12 ms·

Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

385 points by rpgbr 2y ago

exceptione 2y ago
Indeed. There are not too many people that are both bright and willing to look up to the current crop of tech billionaires. Ideals count, certainly for hackers. If you have billions in the bank you might start to look to work on some real pressing problems instead of looking to get a share of the next Privacy Suck. Erosion of democratic societies via algorithmically boosted disinformation campaigns, climate change, healthcare, you name it. Tech is not neutral in the societal sense, far from it. Also, I doubt if AI (now even more widgets), with those tech leaders pressing for it, is compatible with being a tech enthusiast. Techies like tech first, results second. If software engineering becomes chess, it will be preserved as tournaments, not business.
gipp 2y ago
> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. Distills the post to a sentence, and boy does this nail it.
- jmathai 2y ago
  My hypothesis is that it reflects the shift away from consumer and SMB products to Silicon Valley mostly funding enterprise software. 101 North into San Francisco was an exciting drive in the 2000s. I t the 2010s it slowly started to change with billboards one by one changing towards soulless enterprise software. That drive now doesn’t have a single product anyone should be excited about. And enterprise software is truly boring. And that an understatement. I got very bored and disenchanted with software because it all sort of sucked. My other hypothesis is that there will be a resurgence of indie consumer and SMB software that’s not so soulless. And I hate to mention AI but I think it’s the enabler of these apps being viable for very small teams to not go after funding and keep their soul.
  - __loam 2y ago
    You don't like yet another business intelligence platform to help optimize your marketing spend?
    - jmathai 2y ago
      Those are the exception and get me amped up.
  - reissbaker 2y ago
    Yeah — for God's sake I wish tech was even "all Jobs and no Woz." At least under Jobs, Apple came up with the iPod and the iPhone! The 101 billboards are endemic of no Woz and no Jobs. Just... blandness. Beige. Cubicles updated for an open office plan.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - coffeefirst 2y ago
    I think you're onto something. Even the consumer facing stuff seems more interested in chasing OKRs than putting out a compelling product. When I'm thinking who's putting out excellent work, the software that's actually great to use, the list is almost exclusively solo projects (Overcast—arguably the greatest mobile app of all time) or scrappy underdogs (Kagi—seriously, Kagi rocks).
- spacecadet 2y ago
  And Woz got bored of big tech 40 years ago...
- preommr 2y ago
  > Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. Because it's a lot more true than most tech people want to admit. I am continuously amazed at how many brilliant people there are, that do fantastic things, that do not bring in anywhere near what their value is. Look no further than open source, there's people that write important software begging for scraps while flashy startups get showered with money if they yammer the right buzzwords. There are certain people that don't want to hear this, but being a leader and visionary is, in practice, a more valuable asset than the cumulative technical skills.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    Yeah, this is something which FUTO really made me aware of. That this Facebook was built on top of an entire ecosystem of open source tools and yet these tools like PHP and Apache will get not even a fraction of the wealth which Zuckerberg now has. And if you think about what he built in comparison to what PHP and Apache are, it's such a thin layer. So somewhere we are getting the distribution of economic reward wrong in our current system and we need to sort of shift it towards some of these great hackers who are actually doing the work.
    - jimhi 2y ago
      What is FUTO?
      - dualogy 2y ago
        Just a guess, but from the above context maybe futo.org
        ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
        Yeah, this is what I meant.
    - luckylion 2y ago
      I understand that line of thought, but I find it similar to "Shakespeare shouldn't get all the credit, what about the manufacturer of the pen he used? he wouldn't have been able to write his plays without the pen."
- bjornsing 2y ago
  That’s a really good line and I’d love to read a blog post that distills to it. But this ain’t it. I bet a young Woz today would be a hell of a lot better off in Graham’s world than in this guy’s “big companies are great” world.
  - ozozozd 2y ago
    I read the post till the end. It never mentioned big companies being good or great. Can you quote the part?
    - bjornsing 2y ago
      Typically when someone stresses how somebody doesn’t have certain experience it’s because they themselves have that experience and value it highly. In this case the OP stresses Graham’s lack of experience working for big companies.
- Quothling 2y ago
  I would completely agree with this if it said "All Cook and no Woz". I say this because I think it is unfair to label Jobs along the line of all the other MBA spreadsheet CEO's. Jobs actually had a talent for products. Woz and other brilliant engineers may have build these things, but Jobs had a talent for picking the right products, the right packages and the right timing that I don't think anyone else in Tech has ever really been capable of copying. I think that tech will always be full of Woz type people, but without Jobs it's going to be hard to get those products out there. I see a lot of it in Solar energy and Farming tech where a lot of brilliant things are being build, but a lot of it remains relatively small scale because nobody knows how to sell it. I think you could also make the case for saying that the industry is full of Zuckerbergs (maybe Sam Altmans in a few years), but I'm not sure the advertisement industry is really all that related to tech. I know it may not be the most popular thing to say, but is there really that much of a difference between selling Tobacco, Coca Cola, Search Engines or Social Media? All are popular products which haven't really changed the world for the better.
  - msoad 2y ago
    exactly! tech needs more Woz+Jobs and less Cooks.
  - KaiserPro 2y ago
    > unfair to label Jobs along the line of all the other MBA spreadsheet CEO's I suggest you read the post again. It's not against MBAs as such, its against blowhard "heroes" that go around trying to proxy what Jobs did by copying him being an utter prick, rather than a domain expert. Jobs was successful despite him being a prick. He was fired for not doing what he was supposed to do, and over stepping his mark. NeXT Inc. burnt a boat load of cash, and were destined for obscurity had they not been bought by apple. I personally don't like Zuckerberg, but hes not an altman. Altman has virtually no redeeming qualities apart from being able to make PG think he's jesus. Zuckerberg has many fucking faults, but he is much much closer to Woz than Jobs. Thats probably part of the reason why he's so hated. Because he's either incapable or unwilling to worry about the public persona. Altman is in the same class as Adam Neumann, ie a mystery cult with great funding, that happens to be a tech CEO.
  - 2y ago
- tarsinge 2y ago
  No, tech has become no Woz and no Jobs either. You don’t get enshittification with Jobs, but the opposite. Also he would abhorre modern day process driven product management: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE
  - WA 2y ago
    How many years need to pass until HN stops with the "what would Steve Jobs do"-mentality, where it's entirely unclear how he would operate in the current environment and where Apple would've been with him still being in charge (if he still were in charge - he would've turned 70 next year). It's been 13 years. I think most assessments are merely projection by now.
dannyobrien 2y ago
I think another way to explain "being bored" (and a bunch of other features that this post describes). These people are getting old: Andreessen is 53, Graham is 59, the author is in his fifties; I am too. Nothing too surprising about having older people be the supposed "blowhard" voices of an industry -- except during the golden age that these posts harken back too, all of these pundits were twenty or so years younger. I'm prompted to think about this after watching the last Apple event livestream, and thinking to myself "these people all seem so /old/". Steve Jobs seemed ancient to me when he returned to Apple in 1997: he was 42. This is not to say that techs, hackers, etc, have grown old -- but the distribution of ages has definitely widened, and its center may have shifted a little right too. That leaves plenty of room for much younger people to look at much older people and wonder at their strange, blowhard opinions. It also leads to older types feeling tired and bored with tech : and projecting that as the dominant tone to those of any age.
- zoom6628 2y ago
  As an older person in tech I see ageism alive and well in tech. The young ones don't understand why we oldies roll our eyes at hearing the 13th iteration of "this is ground breaking new idea" or when we gently interrupt a personnel or strategy discussion with a few use cases from the past to illustrate the pending shit-storm being proposed. Time for the world realise this tech stuff and programming has been around about 100 years! Let that settle in. A century of code. So the tech population is now clever and curious 8 year olds all the way through to 80+ curious and seasoned Algol programmers. And we ALL have value. #endofrant
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - eric-hu 2y ago
    How have you kept the ageism from scaring you off or just turning you off to go to another industry?
  - archgoon 2y ago
    What were they coding on in 1924?
rexreed 2y ago
"If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager." Sad to say, but the professional fakers dominate the C-suite. And often the top manager (the CEO) is a professional faker in chief, hiring like others instead of those who really know what they are doing, so that they don't call out the BS of the top levels. In the current corporate model that dominates modern capitalism, it's the shit that floats to the top. I am hopeful of a future of mass self-employment and away from finance-led, quarterly-focused, bottom-line driven corporations that stray from their missions and seek to serve a minority of overweighted shareholders, at the expense of employees, customers, and the "common" shareholder.
- jmathai 2y ago
  Ha. That’s the hypothesis I shared in my other comment. I’m hopeful. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41544537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41544537
- spacecadet 2y ago
  Agreed, Ive been slowly boot strapping a co-op with old colleagues and that is where my energy will remain for the rest of my days.
  - rexreed 2y ago
    This is the way. I feel there's an evolution of small business self-employment that can achieve scale without falling into the trap of the current finance-focused corporate approach. Spending my time and energy to focus on building out what this model is.
BenFranklin100 2y ago
The author of the post, Ian Betteridge, makes this statement: "But the other reason why the whole founder mode is a hot mess is that Paul Graham is entirely wrong about management and leadership. Yeah, I know: Graham has been involved with building more companies than I have." However, the about page on his blog and his LinkedIn indicates he has zero experience running any companies, small or large. Am I missing something? https://ianbetteridge.com/about/ https://ianbetteridge.com/about/
- rhapsodic 2y ago
  [dead]
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  He said “more” which is compatible with his experience being “zero.” That said, a cat may look at a king, and everyone can have an opinion.
zoom6628 2y ago
Best quote I will use is: "Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz."
daemonk 2y ago
I think it is entirely fair to say that there probably isnt just one primary way to run a large organization. That’s really the main takeaway I found useful from Paul Graham’s blog post. He obviously didnt specify at all what other ways are and what this nebulous “founder mode” means. But I think just pointing out hiring an army of consultants and mbas might not be the only way to do it is an important statement to make that I don’t think most people in the corporate world would readily admit to.
raytopia 2y ago
There's still fun hacker spaces out there. The Playdate community is a really fun space because it's mostly non commercial and people just making stuff for the love of it. [0] The raspberry pi community is also in the hacker space, I think the shortages and the price of the newer products hurt it some but I'm sure the spirit will come back. [1] Overall I'd say that people spend too much time on the internet and it's effectively a full time job form them but with no breaks, which of course leads to burn out/disappointment. [2] I'm rambling at this point but maybe there needs to be a hobbiest hackernews or something. [0] When most stuff is priced $10 at most and they're are onyl at most 100k devices on the market, there is not much money to be made. [1] I'm still disappointed there is not much of a gamedev/creative software community around the raspberry pi. [2] And when you read about angry sad things all day because that's how Merchants of Despair keep you on their sites. Well it's hard not to feel angry and sad.
- DANmode 2y ago
  > hobbiest hackernews or something hackaday.com community?
kazcaptain 2y ago
To me it seems like an alternative take on e/acc. It’s either become a fatalist or just do stuff. “F it we ball” vs it is what it is.
WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
The industry is mostly run by opportunists, I refused to make career despite my appetite for low level programming I have no desire to contribute to this whole circus full for fraudsters
- sulandor 2y ago
  > industry is mostly run by opportunists yes, non-participation is hardly possible though
  - WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
    I ended up participating and contributing to open source instead ;)
    - sulandor 2y ago
      this is the way
Animats 2y ago
The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is. There are interesting things going on: * Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top. * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now. * Electric cars. For new car sales, 10% in US are electric. 20% worldwide. 50% in China. US is way behind. * Flying cars. The scaled-up drone flying cars actually work. First commercial deployment in China. Range is limited, but good enough to get VIPs around congested cities. * Batteries. Solid-state batteries still are not available in quantity, because the manufacturing process is hard. At least five major companies are working on it. Somebody will crack that. They will not be in the US. * Metals. Lots of sources found for rare earths. Electric powered basic steel has been demonstrated. * Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured.
- woodpanel 2y ago
  > Electric cars. For new car sales … 50% in China. This seems to be incorrect unless you lure in Plugin-Hybrids into the "electric cars" category. Also, the real driver of this "electric cars" market share growth in China seems to be PHEVs ("electric cars" with a combustion engine in it) while BEVs growth seems to be stalling. [1] [1] https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/02/47-plugin-vehicle-market-share-in-china-ev-sales-report/amp/ https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/02/47-plugin-vehicle-marke...
  - Animats 2y ago
    OK, "Plug-in vehicles". I considered getting one of those, but it only has 22 miles of electric range. If they got to 50 miles, I could run on electricity almost all the time.
    - 2y ago
tptacek 2y ago
When the post came out, for the first time in a long time I found myself nodding my head with Graham, because I feel like basically everyone who has worked in a company that has found some form of product/market fit and started staffing and and delegating has had the experience of watching pasteurized process cheese food faceplant trying to understand and further a sane goal a founding team got some traction with when it was smaller. Everyone has. There was something to it. But now, as usual, everyone has overindexed on everything, so we're sitting here comparing Aaron Swartz to Sam Altman as if either of them would be successful parachuted into the median immediate-post-PMF company. As is so often the case, these stories are just vectors along which we recapitulate our existing beliefs. Woz vs. Jobs! We'll be talking about this 50 years from now, as if there was anything to learn from it. Of course, this means the original post, the "founder mode" post, was bad. The first cut of most things is bad! I've talked to 2 people now who saw the AirBNB talk that prompted it, and both said the talk was way better than the "founder mode" post, which left both scratching their heads. Maybe someone (maybe Graham) will find a better way to distill the talk? Neither of my friends will go into more detail about that talk, so I hope someone does. In the meantime: this all feels like drama for its own sake. Certainly, if we're talking about business and invoking aaronsw, it seems safe to guess there isn't much trenchant in this particular story. "Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz". For fuck's sake.
