Ask HN: Is there an over supply of tech products and services?

Your asking the question and stating its puzzling is why (I mean this in a civil way, my rant is directed at the general populace).

Technical people typically use a technical approach to solving a problem, which is not always the best approach. Technical people generally make poor historians. Decisions are a-posteriori, through personal experience and personal failure. Knowledge must be internalized so it becomes intuitive. But this very step is an act of specialization. Expecting the non-specialized market to understand, on faith, this masking of technical complexity, is strange. See, e.g., object-oriented design patterns, geek-speak, a hacker-news comments echo chamber, etc.

There is relatively little value placed on documentation vs performance/correctness. Products are rarely user-centric. There are too many black box APIs. Dumb questions are frowned upon. Gross assumptions are made.

"New" products are quite often not actually new. They are merely evolutionary, not revolutionary. They merely add to the market, or slightly expand it, instead of defining a new one. Just another person internalizing some jargon and slapping a price on it and then proclaiming PEBKAC as if he/she said something insightful. This is not innovation.

The value to creators is to learn a new skill set, merrily hacking away at trees, and chopping down the right tree using brute force luck, a rather naive traveling salesman. For some reason the hard problems are considered easy and the easy problems are considered hard. The difficulty of achieving simplicity is under-appreciated. You solve some technical problem, and stop there, thinking you have won. But this is not the end, this is the beginning. The problem never was minimizing big-o or memory efficiency. The problem was, and is, messaging; the communication of the solution.

Investors recognize market saturation and look at evolutionary innovation as low hanging fruit. "Killer" products are harder to create and higher risk. Demand is more fixed in evolutionary space but demand can be uncovered when entering revolutionary space. The problem is not Wile's proof of Fermat, it is explaining the value to everyone. Explanation is the messaging channel. Properly encapsulating the complexity of a problem is the difficulty. Properly recognizing the problem is the difficulty. Implementing it is the easy part. Much of nerd culture (including myself) has this backwards, through no fault of their own (INTPs are introverted, formal analysis is prized).

Yes. There's too many founders and too much navel-gazing. We're sick of seeing new "products" that only exist to satiate first-world, white-people problems.

This idea that we need to create lots of little crappy projects and show them to the world -- take the various app stores, for example, and how we on HN tend to cheer any yokel with a my-first-mobile-game on "show HN". So now we have an app store flooded with crap.

The tech space is a modern gold rush.

Maybe blindly obsessing over innovation, as proxy for our neverending battle to increase shareholder value, is the wrong path. Nobody truly needs most of the stuff that comes out of SV, we just have armies of marketeers to create that demand where there previously was none.

People are giving you the starry-eyed entrepreneur version, which builds its rhetoric on how they're "changing the world", how they're motivated by learning and pushing the boundaries of what's been done and what is possible, and so on and so forth.

Here's a counterpart explanation that some may consider a bit more cynical, built after some time in SV working for early stage startups, advising some early stage startups, and even founding (!) such a startup.

The short story is that all of this is essentially a giant economic Battle Royale of sorts, with VCs and investors acting as puppetmasters at the top and raking in all the actual money. When you have an entrepreneur such as Zuckerberg or Page/Brin who emerges at the top, it's purely an unintended side effect of this. The people who are really bringing in the big bucks are VCs/investors/incubators/etc (with the real estate and media companies coming in in second place).

Silicon Valley now is a far cry from the Silicon Valley of the 70s-80s that a lot of people have in mind when thinking of startups (and even then, I have feeling it may have been oversold- but I wasn't there). SV today is an extremely large industry, with lots of money to be made, where every startup is touched in some way by the underlying finance behemoth.

The procedure is simple: take bright kids in their late teens/20s, sell them the dream that they are the smartest in the world and the intellectual elite (the easiest way to get them in that mindset is to get them to apply to be part of a super exclusive, hard to get in club- sorry, "incubator"), that they too can change the world with just some Javascript code, 14h days filled with Mountain Dew, and a $500k seed round. Let them battle it out on the market, and acquire customers any way possible. Most companies will die in less than 24 months, often in shitty circumstances (users lose a product they may have relied on in less than a few months' time, employees get fired with no notice or explanation some random Friday afternoon, etc.).

But the 0.1% of startups that makes it out is more than enough for investors to get back many times what they put into all the other startups (cf. YC numbers, for instance), so this doesn't bother the investors in the slightest (they can give out dozens of $500k seed rounds and not have their wallet dented in the slightest. They basically have infinite money in a roulette game where the top prize is a Google or a Facebook or a Whatsapp).

There are a few older founders who know how to play the game and how to actually turn it to their advantage, whether good or bad (for the good kind: cf Nest. for the bad kind: cf Color Labs). But by and large, SV now is 20 years old slaving away for the promise of "making an impact on the world" and "being the next Mark Zuckerberg".

The good news is that if you're aware of all of this and not too dumb, you can make a good living in Silicon Valley (be sure to save money on each paycheck no matter what), and it can be a great start to your career. The bad news is that it's also easy to fall for it, and find yourself at 35 having worked only for early stage startups that have failed, leaving you with 15 years of work and very little in terms of these silly little things some people like to call "career growth" and "retirement plans". I've seen engineers starting to hit the mid-late 30s, realizing that they're not good enough to make the switch to finance/management or to a larger, more secure company. Some of these people move away to other cities where they can aspire to a more stable career (taking a major pay cut, but gaining things like a 401(k) ), while others keep playing the startup game hoping that the next one will be the one that brings them $10M in options and a VP title.

Caveat emptor.

"The people who are really bringing in the big bucks are VCs/investors/incubators/etc (with the real estate and media companies coming in in second place)."

During the California Gold Rush (1848–1855), few actually got rich from gold. The ones who really got rich were the ones who provided services (bar, housing, food, etc) to the people rushing in to find gold.

History does repeat itself.

If there is demand for an oversupply of everything (which there apparently is, otherwise the oversupplying companies would go bankrupt), it no longer fits the definition of oversupply.