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Based on his argument: Fewer people are doing a lot more thanks to being good at automation. It's the automation that's making it possible to be successful, no

Based on his argument: Fewer people are doing a lot more thanks to being good at automation. It's the automation that's making it possible to be successful, not the engineers doing the automation. The past three years, the YC crowd has really tried hard to justify wealth disparities, gentrification and generally treating employees like garbage, as part of their Objectivist agenda. Paul, employees do the automation, not the founders.

CalRobert 4y ago
I don't follow? Lots of technical founders create their own automations.
- yetanotherforg 4y ago
  His whole point is: There is a lot of great free open source software being exploited by small technical teams to run faster. This means the people doing the integration deserve less $$ because they can do the same amount with less. Founders deserve all the money, everybody else should be happy to be employed. 1920s robber baron bs. Ignore the ethics that every single startup would be impossible without standing on the heads of those who have dedicated many hours of their lives building this free software.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Where does he mention open source? And using open source software is not standing on anyone's head.
    - yetanotherforg 4y ago
      Where do you think all of that automation comes from? I promise you, every single start-up you know of is violating somebody's copyrights on their open source. I've seen this in every company I've worked with for the past 30 years. There is always code inside of private applications which was copied and pasted from GPL'd code.
      - Msw242 4y ago
        Not every single startup. It's not hard to read the licenses, and I have a fiduciary duty not to open up my company to unnecessary liability
        yetanotherforg 4y ago
        Have you ever copied and pasted anything from StackOverflow? Did you ask them if they copied it, if they had permission to copy it, or where it was copied from so you could attribute properly? If so, my hat is off to you Sir. I did have a discussion recently with some friends as to their ethical reasons against GPT and co-pilot generated code.
        Msw242 4y ago
        I'm not an engineer, so it's possible there are engineers in my company copying and pasting from stack overflow Although we have a type system so they are probably adjusting things to fit But none of our supply chain has restrictive licenses attached, and good faith errors are usually easy to correct way before they go to trial I know because I have had to sign off on using worse packages when our use case doesn't comply with the license on the best in class package
      - HideousKojima 4y ago
        Unless that code is under the AGPL specifically and the software isn't cloud-based (and the vast majority of start-ups these days are doing SaaS) then there's no license violation there.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        What are you talking about? There is not always code copy and pasted from GPL'd code. Giant amounts of open source software is not released under GPL, and automation is moving fast enough that there's a huge amount that's not released under GPL precisely because if it is then people don't use it.
  - TurboHaskal 4y ago
    > those who have dedicated many hours of their lives digging their own grave I fixed that for you.
    - yetanotherforg 4y ago
      Yep. Absolute suckers for giving out their work for free I guess.
      - theturtletalks 4y ago
        You misunderstand their intentions. “I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding things out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it - those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me.” -Richard Feynman
        TurboHaskal 4y ago
        Did Richard Feynman struggle to pay rent?
        yetanotherforg 4y ago
        Wasn't his work funded by the government?
        yetanotherforg 4y ago
        This assumes that there is no financial intent in the work. My favorite example of this is that many thousands of Google's engineers used an app (Homebrew I think), but Google wouldn't hire him, thus letting him share in wealth partially created by his life's work.
  - hker999 4y ago
    I made this exact argument in the early 2000s when open source starting getting popular and many in the tech community thought I was ridiculous. I think it's ridiculous that open source developers give out their hard work willingly and then seem to think big companies are 'taking advantage' by not hiring them or funding the project. It has nothing to do with ethics. Startups didn't steal anything. The developers gave it out willingly. This sort of attitude has soured me to the entire open source community. They want to be able to give their work out for free, but then have a say in who uses it and how it's used, which is exactly the opposite of free and open.
    - jmagoon 4y ago
      Open source software is often funded by big corporations once it hits critical mass because it's a nice way to stamp out competing small businesses who might be have been able to charge $ for a small chunk of software functionality.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    OSS creators can choose their license. If I make something MIT licensed, I can't then complain that people are "stealing" my work. Just make proprietary software at that point.
wittycardio 4y ago
Pretty clear that these are people who want to fuck you over. Silicon Valley elites have accumulated enough power to come mask off. Entitled dirtbags who profited off government funded science and technology who've never created an ounce of value in their lives.
- yetanotherforg 4y ago
  Thank you. Nobody ever seems to mention how much founders get to stand on the heads of engineers and scientists who were paid with tax dollars. Kind of how the libertarian musk fans ignore how much aid his companies have gotten from the t taxpayers. In the heads of somebody who believed The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged were bibles, there are 1 or 2 people doing 99% of all work in the companies.
  - wittycardio 4y ago
    Most progress has come from universities, defense and government funding. These losers build an app and proclaim themselves gurus on the future. It's insane that people fall for it.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Progress doesn't come from funding, and funding doesn't come from the government. People make progress. People pay taxes.
      - wittycardio 4y ago
        Sure progress comes from scientists , not from idiots building b2b saas apps.
        TurboHaskal 4y ago
        But what about the yet another distributed key store we built?
robertlagrant 4y ago
> It's the automation that's making it possible to be successful, not the engineers doing the automation. That's like saying anyone who thinks hammers are a good idea is really saying a hammer makes a builder successful, not the builder. It's just a tool, and he's saying tools mean one person can do more. You don't need to straw man a philosophy on to it to then have something to argue against. > employees do the automation, not the founders Founders normally are employees. For the phase or type of company pg is talking about, they may be the only employees.
- yetanotherforg 4y ago
  Can you explain how Founders are employees in this context? I read this as pg being focused on justifying post-acquisition wealth. It seemed to be a justification for the founders receiving 100s if not 1,000s of times the level of compensation as the workers. I would be curious to hear more justifications from him for this. Founders really take far less risk than employees. I say this as someone who missed out on about $75 million from a YC start-up when an unnamed higher-up told them to fire me two weeks before my first vesting, because I had the most amount of non-founder stock in the company (a compensation for which I took a 66% salary cut). (edit, typos and turned 100s into 1,00s)
  - clevergadget 4y ago
    Yeah no one has anything to say about this, probably they read it and run to check their agreements sweating buckets. That's messed up, sorry to hear it.
    - yetanotherforg 4y ago
      Many of my friends and colleagues became wealthy thanks to winning the YC lottery, some as founders some as employees. The way they changed afterwards drove me away from the pursuit of money entirely. I'm sure the me in this timeline would not like the me in an alternate timeline where I lasted there two more weeks and achieved wealth status.
the_optimist 4y ago
Stop stealing the internet bits from Claude Shannon. He did the work and deserves his cut.
fleddr 4y ago
The idea that the fruits of automation should be awarded to the single guy on top is ridiculous, and that's not communist thinking. The idea of automation is that we should advance as society. The very point of it is that we need to work less, but it never turns out that way because the benefits of automation are seized by the few. Hence, we forcefully invent new labor regardless of purpose. Half of our economy is keeping each other busy with bullshit to keep this going. And if that wasn't perverted enough, now the message is: actually, we don't need you. At all.
dang 4y ago
I've been around YC for 80% of its existence and have never observed anything that could remotely be described as an "Objectivist agenda". I'd remember it too, if I had. As for "treating employees like garbage", that's just a baseless smear.

CalRobert 4y ago

I don't follow? Lots of technical founders create their own automations.

yetanotherforg 4y ago
His whole point is: There is a lot of great free open source software being exploited by small technical teams to run faster. This means the people doing the integration deserve less $$ because they can do the same amount with less. Founders deserve all the money, everybody else should be happy to be employed. 1920s robber baron bs. Ignore the ethics that every single startup would be impossible without standing on the heads of those who have dedicated many hours of their lives building this free software.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Where does he mention open source? And using open source software is not standing on anyone's head.
  - yetanotherforg 4y ago
    Where do you think all of that automation comes from? I promise you, every single start-up you know of is violating somebody's copyrights on their open source. I've seen this in every company I've worked with for the past 30 years. There is always code inside of private applications which was copied and pasted from GPL'd code.
    - Msw242 4y ago
      Not every single startup. It's not hard to read the licenses, and I have a fiduciary duty not to open up my company to unnecessary liability
      - yetanotherforg 4y ago
        Have you ever copied and pasted anything from StackOverflow? Did you ask them if they copied it, if they had permission to copy it, or where it was copied from so you could attribute properly? If so, my hat is off to you Sir. I did have a discussion recently with some friends as to their ethical reasons against GPT and co-pilot generated code.
        Msw242 4y ago
        I'm not an engineer, so it's possible there are engineers in my company copying and pasting from stack overflow Although we have a type system so they are probably adjusting things to fit But none of our supply chain has restrictive licenses attached, and good faith errors are usually easy to correct way before they go to trial I know because I have had to sign off on using worse packages when our use case doesn't comply with the license on the best in class package
    - HideousKojima 4y ago
      Unless that code is under the AGPL specifically and the software isn't cloud-based (and the vast majority of start-ups these days are doing SaaS) then there's no license violation there.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      What are you talking about? There is not always code copy and pasted from GPL'd code. Giant amounts of open source software is not released under GPL, and automation is moving fast enough that there's a huge amount that's not released under GPL precisely because if it is then people don't use it.
- TurboHaskal 4y ago
  > those who have dedicated many hours of their lives digging their own grave I fixed that for you.
  - yetanotherforg 4y ago
    Yep. Absolute suckers for giving out their work for free I guess.
    - theturtletalks 4y ago
      You misunderstand their intentions. “I’ve already got the prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding things out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it - those are the real things, the honors are unreal to me.” -Richard Feynman
      - TurboHaskal 4y ago
        Did Richard Feynman struggle to pay rent?
        yetanotherforg 4y ago
        Wasn't his work funded by the government?
      - yetanotherforg 4y ago
        This assumes that there is no financial intent in the work. My favorite example of this is that many thousands of Google's engineers used an app (Homebrew I think), but Google wouldn't hire him, thus letting him share in wealth partially created by his life's work.
- hker999 4y ago
  I made this exact argument in the early 2000s when open source starting getting popular and many in the tech community thought I was ridiculous. I think it's ridiculous that open source developers give out their hard work willingly and then seem to think big companies are 'taking advantage' by not hiring them or funding the project. It has nothing to do with ethics. Startups didn't steal anything. The developers gave it out willingly. This sort of attitude has soured me to the entire open source community. They want to be able to give their work out for free, but then have a say in who uses it and how it's used, which is exactly the opposite of free and open.
  - jmagoon 4y ago
    Open source software is often funded by big corporations once it hits critical mass because it's a nice way to stamp out competing small businesses who might be have been able to charge $ for a small chunk of software functionality.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  OSS creators can choose their license. If I make something MIT licensed, I can't then complain that people are "stealing" my work. Just make proprietary software at that point.

wittycardio 4y ago

Pretty clear that these are people who want to fuck you over. Silicon Valley elites have accumulated enough power to come mask off. Entitled dirtbags who profited off government funded science and technology who've never created an ounce of value in their lives.

yetanotherforg 4y ago
Thank you. Nobody ever seems to mention how much founders get to stand on the heads of engineers and scientists who were paid with tax dollars. Kind of how the libertarian musk fans ignore how much aid his companies have gotten from the t taxpayers. In the heads of somebody who believed The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged were bibles, there are 1 or 2 people doing 99% of all work in the companies.
- wittycardio 4y ago
  Most progress has come from universities, defense and government funding. These losers build an app and proclaim themselves gurus on the future. It's insane that people fall for it.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Progress doesn't come from funding, and funding doesn't come from the government. People make progress. People pay taxes.
    - wittycardio 4y ago
      Sure progress comes from scientists , not from idiots building b2b saas apps.
      - TurboHaskal 4y ago
        But what about the yet another distributed key store we built?

robertlagrant 4y ago

> It's the automation that's making it possible to be successful, not the engineers doing the automation. That's like saying anyone who thinks hammers are a good idea is really saying a hammer makes a builder successful, not the builder. It's just a tool, and he's saying tools mean one person can do more. You don't need to straw man a philosophy on to it to then have something to argue against. > employees do the automation, not the founders Founders normally are employees. For the phase or type of company pg is talking about, they may be the only employees.

yetanotherforg 4y ago
Can you explain how Founders are employees in this context? I read this as pg being focused on justifying post-acquisition wealth. It seemed to be a justification for the founders receiving 100s if not 1,000s of times the level of compensation as the workers. I would be curious to hear more justifications from him for this. Founders really take far less risk than employees. I say this as someone who missed out on about $75 million from a YC start-up when an unnamed higher-up told them to fire me two weeks before my first vesting, because I had the most amount of non-founder stock in the company (a compensation for which I took a 66% salary cut). (edit, typos and turned 100s into 1,00s)
- clevergadget 4y ago
  Yeah no one has anything to say about this, probably they read it and run to check their agreements sweating buckets. That's messed up, sorry to hear it.
  - yetanotherforg 4y ago
    Many of my friends and colleagues became wealthy thanks to winning the YC lottery, some as founders some as employees. The way they changed afterwards drove me away from the pursuit of money entirely. I'm sure the me in this timeline would not like the me in an alternate timeline where I lasted there two more weeks and achieved wealth status.

the_optimist 4y ago

Stop stealing the internet bits from Claude Shannon. He did the work and deserves his cut.

fleddr 4y ago

The idea that the fruits of automation should be awarded to the single guy on top is ridiculous, and that's not communist thinking. The idea of automation is that we should advance as society. The very point of it is that we need to work less, but it never turns out that way because the benefits of automation are seized by the few. Hence, we forcefully invent new labor regardless of purpose. Half of our economy is keeping each other busy with bullshit to keep this going. And if that wasn't perverted enough, now the message is: actually, we don't need you. At all.

dang 4y ago

I've been around YC for 80% of its existence and have never observed anything that could remotely be described as an "Objectivist agenda". I'd remember it too, if I had. As for "treating employees like garbage", that's just a baseless smear.