15 ms·

The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

285 points by dralley 1y ago

cruzcampo 1y ago
It really does feel like most tech leaders are having an internal struggle that they externalize and make all of our problems. Have you seen Musks Twitter timeline? That guy is so chronically online and desperate to be liked that it's just sad. How can you be the richest man in the world and yet so deeply pathetic? Same with Zuck's attempt at being "cool" now and don't even get me started on Benioff's whole weird "Aloha" thing. Deeply insecure, unhappy people, despite having all the wealth in the world. And they're gonna make sure all of us are just as unhappy, because if they can't buy happiness, why should anyone else have it?
- ghjvnhjujvj 1y ago
  [flagged]
- jrowen 1y ago
  Insecurity is often (always?) the driver of achievement. Some sort of deep-seated pathology is basically required to build the empires they have.
  - Ericson2314 1y ago
    I'm not sure that's true, but even if it is, it is a sort of bipolar mix insecurity with hope and excitement. The mid-life crisis insecurity doesn't have the hope and the rush in the same way. It has a lot more dread and angst.
    - jrowen 1y ago
      The realization that you achieved as much as one could hope to achieve and you still didn't find contentment. That's honestly, to me, the saddest thing about the mega-rich. They don't know when, or how, to stop. There's no goal state where they can say "ok I made it, I can turn it off and enjoy life now, or at least stop fighting tooth and nail to hoard even more bigger numbers."
  - henry2023 1y ago
    Competition, not insecurity drives achievement and people who are very competitive in one skill usually will lack a ton in most other skills.
    - mchlbnnn 1y ago
      For individuals, though, might competitiveness often be driven by insecurity, and the point stands?
    - whatnow37373 1y ago
      Point is that competition is fueled by insecurity. If you are happy, truly content, with yourself you will find competing extraordinarily tiresome and unnecessary. Not saying it’s good for society by the way. I think our civilization needs the pathologically insecure to be disruptive and create room for innovation. Related traits are narcissism and psychopathy. Painful, but useful, in small doses. Musk, Altman, Bezos they are basically caricatures.
- cogman10 1y ago
  My theory is that it's the absurd wealth in the first place that makes these people completely unhinged. Imagine you are in a situation where nobody you interact with will ever tell you something you don't want to hear. Everyone tries their best to only appease you and tell you that you are the best most brightest person. These people also all depend on your money for their own aspirations (that mysteriously never pan out). It's basically the same thing that happens to dictators. They become unhinged. Their craziest ideas receive no pushback so they go ahead and implement every whim. What they all need are good real friends, yet that's the one thing that's impossible for them to gain if they didn't already have it before they became rich. And they are likely even aware of this dynamic which is why they view everyone in the world as being just in it for the money. So why not do everything in your power to horde more since that's what everyone else you interact with is doing?
  - bradleyjg 1y ago
    What they all need are good real friends, yet that's the one thing that's impossible for them to gain if they didn't already have it before they became rich. Even that isn’t a guarantee because friend dynamics often change with relative wealth disparities. You probably need friends that are also very rich.
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      > You probably need friends that are also very rich. So they’re left to just chase whose partner they can snag or whose yacht is bigger? Sounds delightful. You’d think therapy would be more capital efficient. The hedonic arena is a trap for the emotionally unsound and perpetually unfulfilled.
    - buuu 1y ago
      [dead]
    - cogman10 1y ago
      > Even that isn’t a guarantee because friend dynamics often change with relative wealth disparities. > You probably need friends that are also very rich. I don't disagree. There's a Wendover youtube I recently watched that's tangentially about this [1]. Why do all the rich people have Yachts? His contention it's not because they like having big boats but rather because every other rich person does and that is your real social circle. If you don't fit in with them, you'll basically be friendless. That also goes into why all rich people end up with private jets, because to interact with your social circle you basically have a packed calendar flying across the globe for rich people social events. However, it's an insular group of people all subject to the same problem of generally being surrounded by yesmen. Further, it's not like these rich people aren't also trying to shmooze each other. Their businesses are still trying to make money and they often need to work with one another. So hard for these people to actually be friends. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNcYxHJPLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNcYxHJPLE
- drewcoo 1y ago
  > It really does feel like most tech leaders are having an internal struggle that they externalize and make all of our problems. A lot of times people create problems and can't take responsibility for their own actions, so they blame externalities. That's what the author was saying about blaming DEI.
- swatcoder 1y ago
  You're right about the individuals you're calling out, as well as some others, but I don't think it's fair to say "most" tech leaders. It's just a few of the most troubled celebrity wealth-addicts making public the inherent ego-fragility that tends to drive addiction in the first place. Meanwhile, there's still sooo many other tech leaders just trying to develop whatever vision they have for their business, industry, career, etc Not all tech or business leaders are addicts, but some are, and as a society we tend to enable and even celebrate their addiction for whatever reason. Because of that, and because of power that comes with wealth, some of them wreak havoc as they use that power to manifest their very deep troubles in the public sphere. And it's not a new phenemonom, nor particular to the tech industry. You can see it happen again and again and again throughout history.
- KerrAvon 1y ago
  > Benioff's whole weird "Aloha" thing I'll defend Benioff here, a little. The O'hana thing isn't a new, desperate COVID-fried-divorced-billionaire invention; it dates, I believe, from the establishment of Salesforce, decades ago. I think it was sincere at the time.
argomo 1y ago
Nice take. Don't let the DEI lead-in sway you from reading this observation about tech moguls trying to reclaim their glory days.
- deleted 1y ago
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- PaulHoule 1y ago
  Eh, the rest of us who are really old are reminiscing the Apple ][ or the PDP-11 or the IBM 360 in the case of a former coworker who is pushing 70. Funny I am known for being a steady, slow and dependable hand in real life but I team up with youngsters to win hackathons, I drive them nuts with my insistence on minimal and viable but my ability to go up on stage and demo something broken and make it look great carries the weekend -- good 'old fashion startup veteran skills.
- bradford 1y ago
  I agreed with a lot in the article, but I was a bit baffled by the DEI name-drop in the opening. > "... the guys who had big tech startup successes in the 90s and early aughts think that 'DEI' is the cause of all their problems." Who is the author referring to here? (I realize that DEI has been rolled back at some companies, and Zuckerberg in particular has derided it, yet I still feel like the author is referring to some commonly accepted knowledge that I'm out of the loop on.)
  - dalyons 1y ago
    certainly Andreessen has gone on many public rants about how he thinks dei and other "woke" initiatives are killing american tech innovation. Here's one interview - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-trump-silicon-valley.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-t... About halfway through he really lets it fly
Ericson2314 1y ago
Yup that's right. The best frontier for b2c now is, what, say shipping an b/w e-ink phone in America so we can be less addicted? What's gone is gone. There is more to do b2b, a lot more, but it is far less culturally relevant. It probably dovetails with people who aren't professional generalist programmers doing more programming as part of their job. That's a somewhat fractured conversation almost by definition. I think with the LLM bubble bursts this will settle in better.
ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago
This is actually a great characterization and one of the reasons why for example YC has not had a success in the last 10 years. This has caused tech to look more and more like a ponzi scheme with greater and greater promises and yet the actual output is very feeble. Even large companies like Apple have got caught in all this. Imagine what they promised and what they haven't been able to deliver. We need a grand reset but that needs to come from the young ones. Stop doing leetcode. Go back to original engineering. Stop using JavaScript. Build software like Winamp.
- monknomo 1y ago
  I think it is from the business side, rather than the software side. The business side's goal is to obtain a monopoly and extract rent. You can see it in google search getting worse so they can show more ads, you can see it in Apple's app store behavior, pretty much all the examples. The objective is not to provide a good product that people want to buy, except insofar as that drives adoption towards a monopoly I have sort of come to that believe anti-trust may be the solution to finding more successes and enabling better products
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    Business education has taught everyone that spending $100 to earn $120 that you can live confortably on, is for suckers. The real goal is to then spend $80 to earn $200 the next year, and then spend $60 to earn $1000 the following year, and then to spend $40 to earn $10,000 the following year, and then to spend $20 to earn $100,000, and so on. Growth for no other purpose than growth.
pessimizer 1y ago
It's weird how the first sentence promises that we'll learn the answer to why successful tech people blame DEI for something, and then never mentions DEI again. Being anti-"DEI" is a trendy hobby for most, a serious concern for others, but for "Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, and James Damore" it's literally the default, because DEI is a patchwork of inconsistent restrictions of various and often dubious authority placed on people who hire. It's against them, of course they're against it. They're against workers and labor rights in general, just like most owners. You might as well say that oil companies are against environmental policies because the world has changed and they can no longer do what they used to do, and maybe they just got lucky anyway... or instead assume that most people are against regulations that restrict them from doing things that they might want to do. edit: I suspect this might be a covert explanation about why this particular technologist is less enamored by the future possibilities of their chosen career than they were when they started it, just (for some reason) projected onto celebrities who have already been massively successful.
- munificent 1y ago
  I believe there is an implicit answer here, but I agree that the author didn't tie the threads together as clearly as they could have. What they are saying is that tech moguls have a period in their life where they felt they were at their best, living their glory days. They are latching on to and trying to recreate that environment, including superficial properties that environment had that don't actually have anything to do with why it was such a formative period for them. One attribute of programming back in the 90s is... it was mostly non-poor white guys. Now, obviously anyone with a certain level of maturity and wisdom would realize that the demographic monoculture of the 90s was an effect of the fact that computers were still relatively rare and expensive in the 80s, and those most people who had access to them back them came from a certain level of privilege. Being wealthy, white, and male all increased the odds that you were able to spend your endless summers PEEKing and POKing on an Apple IIe while other less fortunate people didn't have a computer or had to work. Being wealthy, white, and male didn't cause people to be better hackers. Having economic stability is what gave people the freedom to become better hackers. It's just that that level of economic stability has historically not at all been uniformly distributed across people in the US. Thus anti-DEI measures are counterproductive. Going forward, society has a moral and rational incentive to extend that opportunity to as many people as possible, regardless of their anatomy or skin color because that's how society gets the most out of all of its members.
arnaudsm 1y ago
I partly disagree, software still sucks and it's a great time to build. The #1 OS is slow and crashes all the time. The #1 email client takes 10s to load on my mother's laptop. Most popular products are slow, buggy, filled with spam, & filled with dark patterns. Enshittification won. FAANGs are the new IBM. Let's build better stuff.
- hx8 1y ago
  If enshittification can be avoided, why aren't we seeing a wave of no dark patterns software crushing it? Enshittification is mostly just the process of not running on VC Capital and generating sustainable revenue sources.
  - arnaudsm 1y ago
    Users have inertia, it takes years for superior products to win. VC capital is useful for speed & innovation, but most of the time leads to bloat & rent-seeking. Does DocuSign need 7,000 employees? My journey of bootstrapped entrepreneurship has been much more sustainable and respectful to my users.
    - hx8 1y ago
      I think if superior products always win then we wouldn't have so many BigCo Enshittified products that have been terrible for 15+ years.
      - arnaudsm 1y ago
        Schumpeter's cycle of destructive creation usually takes 15 years in software. IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook. They were all the cool underdogs for a decade, then slowly decline in quality.
- HKH2 1y ago
  It's not clear if you mean #1 in quality or popularity. I'll assume you mean the latter. Is Windows really that unstable?
hackrmn 1y ago
Ironically, perhaps, I just read the article while taking a micro-break from writing a triangle rasterizer (aliased, aka pixel-art / retro) in WebAssembly. It'll probably feature rendering performance orders of magnitude slower than a graphics card from 20 years ago, and I am well aware of it but the truth is I am not doing it because I am still nurturing a dream of becoming one of the rich rock stars of IT from an era that passed me by those same 20 years ago. No, it's just that I find it pleasurable to do these things, exactly because I don't need to stay competitive doing it -- well, not against hordes of very capable software engineers churning all kind of useful _valuable_ systems. Not the least because I am doing the things I do like the above, during my spare time, and I have reasons to believe there's plenty need for the artistic pet projects done in spare time on intake of inspiration. So yeah, just reminding everyone that not everything is about fierce competition -- if artists can chain smoke and drink their life through ups and downs of patronage, so can everyone else. Noone says we should stop being responsible, but all the responsibility and adulting without play is much, much worse, in my opinion, than the alternative. It just so happens that I relax writing code. I am still writing other things that have long been invented, and they consistently give me inspiration. Not sure if I missed the point of the article, but I react to what I read from it, after all.
- lo0dot0 1y ago
  Tbh I don't understand the need for games in web assembly. Is it really worth the effort developing an environment for games that runs in the Webbrowser when installing a game through steam or the play store is already very simple and quick
fidotron 1y ago
This is bitter gibberish. Advancement has always been made by standing on the shoulders of giants, and that enables small teams to execute different things in different eras. If you can't see what the changes are today you would have been no better off in another time.
- selfselfgo 1y ago
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- shadowgovt 1y ago
  There are, however, such things as breakthrough eras and consolidation / comprehension eras. Physics hasn't been the same since Einstein's era. While breakthroughs have happened, the fundamental reframing of the way we comprehend the world that happened with the one-two punch of the theories of relativity and the experimental evidence for the quantum model have patterned the world in which we now live, but understanding that pattern is the new work. Similarly, I think a good case can be made that the one-two punch of the implementation of the Internet as a fabric and the web as a killer app is now finished work. While the remaining work is real, valid, and valuable, it is of different kind to the creation of the new pattern; consolidation and comprehension of the pattern is the work of the day, and that's not nearly as glamorous, sexy, or profitable (to reputation or pocketbook). It's fine for there to be eras of great opportunity and eras of not, so long as we respect which we're in. (Google is great as a case-study for this concept. The circumstances that birthed Google are now actively suppressed in the ecosystem... Mostly by Google. The positive feedback loop of great-search-breeds-great-search-data that birthed Google doesn't leave room for multiple Googles because human attention and time is finite; this is evidenced by Bing being unable to draw users despite huge monetary investment and just as much technical competence. But they can't draw the users because they aren't already better than Google. As consequence, two guys in their garage can make something but it won't be a Google-scale search engine. Meanwhile, the small, scrappy search engine is now a huge behemoth with 8.5 billion daily searches, and that amount of real human contact implies real human responsibility... if Google goes offline, people will literally die from lack of access to information, so they can't take the kind of risks they used to be able to. Young systems have different features than old systems. Young ten-person companies have different behavior than old 100,000-person Fortune 500s. Young people have different wants and capabilities than older people. Making the transition is key. Failure to make the transition causes pain not only to the one failing but to the ones interacting with them).
deleted 1y ago
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cjs_ac 1y ago
Aside from the overarching thread of the current crop of CEOs struggling to come to terms with the fact that their empires are now all they'll ever be and it's up to others to continue innovating, I found these quotes interesting: > The Internet is no longer the world's great frontier, and the pool of unsatisfied wants that suddenly welled up as the world first came online is not what it once was. There once was no graphical operating system, no decent web browser, no search engine that could find what you were looking for. The basic amenities are now there. Of course there is still much room for innovation, but merely being able to write a computer program and understand what computer networks are good for is no longer the superpower it once was. If you're young enough to pound Red Bulls all night, you're probably not old enough to have the breadth of knowledge required to launch a great software product. > Maybe most of the critical things that can be created by one guy typing furiously are gone, and the opportunities that remain require expertise and wisdom from a bunch of different people. The tech companies that became big after 2008 solved problems with the same spirit as Jeremy Clarkson asking, 'How hard can it be?' and proceeding to build an electric car with a moustache called Geoff[0]. Those companies - Uber, AirBnB, Meta, Twitter, and so on - waded into very complex problem spaces, waved the magic wand of software, and used vast amounts of venture capital to obliterate the traditional solutions to these problems before anyone could realise how unsatisfactory these new solutions were. So now governments are coming up with all sorts of regulations - some of which are completely inappropriate - in an attempt to get these companies to stop being so irresponsible with the fabric of society, so everyone is now even more upset. The days when a person who can build stuff and a person who can sell stuff were all you needed to start a startup are gone. There's a third role that's crucial now: the person who has deep understanding of the problem before product design starts so that the company doesn't build another version of The Angrifier. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-OlOP0BQ_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-OlOP0BQ_U
- 4ndrewl 1y ago
  I mean yeah, but Uber promised us self-driving taxis, but only found profit by delivering takeaways. Meta and Twitter - adverts, and all on the foundation of a zirp economy.
  - 1y ago
chaseadam17 1y ago
I imagine what these guys miss is the freedom of obscurity. Tech has gone from being ignored to being ridiculed and regulated. Like a company getting more bureaucratic as it scales, it makes sense to professionalize a sector as its influence grows. The problem is that professionalization is often the enemy of innovation. If you care about having the freedom to innovate, this leaves you with three options: be the angry old man yelling at the clouds, constructively try to improve the process of professionalization from within or quietly go innovate elsewhere. The problem with the last option is that there aren’t too many places left to go and it’s hard to start over, which is why I think Elon and others take to some combination of the first two.
- agentultra 1y ago
  Innovation in trad engineering disciplines didn't stop when the industry gained professional guilds and legal status. We have far better buildings, extremely reliable jet planes, high speed rail, the internet...
  - chaseadam17 1y ago
    I disagree. I believe we’ve had far less progress in real world engineering in the past 50 years than the 50+ prior.
    - spencerflem 1y ago
      I don't think mechanical engineering is more professional now than it was 50 years ago. If anything its less so, with execs calling on Engineers to wing it, and getting sign off on shoddy designs.
    - meatmanek 1y ago
