Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

ianbetteridge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 235 posts

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#11

Post by rexreed »

spacecadet wrote: post #9
rexreed wrote: post #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…

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.

This is the way. I feel there's an evolution of small business self-employment that can achieve scale without falling into the trap of the current finance-focused corporate approach. Spending my time and energy to focus on building out what this model is.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#12

Post by __loam »

jmathai wrote: post #6
gipp wrote: post #3

> 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 t…

You don't like yet another business intelligence platform to help optimize your marketing spend?

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#13

Post by rhapsodic »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #10

The 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 some…

[dead]

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#15

Post by zoom6628 »

dannyobrien wrote: post #4

I 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 younge…

As an older person in tech I see ageism alive and well in tech. The young ones don't understand why we oldies roll our eyes at hearing the 13th iteration of "this is ground breaking new idea" or when we gently interrupt a personnel or strategy discussion with a few use cases from the past to illustrate the pending shit-storm being proposed.

Time for the world realise this tech stuff and programming has been around about 100 years! Let that settle in. A century of code. So the tech population is now clever and curious 8 year olds all the way through to 80+ curious and seasoned Algol programmers. And we ALL have value.

#endofrant

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#16

Post by daemonk »

I think it is entirely fair to say that there probably isnt just one primary way to run a large organization. That’s really the main takeaway I found useful from Paul Graham’s blog post.

He obviously didnt specify at all what other ways are and what this nebulous “founder mode” means. But I think just pointing out hiring an army of consultants and mbas might not be the only way to do it is an important statement to make that I don’t think most people in the corporate world would readily admit to.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#17

Post by raytopia »

There's still fun hacker spaces out there. The Playdate community is a really fun space because it's mostly non commercial and people just making stuff for the love of it. [0]

The raspberry pi community is also in the hacker space, I think the shortages and the price of the newer products hurt it some but I'm sure the spirit will come back. [1]

Overall I'd say that people spend too much time on the internet and it's effectively a full time job form them but with no breaks, which of course leads to burn out/disappointment. [2]

I'm rambling at this point but maybe there needs to be a hobbiest hackernews or something.

[0] When most stuff is priced $10 at most and they're are onyl at most 100k devices on the market, there is not much money to be made.

[1] I'm still disappointed there is not much of a gamedev/creative software community around the raspberry pi.

[2] And when you read about angry sad things all day because that's how Merchants of Despair keep you on their sites. Well it's hard not to feel angry and sad.

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#18

Post by thr0w »

dannyobrien wrote: post #4

I 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 younge…

While it seems clear that general vibe is trending to the negative, it's interesting to me that everyone has their own slant on it. My personal issue with Graham is that his writings are all trite common sense-isms dressed up as complicated analogies or profound insight. Like the way people claim Steve Jobs had a "reality distortion field", as if the term "charisma" wasn't coined for good reason a billion years ago...

I mean, at least Andreessen communicates directly, even if he's out of touch and tone deaf.

Anyway, we all have our gripes, and I think this article is poorly written, and the original article it links to is even worse. Doing no service to the fact that the people currently orbiting our little hovel of geekdom leave a lot to be desired. Or maybe you think this rant is poorly written and misses the mark...

Re: Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

#20

Post by [deleted] »

zoom6628 wrote: post #15
dannyobrien wrote: post #4

I 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 younge…

As an older person in tech I see ageism alive and well in tech. The young ones don't understand why we oldies roll our eyes at hearing the 13th iteration of "this is ground breaking new idea" or when we gently interrupt a personnel or strategy discussion with a few use cases from the past to illustrate the pending shit-storm being proposed. Time for the world realise this tech stuff and programming has been around ab…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN