewards really screw up brains, causing them to obsess over the payout despite the overall returns being low. The author feels that startups and gambling have a lot in common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop In the author's case, the conditioning is so strong that, when she thinks back on her experience with the startup, she's still seeing herself as part of it even three years later and she still feels the same compulsion.
  - rhaps0dy 9y ago
    Interesting. I see how that can follow, for example, from the bit about her friend who won the hackathon lottery. Also from the "What is it like to be fun? What is it like to feel like you’ve earned this?", though she writes that when she's talking with a developer who isn't actually in silicon valley. It still seems like a bit of a stretch to infer that from the text, this feeling upset because of her own brain being manipulated by random rewards making the payoff seem higher. But it's a self-consistent interpretation and better than any that I have so I'll take it. Thank you for taking the time to write it!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
kawera 9y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691
cyberpunk0 9y ago
To author: It appears the realization is setting in now that most of the VC landscape is a fugazi, a playground for the mindless rich pissing away millions on trends they can't see the hearts of, on overdeveloping asinine apps and gadgets blind by their pointlessness and lack of need amongst the growing sea of world problems, and on lavish offices and 100 engineers to over-engineer and over-complicate every code base as long as the new hires only come from ${MIT, Stanford, CalTech} after having been privileged with the means to attend. To you and your melancholy, wading through the quagmire of self absorbed executives seeking to get rich, those false prophets whose only aim is as much money as their ravenous actions can exploit, to you I say welcome to the reality the rest of us have been living our entire lives, welcome to your disillusionment.
- dang 9y ago
  Would you please not rant like this here? It isn't that you're wrong; it's that even if right, this is not in the spirit of intellectual curiosity which motivates HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Ginning up rage is a different thing, and the two are not compatible. Take out the rage and it becomes plain that what you've written here is too generic to have much substance. Curiosity requires a gentler touch and a more specific one. For example, if you have personal experience with things related to the article, sharing something about those, the way you would to peers in a good discussion, would make for an entirely better comment.
  - the_cat_kittles 9y ago
    disagree- it reads in an interesting way, cultivating a mood that wouldn't exist if you just stated the "facts". its also, i would say, in thematic agreement with the linked article.
    - dang 9y ago
      Quite right, but it's a tradeoff. We have years of experience with the effects posts like that have on HN, and they're dreadful. I puzzled over this dynamic for years but it seems clear to me now: the issue is genre/medium fit. In the case of the GP comment, the genre is the diatribe. A scathing diatribe in a small literary salon or journal, like n+1, is one thing; on a large, public, internet forum it's another. In the first case it's interesting and leads to interesting responses. In the second it's a fast track to the bottom of the barrel, a snake in Snakes and Ladders. Imagine if anyone who felt like it could reply to any n+1 piece and n+1 had to publish all of them as new pieces without editing. What would happen to quality? It would tank. Personal projection, simple misunderstanding, dimwittedness, windbaggery, reversion to the mean: every known factor would work against you. Extrapolate further and this would kill n+1. In both cases—a small literary forum and a large internet one—the goal is more complex, more interesting formations, but the way to get them could not be more different. The more I learn about this, the more I appreciate McLuhan. Most of the issues on HN derive from the medium, not what people post to it.
malvosenior 9y ago
Very well written but I’m afraid this is the natural outcome when someone who doesn’t truly love tech gets into the tech industry. Sure, office culture is banal in the extreme but if you have a lifelong passion to be the best developer possible, getting paid to code is not such an existentially crushing experience. I think we should question if blindly pushing people into tech actually works/is a good idea or if it’s just a recipe for disaster for all involved.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  "this is the natural outcome when someone who doesn’t truly love tech gets into the tech industry" I had loved tech long before I started working in the industry, and when I first started everything was fresh and new. I saw wide, interesting vistas ahead of me. Learning whatever I had to learn was a joy, and I did it well. Even offices themselves were new and different to me. I was impressed by their opulence, access to cool tech that I couldn't afford on my own, by the professionalism and competence of the people I worked with. I felt I could learn a lot from them, and I did. That lasted maybe a few years. Then I burnt out from overwork and from feeling undervalued and treated like crap by people who didn't understand what I did and thought themselves superior to me. People were lied to and manipulated for profit, treated like replaceable widgets, and thrown out on a whim. Corporate cheerleading speeches and "morale boosting" or "team building" activities were nauseating, two-faced affairs where management pretended to believe in the bullshit they were dishing out and their underlings pretended to love swallowing it. No one was fooled, but the charade continued. The grand technological vistas I had seen ahead of me had dwindled as I learned and mastered the truly novel, interesting things I had to learn. What was left to do became repetitive and boring, and I really couldn't care less about being the cog in the machine that was designed to make the owners of the company and other bigshots rich. Instead of being interesting and challenging, over time I started viewing learning new tech as just an endless, tedious chore of learning irrelevant minutia, and every time I've gone back in to the industry after that first burn out, I've burnt out more and more. Honestly, I don't know how some people keep up their enthusiasm for technology over the decades, in the face of so much stress, corporate bullshit, and endless repetition. I just get way too bored and fed up with all that before long.
JohnDeHope 9y ago
I'm glad this resurfaced. The only thing I have in common with the author was that we both work in tech, but that doesn't have much to do with their story. It was so well written I couldn't put it down. I hope they're feeling better now, a few years later.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  In particular this resonates painfully, “This is a cozy home for believers in bootstrapping and meritocracy, proponents of shallow libertarianism.“ And then... VENTURE CAPITALISTS HAVE SPEARHEADED massive innovation in the past few decades, not least of which is their incubation of this generation’s very worst prose style. The internet is choked with blindly ambitious and professionally inexperienced men giving each other anecdote-based instruction and bullet-point advice. 10 Essential Start-up Lessons You Won’t Learn in School. 10 Things Every Successful Entrepreneur Knows. 5 Ways to Stay Humble. Why the Market Always Wins. Why the Customer Is Never Right. How to Deal with Failure. How to Fail Better. How to Fail Up. How to Pivot. How to Pivot Back. 18 Platitudes to Tape Above Your Computer. Raise Your Way to Emotional Acuity. How to Love Something That Doesn’t Love You Back. Sometimes it feels like everyone is speaking a different language — or the same language, with radically different rules. At our all-hands meeting, we are subjected to a pep talk. Our director looks like he hasn’t slept in days, but he straightens up and moves his gaze from face to face, making direct and metered eye contact with everyone around the table. “We are making products,” he begins, “that can push the fold of mankind.” I wonder if most people in that world understand how bizarre and grotesque it is to everyone else looking in?
staplers 9y ago
This reads like an updated version of American Psycho. Love it.
true_tuna 9y ago
Nice

