10 ms·

An Alternative History of Silicon Valley Disruption

116 points by pmcpinto 8y ago

plankers 8y ago
Can confirm, was a contractor in Silicon Valley. The "narrative" these executives sell is little more than an opiate for their fleets of highly-paid engineers to feel like they're justified in having a salary several times higher than the contractors they work with on a daily basis.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  Huh don't self employed contractors make more in terms of $ to cover the extra costs 3x is norm in the UK.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    This is how I know it from Germany but in the US most contractors seem to make less than employees.
    - 01100011 8y ago
      Depends. If you're a talented engineer you stand to make a lot more money as a contractor if you stay busy and set your rates appropriately. The average salary in my area is $140k for a senior software engineer. As a contractor I could make $110-150/hr which could be $170k at the low end once the extra taxes paid by contractors are taken into account. None of those numbers include normal state and federal income taxes which would apply equally to both. Also being a corp entitles you to play a few tax games which let you reduce your tax burden slightly.
      - maxxxxx 8y ago
        I was contractor for a while and never saw those $100-150/hr contracts. In my current company the contracting agency gets within that range but the contractors themselves see much less.
        curuinor 8y ago
        Did you have any leverage with the counterparty?
        plankers 8y ago
        Not even a tiny bit. Especially when it's your first job out of college.
        mcguire 8y ago
        When I was working for a no-name contractor for IBM, the contractor got 13% of my hourly. Government contractors seem more like 50%.
        01100011 8y ago
        It helps to form your own corp and go direct. If your company can charge $150 for you, then you have a chance at charging $150 for you. Your company might provide some added value, so you might need to drop your rate a bit, but if you develop customer relationships and consistently meet expectations then you can get away with jacking up your rate a bit. There are times when you still might have to take a lower paying job but it varies.
    - curuinor 8y ago
      My contracting rate was double my hourly rate...
      - maxxxxx 8y ago
        Where?
      - dredmorbius 8y ago
        Given taxes, bench/beach time, risk premiums (unexpected downtime, search costs), that may well be too low.
  - jldugger 8y ago
    AFAICT, there's two kinds of contractors. The first kind are experts that companies don't have enough ultraspecialized knowledge work to keep on a salaried basis. These people are like the Wolf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWmRTjLRMfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWmRTjLRMfU), brought in for problems nobody on staff was able to solve and charge accordingly. All the contractors of this type I know are self-represented, no middlemen. 3x is a norm, but often much higher due to their niche experience. The other kind of contractor is ordered from an agency. The agency might charge a shit ton, but the IC sees a fraction of that. These agencies only profit from the markup, so they position themselves accordingly; they find as much cheap labor as they can. If you look at the top H1-B sponsors, it's typically dominated by these places. Nominally places like Infosys file Labor Condition Assessments at 10x the rate of Google, but in a sense most big tech firms are outsourcing the H1-B process to the body shops. As you can imagine, this puts downward pressure on contractor wages.
    - plankers 8y ago
      Quite right. My contracting agency was making as much as I was for every hour I worked. Doesn't seem right when all they did was handle complaints and payroll issues. On the bright side, they were throwing money at us anyway and my student loans are paid off. Left a sour taste in my mouth, though. Haven't worked in tech since.
- sjg007 8y ago
  The w2 outsourced contractors are a long standing issue in silicon valley and tech, as such even the IRS has weighed in and basically only allows tech companies to have someone on contract for 2 years. There's some additional issues with it in that you really are a w2 employee because you don't get to chose when and where you do the work (or what hours you work).. So in a sense it is worse than uber because you can't choose your hours. Companies like it because it is low risk and you typically can get someone in for a lower wage than you would have to pay otherwise. Netflix is using contractors now btw.. I imagine things have evolved since the good old days: https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-dont-treat-c/dont-treat-contractors-like-employees-idUSTRE53063S20090401 https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-... But things largely have stayed the same.
hndude 8y ago
Any additional evidence (either for or against) the claim that government pays for tech advances, while the private sector is who sees a return from that?
- empath75 8y ago
  Federal spending accounts for 44% of basic research spending. at one point, it was as high as 70%. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-govern... Generally, the pattern has been that government and university funded researchers make the early discoveries, and then corporations do the research towards applying them. Universities benefit from patents, but the federal government doesn't.
  - JackFr 8y ago
