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I think it's very important that readers and contributors of this site scrutinize their emotional response to this article. Moral criticism is very hard to swal

by atdt 15y ago

I think it's very important that readers and contributors of this site scrutinize their emotional response to this article. Moral criticism is very hard to swallow. When it is leveled against a community, it is natural for the community to close ranks and lick its wounds. If you prick us, do we not bleed? etc. So you should expect to find eloquent and moving defenses of the current state of the vocation, and you should expect to find them compelling. But I think a far more useful response to this article is to do a bit of soul-searching. The amounts of money pouring into the industry are staggering. There are extremely powerful incentives for us to avert our attention from the warping influence it has had on our values. Many of us -- myself included -- consider ourselves very lucky to be shielded from the economic chaos and instability that is destroying so many lives in other industries, and the thought of forfeiting this safety is exactly as terrifying as the thought that it is rightfully ours is seductive. There is a lot in this article I disagree with, but like the author I am also scandalized that so much talent is squandered in pursuit of an IPO. There is so many astonishingly brilliant and creative people on this site whose time would be much better spent on problems of real social and intellectual significance, problems of lasting significance for the well-being of our species. In a free society people have a right to choose in which direction they spend their energies. But we cannot, in the name of individual choice, ignore the enormous shaping influence of social forces on the course of human life. Much of our behavior over these past few years has been driven by the fact that money is the surest measure of success in our industry, and I would bet a kidney that a lot of people here are nagged by a suspicious that there is something deeply perverse about this. And if you're one of these people, I'd like to propose to you that one way to change things is to start having more honest discussions about this with colleagues, and to be a little more courageous about recognizing success when its measure is lives bettered rather than money raised. I've been a complete coward about this, and I feel gross about myself as a result. But I'm committed to changing.

ddw 15y ago
Thank you for writing this. I think the Airbnb story itself is getting kind of stale, but it's continuing to garner discussion on this site and elsewhere because of the underlining issue, namely that valuations and revenues shouldn't over cede just treating people well. And that we should try to resolve an issue not just because our company will take a PR hit if we don't, but because it's the right thing to do. The two aren't mutually exclusive. If we don't do this then we're no better than the slimiest corporations because we're chasing a dollar and nothing else.
Groxx 15y ago
But isn't this true of every point in time? I'm in no way claiming their observations are incorrect, but what about now is so different from the past, when IBM (for example) employed massive numbers of such brilliant and creative people for their economic gain? Or how governments have and continue to employ brilliant people to build better weapons? What evidence is there that there are fewer altruists out there now, or fewer "cool" people? This article isn't about how this is and always has been. It's about how it wasn't, and how it is now, and how we need to "get back to the good old days". There's no question that selling out for profit is "uncool", but that isn't the central point of the article.
- atdt 15y ago
  I basically agree: the article loses a lot of credibility making Heroic Age / Iron Age comparisons, and I think you & others are right to call them out. But I do think there are things that are uniquely worrying about the present moment. IBM has a lot of skeletons in its closet, but for many years one of its biggest clients (perhaps the biggest -- does anyone know?) was the US government, which made IBM at least minimally responsive to public needs. IBM was paid very handsomly by government clients to keep the US in the lead in science and technology, and that meant that a lot of people at IBM had the necessary leisure and latitude to think about some serious problems, some of whom went on to win the Turing prize and invent things like relational databases. I don't think these people were smarter or more virtuous than us. (The comparison is specious on many levels, but bear with me.) I simply think that things were set up in such a way that it was possible for them to follow their natural creative and intellectual impulses and in so doing gain a measure of social respectability and pride that we all basically crave. I think the startup world is different. The shoestring budget and (even more critically) the highly compressed timeframe in which startups operate create powerful incentives to take up easy problems that could be monetized quickly. I'm struck by how much of the advice that is offered to young people here amounts to something like, "stop thinking so god damn much and build a business." That seems so toxic! It creates an atmosphere of scorn toward big ideas and impatience with moral and intellectual reflection, with lasting consequences on the life-choices people make. I suspect a lot of young men and women internalize this ideology and develop a real sense of shame about being thoughtful or conscientious. I'm not suggesting we all apply for a job at Big Blue. There are a great many wonderful things about the present moment, chief among them the enormously expanded access to creative computational tools and its concomitant, the wonderful increase in the geographical/cultural spread of creative work with technology. But there are also some very worrying trends, and I think we ought to confront them.
prodigal_erik 15y ago
I think it's important to remember that revenue represents how much any capitalist society truly values a contribution, as measured in limited resources we're willing to devote to its success. I think everyone talks a good game about things we wish were important to us yet demonstrably are not, which just encourages people to waste time on projects which will surely fail due to an indifference we feel but can't admit to. Some of HN already views yet more trivial mobile-social-photo-gamification entertainment with distaste, as if we're too good for that work, but I try not to confuse my own disapproval with the stark fact that the crowd does want more of that stuff. I think the real trick is striking a balance between what you want to do and what society wants from you, and believing what we claim to want (but aren't paying for) or what we claim we aren't interested in (yet is somehow in demand) can trick you into a dead end.
- JabavuAdams 15y ago
  > revenue represents how much any capitalist society truly values a contribution No, because humans aren't rational actors. Gambling? Addiction? Ignorance? Exploiting bugs in the firmware isn't the same as adding social value. You can't really answer ethical or moral questions by just appealing to Econ 101 dogma. I do agree, though, that it's important to realize that other people like things that I may not like.