70 points by ForHackernews 9y ago

This is intriguing and aesthetic and I've read it until the end because of that, but I didn't understand it. Is this the story of the author, who quit a startup? Why did she quit? She writes that she believed in her company's work, and was good at her own work, and liked it. However in the end she says she actually means the opposite. Why? I'm quite confused :\

bribroder 9y ago
The author is reflecting on opportunity costs and the dysphoria generated by an anxiety-inducing rewards system which pays out randomly huge amounts to people who don't seem to deserve it, while inflicting a lack of control and ownership on others. The title reference to the "uncanny valley" points out that working for a Silicon Valley startup is marketed as a fulfilled lifestyle, providing a sense of accomplishment in solving real problems and just about everything you could imagine if you work hard enough. But it turns out to be an illusion, eerily close to the real thing yet ultimately unsatisfying and false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley To make things worse, the startup life is so seductive and demanding that it excludes a lot of other potentially rewarding life choices which the author's peers enjoy. The author feels that startup workers are victims of operant conditioning and lack real independent agency in their lives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning It's been pointed out that unpredictable rewards really screw up brains, causing them to obsess over the payout despite the overall returns being low. The author feels that startups and gambling have a lot in common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop In the author's case, the conditioning is so strong that, when she thinks back on her experience with the startup, she's still seeing herself as part of it even three years later and she still feels the same compulsion.
- rhaps0dy 9y ago
  Interesting. I see how that can follow, for example, from the bit about her friend who won the hackathon lottery. Also from the "What is it like to be fun? What is it like to feel like you’ve earned this?", though she writes that when she's talking with a developer who isn't actually in silicon valley. It still seems like a bit of a stretch to infer that from the text, this feeling upset because of her own brain being manipulated by random rewards making the payoff seem higher. But it's a self-consistent interpretation and better than any that I have so I'll take it. Thank you for taking the time to write it!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

kawera 9y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691

cyberpunk0 9y ago

To author: It appears the realization is setting in now that most of the VC landscape is a fugazi, a playground for the mindless rich pissing away millions on trends they can't see the hearts of, on overdeveloping asinine apps and gadgets blind by their pointlessness and lack of need amongst the growing sea of world problems, and on lavish offices and 100 engineers to over-engineer and over-complicate every code base as long as the new hires only come from ${MIT, Stanford, CalTech} after having been privileged with the means to attend. To you and your melancholy, wading through the quagmire of self absorbed executives seeking to get rich, those false prophets whose only aim is as much money as their ravenous actions can exploit, to you I say welcome to the reality the rest of us have been living our entire lives, welcome to your disillusionment.

