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Valley Talent

rkoutnik.com

1–10 of 28 posts

Re: Valley Talent

#2
The core problem is that there's little incentive to build complicated, high-effort startups and hire appropriately-skilled people for them because venture capitalists are giving tens of millions of dollars to people who build quick-and-dirty apps that follow trends which will die within a month.

Re: Valley Talent

#3

The core problem is that there's little incentive to build complicated, high-effort startups and hire appropriately-skilled people for them because venture capitalists are giving tens of millions of dollars to people who build quick-and-dirty apps that follow trends which will die within a month.

On one hand, absolutely. The current wash of investment means that there's plenty of CRUD startups that get funded that wouldn't otherwise. They'll get acquihired at best and the cycle continues.

On the other hand I don't think that founders will say "Oh, I won't pursue that technical passion project - I'll just build another Twitter!" The incentives to plunge into hard technical problems are not (at their core) based on money. That's just a plus. And lots of investor money means that those with the skills are more likely to found a company instead of letting a side project languish on a hard drive somewhere.

So those who can build amazing things will continue to do so. The current funding environment isn't stopping them. Having more CRUD apps than you can shake a RAM stick at is a small price to pay for enabling the next Stripe or Heroku.

Re: Valley Talent

#5
I found this article to be contradicting itself. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you read code line-by-line, you're just obtaining more knowledge, not talent. How does this suggestion lead to more talent?

Re: Valley Talent

#6
I think talent, at least in engineering, has very little to do with the success of startups. The "Absolutely" and "Absolutely not" engineers are the same. There are good ones and bad ones everywhere. It's hardly ever the fault of engineers that the company they are working at doesn't make it. Likewise, very few companies make it because of engineering talent.

Re: Valley Talent

#8
post #6

I think talent, at least in engineering, has very little to do with the success of startups. The "Absolutely" and "Absolutely not" engineers are the same. There are good ones and bad ones everywhere. It's hardly ever the fault of engineers that the company they are working at doesn't make it. Likewise, very few companies make it because of engineering talent.

Talent does not exclusively create success - there's still some elements of luck and market in there. It's still a huge part of success. Look at the absolutely insane amounts of effort companies are putting in to attract talent.

Re: Valley Talent

#9
post #3

The core problem is that there's little incentive to build complicated, high-effort startups and hire appropriately-skilled people for them because venture capitalists are giving tens of millions of dollars to people who build quick-and-dirty apps that follow trends which will die within a month.

On one hand, absolutely. The current wash of investment means that there's plenty of CRUD startups that get funded that wouldn't otherwise. They'll get acquihired at best and the cycle continues. On the other hand I don't think that founders will say "Oh, I won't pursue that technical passion project - I'll just build another Twitter!" The incentives to plunge into hard technical problems are not (at their core) base…

The thing is, there is a lot of interesting things that you could reduce into 'crud' per say. Or crud with servers.

For example, would bitcoin be a 'crud app'? Is mint a 'crud app'? Is pinterest a 'crud app'? Facebook or Instagram?

Re: Valley Talent

#10
post #9
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On one hand, absolutely. The current wash of investment means that there's plenty of CRUD startups that get funded that wouldn't otherwise. They'll get acquihired at best and the cycle continues. On the other hand I don't think that founders will say "Oh, I won't pursue that technical passion project - I'll just build another Twitter!" The incentives to plunge into hard technical problems are not (at their core) base…

The thing is, there is a lot of interesting things that you could reduce into 'crud' per say. Or crud with servers. For example, would bitcoin be a 'crud app'? Is mint a 'crud app'? Is pinterest a 'crud app'? Facebook or Instagram?

BTC: No, there's an astounding amount of cryptography there. You can build CRUD stuff on top of it.

Mint: (assuming the financial tracker) No, ask anyone who's worked with bank software before - it ain't pretty.

Pinterest/FB/Instagram: Possibly. At the start? Absolutely. What makes those companies valuable is their network effect - everyone you know is already there. Supporting users at that scale takes a lot more than just reading up on the latest APIs. FB invented a (sorta) new language to tackle their scaling problems.

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