    One of the things that makes research "basic research" is that there isn't an obvious financial incentive for it. IBM, AT&T and Xerox at the height if their monopolies could afford to do some, but in general it's a financial loss on the timescale of a human or a corporation. But what we see sometimes (alternative energy, drug research, e.g.) is government funding of applied research, and that isn't good for the market or the science, and should be called out.
    - Retric 8y ago
      Locking up applied research at companies often creates a lot waste as several companies do the same research and don’t share their results outside of patents/products.
  - sjg007 8y ago
    Feds get income tax revenue. They/we benefit.
    - DATACOMMANDER 8y ago
      They would have gotten that revenue even if the research had been privately funded.
prepend 8y ago
I’m not sure what this articles point is. Disruption as called by Christensen, Andreeson, Thiel, etc all talks about displaced jobs and industries. I don’t think this is unknown. It’s just that the benefits outweigh the costs (to some). So this isn’t an alternative history more than it is just a weird anecdote or two without follow-up. I’m not sure what Wired is as a magazine any more. It really needs knowledgeable editors to plan and shape stories along some theme. I feel like these stories about rich and bad Silicon Valley is are pretty common and all boil down to the same reality that Silicon Valley has high margins and makes a lot of money for in demand employees and stockholders. This isn’t relevatory though and I’m not sure what Wired’s angle is.
- JackFr 8y ago
  > I’m not sure what this articles point is. ... > So this isn’t an alternative history more than it is just a weird anecdote or two without follow-up. It's weird. The article seems to be a book review somehow cast as a news article or thought piece. Read as a book review it's a perfectly reasonable and informative.
- fullshark 8y ago
  It's a summary of three books and how they are showcasing a larger story of the tech industry under fire I guess.
empath75 8y ago
> For instance, the same year the government loaned $535 million to solar-power company Solyndra, it also loaned Tesla $465 million. “Taxpayers footed the bill for Solyndra’s losses—yet got hardly any of Tesla’s” gains, she says. Solyndra has become “a byword for the government’s sorry track record when it came to picking winners,” a story that has helped keep regulators at bay, she says. I'm no Tesla fan, but that's sort of how loans work. You get your money back plus interest. It's not a lottery ticket. And Tesla paid back their loan early. I don't think the program lost very much money overall.
- AlphaSite 8y ago
  Pretty much, I mean the argument is that there are jobs/tax revenue/etc to be gained from having a healthy local market. There may not be direct returns, but that’s not really the point.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  Loans are often structured with a penalty if they are paid back early. The provider of the capital wants the scheduled payments more than they want access to the capital. Perhaps big fat government loans should really be purchases of special restricted securities (that do things like limit the control the government has over the company and prevent dilution).
  - dbt00 8y ago
    The auto bailouts in the late-08/early-09 timeframe were structured as warrant purchases (similar to options), and the government did see upside. In-Q-Tel is a program where the government invests in startups and participates in equity growth. So it's not impossible, but not particularly common.
- tway2888888 8y ago
  >I don't think the program lost very much money overall. It's not about whether it lost money. What were the risk adjusted expected rates of return? Was the interest rate sufficient? Was this the best way to invest that half-a-billion dollars? It certainly was not with Solyndra. The fact that, in hindsight, Tesla paid back the loan doesn't determine whether it was "worth it" or not. The government may have gotten lucky. That's no way to run a lending business.
malvosenior 8y ago
How can someone write a whole article about disruption but not actually use the correct, well understood meaning of the term? They literally just made up their own strawman definition of what "disruption" means (tech people getting rich I guess?). Disruption has always been used to mean disrupting established market leaders via innovation. Guess what? That's exactly what has happened with Uber, AirBnB, Amazon... If anyone wants to learn more about the actual meaning of disruption, I suggest The Innovator's Dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  > Uber, AirBnB, Amazon Amazon, sure, but Uber & AirBnB? Wasn't their "innovation" flaunting the law to gain a temporary advantage before regulation leveled the field again?
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    Uber disrupted taxi companies. AirBnB disrupted the hotel industry. Both used technology to get there (there were no apps to hail taxis anywhere near feature parity with Uber for instance). They also leveraged the distribution mechanisms of the app store to reach scale. > Wasn't their "innovation" flaunting the law to gain a temporary advantage before regulation leveled the field again? Whether you view it that way or not (I don't) it doesn't change the fact that these companies successfully disrupted established players. It doesn't matter if it was "innovative" (again I think it was), the end result was textbook disruption.
    - ThomPete 8y ago
      Uber and airbnb outcompeted them by offering lower prices and disregarded obviously outdated laws. The phone was what actually disrupted the industry not the actual services.
      - JackFr 8y ago
        > disregarded obviously outdated laws That's disruption?
