Fuck You Startup World

> Fuck your eating disorders, why the fuck does everything has to be so extreme with you? On one end of the scale you’ve got the pizza-guzzling, office-snack hoarding monster, and on the other end you have the ‘I-must-optimize-every-living-second’ douche that only drinks fucking Soylent. Seriously, what the fuck?

And from me: also fuck your third extreme, of eating fucking hipster fruit salads all day every day, because everything has to be healthy and natural and organic and stuff. And fuck the way you force it on the industry events, so that I can't get a goddamn pizza on a programming conference because everything now has a catering company providing various kinds of weird-ass vegetarian food. I can eat healthy at home; I come to industry events for the fucking pizza.

There, I said it. I feel a little bit better.

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As for the rest of the essay, it's a little heavy on the expletive side, but pretty much spot-on if you look at the media side of things. I'd say things aren't so bad in individual startups, but the overall culture - the blogosphere, the professional publications, etc. all feel like encouraging and glorifying this kind of nonsense.

>I never had to shift a bit in a C array in my life! And I never got a compilation error on a white board, when I need an hash set in Java I just use HashSet- I don’t fucking care about the complexity of this code block because I can afford another EC2 instance! So fuck you.

No, fuck you for making everything run so slow on our pocket and desktop supercomputers.

> I can eat healthy at home; I come to industry events for the fucking pizza.

Really? In most realms outside IT, that's the food you buy when you consider the people eating it not worthy of actual catering. I can understand wanting pizza if the alternative is salad and water, but still.

This feels like a bizarre mixture of sensible criticism and sour grapes.

Standing desks? Actually pretty great for those who want them! If your back hurts after a day of sitting, go find some option you like better - why should the rest of us be upset by it? Yeah, they're not an option at a lot of jobs, but demanding that everyone standardize on a bad experience because "you're not special" is a great way to make every job awful.

A book a week? Not so bad, especially if it's something light! There are plenty of books you can read in Understanding complexity? Interviewing is a mess, that's a standard belief, but constant time versus exponential time isn't meaningless yet. Start by getting rid of tree reversal questions, not declaring Big-O a useless concept.

And yet there's something pretty good buried under all the impractical complaints. Putting together a "user story" shouldn't be necessary when the task is "our login page is broke, let's fix it". Adding layers of media references and cultural touchstones to every possible concept just creates useless barriers to entry. A/B testing a hundred different features in isolation isn't a viable way to build a product.

So yes: there are a lot of things to criticize, and I know this is hyperbole. It's still a weird mix of justified and left-field attacks.

Upset ratio means something? Because you irritated a lot of people here in HN.