- gwd 2y ago
  > But now, as usual, everyone has overindexed on everything, so we're sitting here comparing Aaron Swartz to Sam Altman as if either of them would be successful parachuted into the median immediate-post-PMF company. Yeah, my take was that the AirBNB guy said, "I was told A, so I did B. C happened, which was terrible. So I did D, and E happened, which was better." Paul said, "Huh, lots of people seem to have a similar issue with A. There's a general pattern here we should figure out." But basically all the subsequent discussions have been about A, without knowing even what B, C, D, and E were; much less knowing what all the other similar experiences were that prompted Paul's post. Maybe Paul's an idiot or maybe he's a genius, but without that data there's no way to tell.
  - tim333 2y ago
privacymatters4 2y ago
From a post I saw in another thread, I don't know how to link to the direct comment: > "Same year for me. My college experience was a mix of PCU, Animal House, Hackers and Real Genius (ok not quite). I first saw email in a Pine terminal client. Netscape had been freshly ripped off from NCSA Mosaic at my alma mater UIUC the year before. Hacks, warez, mods, music and even Photoshop were being shared in public folders on the Mac LocalTalk network with MB/sec download speeds 4 years before Napster and 6 years before BitTorrent. Perl was the new hotness, and PHP wouldn't be mainstream until closer to 2000. Everyone and their grandma was writing HTML for $75/hr and eBay was injecting cash into young people's pockets (in a way that can't really be conveyed today except using Uber/Lyft and Bitcoin luck as examples) even though PayPal wouldn't be invented for another 4 years. Self-actualization felt within reach, 4 years before The Matrix and Fight Club hit theaters. To say that there was a feeling of endless possibility is an understatement. So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery. Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own. What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it. So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted: - AI (only runs on GPUs not distributed high-multicore CPUs maintained by hobbyists) - VR (delayed by the lack of R&D spending on LCDs and blue LEDs after the Dot Bomb) - Smartphones (put desktop computing on the back burner for nearly 20 years) - WiFi (locked down instead of run publicly as a peer to peer replacement for the internet backbone, creating a tragedy of the commons) - 5G (again, locked down proprietary networks instead of free and public p2p) - High speed internet (inaccessible for many due to protectionist lobbying efforts by ISP duopolies) - Solar panels (delayed ~20 years due to the Bush v Gore decision and 30% Trump tariff) - Electric vehicles (delayed ~20 years for similar reasons, see Who Killed the Electric Car) - Lithium batteries (again delayed ~20 years, reaching mainstream mainly due to Obama's reelection in 2012) - Amazon (a conglomeration of infrastructure that could have been public, see also Louis De Joy and the denial of electric vehicles for the US Postal Service) - SpaceX (a symptom of the lack of NASA funding and R&D in science, see For All Mankind on Apple TV) - CRISPR (delayed 10-20 years by the shuttering of R&D after the Dot Bomb, see also stem cell research delayed by concerns over abortion) - Kickstarter (only allows a subset of endeavors, mainly art and video games) - GoFundMe (a symptom of the lack of public healthcare in the US) - Patreon (if it worked you'd be earning your primary income from it) Had I won the internet lottery, my top goal would have been to reduce suffering in the world by open sourcing (and automating the production of) resources like education, food and raw materials. I would work towards curing all genetic diseases and increasing longevity. Protecting the environment. Reversing global warming. Etc etc etc. The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes. Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?" Me again: It's definitely boring. All the good stuff is hidden behind $50 subscriptions (or whatever), hacker culture from what I've seen (and being alone most of my day) is everybody just working their jobs then disappearing or heading on to video games/a distraction. It's ..something. Definitely a bore fest. I like smallweb stuff. Cool projects, seeing things. We went the wrong way.
cynicalpeace 2y ago
The best way to know if someone’s lost an argument is when they start hurling insults.
noufalibrahim 2y ago
I do like the point about lack of experience hiring leading to bad hires. In "Endurance", there's a short note on how shackleton hired crew members for his expedition. Seemingly on a whim and a 5 minute chat. I interpreted that as deep experience of his area combined with a keen sense of judging people. They combined to work magic. That kind of thing takes a lot of time.
devmunchies 2y ago
My main criticism of this article and the article it references is that it refers to Marc Andreessen as a “not-so-bright billionaire” who “doesn’t build shit”. Do people forgot that he built the first popular web browser (mosaic) and then built Netscape? He is much more part of “hacker” culture than other names mentioned.
- mplewis 2y ago
  Maybe thirty years ago. Today, his money is the most relevant thing about him.
  - imiric 2y ago
    I'm very much on the side of the hackers in this argument, but honestly, why is a hacker turned businessman seen as a bad thing? Most people on this forum and in this community are trying to do the same thing.
    - j4coh 2y ago
      It’s selling out. Trading in your idealism to work on spyware/ad tech or whatever.
      - imiric 2y ago
        Oh, please. "Selling out" is such an immature take. Andreessen was one of the first people who saw the potential of the web in the early days, worked on the first graphical web browsers and built a highly influential business around it. Then he went on to create one of the most powerful VC firms in the industry, which in turn funded some of the most successful companies. His impact wouldn't have been anywhere near what it is today had he stayed working as a software developer. His ideals and goals were clearly much higher than that, and he got rich in the process. Sounds like a capitalist success story if I ever heard one.
        rpgbr 2y ago
mangecoeur 2y ago
When the industry is all about the myth of the trendy tech founder, of course the ones who succeed are the con-men and fabulists. All jobs and no woz indeed
tired_and_awake 2y ago
I'm having a hard time putting this into words. Apologies if this isn't terribly clear. As easy as it is to dismiss tech hype - nothing wrong with doing that honestly - autonomous city driving is inching closer to the ubiquity it promised a decade ago. And come on ChatGPT is pretty amazing even if it is over hyped. Hackers are everywhere, they're just doing work and not writing hype posts. Tech news is all jobs. I love this article just don't fully agree with it. Love the convo in this post too! Keep it coming.
KaiserPro 2y ago
> A good sign that it may be time for a re-shifting of voices in tech Yes, it would be good to get some domain experts in, rather than people who are comfortable re-hashing press releases with an "trust me, the physics of this perpetual motion machine check out" or "lol they are shit" overlay. Especially as tech now is moving from a "oh thats a simple idea, just needs executing" to actual "shiut the physics of this make it super hard" (ie AR)
arathis 2y ago
To me, the boredom comes from seeing technology inevitably get corrupted. Self-driving cars turn into self-driving ads, and AI is used to displace jobs or track people. Everything we’re promised eventually falls apart, and I’m tired of where it all leads. The utopia would be an equitable society, where we work far less than our ancestors did, allowing us to focus on pursuing our interests and desires—not just buying security. But not only does that seem unattainable, it's pursuit is considered laziness or opting-out of a social contract whereby 99% of people fight to make 1% rich with the delusion being that maybe it's me that's the 1% and that with the riches I can score I can ride off into the sunset, and get off this foul ride forever. Makes me sick how far we don fell.
- aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
