6 ms·

The Email Caste's Last Stand

54 points by Ambolia 4y ago

jollyllama 4y ago
What the author is describing isn't even an email caste. It's a phony email caste. There was and still is in many places a genuine email caste of product managers, account managers, customer service directors, and so-on, that, for all of their meetings and draining of engineering hours, managed to add some value to the company.
_jal 4y ago
This is a real-time history rewrite. "Once he got access to the company’s finances, the Tesla boss realized it was losing millions of dollars every day [...]" He knew it would be losing $millions/day because he forced the situation that created the debt. I stopped reading at that point, not interested in dissecting how a beat-sweetener slides into obsequious myth building.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > He knew it would be losing $millions/day because he forced the situation that created the debt. No. He knew about the company's finances because that's part of M&A due diligence. https://morganandwestfield.com/knowledge/due-diligence-checklist/ https://morganandwestfield.com/knowledge/due-diligence-check...
  - sp332 4y ago
    He waived due diligence on this deal. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/06/musk-says-twitter-is-refusing-to-share-data-on-spam-accounts.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/06/musk-says-twitter-is-refusin...
  - _jal 4y ago
    No. The $13B debt he saddled Twitter with did not exist during the due diligence phase, which he also waived. Word was prior to the takeover, their debt was on the order of $200M.
    - judge2020 4y ago
      Based on this Reuters article[0], it was more around $5.3B, but they were only losing 200M/yr. > It's not clear how much of the $5.29 billion debt Twitter had before the acquisition was refinanced or remained with the company. It's also not clear how much of the $2.7 billion in cash that Twitter held as of the end of June it got to keep once it went private. 0: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/twitters-massive-revenue-drop-adds-heavy-debt-burden-2022-11-07/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/twitters-massive-reven...
      - _jal 4y ago
        Ah, thanks for the correction.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    OP is making a point that Twitter is now saddled with ~13 billion in debt, with 1.2B in interest payments now required over the next 12 months[0]. > Musk and his co-investors collectively cut a check for more than $30 billion of their own money for the Twitter deal. That money would be at risk if Twitter required a debt restructuring down the line. 0: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/twitters-massive-revenue-drop-adds-heavy-debt-burden-2022-11-07/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/twitters-massive-reven...
  - sulam 4y ago
    The $4M / day that Musk says Twitter is losing is comprised of $3.2M in cash to service the debt and $.8M other losses.
cafard 4y ago
"Once he got access to the company’s finances, the Tesla boss realized it was losing millions of dollars every day, and that many of its employees weren’t doing much work at all." Once he took possession of the company, he had to demonstrate that it was somebody else's fault that the finances make no sense.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  It was publicly traded company, with publicly available and known finances. How this can be an excuse?
- jklinger410 4y ago
  Twitter was not profitable and had no clear path to profitability. Regardless of your opinion of Musk.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    The debt from the acquisition has made that situation much worse, however, not better. It's like he bought a car with a flat tire and promptly drove nails into the other three. [EDIT] Better version: it's like he bought a car with a flat tire and financed the purchase by selling the other three tires.
- Taniwha 4y ago
  Yeah he obviously knew all this by the time he took over it was why he was trying to get out of the stupid deal he'd done without full due diligence - and besides that - 3/4 of the $4M a day Twitter is losing is the $1B a year interest from Musk's bad deal
  - bilbo0s 4y ago
    and besides that - 3/4 of the $4M a day Twitter is losing is the $1B a year interest from Musk's bad deal To be honest, that's what seems so disingenuous about this article. Why, on Earth, would you fail to mention the fact that the boss is, for the most part, trying to fix losses that he, himself, incurred?
yumraj 4y ago
First of all Twitter is SF based, and is NOT a Silicon Valley company. It's frustrating how many people get this wrong, and most of the times when it suites a particular narrative. Secondly: Not to say that Twitter, or other tech firms, don't have a bunch of people who are not very productive/contributing - but is this a problem unique to tech companies and not every other company that grows beyond a point? Are pharma companies, car manufacturers, utilities, CPG, etc etc all running a perfectly well oiled machinery. Or, is it just that the people who have been on the outside looking in with jealousy suddenly get to vent their rage during times of such correction since it gets them eyeballs.
