6 ms·

This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium. Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens

• goodpoint 4mo ago
  > guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status aka techbros
  • biofox 4mo ago
    I got into programming and computers due to their intellectual depth, and the exciting opportunities they opened to explore everything from electronics to obscure areas of mathematics... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think. The combination of endless trend-chasing, software churn, and techbro culture made me hate everything about software, so I jumped ship to biology.
    • zelphirkalt 4mo ago
      Well, and now with the push towards AI slop and letting agents do work for you, it is even less about creativity and talent. You can't even chase trends in libraries while still being clever about it any longer, you gotta chase more and more braindead ways of getting code generated based on tons and tons of mediocre code found online, gobbled up by big tech without the original creator s' consent.
      • zozbot234 4mo ago
        I think that plenty of 'nerds' would very much disagree about that. Steering agents effectively is something that can take massive amounts of creativity and talent and be quite helpful wrt. the final result. There's no real analogue of this in traditional programming.
        • marmarama 4mo ago
          Sure there's an analogue. It's being the tech lead of a team of junior to mid level developers. You design roughly what the solution should look like, split it into reasonable sized tasks so they don't go off the deep end, advise them on some of the details, then assign them the tasks and let them get on with it, keeping an eye on what they're doing, reviewing their output, and course correcting them when they go wrong. Just like with a team of humans, you have to use your judgement as to how much supervision they need individually and how large a task you can give them without them going off the rails.
          • anygivnthursday 4mo ago
            Thats my thought as well, LLM agents put you in the role of a (often micromanaging) tech/team lead of a small team, but the speed and fast feedback loop makes it look different.
            • fragmede 4mo ago
              Oh it's different alright. Yell at a human employee to tell them they're a fucking loser enough times and at best they'll quit on you. The way some people talk to their LLM is ghastly.
              • anygivnthursday 4mo ago
                And there are also papers that tell thats effective https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04950 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04950
          • 4mo ago
    • jimbokun 4mo ago
      > ... through to theory of mind and the dream of making silicon think. I think part of your naiveté was thinking this goal was likely to turn out as a net benefit for humanity. Maybe it eventually will. But the current scenario was always the most likely scenario for machines rivaling or surpassing humans in intelligence.
• Gud 4mo ago
  None of those categories were ever “nice”, wtf.
  • sigmoid10 4mo ago
    Yeah, for law I imagine these "nice" beginnings were 2000 years ago at best. If they even existed at all. But all these jobs where talking to other humans is paramount will be dominated by extroverted quacks by default. Same goes for the capital raising college dropout pseudo-tech-bros. They were never nice, they just weren't so engaged in public discourse before, when billion dollar net worths still meant you actually had revenue and not just a vague trendy idea.
    • sumitkumar 4mo ago
      Not that far. Lawyers had a great deal of influence in creation of all modern nation-states, human rights, international law and maintenance of the core social contract in the modern society. Similarly lawyers/bankers were the ones who built in trust in capital, contracts, businesses and protection of investor rights. Delaware c corp is not an outcome of bad guys.
      • PaulHoule 4mo ago
        That’s a system though that seems to be at the breaking point.
        • plaidthunder 4mo ago
          Yes. It might be a general property of all human organizational structures, to degrade over time in terms of intent drift and erosion of public goodwill. It offers some predictive power if so, like OBAFGKM + luminosity is enough to determine where a star is on its lifecycle. Maybe there's a similar domain that maps some human coordination structure onto a deterministic trajectory from birth to death. If that were the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see venture capital--as an organizing principle for the tech industry--reaching a later stage of life.
• azalemeth 4mo ago
  Academia is the most relevant, toxic example that I can think of. Be horrible to others on a short term contract (grad students, postdocs) and break them whilst extracting maximum value -- get more papers, more grants written -- more money -- success. Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity. A great example of this is Peter Higgs, who famously said that he'd be unemployed pretty quickly in the academia of 2013. [0] [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-boson-academic-system https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
  • zozbot234 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    • jadar 4mo ago
      The stakes are never higher when the stakes are so low.
    • locknitpicker 4mo ago
      > Whenever something gets subsidized by the government it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics. Your US-blend of anti-state brainwashing is showing. There is nothing inherently different in the for-profit status of an organization that prevents the occurrence of "exploitive petty politics". You see those from any organization from homeowners organization to full blown FANGs. I mean, have you ever paid attention to the crap being pushed by the likes of Tesla/SpaceX/Twitter?
      • saidnooneever 4mo ago
        the only ingredient needed is humans
    • ACCount37 4mo ago
      "Whenever something gets subsidized, it inevitably becomes dominated by exploitive petty politics." I think it's just limited resources + the single most natural way for humans to compete for limited resources. This isn't actually an inevitable outcome - just the most likely one. The "self-funding" regime requires people who are both rich enough to afford to fund science and sharp and driven enough to advance science to exist. That's a high bar. And while there is some correlation between intelligence and wealth, the tails come apart hard. People driven to pursuit wealth above all may not be driven to pursue scientific discovery. We have plenty of billionaires, and preciously few of them actively pursue pushing the frontiers of science and technology. Even by funding the endeavors - let alone by being in the trenches themselves.
