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A VC-backed startup's push for growth left little time for actual engineering

spectrum.ieee.org

1–9 of 9 posts

Re: A VC-backed startup's push for growth left little time for actual engineering

#2
This is an amazing writeup. I usually judge an article by its comments (I know! but it's usually a good metric!), and for the absolute crickets this is getting, this article is well worth the read.

Filipino contractors essentially fulfilling what the eng team was supposed to, but didn't because their hands were tied up recruiting. Incredible.

Re: A VC-backed startup's push for growth left little time for actual engineering

#3
a lot of things happened here:

- due to fundraising, the company forgot that it exists to produce profit rather than fundraise - they started to optimize metrics that would look good for the next round - they never got to building and solidifying their core-competency due to lack of vision from the exec's.

Re: A VC-backed startup's push for growth left little time for actual engineering

#8
I’d imagine a lot of this data on workflows was collected and stored for use in training models to replace the workers. The part on handwriting unique introductions or judging trustworthiness seem like low hanging fruit to automate now.

Re: A VC-backed startup's push for growth left little time for actual engineering

#9
As an indie maker, you have something like venture capital investors and funders. It's called the free market. Theoretically, according to the common perspective on economics, the free market is self-stabilizing. By virtue of bad ideas being heartlessly culled from the socioeconomic gene pool for the dominance of good ideas.

So, if Silicon Valley style investment funding is a culture sponsored and state sponsored bubble, then the giant, long running startup founder techbro welfare scheme being a bubble that will pop any decade now means people, right now, are starting to experience revulsion toward traditional economics arrangements. Maybe capitalism is an artificial intelligence that lives and that is super intelligent? It makes decisions and one of those decisions right now is pulling out from a sincere experiment in trusting startup founders who are too stupid to outsource essential basic tasks to simple GPT-4 based software. As opposed to the strategy of employing a neo-colonial periphery of cheap and geopolitically subjugated overseas laborers.

Time is running out for Silicon Valley and its adjacent communities. Once resources dry up, that will be your opportunity to shine and start up the next Facebook/United States of America. An unrestrained megacorporation. Seriously.