  Companies are, by their very nature, designed to maximize profit (fiduciary duty laws), not benefit humanity. Governments are what we're meant to guide this in the right direction, but globalization and unfathomable wealth broke the system. Technology has become so powerful and integrated into our society that the companies that drive it have become as powerful as governments, and our political systems cannot keep up. I see this in how the EU suddenly is stepping up to regulate American tech companies, something it was never designed or meant to do. They are suddenly the only organization with enough regulatory power to do so properly, as the American government seems to have given up trying themselves. I don't think this is unsolvable. I'd love to see "fiduciary duty laws" disbanded for one, and America being less of a pushover for lobbying would go a long way as well. By time, we will figure out what works and what doesn't.
imiric 2y ago
But this outcome shouldn't be surprising. In the beginning, the industry was dominated by nerds and hackers who were passionate about tech. Then those with business acumen noticed that this could make them very rich, and swooped in to "help out" those hackers, who, being fair, probably wouldn't be able to run a successful business on their own. But there are also examples of hackers themselves getting business savvy, and business people becoming tech oriented, and many combinations in between. While the Silicon Valley, VC funded, hypergrowth mentality is incredibly toxic, I think you'll find many examples in the industry across this spectrum. What we're seeing with crypto, AI, etc. is just the usual hype cycle. This will inevitably be flocked by all types of characters, but we've always had these. Remember the buzz around the early web, the "information superhighway", and the inevitable dot-com bubble? Or the video game crash in the 80s? The same will happen with modern tech. We'll eventually reach the plateau of productivity of these technologies, or they will lose our interest and we'll move on to something else.
mihaic 2y ago
> If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager. > Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. If the expectation for your average Woz is to handle seasoned bullshitters, how can you expect them to also be hackers? It's true that VCs and an ossified economy contribute more to the blandness of new companies, but ignoring the problems with the hiring market leaves you with half a picture. I'm not blaming employees for doing what's best for them, but it feels naive and unempathetic to put the blame of aligning incentives to founders, when the problems are systemic.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  Actually, as a hacker, I find I have less need for the Jobs types these since I can do more myself. VC have a distorted view of the world because they look for unicorns in a world where most companies just aren't. Most companies don't start out using VC money and finance their operations with revenue the company makes. It's easier than ever to get started building a company. All you need is time. And even that is getting better. The web and cloud removed most of the cost over the last thirty years. And with LLMs we can remove a lot of people and time from the equation as well. It's gotten to the point where you can outsource a lot of things to specialized service providers instead of doing them in house.
andrew311 2y ago
> it’s difficult to look at people like Graham — people who aren’t as bright as they think they are Graham’s (alleged) arrogance about his brightness isn’t really the issue here. Let’s face it, he is bright. That’s not what is causing this boredom/dismay, though. The issue is that somehow the rest of us became entranced by the “cult of Graham” and his thinking about startups/founders, and collectively we made his way into the way, ostracizing those that lived their life outside the idealized startup paradigm that Graham crafted. Creation of this dismay isn’t on him alone, it’s on all of us.
- noobermin 2y ago
  We should also be honest how much of it is due to HN itself (as in the existence of the website). Before it I never associated start-ups with hacking, if anything, due to free software ideology, I always thought it flirted with anti-capitalism really. But today, the hacker world seems to be centred in sf and it's likely due to reddit and HN.
ozozozd 2y ago
Is this the original talk? https://youtu.be/s3IhbJDFs5E https://youtu.be/s3IhbJDFs5E
- tomhoward 2y ago
  No - it was a talk to YC current-batch founders, which is always off the record.
langsoul-com 2y ago
Let's not forget that people themselves changed and what is popular. Look at any top show hn post and you'll see all this talk about the market fit, the competitors, and how much money that product can make. The hackers have disappeared and we're apart of the prohlem. Should really have a tag rule to prevent any boring business start up bogus discussions when the poster wants.
- akkartik 2y ago
  > Look at any top show hn post and you'll see all this talk about the market fit, the competitors, and how much money that product can make. This isn't really true. Look at the current top Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41544969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41544969. Zero business discussion on there. I've been avoiding the business threads on HN for about 10 years now[1], and the frontpage still has enough stuff to keep me coming back, and the comments on those threads are fine as well. There are fewer comments on those threads, and that too is a good thing. HN is 3 distinct sub-communities, to my mind: startup news, hacker news and what I think of as "the human condition" news which encompasses humanities posts like lithub and so on. I participate in 2 of them. I agree with you that we hackers are part of the problem. But it's not a systemic problem. We can still choose what we attend to. We're not lacking for options. [1] I really wish that people used HN's favorites feature more, and that favorites were more organically discoverable. Here are mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=akkartik https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=akkartik
r0ze-at-hn 2y ago
> hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground. This sounds like someone who is looking for someone to blame. If founder after founder is having this problem what are the odds that there is something else going on and perhaps the reports are doing exactly what the founder is rewarding? I see in a lot of tech companies is a system where all the incentives are about getting promoted. IC's are trying to build things that look big and complex and "hard". Future maintenance burden, product impact, etc are difficult to measure and also super easy to game. All that matters is that they might get promoted so they can jump teams and do it again. Managers are promoted based on headcount and do everything they can to keep reports and grow like weeds. A dysfunctional org? Yes please, let me triple it in size to solve the problem, we have the money and this org is important, and I become important in the process. Sure some (not all) might need to grow the top line by X%, but in a growing industry/product category/company that might be the default so the focus is again on growing their career. They spend all their time on hiring and annual reviews and promo committees and almost no time on actual strategy. And getting rid of under performers was difficult and as long of a process as possible because there was no incentive to make that simple. As long at the tide rises all boats and the CEO rewards this behavior everyone plays this game. When the water starts flowing out suddenly you have a CEO looking around going wtf when everyone did exactly what they incentivized.
- lazystar 2y ago
  Here's an old paper that you will appreciate: "Organizational disaster and organizational decay: the case of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration" http://www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/schwartz/Org%20Decay%20at%20NASA.htm http://www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/schwartz/Org%20Decay%20at...
- gitfbensool832 2y ago
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- gitfbensool832 2y ago
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fancyfredbot 2y ago
It's a good post but for some reason he decided to end it with a random attack on Paul Graham, which seems weird. It's not really necessary to say this and actually the accusation is slightly ridiculous (how does he know how bright Paul Graham thinks Paul Graham is?). Not good judgment to include this in the post, and undermines the rest of it for me a bit.
- dsubburam 2y ago
  Agreed. Also citing Graham's "lack of experience in this area". Even in the steelman case of the Hollywood celebrity promoting a cause they are clearly not qualified to evaluate, I think we ought not belittle the speech act itself. Better to just present your counter-arguments if you disagree. If everyone felt free to share their opinions, the better the quantity and quality of ideas that surface after due examination.
milabogdanova 2y ago
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385 points by rpgbr 2y ago

