5 ms·

I'm even less old, my career started in 2009. My personal experience was that people back then were both more nerdy and more ambitious, not a tradeoff. And now

I'm even less old, my career started in 2009. My personal experience was that people back then were both more nerdy and more ambitious, not a tradeoff. And now people are "ambitious" but it's a personal ambition to play the game and earn more money than their peers. The people I worked with in 2009 were ambitious in the sense of building products and teams and companies to succeed in the marketplace, or creating new marketplaces. It seems like tech is where greedy people go nowadays, not ambitious people in any greater sense of ambition in the world at large.

birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
Where can one find the ambitious people of 2009 to build products and teams and companies? Asking for a friend.
- Benjammer 6y ago
  If I look back at the company I was thinking of when I wrote that, the "top half" of the people there are VPs/MDs in fintech, staff engineers at companies like Twitter, ~2-3 mildly successful founders, CTOs at startups, and several have one-person-consulting-shop lifestyle businesses. The other half are mostly engineering managers at (boring, non-FAANG) larger companies. I've bounced around doing greenfield projects / new products at several B2B companies. I just find interesting projects I want to work on and then leave after a few years once the politics become overwhelming for me. Our recruiting/interviewing process would be criticized nowadays as completely bias-ridden. We sent teams of just-graduated first-year people back to their school's career fairs, built relationships with career offices at those schools, and just basically would have people walk around and be outgoing and try to just chat with interesting students and see if they wanted to join a cool tech company in NYC with cool people. Our interviews were mostly gut-feel after talking to someone about whatever and doing a very simple many-to-many-linking-table exercise to see if they could visualize simple data relations in their head. We didn't even test coding skills, for the most part. I dunno if it would surprise anyone, but those teams actually were, by far, the most diverse teams I've worked on in my career in terms of age, gender, and race (not to mention socio-eco background). We invested heavily in training people on the job and building culture together internally. We ended up being merged into a larger entity by our parent company and the culture was utterly demolished, and everyone quit around the same time. I just don't see what context would attract these sorts of people back together at a tech company nowadays. If you find something that isn't a startup founded by rich brats trying to completely fleece slightly-above-average engineers in secondary-market cities with 10-yr-old market rate salaries, and isn't a big tech company ruining society, completely driven by political-insider-donors-- ahem, sorry, I mean investors -- please let me know also!
- rhizome 6y ago
  Find the people who criticize current developments in terms of the original promises of (the relevant) technology. People with a sense of history and the big pictures that no longer exist or which are being actively destroyed as inconvenient to business plans.
- Frondo 6y ago
  Look for places where laws can be broken with relative impunity for whatever reason -- maybe they're small laws (like hotel regulations), maybe they're laws that address a relatively small and poor group of people (like the taxi medallion service). Find those laws, and develop a startup that can break them or exploit loopholes, and you've got your next startup of 2009, in 2020. There's probably room in environmental regulation, maybe there's a minimum amount of toxic waste you have to dump for it to be regulated, and you could create an "uber for toxic waste" where people could pick some up from a pollution-heavy plant on their way home from work and take it home to their toilet to dump in. Sky's the limit if you want a 2009-style unicorn.
Viliam1234 6y ago
I also get an impression that a decade ago people mostly went to IT because they loved computers, and now they mostly go to IT because they love money. A decade ago, telling people about design patterns would make you a guru, now it makes you a nerd.

birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago

Where can one find the ambitious people of 2009 to build products and teams and companies? Asking for a friend.

Benjammer 6y ago
If I look back at the company I was thinking of when I wrote that, the "top half" of the people there are VPs/MDs in fintech, staff engineers at companies like Twitter, ~2-3 mildly successful founders, CTOs at startups, and several have one-person-consulting-shop lifestyle businesses. The other half are mostly engineering managers at (boring, non-FAANG) larger companies. I've bounced around doing greenfield projects / new products at several B2B companies. I just find interesting projects I want to work on and then leave after a few years once the politics become overwhelming for me. Our recruiting/interviewing process would be criticized nowadays as completely bias-ridden. We sent teams of just-graduated first-year people back to their school's career fairs, built relationships with career offices at those schools, and just basically would have people walk around and be outgoing and try to just chat with interesting students and see if they wanted to join a cool tech company in NYC with cool people. Our interviews were mostly gut-feel after talking to someone about whatever and doing a very simple many-to-many-linking-table exercise to see if they could visualize simple data relations in their head. We didn't even test coding skills, for the most part. I dunno if it would surprise anyone, but those teams actually were, by far, the most diverse teams I've worked on in my career in terms of age, gender, and race (not to mention socio-eco background). We invested heavily in training people on the job and building culture together internally. We ended up being merged into a larger entity by our parent company and the culture was utterly demolished, and everyone quit around the same time. I just don't see what context would attract these sorts of people back together at a tech company nowadays. If you find something that isn't a startup founded by rich brats trying to completely fleece slightly-above-average engineers in secondary-market cities with 10-yr-old market rate salaries, and isn't a big tech company ruining society, completely driven by political-insider-donors-- ahem, sorry, I mean investors -- please let me know also!
rhizome 6y ago
Find the people who criticize current developments in terms of the original promises of (the relevant) technology. People with a sense of history and the big pictures that no longer exist or which are being actively destroyed as inconvenient to business plans.
Frondo 6y ago
Look for places where laws can be broken with relative impunity for whatever reason -- maybe they're small laws (like hotel regulations), maybe they're laws that address a relatively small and poor group of people (like the taxi medallion service). Find those laws, and develop a startup that can break them or exploit loopholes, and you've got your next startup of 2009, in 2020. There's probably room in environmental regulation, maybe there's a minimum amount of toxic waste you have to dump for it to be regulated, and you could create an "uber for toxic waste" where people could pick some up from a pollution-heavy plant on their way home from work and take it home to their toilet to dump in. Sky's the limit if you want a 2009-style unicorn.

Viliam1234 6y ago

I also get an impression that a decade ago people mostly went to IT because they loved computers, and now they mostly go to IT because they love money. A decade ago, telling people about design patterns would make you a guru, now it makes you a nerd.