      Airline accidents and deaths have steadily declined for 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatal-airliner-accidents-per-million-flights https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatal-airliner-accidents-... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_incidents#/media/File:ACRO_fatalities.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden... Car crash death rates in the US have been declining for 50 years in both total number and per-capita rates (except for an uptick that started in 2020, presumably some knock-on effects from covid): https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatality-trends/deaths-and-rates/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... -- 40,990 deaths in 2023 vs. 54,052 deaths in 1973; 12.06 vs 25.51 per 100k population Car fuel efficiency has ~doubled since 1975: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1237-may-9-2022-fuel-economy-all-vehicle-classes-has-improved https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1237-may-... Airline fuel efficiency has quadrupled since 1975: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#/media/File:Aviation_Efficiency_(RPK_per_kg_CO2).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#/medi... Corn yields per acre have doubled since 1975: https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTrends.html https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTren... Lithium-ion batteries didn't practically exist in 1975. Modern blue LEDs (and thus white LEDs) didn't exist until 1990. The entire personal computing industry. The Internet. Search engines. LLMs. Cellular networks. Neodymium magnets. Reusable orbital launch vehicles. Genetically modified crops. mRNA vaccines. CRISPR.
avg_dev 1y ago
I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this: > As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park. Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.
- no_wizard 1y ago
  would you mind giving a greater explanation of what they mean by this? I couldn't grok the meaning from context, other than the obvious its not really possible to simply startup half baked out of your house or something along those lines
  - masfuerte 1y ago
    It's saying that even just having a garage is a privilege.
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      Even being able to type in a comment box is a privilege, as is life.
      - groby_b 1y ago
        Meanwhile, you're missing the wider point: You don't get to claim "everybody can do this from nothing" if the "nothing" is actually a substantial amount of implicit access to resources. Nobody (well, few) begrudge that privilege, but you cannot have a reasonable discussion about what led to success by leaving out major factors.
    - jackphilson 1y ago
      Even the amount of agency you have is a privilege. Hard determinism.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    It means these guys didn't literally start from nothing. They had a house in the suburbs with a garage, and that implies at least some level of funding and privilege. A leg up that the guy in the trailer park might not have.
malchow 1y ago
[flagged]
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  It is sad that an era of abundance somehow built a world where our younger counterparts are fighting over so few scraps that they are seeing other competent and effective people as threats, not partners. How did we let it get that far off the rails?
jparishy 1y ago
To me this seems pretty apt, and probably more generalizable. The world is claimed. There is no glory to come from being the first anymore, and that is too big a bummer for a lot of Great Men. I think future progress will be the composition of skills, as mentioned in the article. Or we go backwards and just take things from each other. pc has an article about a related topic in my view: https://patrickcollison.com/fast https://patrickcollison.com/fast these things were done by many people with a great vision for the collective, even if lead by one person. maybe not altruistic things but provided more good than they did hoard value. where is the vision anymore?
- alchemyzach 1y ago
  "Or we go backwards and just take things from each other." This is the DEI movement in a nutshell. A bunch of people driven by fear and anxiety and anger into demanding they be handed things for free instead of working for them. Which is why it's ironic that the article seems to validate the DEI movement
- arduanika 1y ago
  > The world is claimed. Isn't it such a strange coincidence that you can imagine all of the things that have ever been invented in the past, and none of the things that will be invented in the future?
dsign 1y ago
Without any hard data about anything, this is just a speculative rant. Go and read my books if you want one of those. But I do agree on one thing: we are lacking a new frontier, a meaningful one. My hope for the years I have left is to see one.
- memhole 1y ago
  This is part of what I feel keeps driving AI/LLMs. The hope that there’s a new frontier to cash in on.
  - munificent 1y ago
    And before that, crypto.
  - layer8 1y ago
    If cashing in on is the primary motivation, then it’s all meaningless anyway.
- 9rx 1y ago
  There are plenty of frontiers to explore. What we lack is people crazy enough to try. But that always happens when times are good. Crazy emerges out of desperation.
bananalychee 1y ago
This reminds me of the adage: "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." There are some insights there, but the article is tainted by envy and self-righteousness.
languagehacker 1y ago
Insightful words from the Coldplay guy. In all seriousness, there is definitely the comfortable lie of nostalgia playing into a lot of the dudes approaching (or squarely in) middle age as far as tech goes. It's truly a bummer that they're expressing the internalization of the wrong lessons. Instead of standing up against decades of enshittification, they're complaining about having to say "allowlist" instead of "blacklist", and still erroneously believing that the right hackathon will solve their company's existential problems. I got the best monkeys and the best typewriters, so if I let them do what they want in this "meritocracy" I created, it will definitely make the next Hamlet, right?
jglamine 1y ago
This essay is weird. The author lumps James Damore, rank-and-file software engineer, in with Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg. Damore hasn't updated his LinedIn since 2018 - he might not even work in tech anymore? It closes saying they need to stop reliving their glory days and be good fathers and not the town drunk. Those are serious accusations - being a bad father and a drunk. The author doesn't give any evidence for either.
- mtrovo 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - jglamine 1y ago
    No, and you can see my post history to verify this.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  Yeah that was weird. Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry? Never heard of them in the open source world. The way I read their arc, they went directly from cosseted upbringing to finding out that they weren't anywhere near as gifted as they'd been told their entire life and shifting from trying to actually compete in the industry to being a paid podcast guest in the grievance-sphere.
  - jglamine 1y ago
    I think that's uncharitable. He was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. Sure he went to Harvard, maybe he had wealthy parents (IDK his background) but neither of those are crimes. I don't think he's the activist people make him out to be. He went on a few podcasts early on but has generally kept a low profile. I'm not under the impression he's doing the paid speaker / podcast circuit. Probably just living his life. After he was cancelled probably nobody wanted to hire him, maybe he left tech completely. But yes, agree it was weird to include him next to the other names. He's not like, a billionaire founder.
PaulHoule 1y ago
I find it amusing that behind some of these "great men" you will find a woman. If anyone is going to get us to Mars it is Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX. Similarly it was Sheryl Sandberg that helped transition Facebook from a popular service to a dominant business.
- alchemyzach 1y ago
  I agree with you in spirit but naming women who were appointed positions inside of companies famously founded by men is not helping
- MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
  Both of the women mentioned have been accused of creating the type of environment mentioned in this blog post. [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/former-spacex-engineer-essay-alleges-culture-is-rife-with-sexism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/former-spacex-engineer-essay... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg#Allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg#Allegations
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    I won't disagree. I'd say that gendered narratives such as "it would be better if women ran things" or "human progress depends on masculine energy" are not helpful and frequently pernicious.
renewiltord 1y ago
When did this style of psychoanalysis become popular? Everyone now uses these terms and instead of coming off like an informed take it just sounds like "I'm just trying to insult other people". At some point, the online forum take of "all the successful guys are sad and I'm not as successful because I'm well-adjusted" has gotten boring. I get that people want to feel better about their lives but this is just embarrassing.
- MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
  This comment kind of comes off as "I'm just trying to insult other people".
  - renewiltord 1y ago
    Hmm, fair enough. I was trying to insult the observed behaviour whereas he was trying to insult the implied behaviour and I would expect them to be different (because the latter is guesswork) but I suppose it seems the same way to you. Ah well.
- deleted 1y ago
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alchemyzach 1y ago
The idea that success often depends on luck, right place/time, and other circumstances often outside one's control, is definitely true. Not sure how this validates the DEI movement though? Still a largely toxic and unserious movement that has good intentions but ultimately harms institutions and wastes time and resources.
- an0malous 1y ago
  I think the OP’s idea is that DEI is a scapegoat for diminishing growth, and the real cause is just that the low hanging fruit is gone
- mrandish 1y ago
  While I think the TFA makes some interesting points, I too felt the DEI reference was tangential. The point that I felt TFA missed is that none of this was fundamentally unique to the dotcom era. Random factors like "right place/time" have always applied at the birth of new industries whether dotcom era, 1970s microcomputers or 19th century punch card tabulating devices. Historically, new industries that quickly emerged from not existing to being consequential, had early players who achieved outsized gains and pole position during a limited window of time when a couple of reasonably clever outliers could choose to speculatively pour unreasonable amounts of time, energy and whatever environmental resources were at their disposal into delivering early value. Usually the choice to pour too much into an unproven, nascent prospect was objectively a bad idea, poor investment or, at least, not prudent. We know this because other smarter, more sober people looked at the opportunity during those early moments and made wiser choices, which only seem unwise in hindsight. It's also usually the case that those early zealots taxed their available environmental resources (whether spousal support, parental savings, current employer latitude, etc) to the point of unfair burden, if not abusive burden. Sometimes those unwilling 'resource investors' were repaid and sometimes not. And, of course, even having environmental resources to tap (and unfairly burden) in the first place has always been a matter of luck. There's an historical record bias here because if we double-click as deeply into the circumstances around other early market entrants, such as a Herman Hollerith and punch card tabulating, we often find similar patterns of abdicating current responsibilities to make unwise leaps into months of furious work to realize some speculative vision, enabled by unfairly (or abusively) burdened family, friends or employers whose existence was random luck. On top of that, there's selection bias at work. Because whether we're talking about Zuckerberg, Gates/Allen, Jobs/Woz, Hollerith or Gutenberg - we're only talking about them because they are the black swan exceptional outliers. The vast majority of the time this pattern ends in unrecorded ignominy or tragedy, existing only as cautionary tales about the distant relative who squandered whatever job or prospects they had, along with their money, family's money and finally the patience of all around them in the pursuit of some crazy dream which never panned out. The more interesting question is whether this repeating pattern of irrationally abdicating responsibilities to chase speculative dreams in unhealthily unbalanced ways enabled by unfairly burdening environmental resources is, on the whole, net bad or good. And I think that depends on the scope by which we measure. On an individual, family or community level its almost certainly net bad. However, on a societal level it could be net positive. The thorny issue is that the pattern involves abuse of unwilling others to whom rewards may not flow, even in the unlikely event it doesn't end in tragedy. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to eliminate the possibility of unfairness toward others or the overall ambient unfairness of 'winning' by leveraging environmental luck.