- mrcrumb1 4y ago
  I mean you can die on that hill, but I'd hazard a guess that nearly everyone considers SF a part of Silicon Valley
  - InsaneOstrich 4y ago
    I've always thought that "Silicon Valley" was just a broad term that described tech companies anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      That's a common misapprehension among people that don't live there. For anyone in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley is some ways south of San Francisco. That said, a lot of startups are in SF, because Silicon Valley is too expensive (though SF itself is catching up because of the second dot com boom/bubble), so it's not surprising that outsiders lump the two of them together as a hub of Bay Area tech activity (which they are.. but they're just two distinct geographical areas).
    - jklinger410 4y ago
      It is.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
Animats 4y ago
The oil states have a huge problem with this - an oversupply of educated but useless people. The government ends up as the employer of last resort. Egypt used to guarantee a Government job to anyone who completed college. Then the oil ran out. There's been much unrest ever since. In the US, only about half of college graduates have jobs that require a college education. Craigslist has about 50 employees. If you really had to, you could probably run Twitter with a very small staff, and the computing outsourced to AWS.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  > If you really had to, you could probably run Twitter with a very small staff, and the computing outsourced to AWS. Why didn't they though? Why did they become a monster that, as we are seeing right now, can survive easily with about half of its employees gone in a heartbeat?
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    Incompetent leadership that maybe should’ve been fired for cause?
  - kweingar 4y ago
    > can survive easily with about half of its employees gone in a heartbeat A bit premature to make this claim imo
  - throwaway1777 4y ago
    The answer is because promotions depend on growing your org. This is extremely common in big tech and known as empire building. You’d be hard pressed to find a company where this isn’t the case.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Investment, too. Investors want to see activity, and you're better off showing useless activity than none. Plus, you don't grow to a tech behemoth (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, et c.) by running smart & lean. You might get bought by them that way (cf. WhatsApp, and maybe even Minecraft) but you don't become one of them. So if leadership/investors thought Twitter had a shot at joining the big-boy club, maybe that's why.
zaphod12 4y ago
Lord what a fawning article. They laid off plenty of engineers, including folks that apparently were necessary. I'm sure they laid off some folks who were doing very little work, but seems pretty clear they also laid off plenty of contributors. Seems like the author started from two perspectives - Elon Musk is a genius and anyone who isn't an engineer doesn't add value to tech companies and just went from there. Neither point is supported.
- edflsafoiewq 4y ago
  The article neither praises Musk nor is really about him at all.
jscheel 4y ago
This is a terrible article. The author contributes nothing to the discussion other than to fawn over Musk and attack straw men through pseudo-intellectual prose. It also appears to have factual information wrong. The article is not worth being on HN if this is the discourse it provides.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  At least the author managed to grind a bunch of political axes like equity, diversity, inclusion, ESG, climate-change(!), perceived censorship, and so on. Checked all the usual culture-war checkboxes.
  - jscheel 4y ago
    Yeah, I noticed that. A quick jaunt to the about section of the site explains everything I needed to know.
- edflsafoiewq 4y ago
  The article doesn't remotely fawn over Musk. Did you read it?
  - jscheel 4y ago
    Umm, yes, I did. It's pretty easy to read between the lines. This article is pretty on-the-nose.
  - xypage 4y ago
    Not overtly but they do seem to be a fan. They literally described his actions on Twitter as "pok[ing] the first hole in the digital Berlin Wall erected over the past half decade." Which makes it sound like he's made momentous steps forward but as far as I'm aware all he's actually done so far is let you pay for check marks and laid a bunch of people off (the latter of which he also tied into 18th century France, aka shortly before the French revolution).
    - 4y ago
orwin 4y ago
