I imagine what these guys miss is the freedom of obscurity. Tech has gone from being ignored to being ridiculed and regulated. Like a company getting more bureaucratic as it scales, it makes sense to professionalize a sector as its influence grows. The problem is that professionalization is often the enemy of innovation. If you care about having the freedom to innovate, this leaves you with three options: be the angry old man yelling at the clouds, constructively try to improve the process of professionalization from within or quietly go innovate elsewhere. The problem with the last option is that there aren’t too many places left to go and it’s hard to start over, which is why I think Elon and others take to some combination of the first two.
The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis
21–30 of 297 posts
Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis
#22I partly disagree, software still sucks and it's a great time to build. The #1 OS is slow and crashes all the time. The #1 email client takes 10s to load on my mother's laptop. Most popular products are slow, buggy, filled with spam, & filled with dark patterns. Enshittification won. FAANGs are the new IBM. Let's build better stuff.
If enshittification can be avoided, why aren't we seeing a wave of no dark patterns software crushing it?
Enshittification is mostly just the process of not running on VC Capital and generating sustainable revenue sources.
Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis
#23It really does feel like most tech leaders are having an internal struggle that they externalize and make all of our problems. Have you seen Musks Twitter timeline? That guy is so chronically online and desperate to be liked that it's just sad. How can you be the richest man in the world and yet so deeply pathetic? Same with Zuck's attempt at being "cool" now and don't even get me started on Benioff's whole weird "Al…
My theory is that it's the absurd wealth in the first place that makes these people completely unhinged. Imagine you are in a situation where nobody you interact with will ever tell you something you don't want to hear. Everyone tries their best to only appease you and tell you that you are the best most brightest person. These people also all depend on your money for their own aspirations (that mysteriously never pa…
What they all need are good real friends, yet that's the one thing that's impossible for them to gain if they didn't already have it before they became rich.
Even that isn’t a guarantee because friend dynamics often change with relative wealth disparities.
You probably need friends that are also very rich.
Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis
#24I partly disagree, software still sucks and it's a great time to build. The #1 OS is slow and crashes all the time. The #1 email client takes 10s to load on my mother's laptop. Most popular products are slow, buggy, filled with spam, & filled with dark patterns. Enshittification won. FAANGs are the new IBM. Let's build better stuff.
It's not clear if you mean #1 in quality or popularity. I'll assume you mean the latter. Is Windows really that unstable?
Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis
#25I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this:
> As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park.
Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.
Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis
#26This is bitter gibberish. Advancement has always been made by standing on the shoulders of giants, and that enables small teams to execute different things in different eras. If you can't see what the changes are today you would have been no better off in another time.
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Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
My theory is that it's the absurd wealth in the first place that makes these people completely unhinged. Imagine you are in a situation where nobody you interact with will ever tell you something you don't want to hear. Everyone tries their best to only appease you and tell you that you are the best most brightest person. These people also all depend on your money for their own aspirations (that mysteriously never pa…
What they all need are good real friends, yet that's the one thing that's impossible for them to gain if they didn't already have it before they became rich. Even that isn’t a guarantee because friend dynamics often change with relative wealth disparities. You probably need friends that are also very rich.
> You probably need friends that are also very rich.
So they’re left to just chase whose partner they can snag or whose yacht is bigger? Sounds delightful. You’d think therapy would be more capital efficient. The hedonic arena is a trap for the emotionally unsound and perpetually unfulfilled.
Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis
#28It's weird how the first sentence promises that we'll learn the answer to why successful tech people blame DEI for something, and then never mentions DEI again. Being anti-"DEI" is a trendy hobby for most, a serious concern for others, but for "Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, and James Damore" it's literally the default, because DEI is a patchwork of inconsistent restrictions of various and often dubious authority…
I believe there is an implicit answer here, but I agree that the author didn't tie the threads together as clearly as they could have.
What they are saying is that tech moguls have a period in their life where they felt they were at their best, living their glory days. They are latching on to and trying to recreate that environment, including superficial properties that environment had that don't actually have anything to do with why it was such a formative period for them.
One attribute of programming back in the 90s is... it was mostly non-poor white guys.
Now, obviously anyone with a certain level of maturity and wisdom would realize that the demographic monoculture of the 90s was an effect of the fact that computers were still relatively rare and expensive in the 80s, and those most people who had access to them back them came from a certain level of privilege. Being wealthy, white, and male all increased the odds that you were able to spend your endless summers PEEKing and POKing on an Apple IIe while other less fortunate people didn't have a computer or had to work.
Being wealthy, white, and male didn't cause people to be better hackers. Having economic stability is what gave people the freedom to become better hackers. It's just that that level of economic stability has historically not at all been uniformly distributed across people in the US. Thus anti-DEI measures are counterproductive. Going forward, society has a moral and rational incentive to extend that opportunity to as many people as possible, regardless of their anatomy or skin color because that's how society gets the most out of all of its members.
Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Insecurity is often (always?) the driver of achievement. Some sort of deep-seated pathology is basically required to build the empires they have.
Competition, not insecurity drives achievement and people who are very competitive in one skill usually will lack a ton in most other skills.
For individuals, though, might competitiveness often be driven by insecurity, and the point stands?
Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis
#30I partly disagree, software still sucks and it's a great time to build. The #1 OS is slow and crashes all the time. The #1 email client takes 10s to load on my mother's laptop. Most popular products are slow, buggy, filled with spam, & filled with dark patterns. Enshittification won. FAANGs are the new IBM. Let's build better stuff.
If enshittification can be avoided, why aren't we seeing a wave of no dark patterns software crushing it? Enshittification is mostly just the process of not running on VC Capital and generating sustainable revenue sources.
Users have inertia, it takes years for superior products to win.
VC capital is useful for speed & innovation, but most of the time leads to bloat & rent-seeking. Does DocuSign need 7,000 employees? My journey of bootstrapped entrepreneurship has been much more sustainable and respectful to my users.