dzink 1y ago
Some potential causes of the scarcity of breakthroughs in the last 10 years: 1. "What got you here won't get you there." The problems that need solved today might require a different mindset/level of experience and that may not be in people with enough time or circumstances to build, or enough likeness to the old model be funded by VCs. 2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM. 3. Tech giants of the past 10 years were slurping the most promising talent with high salaries and burning them out. 4. Filters that sift new founders and hackers are created by people who don't deal with the problems most people deal with. 7. Hackers at hackathons are not dealing with problems most people deal with. A number of hackathons I've participated in had very similar solutions pitched - you could name the categories, and see them all over again in each hackathon years apart. Usually catering to the tech or the sponsors instead of actual products anyone wanted to use.
- stuxnet79 1y ago
  > 2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM. Not enough is said about this. It's almost comical when you think about it. As technologists we are both complicit and victims. I've spent half a decade in one of these 'attention economy' companies and let me tell you the amount of money, talent and resources that our industry deploys to forcefully grab and monetize users' attention is staggering. Recently I've shifted to using single-use, fit-for-purpose devices (Kobo ereader hacked with KOReader, KingJim Pomera DM250 digital memo) for my day-to-day and it was like a weight that I never knew was there was magically lifted away. If capitalism could find a way to produce such devices at scale, not only would it be a public health win, it would be a massive boost to the economy long-term. But with most corporation's incessant focus on short term metrics I'm not holding my breath that this will ever be a reality.
- layer8 1y ago
  Good points, but what happened to 5 and 6?
larusso 1y ago
I often contemplated about people like Zuckerberg who had massive success with the first thing they built and then have to come to terms that not everything they touch turns to gold. I wonder what kind of feeling that must be if your greatest success happened in your 20th. How do you measure your successes then?
- dougb5 1y ago
  My cynical answer: I think they reframe their history to see it as a series of ever-larger successes -- with some setbacks maybe. They avoid introspection that might lead to the unpleasant conclusion that they have actually gone off the rails and caused societal harm since their initial success. By and large their net worth has continued to increase, and that's the measure that they're comfortable with associating with success, and they see that as validation. Plus, they are surrounded by people who have the same incentives to lie to themselves and to each other.
- GoatInGrey 1y ago
  This dynamic has been explored extensively in the creative fields. Most namely with the music industry and the "sophomore album curse".
  - larusso 1y ago
    Interesting. Never heard that term. Will check it out thanks.
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jlos 1y ago
Why is James Damore listed alongside Andreesen and Zuckerberg? Andreesen and Zuckerberg have hundreds of billions at their disposal and Damore was an employee fired for giving feedback on a company diversity program. I mean I know why, but the antipathy underlying the article undermines an otherwise interesting point.
- Johanx64 1y ago
  Because the author can't help himself. Obviously. These guys always let their convictions screech out. The opening statement makes it sound like it's only the wealthy "tech-bros" that are rubbed the wrong way by DEI. (in my recollection of it, the wealthy techbros were the first ones on the uptake of the whole DEI swindle. It's just that it's not the direction the wind blows these days)
neverbehind 1y ago
[flagged]
dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
It loosely reminds me of the move "The World's End".
danielovichdk 1y ago
Great piece of writing. Thank you.
quadhome 1y ago
Rich men age into conservatism. Tale as old as time.
- 9rx 1y ago
  The opposite is taking place with a couple of notable old rich men in particular, though. They aren't hesitant of change at all. They want to see everything change and are doing all they can to see that change happens. It is the rest of the world that has become conservative in light of their actions, praying they will stop.
alganet 1y ago
It's an inaccurate profiling. Instead, the gang you describe is aspiring to migrate into well known high visibility disputes such as climate change, gender issues, politics reform. They genuinely think they can help, but the inner principal motive is to be noticed as quickly as possible as "a big stakes kind of person". The more famous and loud the issues they can touch, the better. They will only talk about what appeals to newer generation struggles.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
> The hackathon is the proof that people believe this can work, and it is the proof that it doesn't. A good TL;DR for the essay.
arduanika 1y ago
"There once was[...] no search engine that could find what you were looking for." What's old is new again.
- NikkiA 1y ago
  The web was only 3 years old when altavista burst on the scene. So the window of there being 'no search engine to find what you were looking for on the web' was tiny.
systemstops 1y ago
"If these are the conditions under which passionate creative problem solving thrives, then of course we must recover them to make software great again. But they are not." This doesn't make any sense. Obviously those conditions lead to incredible thriving in the past. This guy is basically arguing that because it doesn't work now (in a super diverse globalized world) that it never actually worked. These are the same kind of "they just got lucky" arguments I see constantly to downplay the achievements of any specific group of people.
- munificent 1y ago
  There is an infinitely long list of things that were part of the environment when that kind of passionate creative problem solving in software was thriving. What the author is saying is that not all of those properties were causative to make software great again. Do we need people to have enough of a safety net to take risks with entrepreneurship? Yes. Do we need enough regulation to prevent entrenched companies from using regulatory capture to stifle competition while having little enough regulation that small companies can spin up and be nimble? Yes. Do we need to be listening to N'Sync, wearing JNCOs, watching Beavis and Butthead, and drinking Crystal Pepsi? Probably not. Those were in the air, but not causative. And, certainly, I see little evidence to support the implicit claim in "anti-woke" that somehow sexism, homophobia, and racism were causative factors that enabled entrepreneurialism to thrive a few decades ago.
  - systemstops 1y ago
    People still argue what things made a small city state (Athens) suddenly become the cornerstone of western civilization. That fact is that we have these explosions of human potential where certain groups of people in certain environments make massive leaps, and we don't what the magic sauce is. It's great when it happens, but It's foolish to think that we can somehow socially engineer the same results through brute force, which is the problem with DEI thinking. That is also why so many companies are silently ditching those policies.
    - munificent 1y ago
m_dupont 1y ago
The link between DEI and the rest of the content of the article is not well-articulated at all. Leaving aside whether one agrees with the premise, his argumentation is disjointed at best. He is attributing various symptoms of these tech leaders behaviour to them clinging to a bygone world, however he hasn't really articulated any of these symptoms beyond them thinking that "DEI" is the cause of all their problems. He can't even back it up with a single quote or published piece from one of these tech moguls which displays the opinions that he characterizes them to have. Articles as sloppy as this shouldn't get 230+ points on hackernews
- wing-_-nuts 1y ago
  >The link between DEI and the rest of the content of the article is not well-articulated at all. It felt like a lazy generic swipe at 'tech bros'.
yowlingcat 1y ago
You can make a critique of the flimsier parts of anti-DEI fashions with substance but I don't think this is one of them. There are so many questionable assumptions and strawmen layered into the end conclusion that it's hard to tell whether the objection is with morality or taste. For example: - Responsible people have responsibilities -- what is this tautology supposed to mean? That they can no longer value vitality or views on what style of life makes it worth living? - The internet is no longer the world's great frontier -- according to whom? It is certainly the case that the old frontiers of the internet have either imploded or been thoroughly domesticated, but the internet is now thousands or millions of times larger than in its early days, so it's hard to say that frontiers (plural) are gone rather than one is simply not trying hard enough to find them. - Chance is a great factor in success - a belief to be sure but not an observation; chance is often a factor in success, but it's not often a factor in downward mobility (which is extraordinarily common across the classes). It's easy to blame chance for negative outcomes, but it's hard to fully test and regularly exercise (or gradually expand) the limits of what is in one's control. - Long gone are the days of the solo "great mover" - how does this couch with solopreneurs vibe coding their way with gen AI to large independent businesses and lean organizations that have very quickly built the highest revenue/employee at the highest growth rates in history? If anything, individuals are inordinately empowered with tools today that didn't actually exist in usable form 3-6 months ago nevermind a year ago. For a piece of writing that talks so confidently about how stuck in the past others are, it's hard not to question whether the author themself is stuck in the past in some way.
chinchilla2020 1y ago
> old dorm room with paint chips on the walls > Mark Zuckerberg This guy doesn't know much about Mark Zuckerberg
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285 points by dralley 1y ago

It really does feel like most tech leaders are having an internal struggle that they externalize and make all of our problems. Have you seen Musks Twitter timeline? That guy is so chronically online and desperate to be liked that it's just sad. How can you be the richest man in the world and yet so deeply pathetic? Same with Zuck's attempt at being "cool" now and don't even get me started on Benioff's whole weird "Aloha" thing. Deeply insecure, unhappy people, despite having all the wealth in the world. And they're gonna make sure all of us are just as unhappy, because if they can't buy happiness, why should anyone else have it?

ghjvnhjujvj 1y ago
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jrowen 1y ago
Insecurity is often (always?) the driver of achievement. Some sort of deep-seated pathology is basically required to build the empires they have.
- Ericson2314 1y ago
  I'm not sure that's true, but even if it is, it is a sort of bipolar mix insecurity with hope and excitement. The mid-life crisis insecurity doesn't have the hope and the rush in the same way. It has a lot more dread and angst.
  - jrowen 1y ago
    The realization that you achieved as much as one could hope to achieve and you still didn't find contentment. That's honestly, to me, the saddest thing about the mega-rich. They don't know when, or how, to stop. There's no goal state where they can say "ok I made it, I can turn it off and enjoy life now, or at least stop fighting tooth and nail to hoard even more bigger numbers."
- henry2023 1y ago
  Competition, not insecurity drives achievement and people who are very competitive in one skill usually will lack a ton in most other skills.
  - mchlbnnn 1y ago
    For individuals, though, might competitiveness often be driven by insecurity, and the point stands?
  - whatnow37373 1y ago
    Point is that competition is fueled by insecurity. If you are happy, truly content, with yourself you will find competing extraordinarily tiresome and unnecessary. Not saying it’s good for society by the way. I think our civilization needs the pathologically insecure to be disruptive and create room for innovation. Related traits are narcissism and psychopathy. Painful, but useful, in small doses. Musk, Altman, Bezos they are basically caricatures.
cogman10 1y ago
My theory is that it's the absurd wealth in the first place that makes these people completely unhinged. Imagine you are in a situation where nobody you interact with will ever tell you something you don't want to hear. Everyone tries their best to only appease you and tell you that you are the best most brightest person. These people also all depend on your money for their own aspirations (that mysteriously never pan out). It's basically the same thing that happens to dictators. They become unhinged. Their craziest ideas receive no pushback so they go ahead and implement every whim. What they all need are good real friends, yet that's the one thing that's impossible for them to gain if they didn't already have it before they became rich. And they are likely even aware of this dynamic which is why they view everyone in the world as being just in it for the money. So why not do everything in your power to horde more since that's what everyone else you interact with is doing?
- bradleyjg 1y ago
  What they all need are good real friends, yet that's the one thing that's impossible for them to gain if they didn't already have it before they became rich. Even that isn’t a guarantee because friend dynamics often change with relative wealth disparities. You probably need friends that are also very rich.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    > You probably need friends that are also very rich. So they’re left to just chase whose partner they can snag or whose yacht is bigger? Sounds delightful. You’d think therapy would be more capital efficient. The hedonic arena is a trap for the emotionally unsound and perpetually unfulfilled.
  - buuu 1y ago
    [dead]
  - cogman10 1y ago
    > Even that isn’t a guarantee because friend dynamics often change with relative wealth disparities. > You probably need friends that are also very rich. I don't disagree. There's a Wendover youtube I recently watched that's tangentially about this [1]. Why do all the rich people have Yachts? His contention it's not because they like having big boats but rather because every other rich person does and that is your real social circle. If you don't fit in with them, you'll basically be friendless. That also goes into why all rich people end up with private jets, because to interact with your social circle you basically have a packed calendar flying across the globe for rich people social events. However, it's an insular group of people all subject to the same problem of generally being surrounded by yesmen. Further, it's not like these rich people aren't also trying to shmooze each other. Their businesses are still trying to make money and they often need to work with one another. So hard for these people to actually be friends. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNcYxHJPLE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNcYxHJPLE
drewcoo 1y ago
> It really does feel like most tech leaders are having an internal struggle that they externalize and make all of our problems. A lot of times people create problems and can't take responsibility for their own actions, so they blame externalities. That's what the author was saying about blaming DEI.
swatcoder 1y ago
You're right about the individuals you're calling out, as well as some others, but I don't think it's fair to say "most" tech leaders. It's just a few of the most troubled celebrity wealth-addicts making public the inherent ego-fragility that tends to drive addiction in the first place. Meanwhile, there's still sooo many other tech leaders just trying to develop whatever vision they have for their business, industry, career, etc Not all tech or business leaders are addicts, but some are, and as a society we tend to enable and even celebrate their addiction for whatever reason. Because of that, and because of power that comes with wealth, some of them wreak havoc as they use that power to manifest their very deep troubles in the public sphere. And it's not a new phenemonom, nor particular to the tech industry. You can see it happen again and again and again throughout history.
KerrAvon 1y ago
> Benioff's whole weird "Aloha" thing I'll defend Benioff here, a little. The O'hana thing isn't a new, desperate COVID-fried-divorced-billionaire invention; it dates, I believe, from the establishment of Salesforce, decades ago. I think it was sincere at the time.

argomo 1y ago

Nice take. Don't let the DEI lead-in sway you from reading this observation about tech moguls trying to reclaim their glory days.

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PaulHoule 1y ago
Eh, the rest of us who are really old are reminiscing the Apple ][ or the PDP-11 or the IBM 360 in the case of a former coworker who is pushing 70. Funny I am known for being a steady, slow and dependable hand in real life but I team up with youngsters to win hackathons, I drive them nuts with my insistence on minimal and viable but my ability to go up on stage and demo something broken and make it look great carries the weekend -- good 'old fashion startup veteran skills.
bradford 1y ago
I agreed with a lot in the article, but I was a bit baffled by the DEI name-drop in the opening. > "... the guys who had big tech startup successes in the 90s and early aughts think that 'DEI' is the cause of all their problems." Who is the author referring to here? (I realize that DEI has been rolled back at some companies, and Zuckerberg in particular has derided it, yet I still feel like the author is referring to some commonly accepted knowledge that I'm out of the loop on.)
- dalyons 1y ago
  certainly Andreessen has gone on many public rants about how he thinks dei and other "woke" initiatives are killing american tech innovation. Here's one interview - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-trump-silicon-valley.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-t... About halfway through he really lets it fly

Ericson2314 1y ago

Yup that's right. The best frontier for b2c now is, what, say shipping an b/w e-ink phone in America so we can be less addicted? What's gone is gone. There is more to do b2b, a lot more, but it is far less culturally relevant. It probably dovetails with people who aren't professional generalist programmers doing more programming as part of their job. That's a somewhat fractured conversation almost by definition. I think with the LLM bubble bursts this will settle in better.

ilrwbwrkhv 1y ago

This is actually a great characterization and one of the reasons why for example YC has not had a success in the last 10 years. This has caused tech to look more and more like a ponzi scheme with greater and greater promises and yet the actual output is very feeble. Even large companies like Apple have got caught in all this. Imagine what they promised and what they haven't been able to deliver. We need a grand reset but that needs to come from the young ones. Stop doing leetcode. Go back to original engineering. Stop using JavaScript. Build software like Winamp.

monknomo 1y ago
I think it is from the business side, rather than the software side. The business side's goal is to obtain a monopoly and extract rent. You can see it in google search getting worse so they can show more ads, you can see it in Apple's app store behavior, pretty much all the examples. The objective is not to provide a good product that people want to buy, except insofar as that drives adoption towards a monopoly I have sort of come to that believe anti-trust may be the solution to finding more successes and enabling better products
- ryandrake 1y ago
  Business education has taught everyone that spending $100 to earn $120 that you can live confortably on, is for suckers. The real goal is to then spend $80 to earn $200 the next year, and then spend $60 to earn $1000 the following year, and then to spend $40 to earn $10,000 the following year, and then to spend $20 to earn $100,000, and so on. Growth for no other purpose than growth.

pessimizer 1y ago

It's weird how the first sentence promises that we'll learn the answer to why successful tech people blame DEI for something, and then never mentions DEI again. Being anti-"DEI" is a trendy hobby for most, a serious concern for others, but for "Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, and James Damore" it's literally the default, because DEI is a patchwork of inconsistent restrictions of various and often dubious authority placed on people who hire. It's against them, of course they're against it. They're against workers and labor rights in general, just like most owners. You might as well say that oil companies are against environmental policies because the world has changed and they can no longer do what they used to do, and maybe they just got lucky anyway... or instead assume that most people are against regulations that restrict them from doing things that they might want to do. edit: I suspect this might be a covert explanation about why this particular technologist is less enamored by the future possibilities of their chosen career than they were when they started it, just (for some reason) projected onto celebrities who have already been massively successful.

munificent 1y ago
I believe there is an implicit answer here, but I agree that the author didn't tie the threads together as clearly as they could have. What they are saying is that tech moguls have a period in their life where they felt they were at their best, living their glory days. They are latching on to and trying to recreate that environment, including superficial properties that environment had that don't actually have anything to do with why it was such a formative period for them. One attribute of programming back in the 90s is... it was mostly non-poor white guys. Now, obviously anyone with a certain level of maturity and wisdom would realize that the demographic monoculture of the 90s was an effect of the fact that computers were still relatively rare and expensive in the 80s, and those most people who had access to them back them came from a certain level of privilege. Being wealthy, white, and male all increased the odds that you were able to spend your endless summers PEEKing and POKing on an Apple IIe while other less fortunate people didn't have a computer or had to work. Being wealthy, white, and male didn't cause people to be better hackers. Having economic stability is what gave people the freedom to become better hackers. It's just that that level of economic stability has historically not at all been uniformly distributed across people in the US. Thus anti-DEI measures are counterproductive. Going forward, society has a moral and rational incentive to extend that opportunity to as many people as possible, regardless of their anatomy or skin color because that's how society gets the most out of all of its members.

arnaudsm 1y ago

I partly disagree, software still sucks and it's a great time to build. The #1 OS is slow and crashes all the time. The #1 email client takes 10s to load on my mother's laptop. Most popular products are slow, buggy, filled with spam, & filled with dark patterns. Enshittification won. FAANGs are the new IBM. Let's build better stuff.

hx8 1y ago
If enshittification can be avoided, why aren't we seeing a wave of no dark patterns software crushing it? Enshittification is mostly just the process of not running on VC Capital and generating sustainable revenue sources.
- arnaudsm 1y ago
  Users have inertia, it takes years for superior products to win. VC capital is useful for speed & innovation, but most of the time leads to bloat & rent-seeking. Does DocuSign need 7,000 employees? My journey of bootstrapped entrepreneurship has been much more sustainable and respectful to my users.
  - hx8 1y ago
    I think if superior products always win then we wouldn't have so many BigCo Enshittified products that have been terrible for 15+ years.
    - arnaudsm 1y ago
      Schumpeter's cycle of destructive creation usually takes 15 years in software. IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook. They were all the cool underdogs for a decade, then slowly decline in quality.
HKH2 1y ago
It's not clear if you mean #1 in quality or popularity. I'll assume you mean the latter. Is Windows really that unstable?

hackrmn 1y ago

Ironically, perhaps, I just read the article while taking a micro-break from writing a triangle rasterizer (aliased, aka pixel-art / retro) in WebAssembly. It'll probably feature rendering performance orders of magnitude slower than a graphics card from 20 years ago, and I am well aware of it but the truth is I am not doing it because I am still nurturing a dream of becoming one of the rich rock stars of IT from an era that passed me by those same 20 years ago. No, it's just that I find it pleasurable to do these things, exactly because I don't need to stay competitive doing it -- well, not against hordes of very capable software engineers churning all kind of useful _valuable_ systems. Not the least because I am doing the things I do like the above, during my spare time, and I have reasons to believe there's plenty need for the artistic pet projects done in spare time on intake of inspiration. So yeah, just reminding everyone that not everything is about fierce competition -- if artists can chain smoke and drink their life through ups and downs of patronage, so can everyone else. Noone says we should stop being responsible, but all the responsibility and adulting without play is much, much worse, in my opinion, than the alternative. It just so happens that I relax writing code. I am still writing other things that have long been invented, and they consistently give me inspiration. Not sure if I missed the point of the article, but I react to what I read from it, after all.

lo0dot0 1y ago
Tbh I don't understand the need for games in web assembly. Is it really worth the effort developing an environment for games that runs in the Webbrowser when installing a game through steam or the play store is already very simple and quick

fidotron 1y ago

This is bitter gibberish. Advancement has always been made by standing on the shoulders of giants, and that enables small teams to execute different things in different eras. If you can't see what the changes are today you would have been no better off in another time.

selfselfgo 1y ago
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shadowgovt 1y ago
There are, however, such things as breakthrough eras and consolidation / comprehension eras. Physics hasn't been the same since Einstein's era. While breakthroughs have happened, the fundamental reframing of the way we comprehend the world that happened with the one-two punch of the theories of relativity and the experimental evidence for the quantum model have patterned the world in which we now live, but understanding that pattern is the new work. Similarly, I think a good case can be made that the one-two punch of the implementation of the Internet as a fabric and the web as a killer app is now finished work. While the remaining work is real, valid, and valuable, it is of different kind to the creation of the new pattern; consolidation and comprehension of the pattern is the work of the day, and that's not nearly as glamorous, sexy, or profitable (to reputation or pocketbook). It's fine for there to be eras of great opportunity and eras of not, so long as we respect which we're in. (Google is great as a case-study for this concept. The circumstances that birthed Google are now actively suppressed in the ecosystem... Mostly by Google. The positive feedback loop of great-search-breeds-great-search-data that birthed Google doesn't leave room for multiple Googles because human attention and time is finite; this is evidenced by Bing being unable to draw users despite huge monetary investment and just as much technical competence. But they can't draw the users because they aren't already better than Google. As consequence, two guys in their garage can make something but it won't be a Google-scale search engine. Meanwhile, the small, scrappy search engine is now a huge behemoth with 8.5 billion daily searches, and that amount of real human contact implies real human responsibility... if Google goes offline, people will literally die from lack of access to information, so they can't take the kind of risks they used to be able to. Young systems have different features than old systems. Young ten-person companies have different behavior than old 100,000-person Fortune 500s. Young people have different wants and capabilities than older people. Making the transition is key. Failure to make the transition causes pain not only to the one failing but to the ones interacting with them).

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cjs_ac 1y ago

Aside from the overarching thread of the current crop of CEOs struggling to come to terms with the fact that their empires are now all they'll ever be and it's up to others to continue innovating, I found these quotes interesting: > The Internet is no longer the world's great frontier, and the pool of unsatisfied wants that suddenly welled up as the world first came online is not what it once was. There once was no graphical operating system, no decent web browser, no search engine that could find what you were looking for. The basic amenities are now there. Of course there is still much room for innovation, but merely being able to write a computer program and understand what computer networks are good for is no longer the superpower it once was. If you're young enough to pound Red Bulls all night, you're probably not old enough to have the breadth of knowledge required to launch a great software product. > Maybe most of the critical things that can be created by one guy typing furiously are gone, and the opportunities that remain require expertise and wisdom from a bunch of different people. The tech companies that became big after 2008 solved problems with the same spirit as Jeremy Clarkson asking, 'How hard can it be?' and proceeding to build an electric car with a moustache called Geoff[0]. Those companies - Uber, AirBnB, Meta, Twitter, and so on - waded into very complex problem spaces, waved the magic wand of software, and used vast amounts of venture capital to obliterate the traditional solutions to these problems before anyone could realise how unsatisfactory these new solutions were. So now governments are coming up with all sorts of regulations - some of which are completely inappropriate - in an attempt to get these companies to stop being so irresponsible with the fabric of society, so everyone is now even more upset. The days when a person who can build stuff and a person who can sell stuff were all you needed to start a startup are gone. There's a third role that's crucial now: the person who has deep understanding of the problem before product design starts so that the company doesn't build another version of The Angrifier. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-OlOP0BQ_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-OlOP0BQ_U

4ndrewl 1y ago
I mean yeah, but Uber promised us self-driving taxis, but only found profit by delivering takeaways. Meta and Twitter - adverts, and all on the foundation of a zirp economy.
- 1y ago

chaseadam17 1y ago

I imagine what these guys miss is the freedom of obscurity. Tech has gone from being ignored to being ridiculed and regulated. Like a company getting more bureaucratic as it scales, it makes sense to professionalize a sector as its influence grows. The problem is that professionalization is often the enemy of innovation. If you care about having the freedom to innovate, this leaves you with three options: be the angry old man yelling at the clouds, constructively try to improve the process of professionalization from within or quietly go innovate elsewhere. The problem with the last option is that there aren’t too many places left to go and it’s hard to start over, which is why I think Elon and others take to some combination of the first two.

agentultra 1y ago
Innovation in trad engineering disciplines didn't stop when the industry gained professional guilds and legal status. We have far better buildings, extremely reliable jet planes, high speed rail, the internet...
- chaseadam17 1y ago
  I disagree. I believe we’ve had far less progress in real world engineering in the past 50 years than the 50+ prior.
  - spencerflem 1y ago
    I don't think mechanical engineering is more professional now than it was 50 years ago. If anything its less so, with execs calling on Engineers to wing it, and getting sign off on shoddy designs.
  - meatmanek 1y ago
    Airline accidents and deaths have steadily declined for 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatal-airliner-accidents-per-million-flights https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatal-airliner-accidents-... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_incidents#/media/File:ACRO_fatalities.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden... Car crash death rates in the US have been declining for 50 years in both total number and per-capita rates (except for an uptick that started in 2020, presumably some knock-on effects from covid): https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatality-trends/deaths-and-rates/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... -- 40,990 deaths in 2023 vs. 54,052 deaths in 1973; 12.06 vs 25.51 per 100k population Car fuel efficiency has ~doubled since 1975: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1237-may-9-2022-fuel-economy-all-vehicle-classes-has-improved https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1237-may-... Airline fuel efficiency has quadrupled since 1975: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#/media/File:Aviation_Efficiency_(RPK_per_kg_CO2).svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#/medi... Corn yields per acre have doubled since 1975: https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTrends.html https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTren... Lithium-ion batteries didn't practically exist in 1975. Modern blue LEDs (and thus white LEDs) didn't exist until 1990. The entire personal computing industry. The Internet. Search engines. LLMs. Cellular networks. Neodymium magnets. Reusable orbital launch vehicles. Genetically modified crops. mRNA vaccines. CRISPR.

avg_dev 1y ago

I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this: > As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park. Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.

no_wizard 1y ago
would you mind giving a greater explanation of what they mean by this? I couldn't grok the meaning from context, other than the obvious its not really possible to simply startup half baked out of your house or something along those lines
- masfuerte 1y ago
  It's saying that even just having a garage is a privilege.
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    Even being able to type in a comment box is a privilege, as is life.
    - groby_b 1y ago
      Meanwhile, you're missing the wider point: You don't get to claim "everybody can do this from nothing" if the "nothing" is actually a substantial amount of implicit access to resources. Nobody (well, few) begrudge that privilege, but you cannot have a reasonable discussion about what led to success by leaving out major factors.
  - jackphilson 1y ago
    Even the amount of agency you have is a privilege. Hard determinism.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  It means these guys didn't literally start from nothing. They had a house in the suburbs with a garage, and that implies at least some level of funding and privilege. A leg up that the guy in the trailer park might not have.

malchow 1y ago

[flagged]

shadowgovt 1y ago
It is sad that an era of abundance somehow built a world where our younger counterparts are fighting over so few scraps that they are seeing other competent and effective people as threats, not partners. How did we let it get that far off the rails?

jparishy 1y ago

To me this seems pretty apt, and probably more generalizable. The world is claimed. There is no glory to come from being the first anymore, and that is too big a bummer for a lot of Great Men. I think future progress will be the composition of skills, as mentioned in the article. Or we go backwards and just take things from each other. pc has an article about a related topic in my view: https://patrickcollison.com/fast https://patrickcollison.com/fast these things were done by many people with a great vision for the collective, even if lead by one person. maybe not altruistic things but provided more good than they did hoard value. where is the vision anymore?

alchemyzach 1y ago
"Or we go backwards and just take things from each other." This is the DEI movement in a nutshell. A bunch of people driven by fear and anxiety and anger into demanding they be handed things for free instead of working for them. Which is why it's ironic that the article seems to validate the DEI movement
arduanika 1y ago
> The world is claimed. Isn't it such a strange coincidence that you can imagine all of the things that have ever been invented in the past, and none of the things that will be invented in the future?

dsign 1y ago

Without any hard data about anything, this is just a speculative rant. Go and read my books if you want one of those. But I do agree on one thing: we are lacking a new frontier, a meaningful one. My hope for the years I have left is to see one.

memhole 1y ago
This is part of what I feel keeps driving AI/LLMs. The hope that there’s a new frontier to cash in on.
- munificent 1y ago
  And before that, crypto.
- layer8 1y ago
  If cashing in on is the primary motivation, then it’s all meaningless anyway.
9rx 1y ago
There are plenty of frontiers to explore. What we lack is people crazy enough to try. But that always happens when times are good. Crazy emerges out of desperation.

bananalychee 1y ago

This reminds me of the adage: "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." There are some insights there, but the article is tainted by envy and self-righteousness.

languagehacker 1y ago

Insightful words from the Coldplay guy. In all seriousness, there is definitely the comfortable lie of nostalgia playing into a lot of the dudes approaching (or squarely in) middle age as far as tech goes. It's truly a bummer that they're expressing the internalization of the wrong lessons. Instead of standing up against decades of enshittification, they're complaining about having to say "allowlist" instead of "blacklist", and still erroneously believing that the right hackathon will solve their company's existential problems. I got the best monkeys and the best typewriters, so if I let them do what they want in this "meritocracy" I created, it will definitely make the next Hamlet, right?

jglamine 1y ago

This essay is weird. The author lumps James Damore, rank-and-file software engineer, in with Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg. Damore hasn't updated his LinedIn since 2018 - he might not even work in tech anymore? It closes saying they need to stop reliving their glory days and be good fathers and not the town drunk. Those are serious accusations - being a bad father and a drunk. The author doesn't give any evidence for either.

mtrovo 1y ago
[flagged]
- jglamine 1y ago
  No, and you can see my post history to verify this.
jeffbee 1y ago
Yeah that was weird. Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry? Never heard of them in the open source world. The way I read their arc, they went directly from cosseted upbringing to finding out that they weren't anywhere near as gifted as they'd been told their entire life and shifting from trying to actually compete in the industry to being a paid podcast guest in the grievance-sphere.
- jglamine 1y ago
  I think that's uncharitable. He was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. Sure he went to Harvard, maybe he had wealthy parents (IDK his background) but neither of those are crimes. I don't think he's the activist people make him out to be. He went on a few podcasts early on but has generally kept a low profile. I'm not under the impression he's doing the paid speaker / podcast circuit. Probably just living his life. After he was cancelled probably nobody wanted to hire him, maybe he left tech completely. But yes, agree it was weird to include him next to the other names. He's not like, a billionaire founder.

PaulHoule 1y ago

I find it amusing that behind some of these "great men" you will find a woman. If anyone is going to get us to Mars it is Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX. Similarly it was Sheryl Sandberg that helped transition Facebook from a popular service to a dominant business.

alchemyzach 1y ago
I agree with you in spirit but naming women who were appointed positions inside of companies famously founded by men is not helping
MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
Both of the women mentioned have been accused of creating the type of environment mentioned in this blog post. [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/former-spacex-engineer-essay-alleges-culture-is-rife-with-sexism.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/former-spacex-engineer-essay... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg#Allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg#Allegations
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  I won't disagree. I'd say that gendered narratives such as "it would be better if women ran things" or "human progress depends on masculine energy" are not helpful and frequently pernicious.

renewiltord 1y ago

When did this style of psychoanalysis become popular? Everyone now uses these terms and instead of coming off like an informed take it just sounds like "I'm just trying to insult other people". At some point, the online forum take of "all the successful guys are sad and I'm not as successful because I'm well-adjusted" has gotten boring. I get that people want to feel better about their lives but this is just embarrassing.

MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
This comment kind of comes off as "I'm just trying to insult other people".
- renewiltord 1y ago
  Hmm, fair enough. I was trying to insult the observed behaviour whereas he was trying to insult the implied behaviour and I would expect them to be different (because the latter is guesswork) but I suppose it seems the same way to you. Ah well.
deleted 1y ago
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alchemyzach 1y ago

The idea that success often depends on luck, right place/time, and other circumstances often outside one's control, is definitely true. Not sure how this validates the DEI movement though? Still a largely toxic and unserious movement that has good intentions but ultimately harms institutions and wastes time and resources.

an0malous 1y ago
I think the OP’s idea is that DEI is a scapegoat for diminishing growth, and the real cause is just that the low hanging fruit is gone
mrandish 1y ago
While I think the TFA makes some interesting points, I too felt the DEI reference was tangential. The point that I felt TFA missed is that none of this was fundamentally unique to the dotcom era. Random factors like "right place/time" have always applied at the birth of new industries whether dotcom era, 1970s microcomputers or 19th century punch card tabulating devices. Historically, new industries that quickly emerged from not existing to being consequential, had early players who achieved outsized gains and pole position during a limited window of time when a couple of reasonably clever outliers could choose to speculatively pour unreasonable amounts of time, energy and whatever environmental resources were at their disposal into delivering early value. Usually the choice to pour too much into an unproven, nascent prospect was objectively a bad idea, poor investment or, at least, not prudent. We know this because other smarter, more sober people looked at the opportunity during those early moments and made wiser choices, which only seem unwise in hindsight. It's also usually the case that those early zealots taxed their available environmental resources (whether spousal support, parental savings, current employer latitude, etc) to the point of unfair burden, if not abusive burden. Sometimes those unwilling 'resource investors' were repaid and sometimes not. And, of course, even having environmental resources to tap (and unfairly burden) in the first place has always been a matter of luck. There's an historical record bias here because if we double-click as deeply into the circumstances around other early market entrants, such as a Herman Hollerith and punch card tabulating, we often find similar patterns of abdicating current responsibilities to make unwise leaps into months of furious work to realize some speculative vision, enabled by unfairly (or abusively) burdened family, friends or employers whose existence was random luck. On top of that, there's selection bias at work. Because whether we're talking about Zuckerberg, Gates/Allen, Jobs/Woz, Hollerith or Gutenberg - we're only talking about them because they are the black swan exceptional outliers. The vast majority of the time this pattern ends in unrecorded ignominy or tragedy, existing only as cautionary tales about the distant relative who squandered whatever job or prospects they had, along with their money, family's money and finally the patience of all around them in the pursuit of some crazy dream which never panned out. The more interesting question is whether this repeating pattern of irrationally abdicating responsibilities to chase speculative dreams in unhealthily unbalanced ways enabled by unfairly burdening environmental resources is, on the whole, net bad or good. And I think that depends on the scope by which we measure. On an individual, family or community level its almost certainly net bad. However, on a societal level it could be net positive. The thorny issue is that the pattern involves abuse of unwilling others to whom rewards may not flow, even in the unlikely event it doesn't end in tragedy. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to eliminate the possibility of unfairness toward others or the overall ambient unfairness of 'winning' by leveraging environmental luck.