Not talking about the Musk point, i don't like the guys and never liked most cargo-cult in general, be it Jobs, Musk, Gates, but also Linus or even Stallman, so i might have negative priors, i won't judge it on this. The author take on French revolution is bullshit. And i don't even understand where it came from? I assume a lot here, because i cannot be in the author head. The author read about Louvois for whatever reason, let's say an army fetish? (i'm projecting maybe). Then he misunderstood the impact of this army size on coordination and cooperation, especially at the time. Read about Autrichian war of succession and the fact that the biggest european army did not handle itself as it should have. Then he extrapolated a lot without reading any academic discussions and made himself an opinion. I understand, i do that a lot in my HN comments, but if i wrote in a journal, i would be very careful about being correct about historical parallels. To me it's disqualifying the whole article, and this put "compactmag.com" in the "might be untrustworthy" category.
1attice 4y ago
This article's closing insinuation that diversity only matters (or is pushed by) 'the email caste' perpetuates a sterotype. There are lots of us "diverse" engineers who wouldn't have been given a first shot without such sensitivities.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- teekert 4y ago
  Diverse engineers, sure, but tfa is about engineers being occupied by/with matters such as diversity.
  - 1attice 4y ago
    Dude. I'm preoccupied with "matters of diversity" because they govern whether I'm in the room, and whether I get paid. So is every other diverse engineer. Circumscribing these concerns as somehow fake or inauthentic, just some mandarins and policy wonks, is gutting. But that's just another day in this industry.
    - cudgy 4y ago
      Would you want to hire someone that is preoccupied? pre·oc·cu·pied (prē-ŏk′yə-pīd′) adj. 1. a. Absorbed in thought; engrossed. b. Excessively concerned with something; distracted. 2. Formerly or already occupied. 3. Already used and therefore unavailable for further use. https://www.thefreedictionary.com/preoccupied https://www.thefreedictionary.com/preoccupied
      - 1attice 4y ago
        Yes, I would. A rational agent is going to be preoccupied with survival. I only hire rational people. Capitalism insists you be preoccupied with yours, as well. My survival depends in part on diversity & inclusion efforts. As much as they can seem to cut against the grain of output, the industry was Not Okay Without Them. ...and, good lord. Bringing a dictionary definition to an idea-fight.
nayroclade 4y ago
This is a fun polemic to read but rather short on evidence. Personally, I doubt tech companies bloat because of a social-minded desire to give "scions of the professional-managerial class" employment, but for the same reason any company does: managers wanted bigger teams because it enhances their status, and when times are good nobody complains.
- woozyolliew 4y ago
  Yeah, definitely a ton of Parkinson’s law at work in these places.
snowwrestler 4y ago
I think the author of this piece fundamentally misunderstands what business Twitter is in. It’s not a tech company, it is a publisher. The technology is necessary and profitable only in so far as it enables Twitter to grow a valuable audience. And to be more specific, an audience that is valuable to certain advertisers. Chris Sacco nailed this in the comments he tweeted recently. There are businesses where engineering can “get it right,” like cars and rockets, but Twitter is not one of those businesses. It’s not clear to me why cutting back to only engineers would be a good strategy at Twitter. Twitter doesn’t make widgets for people to buy, it makes culture. Rejecting cultural topics in favor of lines of code seems like an internally-driven decision, not one that reflects a deep understanding of the customer.
WirelessGigabit 4y ago
Regardless of the quality of the article, I for one would love to be surrounded by more engineers and less MBAs.
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
this is the silver lining to this recession
kkfx 4y ago
Two notes: skilled workers for a proprietary platform should learn that they work against their interests since anything they create is bound to the owner so instead of creating technical value they'll keep reinventing the wheel a company after another with small differences between them since all of those are interested only in trapping users inside their service model. As a result preferred workers are those with less skill who knowing that accept limited compensation and being treated like human-robots; the lesson users should learn about proprietary platform is that they are at the mercy of the platform so NOTHING done with it should have a value since it might change or vanish overnight. The juice of this note is simple: IT MUST BE FLOSS, services must be open protocols anyone can implement and keep up not tied to any company or developer in particular. That's is. Beside that the sole comparison I see with the French Revolution is the fact revolutionaries / innovators in both cases are betrayed by those who led/hire them and in both cases such cohort of people allow betrayers to betray them.
lifefeed 4y ago
I read through some of this author's other articles, and he has a really inaccurate view of technology workers. We're not VC-backed digital nomads spending our days eating artisanal hot dogs. Most of us are just nine-to-five workers with families and hobbies, and most of use work on relatively boring parts of code that keep the wheels turning. (Only a specialized few get excited about automating mass data migrations. I love it, but it doesn't make for interesting TikToks.)