Indeed. There are not too many people that are both bright and willing to look up to the current crop of tech billionaires. Ideals count, certainly for hackers. If you have billions in the bank you might start to look to work on some real pressing problems instead of looking to get a share of the next Privacy Suck. Erosion of democratic societies via algorithmically boosted disinformation campaigns, climate change, healthcare, you name it. Tech is not neutral in the societal sense, far from it. Also, I doubt if AI (now even more widgets), with those tech leaders pressing for it, is compatible with being a tech enthusiast. Techies like tech first, results second. If software engineering becomes chess, it will be preserved as tournaments, not business.

gipp 2y ago

> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. Distills the post to a sentence, and boy does this nail it.

jmathai 2y ago
My hypothesis is that it reflects the shift away from consumer and SMB products to Silicon Valley mostly funding enterprise software. 101 North into San Francisco was an exciting drive in the 2000s. I t the 2010s it slowly started to change with billboards one by one changing towards soulless enterprise software. That drive now doesn’t have a single product anyone should be excited about. And enterprise software is truly boring. And that an understatement. I got very bored and disenchanted with software because it all sort of sucked. My other hypothesis is that there will be a resurgence of indie consumer and SMB software that’s not so soulless. And I hate to mention AI but I think it’s the enabler of these apps being viable for very small teams to not go after funding and keep their soul.
- __loam 2y ago
  You don't like yet another business intelligence platform to help optimize your marketing spend?
  - jmathai 2y ago
    Those are the exception and get me amped up.
- reissbaker 2y ago
  Yeah — for God's sake I wish tech was even "all Jobs and no Woz." At least under Jobs, Apple came up with the iPod and the iPhone! The 101 billboards are endemic of no Woz and no Jobs. Just... blandness. Beige. Cubicles updated for an open office plan.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- coffeefirst 2y ago
  I think you're onto something. Even the consumer facing stuff seems more interested in chasing OKRs than putting out a compelling product. When I'm thinking who's putting out excellent work, the software that's actually great to use, the list is almost exclusively solo projects (Overcast—arguably the greatest mobile app of all time) or scrappy underdogs (Kagi—seriously, Kagi rocks).
spacecadet 2y ago
And Woz got bored of big tech 40 years ago...
preommr 2y ago
> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. Because it's a lot more true than most tech people want to admit. I am continuously amazed at how many brilliant people there are, that do fantastic things, that do not bring in anywhere near what their value is. Look no further than open source, there's people that write important software begging for scraps while flashy startups get showered with money if they yammer the right buzzwords. There are certain people that don't want to hear this, but being a leader and visionary is, in practice, a more valuable asset than the cumulative technical skills.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Yeah, this is something which FUTO really made me aware of. That this Facebook was built on top of an entire ecosystem of open source tools and yet these tools like PHP and Apache will get not even a fraction of the wealth which Zuckerberg now has. And if you think about what he built in comparison to what PHP and Apache are, it's such a thin layer. So somewhere we are getting the distribution of economic reward wrong in our current system and we need to sort of shift it towards some of these great hackers who are actually doing the work.
  - jimhi 2y ago
    What is FUTO?
    - dualogy 2y ago
      Just a guess, but from the above context maybe futo.org
      - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
        Yeah, this is what I meant.
  - luckylion 2y ago
    I understand that line of thought, but I find it similar to "Shakespeare shouldn't get all the credit, what about the manufacturer of the pen he used? he wouldn't have been able to write his plays without the pen."
bjornsing 2y ago
That’s a really good line and I’d love to read a blog post that distills to it. But this ain’t it. I bet a young Woz today would be a hell of a lot better off in Graham’s world than in this guy’s “big companies are great” world.
- ozozozd 2y ago
  I read the post till the end. It never mentioned big companies being good or great. Can you quote the part?
  - bjornsing 2y ago
    Typically when someone stresses how somebody doesn’t have certain experience it’s because they themselves have that experience and value it highly. In this case the OP stresses Graham’s lack of experience working for big companies.
Quothling 2y ago
I would completely agree with this if it said "All Cook and no Woz". I say this because I think it is unfair to label Jobs along the line of all the other MBA spreadsheet CEO's. Jobs actually had a talent for products. Woz and other brilliant engineers may have build these things, but Jobs had a talent for picking the right products, the right packages and the right timing that I don't think anyone else in Tech has ever really been capable of copying. I think that tech will always be full of Woz type people, but without Jobs it's going to be hard to get those products out there. I see a lot of it in Solar energy and Farming tech where a lot of brilliant things are being build, but a lot of it remains relatively small scale because nobody knows how to sell it. I think you could also make the case for saying that the industry is full of Zuckerbergs (maybe Sam Altmans in a few years), but I'm not sure the advertisement industry is really all that related to tech. I know it may not be the most popular thing to say, but is there really that much of a difference between selling Tobacco, Coca Cola, Search Engines or Social Media? All are popular products which haven't really changed the world for the better.
- msoad 2y ago
  exactly! tech needs more Woz+Jobs and less Cooks.
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  > unfair to label Jobs along the line of all the other MBA spreadsheet CEO's I suggest you read the post again. It's not against MBAs as such, its against blowhard "heroes" that go around trying to proxy what Jobs did by copying him being an utter prick, rather than a domain expert. Jobs was successful despite him being a prick. He was fired for not doing what he was supposed to do, and over stepping his mark. NeXT Inc. burnt a boat load of cash, and were destined for obscurity had they not been bought by apple. I personally don't like Zuckerberg, but hes not an altman. Altman has virtually no redeeming qualities apart from being able to make PG think he's jesus. Zuckerberg has many fucking faults, but he is much much closer to Woz than Jobs. Thats probably part of the reason why he's so hated. Because he's either incapable or unwilling to worry about the public persona. Altman is in the same class as Adam Neumann, ie a mystery cult with great funding, that happens to be a tech CEO.
- 2y ago
tarsinge 2y ago
No, tech has become no Woz and no Jobs either. You don’t get enshittification with Jobs, but the opposite. Also he would abhorre modern day process driven product management: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE
- WA 2y ago
  How many years need to pass until HN stops with the "what would Steve Jobs do"-mentality, where it's entirely unclear how he would operate in the current environment and where Apple would've been with him still being in charge (if he still were in charge - he would've turned 70 next year). It's been 13 years. I think most assessments are merely projection by now.

dannyobrien 2y ago

I think another way to explain "being bored" (and a bunch of other features that this post describes). These people are getting old: Andreessen is 53, Graham is 59, the author is in his fifties; I am too. Nothing too surprising about having older people be the supposed "blowhard" voices of an industry -- except during the golden age that these posts harken back too, all of these pundits were twenty or so years younger. I'm prompted to think about this after watching the last Apple event livestream, and thinking to myself "these people all seem so /old/". Steve Jobs seemed ancient to me when he returned to Apple in 1997: he was 42. This is not to say that techs, hackers, etc, have grown old -- but the distribution of ages has definitely widened, and its center may have shifted a little right too. That leaves plenty of room for much younger people to look at much older people and wonder at their strange, blowhard opinions. It also leads to older types feeling tired and bored with tech : and projecting that as the dominant tone to those of any age.

zoom6628 2y ago
As an older person in tech I see ageism alive and well in tech. The young ones don't understand why we oldies roll our eyes at hearing the 13th iteration of "this is ground breaking new idea" or when we gently interrupt a personnel or strategy discussion with a few use cases from the past to illustrate the pending shit-storm being proposed. Time for the world realise this tech stuff and programming has been around about 100 years! Let that settle in. A century of code. So the tech population is now clever and curious 8 year olds all the way through to 80+ curious and seasoned Algol programmers. And we ALL have value. #endofrant
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- eric-hu 2y ago
  How have you kept the ageism from scaring you off or just turning you off to go to another industry?
- archgoon 2y ago
  What were they coding on in 1924?

rexreed 2y ago

"If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager." Sad to say, but the professional fakers dominate the C-suite. And often the top manager (the CEO) is a professional faker in chief, hiring like others instead of those who really know what they are doing, so that they don't call out the BS of the top levels. In the current corporate model that dominates modern capitalism, it's the shit that floats to the top. I am hopeful of a future of mass self-employment and away from finance-led, quarterly-focused, bottom-line driven corporations that stray from their missions and seek to serve a minority of overweighted shareholders, at the expense of employees, customers, and the "common" shareholder.

jmathai 2y ago
Ha. That’s the hypothesis I shared in my other comment. I’m hopeful. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41544537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41544537
spacecadet 2y ago
Agreed, Ive been slowly boot strapping a co-op with old colleagues and that is where my energy will remain for the rest of my days.
- rexreed 2y ago
  This is the way. I feel there's an evolution of small business self-employment that can achieve scale without falling into the trap of the current finance-focused corporate approach. Spending my time and energy to focus on building out what this model is.

BenFranklin100 2y ago

The author of the post, Ian Betteridge, makes this statement: "But the other reason why the whole founder mode is a hot mess is that Paul Graham is entirely wrong about management and leadership. Yeah, I know: Graham has been involved with building more companies than I have." However, the about page on his blog and his LinkedIn indicates he has zero experience running any companies, small or large. Am I missing something? https://ianbetteridge.com/about/ https://ianbetteridge.com/about/

rhapsodic 2y ago
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shermantanktop 2y ago
He said “more” which is compatible with his experience being “zero.” That said, a cat may look at a king, and everyone can have an opinion.

zoom6628 2y ago

Best quote I will use is: "Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz."

daemonk 2y ago

I think it is entirely fair to say that there probably isnt just one primary way to run a large organization. That’s really the main takeaway I found useful from Paul Graham’s blog post. He obviously didnt specify at all what other ways are and what this nebulous “founder mode” means. But I think just pointing out hiring an army of consultants and mbas might not be the only way to do it is an important statement to make that I don’t think most people in the corporate world would readily admit to.

raytopia 2y ago

There's still fun hacker spaces out there. The Playdate community is a really fun space because it's mostly non commercial and people just making stuff for the love of it. [0] The raspberry pi community is also in the hacker space, I think the shortages and the price of the newer products hurt it some but I'm sure the spirit will come back. [1] Overall I'd say that people spend too much time on the internet and it's effectively a full time job form them but with no breaks, which of course leads to burn out/disappointment. [2] I'm rambling at this point but maybe there needs to be a hobbiest hackernews or something. [0] When most stuff is priced $10 at most and they're are onyl at most 100k devices on the market, there is not much money to be made. [1] I'm still disappointed there is not much of a gamedev/creative software community around the raspberry pi. [2] And when you read about angry sad things all day because that's how Merchants of Despair keep you on their sites. Well it's hard not to feel angry and sad.

DANmode 2y ago
> hobbiest hackernews or something hackaday.com community?

kazcaptain 2y ago

To me it seems like an alternative take on e/acc. It’s either become a fatalist or just do stuff. “F it we ball” vs it is what it is.

WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago

The industry is mostly run by opportunists, I refused to make career despite my appetite for low level programming I have no desire to contribute to this whole circus full for fraudsters

sulandor 2y ago
> industry is mostly run by opportunists yes, non-participation is hardly possible though
- WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
  I ended up participating and contributing to open source instead ;)
  - sulandor 2y ago
    this is the way

Animats 2y ago

The part of "tech" which is ad-driven has become both boring and seriously annoying. Unfortunately, that's where the money is. There are interesting things going on: * Self-driving cars finally work. San Francisco is full of them. Next step is to get the cost down and replace those rotating scanners with something cheaper. At least the ones that aren't on top. * Robotic manipulation in unstructured situations is just, maybe, starting to work. Maybe. We're getting close to Amazon warehouses, at least, going fully automatic. We might get more general purpose automated factories. This has been expected since the 1950s, but this time it might happen. Neural nets are better and cheaper now. * Electric cars. For new car sales, 10% in US are electric. 20% worldwide. 50% in China. US is way behind. * Flying cars. The scaled-up drone flying cars actually work. First commercial deployment in China. Range is limited, but good enough to get VIPs around congested cities. * Batteries. Solid-state batteries still are not available in quantity, because the manufacturing process is hard. At least five major companies are working on it. Somebody will crack that. They will not be in the US. * Metals. Lots of sources found for rare earths. Electric powered basic steel has been demonstrated. * Medical. AIDS drugs are in good shape. Diabetes may be next. There's been real progress on some kinds of cancer. Even obesity can be cured.

woodpanel 2y ago
> Electric cars. For new car sales … 50% in China. This seems to be incorrect unless you lure in Plugin-Hybrids into the "electric cars" category. Also, the real driver of this "electric cars" market share growth in China seems to be PHEVs ("electric cars" with a combustion engine in it) while BEVs growth seems to be stalling. [1] [1] https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/02/47-plugin-vehicle-market-share-in-china-ev-sales-report/amp/ https://cleantechnica.com/2024/07/02/47-plugin-vehicle-marke...
- Animats 2y ago
  OK, "Plug-in vehicles". I considered getting one of those, but it only has 22 miles of electric range. If they got to 50 miles, I could run on electricity almost all the time.
  - 2y ago

tptacek 2y ago

When the post came out, for the first time in a long time I found myself nodding my head with Graham, because I feel like basically everyone who has worked in a company that has found some form of product/market fit and started staffing and and delegating has had the experience of watching pasteurized process cheese food faceplant trying to understand and further a sane goal a founding team got some traction with when it was smaller. Everyone has. There was something to it. But now, as usual, everyone has overindexed on everything, so we're sitting here comparing Aaron Swartz to Sam Altman as if either of them would be successful parachuted into the median immediate-post-PMF company. As is so often the case, these stories are just vectors along which we recapitulate our existing beliefs. Woz vs. Jobs! We'll be talking about this 50 years from now, as if there was anything to learn from it. Of course, this means the original post, the "founder mode" post, was bad. The first cut of most things is bad! I've talked to 2 people now who saw the AirBNB talk that prompted it, and both said the talk was way better than the "founder mode" post, which left both scratching their heads. Maybe someone (maybe Graham) will find a better way to distill the talk? Neither of my friends will go into more detail about that talk, so I hope someone does. In the meantime: this all feels like drama for its own sake. Certainly, if we're talking about business and invoking aaronsw, it seems safe to guess there isn't much trenchant in this particular story. "Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz". For fuck's sake.

gwd 2y ago
> But now, as usual, everyone has overindexed on everything, so we're sitting here comparing Aaron Swartz to Sam Altman as if either of them would be successful parachuted into the median immediate-post-PMF company. Yeah, my take was that the AirBNB guy said, "I was told A, so I did B. C happened, which was terrible. So I did D, and E happened, which was better." Paul said, "Huh, lots of people seem to have a similar issue with A. There's a general pattern here we should figure out." But basically all the subsequent discussions have been about A, without knowing even what B, C, D, and E were; much less knowing what all the other similar experiences were that prompted Paul's post. Maybe Paul's an idiot or maybe he's a genius, but without that data there's no way to tell.
- tim333 2y ago

privacymatters4 2y ago

From a post I saw in another thread, I don't know how to link to the direct comment: > "Same year for me. My college experience was a mix of PCU, Animal House, Hackers and Real Genius (ok not quite). I first saw email in a Pine terminal client. Netscape had been freshly ripped off from NCSA Mosaic at my alma mater UIUC the year before. Hacks, warez, mods, music and even Photoshop were being shared in public folders on the Mac LocalTalk network with MB/sec download speeds 4 years before Napster and 6 years before BitTorrent. Perl was the new hotness, and PHP wouldn't be mainstream until closer to 2000. Everyone and their grandma was writing HTML for $75/hr and eBay was injecting cash into young people's pockets (in a way that can't really be conveyed today except using Uber/Lyft and Bitcoin luck as examples) even though PayPal wouldn't be invented for another 4 years. Self-actualization felt within reach, 4 years before The Matrix and Fight Club hit theaters. To say that there was a feeling of endless possibility is an understatement. So what went wrong in the ~30 years since? The wrong people won the internet lottery. Instead of people who are visionaries like Tim Berners-Lee and Jimmy Wales working to pay it forward and give everyone access to the knowledge and resources they need to take us into the 21st century, we got Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who sink capital into specific ego-driven goals, mostly their own. What limited progress we see today happened in spite of tech, not because of it. So everything we see around us, when viewed through this lens, is tainted: - AI (only runs on GPUs not distributed high-multicore CPUs maintained by hobbyists) - VR (delayed by the lack of R&D spending on LCDs and blue LEDs after the Dot Bomb) - Smartphones (put desktop computing on the back burner for nearly 20 years) - WiFi (locked down instead of run publicly as a peer to peer replacement for the internet backbone, creating a tragedy of the commons) - 5G (again, locked down proprietary networks instead of free and public p2p) - High speed internet (inaccessible for many due to protectionist lobbying efforts by ISP duopolies) - Solar panels (delayed ~20 years due to the Bush v Gore decision and 30% Trump tariff) - Electric vehicles (delayed ~20 years for similar reasons, see Who Killed the Electric Car) - Lithium batteries (again delayed ~20 years, reaching mainstream mainly due to Obama's reelection in 2012) - Amazon (a conglomeration of infrastructure that could have been public, see also Louis De Joy and the denial of electric vehicles for the US Postal Service) - SpaceX (a symptom of the lack of NASA funding and R&D in science, see For All Mankind on Apple TV) - CRISPR (delayed 10-20 years by the shuttering of R&D after the Dot Bomb, see also stem cell research delayed by concerns over abortion) - Kickstarter (only allows a subset of endeavors, mainly art and video games) - GoFundMe (a symptom of the lack of public healthcare in the US) - Patreon (if it worked you'd be earning your primary income from it) Had I won the internet lottery, my top goal would have been to reduce suffering in the world by open sourcing (and automating the production of) resources like education, food and raw materials. I would work towards curing all genetic diseases and increasing longevity. Protecting the environment. Reversing global warming. Etc etc etc. The world's billionaires, CEOs and Wall Street execs do none of those things. The just roll profits into ever-increasing ventures maximizing greed and exploitation while they dodge their taxes. Is it any wonder that the web tools we depend upon every day from the status quo become ever-more complex, separating us from our ability to get real work done? Or that all of the interesting websites require us to join or submit our emails and phone numbers? Or that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls? Or that social networks and electronic devices are eavesdropping on our conversations?" Me again: It's definitely boring. All the good stuff is hidden behind $50 subscriptions (or whatever), hacker culture from what I've seen (and being alone most of my day) is everybody just working their jobs then disappearing or heading on to video games/a distraction. It's ..something. Definitely a bore fest. I like smallweb stuff. Cool projects, seeing things. We went the wrong way.

cynicalpeace 2y ago

The best way to know if someone’s lost an argument is when they start hurling insults.

noufalibrahim 2y ago

I do like the point about lack of experience hiring leading to bad hires. In "Endurance", there's a short note on how shackleton hired crew members for his expedition. Seemingly on a whim and a 5 minute chat. I interpreted that as deep experience of his area combined with a keen sense of judging people. They combined to work magic. That kind of thing takes a lot of time.

devmunchies 2y ago

My main criticism of this article and the article it references is that it refers to Marc Andreessen as a “not-so-bright billionaire” who “doesn’t build shit”. Do people forgot that he built the first popular web browser (mosaic) and then built Netscape? He is much more part of “hacker” culture than other names mentioned.

mplewis 2y ago
Maybe thirty years ago. Today, his money is the most relevant thing about him.
- imiric 2y ago
  I'm very much on the side of the hackers in this argument, but honestly, why is a hacker turned businessman seen as a bad thing? Most people on this forum and in this community are trying to do the same thing.
  - j4coh 2y ago
    It’s selling out. Trading in your idealism to work on spyware/ad tech or whatever.
    - imiric 2y ago
      Oh, please. "Selling out" is such an immature take. Andreessen was one of the first people who saw the potential of the web in the early days, worked on the first graphical web browsers and built a highly influential business around it. Then he went on to create one of the most powerful VC firms in the industry, which in turn funded some of the most successful companies. His impact wouldn't have been anywhere near what it is today had he stayed working as a software developer. His ideals and goals were clearly much higher than that, and he got rich in the process. Sounds like a capitalist success story if I ever heard one.
      - rpgbr 2y ago

mangecoeur 2y ago

When the industry is all about the myth of the trendy tech founder, of course the ones who succeed are the con-men and fabulists. All jobs and no woz indeed

tired_and_awake 2y ago

I'm having a hard time putting this into words. Apologies if this isn't terribly clear. As easy as it is to dismiss tech hype - nothing wrong with doing that honestly - autonomous city driving is inching closer to the ubiquity it promised a decade ago. And come on ChatGPT is pretty amazing even if it is over hyped. Hackers are everywhere, they're just doing work and not writing hype posts. Tech news is all jobs. I love this article just don't fully agree with it. Love the convo in this post too! Keep it coming.