dzink 1y ago

Some potential causes of the scarcity of breakthroughs in the last 10 years: 1. "What got you here won't get you there." The problems that need solved today might require a different mindset/level of experience and that may not be in people with enough time or circumstances to build, or enough likeness to the old model be funded by VCs. 2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM. 3. Tech giants of the past 10 years were slurping the most promising talent with high salaries and burning them out. 4. Filters that sift new founders and hackers are created by people who don't deal with the problems most people deal with. 7. Hackers at hackathons are not dealing with problems most people deal with. A number of hackathons I've participated in had very similar solutions pitched - you could name the categories, and see them all over again in each hackathon years apart. Usually catering to the tech or the sponsors instead of actual products anyone wanted to use.

stuxnet79 1y ago
> 2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM. Not enough is said about this. It's almost comical when you think about it. As technologists we are both complicit and victims. I've spent half a decade in one of these 'attention economy' companies and let me tell you the amount of money, talent and resources that our industry deploys to forcefully grab and monetize users' attention is staggering. Recently I've shifted to using single-use, fit-for-purpose devices (Kobo ereader hacked with KOReader, KingJim Pomera DM250 digital memo) for my day-to-day and it was like a weight that I never knew was there was magically lifted away. If capitalism could find a way to produce such devices at scale, not only would it be a public health win, it would be a massive boost to the economy long-term. But with most corporation's incessant focus on short term metrics I'm not holding my breath that this will ever be a reality.
layer8 1y ago
Good points, but what happened to 5 and 6?

larusso 1y ago

I often contemplated about people like Zuckerberg who had massive success with the first thing they built and then have to come to terms that not everything they touch turns to gold. I wonder what kind of feeling that must be if your greatest success happened in your 20th. How do you measure your successes then?

dougb5 1y ago
My cynical answer: I think they reframe their history to see it as a series of ever-larger successes -- with some setbacks maybe. They avoid introspection that might lead to the unpleasant conclusion that they have actually gone off the rails and caused societal harm since their initial success. By and large their net worth has continued to increase, and that's the measure that they're comfortable with associating with success, and they see that as validation. Plus, they are surrounded by people who have the same incentives to lie to themselves and to each other.
GoatInGrey 1y ago
This dynamic has been explored extensively in the creative fields. Most namely with the music industry and the "sophomore album curse".
- larusso 1y ago
  Interesting. Never heard that term. Will check it out thanks.

deleted 1y ago

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jlos 1y ago

Why is James Damore listed alongside Andreesen and Zuckerberg? Andreesen and Zuckerberg have hundreds of billions at their disposal and Damore was an employee fired for giving feedback on a company diversity program. I mean I know why, but the antipathy underlying the article undermines an otherwise interesting point.

Johanx64 1y ago
Because the author can't help himself. Obviously. These guys always let their convictions screech out. The opening statement makes it sound like it's only the wealthy "tech-bros" that are rubbed the wrong way by DEI. (in my recollection of it, the wealthy techbros were the first ones on the uptake of the whole DEI swindle. It's just that it's not the direction the wind blows these days)

neverbehind 1y ago

[flagged]

dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago

It loosely reminds me of the move "The World's End".

danielovichdk 1y ago

Great piece of writing. Thank you.

quadhome 1y ago

Rich men age into conservatism. Tale as old as time.

9rx 1y ago
The opposite is taking place with a couple of notable old rich men in particular, though. They aren't hesitant of change at all. They want to see everything change and are doing all they can to see that change happens. It is the rest of the world that has become conservative in light of their actions, praying they will stop.

alganet 1y ago

It's an inaccurate profiling. Instead, the gang you describe is aspiring to migrate into well known high visibility disputes such as climate change, gender issues, politics reform. They genuinely think they can help, but the inner principal motive is to be noticed as quickly as possible as "a big stakes kind of person". The more famous and loud the issues they can touch, the better. They will only talk about what appeals to newer generation struggles.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

> The hackathon is the proof that people believe this can work, and it is the proof that it doesn't. A good TL;DR for the essay.

arduanika 1y ago

"There once was[...] no search engine that could find what you were looking for." What's old is new again.

NikkiA 1y ago
The web was only 3 years old when altavista burst on the scene. So the window of there being 'no search engine to find what you were looking for on the web' was tiny.

systemstops 1y ago

"If these are the conditions under which passionate creative problem solving thrives, then of course we must recover them to make software great again. But they are not." This doesn't make any sense. Obviously those conditions lead to incredible thriving in the past. This guy is basically arguing that because it doesn't work now (in a super diverse globalized world) that it never actually worked. These are the same kind of "they just got lucky" arguments I see constantly to downplay the achievements of any specific group of people.

munificent 1y ago
There is an infinitely long list of things that were part of the environment when that kind of passionate creative problem solving in software was thriving. What the author is saying is that not all of those properties were causative to make software great again. Do we need people to have enough of a safety net to take risks with entrepreneurship? Yes. Do we need enough regulation to prevent entrenched companies from using regulatory capture to stifle competition while having little enough regulation that small companies can spin up and be nimble? Yes. Do we need to be listening to N'Sync, wearing JNCOs, watching Beavis and Butthead, and drinking Crystal Pepsi? Probably not. Those were in the air, but not causative. And, certainly, I see little evidence to support the implicit claim in "anti-woke" that somehow sexism, homophobia, and racism were causative factors that enabled entrepreneurialism to thrive a few decades ago.
- systemstops 1y ago
  People still argue what things made a small city state (Athens) suddenly become the cornerstone of western civilization. That fact is that we have these explosions of human potential where certain groups of people in certain environments make massive leaps, and we don't what the magic sauce is. It's great when it happens, but It's foolish to think that we can somehow socially engineer the same results through brute force, which is the problem with DEI thinking. That is also why so many companies are silently ditching those policies.
  - munificent 1y ago

m_dupont 1y ago

The link between DEI and the rest of the content of the article is not well-articulated at all. Leaving aside whether one agrees with the premise, his argumentation is disjointed at best. He is attributing various symptoms of these tech leaders behaviour to them clinging to a bygone world, however he hasn't really articulated any of these symptoms beyond them thinking that "DEI" is the cause of all their problems. He can't even back it up with a single quote or published piece from one of these tech moguls which displays the opinions that he characterizes them to have. Articles as sloppy as this shouldn't get 230+ points on hackernews

wing-_-nuts 1y ago
>The link between DEI and the rest of the content of the article is not well-articulated at all. It felt like a lazy generic swipe at 'tech bros'.

yowlingcat 1y ago

You can make a critique of the flimsier parts of anti-DEI fashions with substance but I don't think this is one of them. There are so many questionable assumptions and strawmen layered into the end conclusion that it's hard to tell whether the objection is with morality or taste. For example: - Responsible people have responsibilities -- what is this tautology supposed to mean? That they can no longer value vitality or views on what style of life makes it worth living? - The internet is no longer the world's great frontier -- according to whom? It is certainly the case that the old frontiers of the internet have either imploded or been thoroughly domesticated, but the internet is now thousands or millions of times larger than in its early days, so it's hard to say that frontiers (plural) are gone rather than one is simply not trying hard enough to find them. - Chance is a great factor in success - a belief to be sure but not an observation; chance is often a factor in success, but it's not often a factor in downward mobility (which is extraordinarily common across the classes). It's easy to blame chance for negative outcomes, but it's hard to fully test and regularly exercise (or gradually expand) the limits of what is in one's control. - Long gone are the days of the solo "great mover" - how does this couch with solopreneurs vibe coding their way with gen AI to large independent businesses and lean organizations that have very quickly built the highest revenue/employee at the highest growth rates in history? If anything, individuals are inordinately empowered with tools today that didn't actually exist in usable form 3-6 months ago nevermind a year ago. For a piece of writing that talks so confidently about how stuck in the past others are, it's hard not to question whether the author themself is stuck in the past in some way.

chinchilla2020 1y ago

> old dorm room with paint chips on the walls > Mark Zuckerberg This guy doesn't know much about Mark Zuckerberg

deleted 1y ago

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