by atdt 15y ago

ddw 15y ago

Thank you for writing this. I think the Airbnb story itself is getting kind of stale, but it's continuing to garner discussion on this site and elsewhere because of the underlining issue, namely that valuations and revenues shouldn't over cede just treating people well. And that we should try to resolve an issue not just because our company will take a PR hit if we don't, but because it's the right thing to do. The two aren't mutually exclusive. If we don't do this then we're no better than the slimiest corporations because we're chasing a dollar and nothing else.

Groxx 15y ago

But isn't this true of every point in time? I'm in no way claiming their observations are incorrect, but what about now is so different from the past, when IBM (for example) employed massive numbers of such brilliant and creative people for their economic gain? Or how governments have and continue to employ brilliant people to build better weapons? What evidence is there that there are fewer altruists out there now, or fewer "cool" people? This article isn't about how this is and always has been. It's about how it wasn't, and how it is now, and how we need to "get back to the good old days". There's no question that selling out for profit is "uncool", but that isn't the central point of the article.

atdt 15y ago
I basically agree: the article loses a lot of credibility making Heroic Age / Iron Age comparisons, and I think you & others are right to call them out. But I do think there are things that are uniquely worrying about the present moment. IBM has a lot of skeletons in its closet, but for many years one of its biggest clients (perhaps the biggest -- does anyone know?) was the US government, which made IBM at least minimally responsive to public needs. IBM was paid very handsomly by government clients to keep the US in the lead in science and technology, and that meant that a lot of people at IBM had the necessary leisure and latitude to think about some serious problems, some of whom went on to win the Turing prize and invent things like relational databases. I don't think these people were smarter or more virtuous than us. (The comparison is specious on many levels, but bear with me.) I simply think that things were set up in such a way that it was possible for them to follow their natural creative and intellectual impulses and in so doing gain a measure of social respectability and pride that we all basically crave. I think the startup world is different. The shoestring budget and (even more critically) the highly compressed timeframe in which startups operate create powerful incentives to take up easy problems that could be monetized quickly. I'm struck by how much of the advice that is offered to young people here amounts to something like, "stop thinking so god damn much and build a business." That seems so toxic! It creates an atmosphere of scorn toward big ideas and impatience with moral and intellectual reflection, with lasting consequences on the life-choices people make. I suspect a lot of young men and women internalize this ideology and develop a real sense of shame about being thoughtful or conscientious. I'm not suggesting we all apply for a job at Big Blue. There are a great many wonderful things about the present moment, chief among them the enormously expanded access to creative computational tools and its concomitant, the wonderful increase in the geographical/cultural spread of creative work with technology. But there are also some very worrying trends, and I think we ought to confront them.

prodigal_erik 15y ago

I think it's important to remember that revenue represents how much any capitalist society truly values a contribution, as measured in limited resources we're willing to devote to its success. I think everyone talks a good game about things we wish were important to us yet demonstrably are not, which just encourages people to waste time on projects which will surely fail due to an indifference we feel but can't admit to. Some of HN already views yet more trivial mobile-social-photo-gamification entertainment with distaste, as if we're too good for that work, but I try not to confuse my own disapproval with the stark fact that the crowd does want more of that stuff. I think the real trick is striking a balance between what you want to do and what society wants from you, and believing what we claim to want (but aren't paying for) or what we claim we aren't interested in (yet is somehow in demand) can trick you into a dead end.

JabavuAdams 15y ago
> revenue represents how much any capitalist society truly values a contribution No, because humans aren't rational actors. Gambling? Addiction? Ignorance? Exploiting bugs in the firmware isn't the same as adding social value. You can't really answer ethical or moral questions by just appealing to Econ 101 dogma. I do agree, though, that it's important to realize that other people like things that I may not like.