• paulcole 4mo ago
  > This happens in any industry where value/status are at a premium. So, all of them?
  • jameshart 4mo ago
    Right? Isn’t that just tautology? This happens in industries where value is valued and status confers status?
  • ajross 4mo ago
    [dead]
• mystraline 4mo ago
  > Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status. Those career paths were always crooked. We see that going back to my great grandparents time with Black friday of 1929. They fucked around with unrestricted capitalism, and found out. Quite a few killed themselves by throwing themselves off of buildings. It was only when FDR took office and worked with Congress to make tons of rules keeping the money hoarders from destroying the economy yet again. And it bloody worked. For those of you who say FDR was a communist, absolutely not. He was fighting against a large contingent of the population who were socialists and communists. He did appease some of their demands, bit not many. FDR led us into our most glorious 20 years, the 1950's to 1960's. Cheap education, cheap homes, plentiful well paying jobs, only needed 1 worker per house. Thats what the boomers remember and want. And it was systematically dismantled piece by piece. 'VC guys were good too'?!?! I take it you do t remember the 1980's Mergers and Acquisitions crisis? Thats when enough data was available for a company, that mergers, acquisitions, and liquidations coukd make a handful of people scads of money, and destroy the economy to boot. And i also scarce remember a time when 'Finance' was good. Their slur was beancounters. Something costs $20 but saves $1000? Nope, its -20$. The loss is never analyzed. Every job Ive woeked in has had this perverse logic. And especially with money, Goodharts Law comes to mind. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". "Men living in democratic ages have many passions but most of their passions either end in the love of riches or proceed from it." Alexis de Toqueville
  • iwontberude 4mo ago
    Unless you were black then you might think good god these yts gonna displace us again with a new new deal.
    • mystraline 4mo ago
      I know youre trying be inflammatory, but also accurate. US culture has always had an out-group that could be sacrificed to the capitalist machine. And even Northern rhetoric woukd have people believe that slavery didnt exist there. Ive been in Boston at the slave docks. Banned in 1830's btw there. And slavery also benefitted the North even if banned. And after the Civil war, black folks were still 3rd class. Took another 100 years to get the same legal rights. And even now, blacks are underpaid compared to the same jobs by whites. Most of wealth extraction to black communities is mostly complete. Musk runs datacenters using methane generators in black communities, horrifically polluting them. And the republicans who run the cities/states dont care. But the USA has effectively run out of people to sacrifice. Now, theyre coming for the middle-income whites. Thats the squeeze we're seeing. And thats not going to end well. Likely will be horrifically violent.
• boringg 4mo ago
  How do we remove that? Those are the exact kind of people most intelligent people find quite grating in an organization - though because they self-promote so much its difficult to unpack the truth until they have kind of weaseled their way into an entrenched position (normally they are reasonably good at politics). I'll use the All-in podcast as a perfect example of the type of person described. They have some value in that they have palace intrigue + arguably asymetric access to information.
  • sevenzero 4mo ago
    >Those are the exact kind of people most intelligent people find quite grating in an organization Most intelligent people contribute to this as well though. Being intelligent doesn't automatically remove egoistical traits, for some it's even supercharged if it results in personal growth within the organization.
    • deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
• mhh__ 4mo ago
  Along these lines always watch the flow of entrepreneurial Asians.
• nerdsniper 4mo ago
  Law was good people when? During the era of the 3/5ths compromise? Dredd Scott? Plessy? Lochner v NY? Buck v Bell? Korematsu? Finance was good people when? When Swiss banks captured all the war spoils of WW2? When they ran Penny Auctions during the Great Depression? When they financed slave ships? When the Medici financed endless war across Europe? I’m not saying people are all awful, but I don’t think there’s any “before times” where people were better than they have been since then in any ageless profession. Perhaps there’s some degree of variance or even ebb-and-flow patterns.
  • newaccountman2 4mo ago
    > Law was good people when? During the era of the 3/5ths compromise? Dredd Scott? Plessy? Lochner v NY? Buck v Bell? Korematsu? All of those are only things because there were lawyers willing and eager to sue the government over the evils at issue, so your point is much weaker than you think.
    • nerdsniper 4mo ago
      That’s actually exactly my point. That all these fields have had good and bad people the entire time and that the ratios probably don’t change all that much. It sounds like you’d agree with me.
      • newaccountman2 4mo ago
        Well, yeah, I suppose I don't disagree with your overall point lol, sorry if comment sounded overly combative Law and finance were sources of and avenues to money and power from the outset. Took some time for tech to emerge as such.
  • hattmall 4mo ago
    I think you miss the point, it's not that they were morally good or only in pursuit of lofty goals. But the culture was different and the profession wasn't dominated by monetary opportunity seekers. Look back in historical newspapers and you won't find a single ad for personal injury attorneys.