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The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

chris-martin.org

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Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#181

Post by agentultra »

meatmanek wrote: post #114
chaseadam17 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I believe we’ve had far less progress in real world engineering in the past 50 years than the 50+ prior.

Airline accidents and deaths have steadily declined for 50 years: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fatal-airliner-accidents-... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_inciden... Car crash death rates in the US have been declining for 50 years in both total number and per-capita rates (except for an uptick that started in 2020, presumably some knock-on effects from covid): https://injuryfacts.nsc.org…

It's quite the feat that capital holders have pulled off with software, being able to run amok in the public sphere wrecking anything they want with little over-sight or regulation.

... or cough "innovation"

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#183

Post by munificent »

badpun wrote: post #136
munificent wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. How do you figure being male help one's chances with that?

I think it's a combination of a few factors:

* Girls are often put under more social obligations than boys. Look around and you'll find lots of stories where girls are expected to help out with the housework while their brothers are given free reign to do what they feel like.

* I deeply believe that representation matters. Many girls probably never even considered that computers were a thing they might enjoy because they never saw other girls being into it.

* This less true today, but there has historically been a lot of pressure on girls and boys to do gendered activities, and tech was male coded. Parents would tell their daughters to play with dolls, not videogames. (And videogames are very often the pathway into programming.) Peers would make fun of girls that were interested in nerd stuff.

* For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, male nerd culture has often been outright hostile to females entering the space. Girls trying to join programming clubs, take CS classes, etc. would frequently get harassed by guys. (You can look at Gamergate as an extreme example of this.)

Meanwhile, male found it easy to think of being into computers because almost everyone you saw using a computer was a male like them. They were given ample free time, and faced few headwinds when expressing an interest in tech.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#184

Post by ryandrake »

K0balt wrote: post #131
avg_dev wrote: post #25

I 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.

This is a sort of perplexing subject for me. I grew up pretty poor. We had a well, but not running water. We flushed with a bucket, bathed out of a trash can-cum-water barrel. We subsistence hunted. We had vehicles that mostly ran, most of the time. Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege. Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk. My parents prioritized one…

How does this land help you? What do you do with it? I'm totally lost on how a half acre in the middle of Montana does anything for you, if you already have somewhere to live. Do you just enjoy camping or something?

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#185

Post by jgalt212 »

mandevil wrote: post #110
avg_dev wrote: post #25

I 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.

The biggest thing is about "Amazon was started in a garage" is that Jeff Bezos had worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw (founded in 1989) from 1990-1994 (that's where he met MacKenzie, she was an admin staff, he was a finance guy). So he had hedge fund money already before he founded Amazon.

He also drove a car cross-country to a new city to seek his fortune to leave his current city where he was already on his way to building a small fortune. sour grapes.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#186

Post by systemstops »

"If these are the conditions under which passionate creative problem solving thrives, then of course we must recover them to make software great again. But they are not."

This doesn't make any sense. Obviously those conditions lead to incredible thriving in the past. This guy is basically arguing that because it doesn't work now (in a super diverse globalized world) that it never actually worked.

These are the same kind of "they just got lucky" arguments I see constantly to downplay the achievements of any specific group of people.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#187

Post by layer8 »

dgfitz wrote: post #148
ryandrake wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They clearly did something different Survivorship bias that results from looking back at the winners. If we asked 1000 people to flip a coin 10 times, probability says one will end up flipping heads 10 times in a row. Looking only backwards after the fact, what did he do different? Is he just a better coin flipper? There is likely a person in their 20s right now who in 40 years we will look back on because they fou…

I think the point is, most people don't even flip the coin, you're making a false equivalence.

Most people don’t want to end up in debt in the likely case that the coin-flipping doesn’t succeed.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#188

Post by arduanika »

jeffbee wrote: post #89
jglamine wrote: post #52

This essay is weird. The author lumps James Damore, rank-and-file software engineer, in with Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg. Damore hasn't updated his LinedIn since 2018 - he might not even work in tech anymore? It closes saying they need to stop reliving their glory days and be good fathers and not the town drunk. Those are serious accusations - being a bad father and a drunk. The author doesn't give any eviden…

Yeah that was weird. Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry? Never heard of them in the open source world. The way I read their arc, they went directly from cosseted upbringing to finding out that they weren't anywhere near as gifted as they'd been told their entire life and shifting from trying to actually compete in the industry to being a paid podcast guest in the grievance-sphere.

Where does this "they" come from? You seem to know a lot about the guy. Do you have some information about his gender that's not public to the rest of us?

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#189

Post by an0malous »

arnaudsm wrote: post #150
an0malous wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The previous startup waves were built on top of expanded Internet access, mobile phones, and virtualization. This allowed low capitalized startups to create 10x better software. What you’re describing is marginally better software, you’re not going to beat Gmail by making it 10s faster. No one really cares about dark patterns and spam. There will eventually be new waves that create opportunities for startups again, L…

You're correctly describing the most common mindset in tech entrepreneurs. Chasing the last shiny trend instead of caring about quality. Apple is the best example that doing the opposite can be immensely successful.

When Apple was a startup they were riding the personal computing wave, when they created the iPod and iPhone they were no longer a startup. Sure, if you have a billion dollars and thousands of engineers you can create your own waves.

I don’t think that ignoring these foundational innovations or trying to work against trends is generally good advice for startups though, it’s easy to think you’re really clever and smart and different but meanwhile the team that did “Airbnb for dogs” has sold for $1B

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#190

Post by ryandrake »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #147
throwaway-blaze wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the contrapositive also true? If Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos had been dirt poor in childhood rather than solidly middle class, would they not have had success? I.e. how much weight should we put on the things out of their control vs within their control?

It is impossible to know of course, but it is probably fair to say that if they had been born dirt poor they would have been much less likely to have the kind if incredible success that they did have People like to say that success is right time, right place, but that's not all there is to it. You also need sufficient resources to take advantage of opportunity Sitting on a gold mine does not matter if you don't have…

The cartoon "On A Plate"[1] comes to mind in this discussion.

1: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilswo...

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