14 ms·

I respect you a lot Michael, but don't you think perhaps you are romanticizing the past a bit too much here? I mean there was a time when tech advancements wer

I respect you a lot Michael, but don't you think perhaps you are romanticizing the past a bit too much here? I mean there was a time when tech advancements were more fundamental simply because you couldn't do as much in software. What makes you think VCs have changed so much?

michaelochurch 13y ago
I don't know whether VCs have changed, so much as they've either pushed themselves or been pushed into an inappropriate role. A large part of it is that big companies have given up on trying to innovate (they just buy innovations, at a panic price) and the people from whom innovation typically came are now a pariah caste of almost-unemployable miserable geniuses. Even worse, those people can't raise funding anymore because they've been outcompeted (for attention, press, and funding) by people with superior social polish but shittier ideas. VCs are private equity guys. For deciding whether two $300-million biotech companies should merge, they're probably the best people out there. It's not that they're "good" at making those calls, but that the companies are so complex and unusual that almost no one is, and they're the most adept at figuring out what's going on amid the chaos. They might be able to tease out a +0.02 correlation in decision-making while the rest of us would get zero. For figuring out who has the competence to start a tech company? They're in the dark. Not a clue among them. It's not what they learned in business school or McKinsey. They'd do 100 times better to have a person like me do the talent scouting/vetting, but for a variety of reasons that will never happen. The real evil isn't VCs so much as it's the replacement of R&D by M&A, representing a wide-scale trend of engineer disempowerment. Being a software engineer used to be an R&D job because non-engineers understood that they didn't know how to do that job, so it got a lot of autonomy and trust. Now, it's being treated as commodity work, and the result is a catastrophic dilution of the industry. VCs aren't singularly to blame for this, but they certainly didn't stop it. It was actually a lot better, for engineers, to be in R&D labs of large companies than it is to be an engineer at a VC-istan startup. You had more career growth and more opportunities to learn stuff. Don't be fooled by the bullshit equity handed out now. Sure, these R&D engineers didn't get rich at 27-- they had to strike out on their own to do that, and many were happy being upper-middle-class technology researchers as a lifelong career, so most never did-- but most VC-istanis don't either. We need to bring back the R&D flavor of the software industry, or we'll have lost the industry for good.
- dasil003 13y ago
  I tend to view the tech R&D golden age as a product of post-war prosperity and the unique advantages the US had during the latter half of the 20th century. Trust between corporations and employees, and indeed the longevity of corporations themselves has now been so eroded that no one is willing to continue playing the long game of R&D. Take into account the insanity of how the patent system protects all the wrong people and has on balance the exact opposite of its intended effect, and I see the current situation as a bit of a Darwinian inevitability. Being a software engineer is still a kick-ass job compared to almost anything else out there today.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    Being a software engineer is still a kick-ass job compared to almost anything else out there today. No, I really don't think so. If I were to do it over again, I would rather be an Alaskan fishing boat operator than a software engineer doing 99% of the stuff that paid programmers have to do. My body is mediocre. It works, there's nothing wrong with it, and I'm probably in the top 33% for physique, but I'm not Olympic material, so using my body for mediocre physical work does not offend me. It seems about right. I think I would be happier in medieval times when there was no expectation that a smart person would do high-quality work. You did harsh physical work for 45 years and then died. Seems more fulfilling than this corporate bullshit where a bunch of well-connected high priests don't merely do less work and make more money, but the fuckers think they earned it! My mind, on the other hand, is Olympic material and any time someone tries to coerce me into using it for the grunt work they don't want to do, it just makes me homicidal.
    - dasil003 13y ago
      I have go call bullshit on this. You are probably younger than every Alaskan fishing boat operator today and you could go do that tomorrow if you really wanted. Also, why would it be better to pay 80% of your labor directly to a king who would let you starve after a bad harvest or two than it would be to deal with some douchey suits? I mean you can't really be serious with this, it's just a diatribe against the existing corporate hegemony, am I wrong?

michaelochurch 13y ago

I don't know whether VCs have changed, so much as they've either pushed themselves or been pushed into an inappropriate role. A large part of it is that big companies have given up on trying to innovate (they just buy innovations, at a panic price) and the people from whom innovation typically came are now a pariah caste of almost-unemployable miserable geniuses. Even worse, those people can't raise funding anymore because they've been outcompeted (for attention, press, and funding) by people with superior social polish but shittier ideas. VCs are private equity guys. For deciding whether two $300-million biotech companies should merge, they're probably the best people out there. It's not that they're "good" at making those calls, but that the companies are so complex and unusual that almost no one is, and they're the most adept at figuring out what's going on amid the chaos. They might be able to tease out a +0.02 correlation in decision-making while the rest of us would get zero. For figuring out who has the competence to start a tech company? They're in the dark. Not a clue among them. It's not what they learned in business school or McKinsey. They'd do 100 times better to have a person like me do the talent scouting/vetting, but for a variety of reasons that will never happen. The real evil isn't VCs so much as it's the replacement of R&D by M&A, representing a wide-scale trend of engineer disempowerment. Being a software engineer used to be an R&D job because non-engineers understood that they didn't know how to do that job, so it got a lot of autonomy and trust. Now, it's being treated as commodity work, and the result is a catastrophic dilution of the industry. VCs aren't singularly to blame for this, but they certainly didn't stop it. It was actually a lot better, for engineers, to be in R&D labs of large companies than it is to be an engineer at a VC-istan startup. You had more career growth and more opportunities to learn stuff. Don't be fooled by the bullshit equity handed out now. Sure, these R&D engineers didn't get rich at 27-- they had to strike out on their own to do that, and many were happy being upper-middle-class technology researchers as a lifelong career, so most never did-- but most VC-istanis don't either. We need to bring back the R&D flavor of the software industry, or we'll have lost the industry for good.

dasil003 13y ago
I tend to view the tech R&D golden age as a product of post-war prosperity and the unique advantages the US had during the latter half of the 20th century. Trust between corporations and employees, and indeed the longevity of corporations themselves has now been so eroded that no one is willing to continue playing the long game of R&D. Take into account the insanity of how the patent system protects all the wrong people and has on balance the exact opposite of its intended effect, and I see the current situation as a bit of a Darwinian inevitability. Being a software engineer is still a kick-ass job compared to almost anything else out there today.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  Being a software engineer is still a kick-ass job compared to almost anything else out there today. No, I really don't think so. If I were to do it over again, I would rather be an Alaskan fishing boat operator than a software engineer doing 99% of the stuff that paid programmers have to do. My body is mediocre. It works, there's nothing wrong with it, and I'm probably in the top 33% for physique, but I'm not Olympic material, so using my body for mediocre physical work does not offend me. It seems about right. I think I would be happier in medieval times when there was no expectation that a smart person would do high-quality work. You did harsh physical work for 45 years and then died. Seems more fulfilling than this corporate bullshit where a bunch of well-connected high priests don't merely do less work and make more money, but the fuckers think they earned it! My mind, on the other hand, is Olympic material and any time someone tries to coerce me into using it for the grunt work they don't want to do, it just makes me homicidal.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    I have go call bullshit on this. You are probably younger than every Alaskan fishing boat operator today and you could go do that tomorrow if you really wanted. Also, why would it be better to pay 80% of your labor directly to a king who would let you starve after a bad harvest or two than it would be to deal with some douchey suits? I mean you can't really be serious with this, it's just a diatribe against the existing corporate hegemony, am I wrong?