dang 9y ago
Would you please not rant like this here? It isn't that you're wrong; it's that even if right, this is not in the spirit of intellectual curiosity which motivates HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Ginning up rage is a different thing, and the two are not compatible. Take out the rage and it becomes plain that what you've written here is too generic to have much substance. Curiosity requires a gentler touch and a more specific one. For example, if you have personal experience with things related to the article, sharing something about those, the way you would to peers in a good discussion, would make for an entirely better comment.
- the_cat_kittles 9y ago
  disagree- it reads in an interesting way, cultivating a mood that wouldn't exist if you just stated the "facts". its also, i would say, in thematic agreement with the linked article.
  - dang 9y ago
    Quite right, but it's a tradeoff. We have years of experience with the effects posts like that have on HN, and they're dreadful. I puzzled over this dynamic for years but it seems clear to me now: the issue is genre/medium fit. In the case of the GP comment, the genre is the diatribe. A scathing diatribe in a small literary salon or journal, like n+1, is one thing; on a large, public, internet forum it's another. In the first case it's interesting and leads to interesting responses. In the second it's a fast track to the bottom of the barrel, a snake in Snakes and Ladders. Imagine if anyone who felt like it could reply to any n+1 piece and n+1 had to publish all of them as new pieces without editing. What would happen to quality? It would tank. Personal projection, simple misunderstanding, dimwittedness, windbaggery, reversion to the mean: every known factor would work against you. Extrapolate further and this would kill n+1. In both cases—a small literary forum and a large internet one—the goal is more complex, more interesting formations, but the way to get them could not be more different. The more I learn about this, the more I appreciate McLuhan. Most of the issues on HN derive from the medium, not what people post to it.

malvosenior 9y ago

Very well written but I’m afraid this is the natural outcome when someone who doesn’t truly love tech gets into the tech industry. Sure, office culture is banal in the extreme but if you have a lifelong passion to be the best developer possible, getting paid to code is not such an existentially crushing experience. I think we should question if blindly pushing people into tech actually works/is a good idea or if it’s just a recipe for disaster for all involved.

pmoriarty 9y ago
"this is the natural outcome when someone who doesn’t truly love tech gets into the tech industry" I had loved tech long before I started working in the industry, and when I first started everything was fresh and new. I saw wide, interesting vistas ahead of me. Learning whatever I had to learn was a joy, and I did it well. Even offices themselves were new and different to me. I was impressed by their opulence, access to cool tech that I couldn't afford on my own, by the professionalism and competence of the people I worked with. I felt I could learn a lot from them, and I did. That lasted maybe a few years. Then I burnt out from overwork and from feeling undervalued and treated like crap by people who didn't understand what I did and thought themselves superior to me. People were lied to and manipulated for profit, treated like replaceable widgets, and thrown out on a whim. Corporate cheerleading speeches and "morale boosting" or "team building" activities were nauseating, two-faced affairs where management pretended to believe in the bullshit they were dishing out and their underlings pretended to love swallowing it. No one was fooled, but the charade continued. The grand technological vistas I had seen ahead of me had dwindled as I learned and mastered the truly novel, interesting things I had to learn. What was left to do became repetitive and boring, and I really couldn't care less about being the cog in the machine that was designed to make the owners of the company and other bigshots rich. Instead of being interesting and challenging, over time I started viewing learning new tech as just an endless, tedious chore of learning irrelevant minutia, and every time I've gone back in to the industry after that first burn out, I've burnt out more and more. Honestly, I don't know how some people keep up their enthusiasm for technology over the decades, in the face of so much stress, corporate bullshit, and endless repetition. I just get way too bored and fed up with all that before long.

JohnDeHope 9y ago

I'm glad this resurfaced. The only thing I have in common with the author was that we both work in tech, but that doesn't have much to do with their story. It was so well written I couldn't put it down. I hope they're feeling better now, a few years later.

QAPereo 9y ago
In particular this resonates painfully, “This is a cozy home for believers in bootstrapping and meritocracy, proponents of shallow libertarianism.“ And then... VENTURE CAPITALISTS HAVE SPEARHEADED massive innovation in the past few decades, not least of which is their incubation of this generation’s very worst prose style. The internet is choked with blindly ambitious and professionally inexperienced men giving each other anecdote-based instruction and bullet-point advice. 10 Essential Start-up Lessons You Won’t Learn in School. 10 Things Every Successful Entrepreneur Knows. 5 Ways to Stay Humble. Why the Market Always Wins. Why the Customer Is Never Right. How to Deal with Failure. How to Fail Better. How to Fail Up. How to Pivot. How to Pivot Back. 18 Platitudes to Tape Above Your Computer. Raise Your Way to Emotional Acuity. How to Love Something That Doesn’t Love You Back. Sometimes it feels like everyone is speaking a different language — or the same language, with radically different rules. At our all-hands meeting, we are subjected to a pep talk. Our director looks like he hasn’t slept in days, but he straightens up and moves his gaze from face to face, making direct and metered eye contact with everyone around the table. “We are making products,” he begins, “that can push the fold of mankind.” I wonder if most people in that world understand how bizarre and grotesque it is to everyone else looking in?

staplers 9y ago

This reads like an updated version of American Psycho. Love it.

true_tuna 9y ago

Nice