thoughtexplorer 8y ago
> (One of the future Trump adviser’s least favorite words? “Politics.”) What's with this unrelated off topic dig? Secondly, what's the point they're trying to make? That Thiel is a hypocrite? If so, you can both hate politics/government and work to try to improve it. One strategy is to do so from within. Musk was trying to do the same for a while.
technobabble 8y ago
Books mentioned in the article: - How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary by Louis Hyman - The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy by Mariana Mazzucato - Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas edit: formatting, copy paste issues (argh)
- albntomat0 8y ago
  The book by Mazzucato is "The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy"
  - technobabble 8y ago
    Thank you
mcguire 8y ago
It's nice to see Wired still has their visual panache, but how do I get rid of the pop-up ad covering half the screen?
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  https://outline.com/https://www.wired.com/story/alternative-history-of-silicon-valley-disruption/ https://outline.com/https://www.wired.com/story/alternative-...
Endama 8y ago
This article touches on an idea that I think many in the tech industry (myself included) continue to be myopic about: as disruptors we are held responsible for the negative social outcomes that we bestow upon society. I think many (not all) of us who work in software believe that the innovations we unleash, in-and-of themselves, make up for nearly any negative externality caused as consequence. We have brought services or experiences that have made life more convenient, faster, more accessible, etc.; that should be more than sufficient to legitimize our existence and effort. Inside this framework, the driving factor is what Wired calls "techno-darwinism" the idea that software companies are "still standing post-disruption must have survived because they were the fittest". If you talk to people in SV, especially after the depression, the stereotype was that every startup was about to "change the world by becoming the [X] for [Y]" (Uber for cookies, AirBNB for laundry, etc.) However, the outside world looks at us with disdain: they don't view our motivations as a desire for simple innovation or creativity, but outright greed and power. The folks that we have disrupted are often those who do not have the means to convert their labor to new industries; even when they do, those industries then get disrupted by some new actor. Tech workers also have, stereotypically, been disdainful of government: it's too slow, too compromised/corrupt, too inefficient. However, engagement with the polity is the main vehicle by which the poor and disenfranchised are are able to find some kind of recourse for their lives, either by the ballot box or the ammo box. I've been telling my non-tech friends recently that the great sin of our industry is not greed, its naivety and hubris.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  > However, the outside world looks at us with disdain The only people that view the tech industry with disdain are journalists and old media. Regular people happily use their iPhones, Facebook, Uber, AirBnB... Just because a lot of ink is spilled trying to keep outdated media models alive, it doesn't mean the general population feels this way. The success of all of these services is proof enough that people are not bothered.
  - Endama 8y ago
    When it comes to the services/products, I agree with you, the general population certainly thinks they are great. However, how often have you heard of tech workers as being a positive thing for a city? How many times in TV shows / movies are tech workers seen as a boon? (e.g. Silicon Valley, Black Mirror, Searching) I'm not saying that this _necessarily_ means that literally everyone feels disdain towards the tech industry across all slices of society, I am arguing that the banner of disruption of being a good thing by definition, is misguided.
charlesbradshaw 8y ago
This article deeply disappoints me as Hacker news is the last place that I would expect to find Luddites. > They promised the open web, we got walled gardens Google doesn't give out its users data in the same way that a bank doesn't give out it's users balances. > ...many of the dystopian business practices we associate with fast-growing tech platforms [like] operating with a small group of well-paid engineers, surrounded by contractors The implication here is that before Amazon, no company applied aggressive and unethical cost saving measures. When was Nestle founded again? > Uber did not cause this precarious economy. It is the waste product of the service economy This is the kind of thing that makes you sound smart but means nothing. There is not an explanation of the "waste product of the service economy" that follows this quote. In fact this implies it is not Uber's fault at all for disrupting the taxi industry. > In the case of venture capitalists, [...] their real genius appears to lie in their timing: their ability to enter a sector late, after the highest development risks had already been taken, but at an optimum moment to make a killing The implication being that nobody made a competitor company before the internet was around. The other claim is that being n+1 to the market gives you a guaranteed and significant advantage. If this was the case it would be trivial to overtake Google. > The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings This line tells me that the author has gotten used to modern day conveniences that tech has brought us and thinks its unpredictable that people who made companies that span the globe are rich and powerful.

