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The sarcasm may not be too far off. I used to have ambitions to build a company, but now the future plan is to pick up the task of being a solo developer. Why?

The sarcasm may not be too far off. I used to have ambitions to build a company, but now the future plan is to pick up the task of being a solo developer. Why? people are the worst and I have no desire to have anyone on payroll. Those workers are definitely a temporary problem until those warehouses are 100% automated. Once all the people are gone, all the labor concerns are gone as well. No more safety. AC costs are minimized to what is needed for product safety. No more restrooms with no more plumbing. Just machines which ingest goods and distribute goods.

apocalypstyx 6y ago
>Why? people are the worst No offense intended. But do you classify yourself as part of humanity? Or one of the good ones? I mean, I know one or two people who profess to think this, and they admit they themselves are just as disgusting, so at least I can have some respect for their self-reflection.
- rpdillon 6y ago
  A charitable reading is that there are many parts of running a business, but managing employees/contractors is definitely one of the most difficult to get right while also being perceived as peripheral to the core goal; if you can still accomplish a mission you care about without bringing in all that extra work, it might be preferable. As an engineer, this reading resonates for me to some degree. I'm naturally more interested in engineering problems than I am by payroll, performance management, and hiring.
- lisper 6y ago
  Not the OP, but I share hir antisocial attitude. But here's how I frame it: humans are a result of an undirected design process whose only quality metric is reproductive fitness. As a side effect of this process, we ended up with brains that care about things other than reproductive fitness, things like beauty and mathematical elegance and self-actualization and discovery for its own sake. As a consequence of this, we ended up inventing birth control. That invention is distinguished among human inventions because it is an immediate existential threat to our short-term reproductive fitness: genes that make brains that choose not to have children don't reproduce as well (in the short term) as genes that make brains that, say, have an instinctive revulsion against using birth control, and which (say) take seriously the idea that the Creator of the Universe commanded them to be fruitful and multiply. The problem is that those people still have access to the leverage provided by technology, and so now they pose an existential threat to civilization by way of carbon emissions. So it's not so much "good one" vs "bad ones" as brains that optimize for short-term reproductive fitness vs ones that don't. It's not an epic struggle between good and evil, it's just, quite literally, evolution in action. Like all living things, I want "my side" to win. The tricky bit is deciding where "my side" ends and "the other" begins. Everyone has to struggle with that.
  - mathgladiator 6y ago
    It's more practical than that. I have no problem hiring people, but I want to them to do work rather than other shit. However, people need so much care that it is so draining. The crazy thing is that these problems don't manifest until a business is reasonably successful and the medium growth spurt happens. That's when you need to get HR, and at the moment the business becomes a prison.
- konschubert 6y ago
  Yea, I think it’s a consistent view to think that dealing with people is hard, and knowing that one would also find it hard, or even harder, to deal with oneself as colleague or employee
- mathgladiator 6y ago
  Yes, I am no saint. I accept that I'm a dumb dirty primate. The problem now feels that we have a minority of very loud people that cause expensive problems. I can't wait until I have AI to amplify myself.

apocalypstyx 6y ago

>Why? people are the worst No offense intended. But do you classify yourself as part of humanity? Or one of the good ones? I mean, I know one or two people who profess to think this, and they admit they themselves are just as disgusting, so at least I can have some respect for their self-reflection.

rpdillon 6y ago
A charitable reading is that there are many parts of running a business, but managing employees/contractors is definitely one of the most difficult to get right while also being perceived as peripheral to the core goal; if you can still accomplish a mission you care about without bringing in all that extra work, it might be preferable. As an engineer, this reading resonates for me to some degree. I'm naturally more interested in engineering problems than I am by payroll, performance management, and hiring.
lisper 6y ago
Not the OP, but I share hir antisocial attitude. But here's how I frame it: humans are a result of an undirected design process whose only quality metric is reproductive fitness. As a side effect of this process, we ended up with brains that care about things other than reproductive fitness, things like beauty and mathematical elegance and self-actualization and discovery for its own sake. As a consequence of this, we ended up inventing birth control. That invention is distinguished among human inventions because it is an immediate existential threat to our short-term reproductive fitness: genes that make brains that choose not to have children don't reproduce as well (in the short term) as genes that make brains that, say, have an instinctive revulsion against using birth control, and which (say) take seriously the idea that the Creator of the Universe commanded them to be fruitful and multiply. The problem is that those people still have access to the leverage provided by technology, and so now they pose an existential threat to civilization by way of carbon emissions. So it's not so much "good one" vs "bad ones" as brains that optimize for short-term reproductive fitness vs ones that don't. It's not an epic struggle between good and evil, it's just, quite literally, evolution in action. Like all living things, I want "my side" to win. The tricky bit is deciding where "my side" ends and "the other" begins. Everyone has to struggle with that.
- mathgladiator 6y ago
  It's more practical than that. I have no problem hiring people, but I want to them to do work rather than other shit. However, people need so much care that it is so draining. The crazy thing is that these problems don't manifest until a business is reasonably successful and the medium growth spurt happens. That's when you need to get HR, and at the moment the business becomes a prison.
konschubert 6y ago
Yea, I think it’s a consistent view to think that dealing with people is hard, and knowing that one would also find it hard, or even harder, to deal with oneself as colleague or employee
mathgladiator 6y ago
Yes, I am no saint. I accept that I'm a dumb dirty primate. The problem now feels that we have a minority of very loud people that cause expensive problems. I can't wait until I have AI to amplify myself.