Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech

The engineering knowledge that went into the WWII fire control computers was clearly a form of programming.

You will also notice the words "computer", "input", and "output" are used without needing to be explained.

https://youtu.be/s1i-dnAH9Y4

[dead]

> hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

This sounds like someone who is looking for someone to blame. If founder after founder is having this problem what are the odds that there is something else going on and perhaps the reports are doing exactly what the founder is rewarding?

I see in a lot of tech companies is a system where all the incentives are about getting promoted. IC's are trying to build things that look big and complex and "hard". Future maintenance burden, product impact, etc are difficult to measure and also super easy to game. All that matters is that they might get promoted so they can jump teams and do it again. Managers are promoted based on headcount and do everything they can to keep reports and grow like weeds. A dysfunctional org? Yes please, let me triple it in size to solve the problem, we have the money and this org is important, and I become important in the process. Sure some (not all) might need to grow the top line by X%, but in a growing industry/product category/company that might be the default so the focus is again on growing their career. They spend all their time on hiring and annual reviews and promo committees and almost no time on actual strategy. And getting rid of under performers was difficult and as long of a process as possible because there was no incentive to make that simple.

As long at the tide rises all boats and the CEO rewards this behavior everyone plays this game. When the water starts flowing out suddenly you have a CEO looking around going wtf when everyone did exactly what they incentivized.

> this all feels like drama for its own sake

It’s broadcasting that Y Combinator is a founder friendly investor. That comes with costs, e.g. if LPs think YC would have doubled down on the next Neumann or Bankman-Fried, or that its leadership is going full Ackman. But it will work at the margins for deal-finding partners, particularly with young founders.

The hilarious part is this obviously wasn’t a message they trusted their partners to deliver. An army with precision weapons and intelligence doesn’t carpet bomb; YC is carpet bombing.

You mean the Graham post, right? Sure; I mean, I don't think it was a calculated move to market YC --- for one thing, YC more or less sets the industry standard for founder-friendliness --- but I could see how the ABNB talk may have rhymed with something Graham believes is a strength of YC.

My thing here is with this particular Ian Betteridge post. I don't think it says anything. It feels like it exists just to connect the "founder mode" meme to a cast of prefab heroes and villains, Swarz and Srinavasan, Woz and Jobs. I have a couple problems with that:

* While I don't think the "founder mode" post is aging well, I don't think it's at all about promoting the mythology of Jobs or marca or sama. Like I said in my addled previous comment, I think the "founder mode" post describes a very real phenomenon that people who build companies run into all the time and talk about all the time.

* I don't think "heroes and villains" is a useful frame with which to understand the technology industry, and they're especially not useful for understand what does and doesn't work when building a company. It's irritating that the post sort of implicitly asks us to think about whether Swartz or Altman are better (or worse, or something?) at managing companies.

* It is very weird to me to try to build in 2024 an argument around the idea that Graham is unfamiliar with what does and doesn't constitute effective management.

* I am past tired of people casting Steve Wozniak as the soul of what's good about Apple, and Jobs as a manifestation of what's fake about it. Like Steve Arlo said in Zero Effect: there are no good guys and bad guys; it's just a bunch of guys.

Sorry, some of this isn't really a response to you so much as an attempt to salvage what I was trying to say with my preceding comment. It was our last block party of the year. I was apparently in a state.