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

The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

chris-martin.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 297 posts

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#41

Post by jparishy »

To me this seems pretty apt, and probably more generalizable. The world is claimed. There is no glory to come from being the first anymore, and that is too big a bummer for a lot of Great Men. I think future progress will be the composition of skills, as mentioned in the article. Or we go backwards and just take things from each other.

pc has an article about a related topic in my view: https://patrickcollison.com/fast

these things were done by many people with a great vision for the collective, even if lead by one person. maybe not altruistic things but provided more good than they did hoard value. where is the vision anymore?

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#42

Post by swatcoder »

arnaudsm wrote: post #14

I 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.

Unfortunately, we've reached the point where a generation of new adults take janky technology as normal, both as consumers and producers.

Their entire life was in an environment where nothing was stable or cohesive or efficient and everything was either "free" or rented. They don't recognize what they're missing or why it might matter.

So as consumers they don't know to care when you build better stuff, and as producers they don't even know what it means to build better stuff. And soon these people will graduate into leadership and management with the same understanding of the world.

Surely, there's plenty of opportunity for the rest of us to keep quietly rescuing these janky projects from disaster, shoring them up as their sloppy compromises overtake them, but unfortunately it's very possible that it'll be a long while still before a strong and viable demand for "better stuff" returns.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#44

Post by shadowgovt »

malchow wrote: post #35

[flagged]

It is sad that an era of abundance somehow built a world where our younger counterparts are fighting over so few scraps that they are seeing other competent and effective people as threats, not partners.

How did we let it get that far off the rails?

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#45

Post by arnaudsm »

ivape wrote: post #36
arnaudsm wrote: post #14

I 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.

I am kind of with you, I do think the notion of a lone developer not collaborating is going to be the norm with AI. We just don't need to collaborate anymore.

Good question, AI coding is currently limited by how fast you can review it. I still see Gemini 2.5 Pro output insane vulnerabilities once in a while.

You may get a 2x speedup, but humans are still the bottleneck.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#46

Post by hx8 »

arnaudsm wrote: post #30
hx8 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think if superior products always win then we wouldn't have so many BigCo Enshittified products that have been terrible for 15+ years.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#47

Post by 4ndrewl »

cjs_ac wrote: post #20

Aside from the overarching thread of the current crop of CEOs struggling to come to terms with the fact that their empires are now all they'll ever be and it's up to others to continue innovating, I found these quotes interesting: > The Internet is no longer the world's great frontier, and the pool of unsatisfied wants that suddenly welled up as the world first came online is not what it once was. There once was no g…

I mean yeah, but Uber promised us self-driving taxis, but only found profit by delivering takeaways. Meta and Twitter - adverts, and all on the foundation of a zirp economy.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#48

Post by languagehacker »

Insightful words from the Coldplay guy.

In all seriousness, there is definitely the comfortable lie of nostalgia playing into a lot of the dudes approaching (or squarely in) middle age as far as tech goes.

It's truly a bummer that they're expressing the internalization of the wrong lessons. Instead of standing up against decades of enshittification, they're complaining about having to say "allowlist" instead of "blacklist", and still erroneously believing that the right hackathon will solve their company's existential problems.

I got the best monkeys and the best typewriters, so if I let them do what they want in this "meritocracy" I created, it will definitely make the next Hamlet, right?

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#49

Post by geephroh »

munificent wrote: post #28
pessimizer wrote: post #13

It'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 anythi…

I wish I could have said it as well as you have here.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#50

Post by arnaudsm »

hx8 wrote: post #46
arnaudsm wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think if superior products always win then we wouldn't have so many BigCo Enshittified products that have been terrible for 15+ years.

Schumpeter's cycle of destructive creation usually takes 15 years in software.

IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook. They were all the cool underdogs for a decade, then slowly decline in quality.

Post reply on HN