54 points by Ambolia 4y ago

What the author is describing isn't even an email caste. It's a phony email caste. There was and still is in many places a genuine email caste of product managers, account managers, customer service directors, and so-on, that, for all of their meetings and draining of engineering hours, managed to add some value to the company.

_jal 4y ago

This is a real-time history rewrite. "Once he got access to the company’s finances, the Tesla boss realized it was losing millions of dollars every day [...]" He knew it would be losing $millions/day because he forced the situation that created the debt. I stopped reading at that point, not interested in dissecting how a beat-sweetener slides into obsequious myth building.

drewcoo 4y ago
> He knew it would be losing $millions/day because he forced the situation that created the debt. No. He knew about the company's finances because that's part of M&A due diligence. https://morganandwestfield.com/knowledge/due-diligence-checklist/ https://morganandwestfield.com/knowledge/due-diligence-check...
- sp332 4y ago
  He waived due diligence on this deal. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/06/musk-says-twitter-is-refusing-to-share-data-on-spam-accounts.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/06/musk-says-twitter-is-refusin...
- _jal 4y ago
  No. The $13B debt he saddled Twitter with did not exist during the due diligence phase, which he also waived. Word was prior to the takeover, their debt was on the order of $200M.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    Based on this Reuters article[0], it was more around $5.3B, but they were only losing 200M/yr. > It's not clear how much of the $5.29 billion debt Twitter had before the acquisition was refinanced or remained with the company. It's also not clear how much of the $2.7 billion in cash that Twitter held as of the end of June it got to keep once it went private. 0: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/twitters-massive-revenue-drop-adds-heavy-debt-burden-2022-11-07/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/twitters-massive-reven...
    - _jal 4y ago
      Ah, thanks for the correction.
- judge2020 4y ago
  OP is making a point that Twitter is now saddled with ~13 billion in debt, with 1.2B in interest payments now required over the next 12 months[0]. > Musk and his co-investors collectively cut a check for more than $30 billion of their own money for the Twitter deal. That money would be at risk if Twitter required a debt restructuring down the line. 0: https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/twitters-massive-revenue-drop-adds-heavy-debt-burden-2022-11-07/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/twitters-massive-reven...
- sulam 4y ago
  The $4M / day that Musk says Twitter is losing is comprised of $3.2M in cash to service the debt and $.8M other losses.

cafard 4y ago

"Once he got access to the company’s finances, the Tesla boss realized it was losing millions of dollars every day, and that many of its employees weren’t doing much work at all." Once he took possession of the company, he had to demonstrate that it was somebody else's fault that the finances make no sense.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
It was publicly traded company, with publicly available and known finances. How this can be an excuse?
jklinger410 4y ago
Twitter was not profitable and had no clear path to profitability. Regardless of your opinion of Musk.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The debt from the acquisition has made that situation much worse, however, not better. It's like he bought a car with a flat tire and promptly drove nails into the other three. [EDIT] Better version: it's like he bought a car with a flat tire and financed the purchase by selling the other three tires.
Taniwha 4y ago
Yeah he obviously knew all this by the time he took over it was why he was trying to get out of the stupid deal he'd done without full due diligence - and besides that - 3/4 of the $4M a day Twitter is losing is the $1B a year interest from Musk's bad deal
- bilbo0s 4y ago
  and besides that - 3/4 of the $4M a day Twitter is losing is the $1B a year interest from Musk's bad deal To be honest, that's what seems so disingenuous about this article. Why, on Earth, would you fail to mention the fact that the boss is, for the most part, trying to fix losses that he, himself, incurred?

yumraj 4y ago

First of all Twitter is SF based, and is NOT a Silicon Valley company. It's frustrating how many people get this wrong, and most of the times when it suites a particular narrative. Secondly: Not to say that Twitter, or other tech firms, don't have a bunch of people who are not very productive/contributing - but is this a problem unique to tech companies and not every other company that grows beyond a point? Are pharma companies, car manufacturers, utilities, CPG, etc etc all running a perfectly well oiled machinery. Or, is it just that the people who have been on the outside looking in with jealousy suddenly get to vent their rage during times of such correction since it gets them eyeballs.

mrcrumb1 4y ago
I mean you can die on that hill, but I'd hazard a guess that nearly everyone considers SF a part of Silicon Valley
- InsaneOstrich 4y ago
  I've always thought that "Silicon Valley" was just a broad term that described tech companies anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    That's a common misapprehension among people that don't live there. For anyone in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley is some ways south of San Francisco. That said, a lot of startups are in SF, because Silicon Valley is too expensive (though SF itself is catching up because of the second dot com boom/bubble), so it's not surprising that outsiders lump the two of them together as a hub of Bay Area tech activity (which they are.. but they're just two distinct geographical areas).
  - jklinger410 4y ago
    It is.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

Animats 4y ago

The oil states have a huge problem with this - an oversupply of educated but useless people. The government ends up as the employer of last resort. Egypt used to guarantee a Government job to anyone who completed college. Then the oil ran out. There's been much unrest ever since. In the US, only about half of college graduates have jobs that require a college education. Craigslist has about 50 employees. If you really had to, you could probably run Twitter with a very small staff, and the computing outsourced to AWS.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago
> If you really had to, you could probably run Twitter with a very small staff, and the computing outsourced to AWS. Why didn't they though? Why did they become a monster that, as we are seeing right now, can survive easily with about half of its employees gone in a heartbeat?
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  Incompetent leadership that maybe should’ve been fired for cause?
- kweingar 4y ago
  > can survive easily with about half of its employees gone in a heartbeat A bit premature to make this claim imo
- throwaway1777 4y ago
  The answer is because promotions depend on growing your org. This is extremely common in big tech and known as empire building. You’d be hard pressed to find a company where this isn’t the case.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Investment, too. Investors want to see activity, and you're better off showing useless activity than none. Plus, you don't grow to a tech behemoth (Google, Microsoft, Facebook, et c.) by running smart & lean. You might get bought by them that way (cf. WhatsApp, and maybe even Minecraft) but you don't become one of them. So if leadership/investors thought Twitter had a shot at joining the big-boy club, maybe that's why.

zaphod12 4y ago

Lord what a fawning article. They laid off plenty of engineers, including folks that apparently were necessary. I'm sure they laid off some folks who were doing very little work, but seems pretty clear they also laid off plenty of contributors. Seems like the author started from two perspectives - Elon Musk is a genius and anyone who isn't an engineer doesn't add value to tech companies and just went from there. Neither point is supported.

edflsafoiewq 4y ago
The article neither praises Musk nor is really about him at all.

jscheel 4y ago

This is a terrible article. The author contributes nothing to the discussion other than to fawn over Musk and attack straw men through pseudo-intellectual prose. It also appears to have factual information wrong. The article is not worth being on HN if this is the discourse it provides.

ryandrake 4y ago
At least the author managed to grind a bunch of political axes like equity, diversity, inclusion, ESG, climate-change(!), perceived censorship, and so on. Checked all the usual culture-war checkboxes.
- jscheel 4y ago
  Yeah, I noticed that. A quick jaunt to the about section of the site explains everything I needed to know.
edflsafoiewq 4y ago
The article doesn't remotely fawn over Musk. Did you read it?
- jscheel 4y ago
  Umm, yes, I did. It's pretty easy to read between the lines. This article is pretty on-the-nose.
- xypage 4y ago
  Not overtly but they do seem to be a fan. They literally described his actions on Twitter as "pok[ing] the first hole in the digital Berlin Wall erected over the past half decade." Which makes it sound like he's made momentous steps forward but as far as I'm aware all he's actually done so far is let you pay for check marks and laid a bunch of people off (the latter of which he also tied into 18th century France, aka shortly before the French revolution).
  - 4y ago

orwin 4y ago

Not talking about the Musk point, i don't like the guys and never liked most cargo-cult in general, be it Jobs, Musk, Gates, but also Linus or even Stallman, so i might have negative priors, i won't judge it on this. The author take on French revolution is bullshit. And i don't even understand where it came from? I assume a lot here, because i cannot be in the author head. The author read about Louvois for whatever reason, let's say an army fetish? (i'm projecting maybe). Then he misunderstood the impact of this army size on coordination and cooperation, especially at the time. Read about Autrichian war of succession and the fact that the biggest european army did not handle itself as it should have. Then he extrapolated a lot without reading any academic discussions and made himself an opinion. I understand, i do that a lot in my HN comments, but if i wrote in a journal, i would be very careful about being correct about historical parallels. To me it's disqualifying the whole article, and this put "compactmag.com" in the "might be untrustworthy" category.

