71–77 of 77 posts
Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4ToCZE...
Does anyone know why this article was unreachable yesterday? Was it "just" an outage of the entire n+1 magazine?
Clearly, the only acceptable answers to this question (if indeed one wants that team leader position) are the numbers 5 and 1.
And if you don't implicitly understand this, then this definitely isn't the right industry for you.
I work at a company that has just morphed out of "startup" and into "contender". I didn't start early, I was hired by the guys who were hired by the founders (so that makes me a 'C' I guess by some old adage), and I've seen the company change so much even in my short time there.
But this article nails so many perfect details. The plastic tubs of goldfish and trailmix, the Mid Century modern-esque furniture.
Also, the bar referenced is probably OddJob.
It's interesting to me that my friends and I who grew up in SV and lived through the .com boom as adolescents and had parents who worked during the .com and PC/networking/semiconductor booms are largely skeptical and at times even dismissive of the latest incarnation of SV culture. Perhaps it's hubris ("the old version --my version-- was better"), perhaps it's cynicism (seeing family/friends be burned in the last boo…
I graduated from high school in 1996 and was way into web development from the very first days. I didn't end up coming out for the dotcom days, but I definitely have fond memories of those times. There was a sense of camaraderie of early PC and internet users where the motivations seemed to me to be slightly more noble. Not that the VCs or tech giants of the time weren't greedy—of course they were—but there wasn't th…
The old days were better. We were naive, we cared, this was Going To Be Big. I dropped out of HS the same year to start web dev as well. I never felt gross or used or like anything was fake. It was exciting, maybe irrationally exuberant but it was real. I don't recognize the valley now. It's just a slot machine with young peoples dreams painted on the side.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>this article honestly came across as someone who had read too much Bret Easton Ellis recently... I very much enjoyed this article, but I had that BEE thought as well! My theory is that a lot of us human beings manufacture strife and struggle, because that is the Hero's Journey that everyone wants to be able to tell to their grandchildren. In the absence of "real" conflict (war, poverty, abuse), we shine the dark lig…
Joseph Campbell's idea of the hero's journey was, I think, partly inspired by the myth of the Buddha, whose problem was (excuse me) the same as Kanye's: he had everything, yet he was unhappy.
Really well-written piece. Someone else mentioned Brett Easton-Ellis in this thread, and I totally got that vibe from the early paragraphs on. What really got me though, was thinking about my earliest days building small Beavis and Butthead fan sites on Geocities, browsing Netscape for hours and waiting five minutes for a certain page to finally load. I was only 12 then, but everything just felt so new and shiny, and…
I remember there was a site called the Internet Millionaires List that had a list of all the people who had gotten rich off the Internet. It was still quite short. I think Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark were at the top of the list. eBay had not gone public yet.
Anyway, I love that I can remember "before the Internet" as an adult. And I still get excited about all the new technologies that continue to emerge.
Companies, being run by people, are inherently flawed. I feel like the writer has low-level depression and uses that to paint everything in a negative light.