116 points by pmcpinto 8y ago

Can confirm, was a contractor in Silicon Valley. The "narrative" these executives sell is little more than an opiate for their fleets of highly-paid engineers to feel like they're justified in having a salary several times higher than the contractors they work with on a daily basis.

C1sc0cat 8y ago
Huh don't self employed contractors make more in terms of $ to cover the extra costs 3x is norm in the UK.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  This is how I know it from Germany but in the US most contractors seem to make less than employees.
  - 01100011 8y ago
    Depends. If you're a talented engineer you stand to make a lot more money as a contractor if you stay busy and set your rates appropriately. The average salary in my area is $140k for a senior software engineer. As a contractor I could make $110-150/hr which could be $170k at the low end once the extra taxes paid by contractors are taken into account. None of those numbers include normal state and federal income taxes which would apply equally to both. Also being a corp entitles you to play a few tax games which let you reduce your tax burden slightly.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      I was contractor for a while and never saw those $100-150/hr contracts. In my current company the contracting agency gets within that range but the contractors themselves see much less.
      - curuinor 8y ago
        Did you have any leverage with the counterparty?
        plankers 8y ago
        Not even a tiny bit. Especially when it's your first job out of college.
      - mcguire 8y ago
        When I was working for a no-name contractor for IBM, the contractor got 13% of my hourly. Government contractors seem more like 50%.
      - 01100011 8y ago
        It helps to form your own corp and go direct. If your company can charge $150 for you, then you have a chance at charging $150 for you. Your company might provide some added value, so you might need to drop your rate a bit, but if you develop customer relationships and consistently meet expectations then you can get away with jacking up your rate a bit. There are times when you still might have to take a lower paying job but it varies.
  - curuinor 8y ago
    My contracting rate was double my hourly rate...
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      Where?
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      Given taxes, bench/beach time, risk premiums (unexpected downtime, search costs), that may well be too low.
- jldugger 8y ago
  AFAICT, there's two kinds of contractors. The first kind are experts that companies don't have enough ultraspecialized knowledge work to keep on a salaried basis. These people are like the Wolf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWmRTjLRMfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWmRTjLRMfU), brought in for problems nobody on staff was able to solve and charge accordingly. All the contractors of this type I know are self-represented, no middlemen. 3x is a norm, but often much higher due to their niche experience. The other kind of contractor is ordered from an agency. The agency might charge a shit ton, but the IC sees a fraction of that. These agencies only profit from the markup, so they position themselves accordingly; they find as much cheap labor as they can. If you look at the top H1-B sponsors, it's typically dominated by these places. Nominally places like Infosys file Labor Condition Assessments at 10x the rate of Google, but in a sense most big tech firms are outsourcing the H1-B process to the body shops. As you can imagine, this puts downward pressure on contractor wages.
  - plankers 8y ago
    Quite right. My contracting agency was making as much as I was for every hour I worked. Doesn't seem right when all they did was handle complaints and payroll issues. On the bright side, they were throwing money at us anyway and my student loans are paid off. Left a sour taste in my mouth, though. Haven't worked in tech since.
sjg007 8y ago
The w2 outsourced contractors are a long standing issue in silicon valley and tech, as such even the IRS has weighed in and basically only allows tech companies to have someone on contract for 2 years. There's some additional issues with it in that you really are a w2 employee because you don't get to chose when and where you do the work (or what hours you work).. So in a sense it is worse than uber because you can't choose your hours. Companies like it because it is low risk and you typically can get someone in for a lower wage than you would have to pay otherwise. Netflix is using contractors now btw.. I imagine things have evolved since the good old days: https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-dont-treat-c/dont-treat-contractors-like-employees-idUSTRE53063S20090401 https://www.reuters.com/article/businesspropicks-us-findlaw-... But things largely have stayed the same.

hndude 8y ago

Any additional evidence (either for or against) the claim that government pays for tech advances, while the private sector is who sees a return from that?

empath75 8y ago
Federal spending accounts for 44% of basic research spending. at one point, it was as high as 70%. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-govern... Generally, the pattern has been that government and university funded researchers make the early discoveries, and then corporations do the research towards applying them. Universities benefit from patents, but the federal government doesn't.
- JackFr 8y ago
  One of the things that makes research "basic research" is that there isn't an obvious financial incentive for it. IBM, AT&T and Xerox at the height if their monopolies could afford to do some, but in general it's a financial loss on the timescale of a human or a corporation. But what we see sometimes (alternative energy, drug research, e.g.) is government funding of applied research, and that isn't good for the market or the science, and should be called out.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Locking up applied research at companies often creates a lot waste as several companies do the same research and don’t share their results outside of patents/products.
- sjg007 8y ago
  Feds get income tax revenue. They/we benefit.
  - DATACOMMANDER 8y ago
    They would have gotten that revenue even if the research had been privately funded.

