Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
ianbetteridge.com
Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
1–10 of 235 posts
Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
#2Indeed. There are not too many people that are both bright and willing to look up to the current crop of tech billionaires.
Ideals count, certainly for hackers. If you have billions in the bank you might start to look to work on some real pressing problems instead of looking to get a share of the next Privacy Suck.
Erosion of democratic societies via algorithmically boosted disinformation campaigns, climate change, healthcare, you name it. Tech is not neutral in the societal sense, far from it.
Also, I doubt if AI (now even more widgets), with those tech leaders pressing for it, is compatible with being a tech enthusiast. Techies like tech first, results second.
If software engineering becomes chess, it will be preserved as tournaments, not business.
Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
#3> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz.
Distills the post to a sentence, and boy does this nail it.
Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
#4I think another way to explain "being bored" (and a bunch of other features that this post describes). These people are getting old: Andreessen is 53, Graham is 59, the author is in his fifties; I am too. Nothing too surprising about having older people be the supposed "blowhard" voices of an industry -- except during the golden age that these posts harken back too, all of these pundits were twenty or so years younger.
I'm prompted to think about this after watching the last Apple event livestream, and thinking to myself "these people all seem so /old/". Steve Jobs seemed ancient to me when he returned to Apple in 1997: he was 42.
This is not to say that techs, hackers, etc, have grown old -- but the distribution of ages has definitely widened, and its center may have shifted a little right too. That leaves plenty of room for much younger people to look at much older people and wonder at their strange, blowhard opinions. It also leads to older types feeling tired and bored with tech : and projecting that as the dominant tone to those of any age.
Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
#5"If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager." Sad to say, but the professional fakers dominate the C-suite. And often the top manager (the CEO) is a professional faker in chief, hiring like others instead of those who really know what they are doing, so that they don't call out the BS of the top levels.
In the current corporate model that dominates modern capitalism, it's the shit that floats to the top. I am hopeful of a future of mass self-employment and away from finance-led, quarterly-focused, bottom-line driven corporations that stray from their missions and seek to serve a minority of overweighted shareholders, at the expense of employees, customers, and the "common" shareholder.
Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
#6> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. Distills the post to a sentence, and boy does this nail it.
My hypothesis is that it reflects the shift away from consumer and SMB products to Silicon Valley mostly funding enterprise software.
101 North into San Francisco was an exciting drive in the 2000s. I t the 2010s it slowly started to change with billboards one by one changing towards soulless enterprise software.
That drive now doesn’t have a single product anyone should be excited about.
And enterprise software is truly boring. And that an understatement. I got very bored and disenchanted with software because it all sort of sucked.
My other hypothesis is that there will be a resurgence of indie consumer and SMB software that’s not so soulless. And I hate to mention AI but I think it’s the enabler of these apps being viable for very small teams to not go after funding and keep their soul.
Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
#7"If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager." Sad to say, but the professional fakers dominate the C-suite. And often the top manager (the CEO) is a professional faker in chief, hiring like others instead of those who really know what they are doing, so that they don't call out the BS of the top levels. In the current corporate model that dominates modern capitalism, it's the shit that…
Ha. That’s the hypothesis I shared in my other comment. I’m hopeful.
Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
#8> Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. Distills the post to a sentence, and boy does this nail it.
And Woz got bored of big tech 40 years ago...
Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
#9"If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager." Sad to say, but the professional fakers dominate the C-suite. And often the top manager (the CEO) is a professional faker in chief, hiring like others instead of those who really know what they are doing, so that they don't call out the BS of the top levels. In the current corporate model that dominates modern capitalism, it's the shit that…
Agreed, Ive been slowly boot strapping a co-op with old colleagues and that is where my energy will remain for the rest of my days.
Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
#10The author of the post, Ian Betteridge, makes this statement:
"But the other reason why the whole founder mode is a hot mess is that Paul Graham is entirely wrong about management and leadership. Yeah, I know: Graham has been involved with building more companies than I have."
However, the about page on his blog and his LinkedIn indicates he has zero experience running any companies, small or large. Am I missing something?