KaiserPro 2y ago

> A good sign that it may be time for a re-shifting of voices in tech Yes, it would be good to get some domain experts in, rather than people who are comfortable re-hashing press releases with an "trust me, the physics of this perpetual motion machine check out" or "lol they are shit" overlay. Especially as tech now is moving from a "oh thats a simple idea, just needs executing" to actual "shiut the physics of this make it super hard" (ie AR)

arathis 2y ago

To me, the boredom comes from seeing technology inevitably get corrupted. Self-driving cars turn into self-driving ads, and AI is used to displace jobs or track people. Everything we’re promised eventually falls apart, and I’m tired of where it all leads. The utopia would be an equitable society, where we work far less than our ancestors did, allowing us to focus on pursuing our interests and desires—not just buying security. But not only does that seem unattainable, it's pursuit is considered laziness or opting-out of a social contract whereby 99% of people fight to make 1% rich with the delusion being that maybe it's me that's the 1% and that with the riches I can score I can ride off into the sunset, and get off this foul ride forever. Makes me sick how far we don fell.

aDyslecticCrow 2y ago
Companies are, by their very nature, designed to maximize profit (fiduciary duty laws), not benefit humanity. Governments are what we're meant to guide this in the right direction, but globalization and unfathomable wealth broke the system. Technology has become so powerful and integrated into our society that the companies that drive it have become as powerful as governments, and our political systems cannot keep up. I see this in how the EU suddenly is stepping up to regulate American tech companies, something it was never designed or meant to do. They are suddenly the only organization with enough regulatory power to do so properly, as the American government seems to have given up trying themselves. I don't think this is unsolvable. I'd love to see "fiduciary duty laws" disbanded for one, and America being less of a pushover for lobbying would go a long way as well. By time, we will figure out what works and what doesn't.

imiric 2y ago

But this outcome shouldn't be surprising. In the beginning, the industry was dominated by nerds and hackers who were passionate about tech. Then those with business acumen noticed that this could make them very rich, and swooped in to "help out" those hackers, who, being fair, probably wouldn't be able to run a successful business on their own. But there are also examples of hackers themselves getting business savvy, and business people becoming tech oriented, and many combinations in between. While the Silicon Valley, VC funded, hypergrowth mentality is incredibly toxic, I think you'll find many examples in the industry across this spectrum. What we're seeing with crypto, AI, etc. is just the usual hype cycle. This will inevitably be flocked by all types of characters, but we've always had these. Remember the buzz around the early web, the "information superhighway", and the inevitable dot-com bubble? Or the video game crash in the 80s? The same will happen with modern tech. We'll eventually reach the plateau of productivity of these technologies, or they will lose our interest and we'll move on to something else.

mihaic 2y ago

> If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager. > Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. If the expectation for your average Woz is to handle seasoned bullshitters, how can you expect them to also be hackers? It's true that VCs and an ossified economy contribute more to the blandness of new companies, but ignoring the problems with the hiring market leaves you with half a picture. I'm not blaming employees for doing what's best for them, but it feels naive and unempathetic to put the blame of aligning incentives to founders, when the problems are systemic.

jillesvangurp 2y ago
Actually, as a hacker, I find I have less need for the Jobs types these since I can do more myself. VC have a distorted view of the world because they look for unicorns in a world where most companies just aren't. Most companies don't start out using VC money and finance their operations with revenue the company makes. It's easier than ever to get started building a company. All you need is time. And even that is getting better. The web and cloud removed most of the cost over the last thirty years. And with LLMs we can remove a lot of people and time from the equation as well. It's gotten to the point where you can outsource a lot of things to specialized service providers instead of doing them in house.

andrew311 2y ago

> it’s difficult to look at people like Graham — people who aren’t as bright as they think they are Graham’s (alleged) arrogance about his brightness isn’t really the issue here. Let’s face it, he is bright. That’s not what is causing this boredom/dismay, though. The issue is that somehow the rest of us became entranced by the “cult of Graham” and his thinking about startups/founders, and collectively we made his way into the way, ostracizing those that lived their life outside the idealized startup paradigm that Graham crafted. Creation of this dismay isn’t on him alone, it’s on all of us.

noobermin 2y ago
We should also be honest how much of it is due to HN itself (as in the existence of the website). Before it I never associated start-ups with hacking, if anything, due to free software ideology, I always thought it flirted with anti-capitalism really. But today, the hacker world seems to be centred in sf and it's likely due to reddit and HN.

ozozozd 2y ago

Is this the original talk? https://youtu.be/s3IhbJDFs5E https://youtu.be/s3IhbJDFs5E

tomhoward 2y ago
No - it was a talk to YC current-batch founders, which is always off the record.

langsoul-com 2y ago

Let's not forget that people themselves changed and what is popular. Look at any top show hn post and you'll see all this talk about the market fit, the competitors, and how much money that product can make. The hackers have disappeared and we're apart of the prohlem. Should really have a tag rule to prevent any boring business start up bogus discussions when the poster wants.

akkartik 2y ago
> Look at any top show hn post and you'll see all this talk about the market fit, the competitors, and how much money that product can make. This isn't really true. Look at the current top Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41544969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41544969. Zero business discussion on there. I've been avoiding the business threads on HN for about 10 years now[1], and the frontpage still has enough stuff to keep me coming back, and the comments on those threads are fine as well. There are fewer comments on those threads, and that too is a good thing. HN is 3 distinct sub-communities, to my mind: startup news, hacker news and what I think of as "the human condition" news which encompasses humanities posts like lithub and so on. I participate in 2 of them. I agree with you that we hackers are part of the problem. But it's not a systemic problem. We can still choose what we attend to. We're not lacking for options. [1] I really wish that people used HN's favorites feature more, and that favorites were more organically discoverable. Here are mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=akkartik https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=akkartik

r0ze-at-hn 2y ago

> hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground. This sounds like someone who is looking for someone to blame. If founder after founder is having this problem what are the odds that there is something else going on and perhaps the reports are doing exactly what the founder is rewarding? I see in a lot of tech companies is a system where all the incentives are about getting promoted. IC's are trying to build things that look big and complex and "hard". Future maintenance burden, product impact, etc are difficult to measure and also super easy to game. All that matters is that they might get promoted so they can jump teams and do it again. Managers are promoted based on headcount and do everything they can to keep reports and grow like weeds. A dysfunctional org? Yes please, let me triple it in size to solve the problem, we have the money and this org is important, and I become important in the process. Sure some (not all) might need to grow the top line by X%, but in a growing industry/product category/company that might be the default so the focus is again on growing their career. They spend all their time on hiring and annual reviews and promo committees and almost no time on actual strategy. And getting rid of under performers was difficult and as long of a process as possible because there was no incentive to make that simple. As long at the tide rises all boats and the CEO rewards this behavior everyone plays this game. When the water starts flowing out suddenly you have a CEO looking around going wtf when everyone did exactly what they incentivized.

lazystar 2y ago
Here's an old paper that you will appreciate: "Organizational disaster and organizational decay: the case of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration" http://www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/schwartz/Org%20Decay%20at%20NASA.htm http://www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/schwartz/Org%20Decay%20at...
gitfbensool832 2y ago
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gitfbensool832 2y ago
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fancyfredbot 2y ago

It's a good post but for some reason he decided to end it with a random attack on Paul Graham, which seems weird. It's not really necessary to say this and actually the accusation is slightly ridiculous (how does he know how bright Paul Graham thinks Paul Graham is?). Not good judgment to include this in the post, and undermines the rest of it for me a bit.

dsubburam 2y ago
Agreed. Also citing Graham's "lack of experience in this area". Even in the steelman case of the Hollywood celebrity promoting a cause they are clearly not qualified to evaluate, I think we ought not belittle the speech act itself. Better to just present your counter-arguments if you disagree. If everyone felt free to share their opinions, the better the quantity and quality of ideas that surface after due examination.

milabogdanova 2y ago

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