1attice 4y ago

This article's closing insinuation that diversity only matters (or is pushed by) 'the email caste' perpetuates a sterotype. There are lots of us "diverse" engineers who wouldn't have been given a first shot without such sensitivities.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
teekert 4y ago
Diverse engineers, sure, but tfa is about engineers being occupied by/with matters such as diversity.
- 1attice 4y ago
  Dude. I'm preoccupied with "matters of diversity" because they govern whether I'm in the room, and whether I get paid. So is every other diverse engineer. Circumscribing these concerns as somehow fake or inauthentic, just some mandarins and policy wonks, is gutting. But that's just another day in this industry.
  - cudgy 4y ago
    Would you want to hire someone that is preoccupied? pre·oc·cu·pied (prē-ŏk′yə-pīd′) adj. 1. a. Absorbed in thought; engrossed. b. Excessively concerned with something; distracted. 2. Formerly or already occupied. 3. Already used and therefore unavailable for further use. https://www.thefreedictionary.com/preoccupied https://www.thefreedictionary.com/preoccupied
    - 1attice 4y ago
      Yes, I would. A rational agent is going to be preoccupied with survival. I only hire rational people. Capitalism insists you be preoccupied with yours, as well. My survival depends in part on diversity & inclusion efforts. As much as they can seem to cut against the grain of output, the industry was Not Okay Without Them. ...and, good lord. Bringing a dictionary definition to an idea-fight.

nayroclade 4y ago

This is a fun polemic to read but rather short on evidence. Personally, I doubt tech companies bloat because of a social-minded desire to give "scions of the professional-managerial class" employment, but for the same reason any company does: managers wanted bigger teams because it enhances their status, and when times are good nobody complains.

woozyolliew 4y ago
Yeah, definitely a ton of Parkinson’s law at work in these places.

snowwrestler 4y ago

I think the author of this piece fundamentally misunderstands what business Twitter is in. It’s not a tech company, it is a publisher. The technology is necessary and profitable only in so far as it enables Twitter to grow a valuable audience. And to be more specific, an audience that is valuable to certain advertisers. Chris Sacco nailed this in the comments he tweeted recently. There are businesses where engineering can “get it right,” like cars and rockets, but Twitter is not one of those businesses. It’s not clear to me why cutting back to only engineers would be a good strategy at Twitter. Twitter doesn’t make widgets for people to buy, it makes culture. Rejecting cultural topics in favor of lines of code seems like an internally-driven decision, not one that reflects a deep understanding of the customer.

WirelessGigabit 4y ago

Regardless of the quality of the article, I for one would love to be surrounded by more engineers and less MBAs.

throwaway0x7E6 4y ago

this is the silver lining to this recession

kkfx 4y ago

Two notes: skilled workers for a proprietary platform should learn that they work against their interests since anything they create is bound to the owner so instead of creating technical value they'll keep reinventing the wheel a company after another with small differences between them since all of those are interested only in trapping users inside their service model. As a result preferred workers are those with less skill who knowing that accept limited compensation and being treated like human-robots; the lesson users should learn about proprietary platform is that they are at the mercy of the platform so NOTHING done with it should have a value since it might change or vanish overnight. The juice of this note is simple: IT MUST BE FLOSS, services must be open protocols anyone can implement and keep up not tied to any company or developer in particular. That's is. Beside that the sole comparison I see with the French Revolution is the fact revolutionaries / innovators in both cases are betrayed by those who led/hire them and in both cases such cohort of people allow betrayers to betray them.

lifefeed 4y ago

I read through some of this author's other articles, and he has a really inaccurate view of technology workers. We're not VC-backed digital nomads spending our days eating artisanal hot dogs. Most of us are just nine-to-five workers with families and hobbies, and most of use work on relatively boring parts of code that keep the wheels turning. (Only a specialized few get excited about automating mass data migrations. I love it, but it doesn't make for interesting TikToks.)