prepend 8y ago

I’m not sure what this articles point is. Disruption as called by Christensen, Andreeson, Thiel, etc all talks about displaced jobs and industries. I don’t think this is unknown. It’s just that the benefits outweigh the costs (to some). So this isn’t an alternative history more than it is just a weird anecdote or two without follow-up. I’m not sure what Wired is as a magazine any more. It really needs knowledgeable editors to plan and shape stories along some theme. I feel like these stories about rich and bad Silicon Valley is are pretty common and all boil down to the same reality that Silicon Valley has high margins and makes a lot of money for in demand employees and stockholders. This isn’t relevatory though and I’m not sure what Wired’s angle is.

JackFr 8y ago
> I’m not sure what this articles point is. ... > So this isn’t an alternative history more than it is just a weird anecdote or two without follow-up. It's weird. The article seems to be a book review somehow cast as a news article or thought piece. Read as a book review it's a perfectly reasonable and informative.
fullshark 8y ago
It's a summary of three books and how they are showcasing a larger story of the tech industry under fire I guess.

empath75 8y ago

> For instance, the same year the government loaned $535 million to solar-power company Solyndra, it also loaned Tesla $465 million. “Taxpayers footed the bill for Solyndra’s losses—yet got hardly any of Tesla’s” gains, she says. Solyndra has become “a byword for the government’s sorry track record when it came to picking winners,” a story that has helped keep regulators at bay, she says. I'm no Tesla fan, but that's sort of how loans work. You get your money back plus interest. It's not a lottery ticket. And Tesla paid back their loan early. I don't think the program lost very much money overall.

AlphaSite 8y ago
Pretty much, I mean the argument is that there are jobs/tax revenue/etc to be gained from having a healthy local market. There may not be direct returns, but that’s not really the point.
maxerickson 8y ago
Loans are often structured with a penalty if they are paid back early. The provider of the capital wants the scheduled payments more than they want access to the capital. Perhaps big fat government loans should really be purchases of special restricted securities (that do things like limit the control the government has over the company and prevent dilution).
- dbt00 8y ago
  The auto bailouts in the late-08/early-09 timeframe were structured as warrant purchases (similar to options), and the government did see upside. In-Q-Tel is a program where the government invests in startups and participates in equity growth. So it's not impossible, but not particularly common.
tway2888888 8y ago
>I don't think the program lost very much money overall. It's not about whether it lost money. What were the risk adjusted expected rates of return? Was the interest rate sufficient? Was this the best way to invest that half-a-billion dollars? It certainly was not with Solyndra. The fact that, in hindsight, Tesla paid back the loan doesn't determine whether it was "worth it" or not. The government may have gotten lucky. That's no way to run a lending business.

malvosenior 8y ago

How can someone write a whole article about disruption but not actually use the correct, well understood meaning of the term? They literally just made up their own strawman definition of what "disruption" means (tech people getting rich I guess?). Disruption has always been used to mean disrupting established market leaders via innovation. Guess what? That's exactly what has happened with Uber, AirBnB, Amazon... If anyone wants to learn more about the actual meaning of disruption, I suggest The Innovator's Dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

rootusrootus 8y ago
> Uber, AirBnB, Amazon Amazon, sure, but Uber & AirBnB? Wasn't their "innovation" flaunting the law to gain a temporary advantage before regulation leveled the field again?
- malvosenior 8y ago
  Uber disrupted taxi companies. AirBnB disrupted the hotel industry. Both used technology to get there (there were no apps to hail taxis anywhere near feature parity with Uber for instance). They also leveraged the distribution mechanisms of the app store to reach scale. > Wasn't their "innovation" flaunting the law to gain a temporary advantage before regulation leveled the field again? Whether you view it that way or not (I don't) it doesn't change the fact that these companies successfully disrupted established players. It doesn't matter if it was "innovative" (again I think it was), the end result was textbook disruption.
  - ThomPete 8y ago
    Uber and airbnb outcompeted them by offering lower prices and disregarded obviously outdated laws. The phone was what actually disrupted the industry not the actual services.
    - JackFr 8y ago
      > disregarded obviously outdated laws That's disruption?

thoughtexplorer 8y ago

> (One of the future Trump adviser’s least favorite words? “Politics.”) What's with this unrelated off topic dig? Secondly, what's the point they're trying to make? That Thiel is a hypocrite? If so, you can both hate politics/government and work to try to improve it. One strategy is to do so from within. Musk was trying to do the same for a while.

technobabble 8y ago

Books mentioned in the article: - How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary by Louis Hyman - The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy by Mariana Mazzucato - Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas edit: formatting, copy paste issues (argh)

albntomat0 8y ago
The book by Mazzucato is "The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy"
- technobabble 8y ago
  Thank you

mcguire 8y ago

It's nice to see Wired still has their visual panache, but how do I get rid of the pop-up ad covering half the screen?

dredmorbius 8y ago
https://outline.com/https://www.wired.com/story/alternative-history-of-silicon-valley-disruption/ https://outline.com/https://www.wired.com/story/alternative-...

Endama 8y ago

This article touches on an idea that I think many in the tech industry (myself included) continue to be myopic about: as disruptors we are held responsible for the negative social outcomes that we bestow upon society. I think many (not all) of us who work in software believe that the innovations we unleash, in-and-of themselves, make up for nearly any negative externality caused as consequence. We have brought services or experiences that have made life more convenient, faster, more accessible, etc.; that should be more than sufficient to legitimize our existence and effort. Inside this framework, the driving factor is what Wired calls "techno-darwinism" the idea that software companies are "still standing post-disruption must have survived because they were the fittest". If you talk to people in SV, especially after the depression, the stereotype was that every startup was about to "change the world by becoming the [X] for [Y]" (Uber for cookies, AirBNB for laundry, etc.) However, the outside world looks at us with disdain: they don't view our motivations as a desire for simple innovation or creativity, but outright greed and power. The folks that we have disrupted are often those who do not have the means to convert their labor to new industries; even when they do, those industries then get disrupted by some new actor. Tech workers also have, stereotypically, been disdainful of government: it's too slow, too compromised/corrupt, too inefficient. However, engagement with the polity is the main vehicle by which the poor and disenfranchised are are able to find some kind of recourse for their lives, either by the ballot box or the ammo box. I've been telling my non-tech friends recently that the great sin of our industry is not greed, its naivety and hubris.

malvosenior 8y ago
> However, the outside world looks at us with disdain The only people that view the tech industry with disdain are journalists and old media. Regular people happily use their iPhones, Facebook, Uber, AirBnB... Just because a lot of ink is spilled trying to keep outdated media models alive, it doesn't mean the general population feels this way. The success of all of these services is proof enough that people are not bothered.
- Endama 8y ago
  When it comes to the services/products, I agree with you, the general population certainly thinks they are great. However, how often have you heard of tech workers as being a positive thing for a city? How many times in TV shows / movies are tech workers seen as a boon? (e.g. Silicon Valley, Black Mirror, Searching) I'm not saying that this _necessarily_ means that literally everyone feels disdain towards the tech industry across all slices of society, I am arguing that the banner of disruption of being a good thing by definition, is misguided.

charlesbradshaw 8y ago

This article deeply disappoints me as Hacker news is the last place that I would expect to find Luddites. > They promised the open web, we got walled gardens Google doesn't give out its users data in the same way that a bank doesn't give out it's users balances. > ...many of the dystopian business practices we associate with fast-growing tech platforms [like] operating with a small group of well-paid engineers, surrounded by contractors The implication here is that before Amazon, no company applied aggressive and unethical cost saving measures. When was Nestle founded again? > Uber did not cause this precarious economy. It is the waste product of the service economy This is the kind of thing that makes you sound smart but means nothing. There is not an explanation of the "waste product of the service economy" that follows this quote. In fact this implies it is not Uber's fault at all for disrupting the taxi industry. > In the case of venture capitalists, [...] their real genius appears to lie in their timing: their ability to enter a sector late, after the highest development risks had already been taken, but at an optimum moment to make a killing The implication being that nobody made a competitor company before the internet was around. The other claim is that being n+1 to the market gives you a guaranteed and significant advantage. If this was the case it would be trivial to overtake Google. > The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings This line tells me that the author has gotten used to modern day conveniences that tech has brought us and thinks its unpredictable that people who made companies that span the globe are rich and powerful.