Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

chris-martin.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 297 posts

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#81

Post by ryandrake »

monknomo wrote: post #40
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #12

This is actually a great characterization and one of the reasons why for example YC has not had a success in the last 10 years. This has caused tech to look more and more like a ponzi scheme with greater and greater promises and yet the actual output is very feeble. Even large companies like Apple have got caught in all this. Imagine what they promised and what they haven't been able to deliver. We need a grand reset…

I think it is from the business side, rather than the software side. The business side's goal is to obtain a monopoly and extract rent. You can see it in google search getting worse so they can show more ads, you can see it in Apple's app store behavior, pretty much all the examples. The objective is not to provide a good product that people want to buy, except insofar as that drives adoption towards a monopoly I hav…

Business education has taught everyone that spending $100 to earn $120 that you can live confortably on, is for suckers. The real goal is to then spend $80 to earn $200 the next year, and then spend $60 to earn $1000 the following year, and then to spend $40 to earn $10,000 the following year, and then to spend $20 to earn $100,000, and so on. Growth for no other purpose than growth.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#82

Post by PaulHoule »

4ndrewl wrote: post #47
cjs_ac wrote: post #20

Aside from the overarching thread of the current crop of CEOs struggling to come to terms with the fact that their empires are now all they'll ever be and it's up to others to continue innovating, I found these quotes interesting: > The Internet is no longer the world's great frontier, and the pool of unsatisfied wants that suddenly welled up as the world first came online is not what it once was. There once was no g…

I mean yeah, but Uber promised us self-driving taxis, but only found profit by delivering takeaways. Meta and Twitter - adverts, and all on the foundation of a zirp economy.

I'm not impressed with the complexity of Uber as a business, at least not to first order. You could hire out contractors in India to make a ride hailing app for $20k with maybe a 20% chance of success. Before Uber came out I knew people solving much more complex problems like routing a fleet of trucks to refill vending machines. I'd also say making a web site like AirBNB is not difficult at all -- being at ground zero for startups might have gave them a year and a half lead technologically.

Uber, AirBNB and such were really remarkable because they could fight city hall and cartels like taxis and hotels (for better and for worse.) Also those businesses have a huge amount of "dealing with bullshit" in the sense of the Uber driver assaulting a passenger, a passenger assaulting the driver, the people who have a party and trash your apartment, etc. If I'd tried to pitch businesses like that anywhere outside the bay area any investors would be like "are you kidding?"

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#83

Post by spencerflem »

chaseadam17 wrote: post #39
agentultra wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Innovation in trad engineering disciplines didn't stop when the industry gained professional guilds and legal status. We have far better buildings, extremely reliable jet planes, high speed rail, the internet...

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

I don't think mechanical engineering is more professional now than it was 50 years ago. If anything its less so, with execs calling on Engineers to wing it, and getting sign off on shoddy designs.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#84

Post by mtrovo »

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…

[flagged]

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#85

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

PaulHoule wrote: post #53

I find it amusing that behind some of these "great men" you will find a woman. If anyone is going to get us to Mars it is Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX. Similarly it was Sheryl Sandberg that helped transition Facebook from a popular service to a dominant business.

Both of the women mentioned have been accused of creating the type of environment mentioned in this blog post.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/former-spacex-engineer-essay...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg#Allegations

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#86

Post by jacobsenscott »

monknomo wrote: post #60
no_wizard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would you mind giving a greater explanation of what they mean by this? I couldn't grok the meaning from context, other than the obvious its not really possible to simply startup half baked out of your house or something along those lines

What I took from it is that the story about starting a company in a garage is about the humble origins. But to start a company in a garage you must have access to a garage; lots of people do not have this level of resources. The origins of these companies are not as humble as they sound, they rely access to resources that are not actually common (unless you look from the POV of a well-offish 'middle class' family)

Having a garage isn't enough. A lot of people with garages need to work everyday to pay for their garage, and food, and everything else. Bezos and Jobs both had free garages and free time paid for by their parents. I would bet the others mentioned in the post had the same sort of freebies.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#87

Post by jacobsenscott »

mbrumlow wrote: post #76
ryandrake wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means these guys didn't literally start from nothing. They had a house in the suburbs with a garage, and that implies at least some level of funding and privilege. A leg up that the guy in the trailer park might not have.

Sure. But I think the notion is that a huge group of people also had that same level funding and privilege, but did nothing with it. Like why did these guys neighbors not end up billionaire. Or the other people in their class or school. While they may have had some money it’s not like they took fathers 500 billion and turned it in to a nice 200 billion for them self. They clearly did something different out of the ve…

Random chance, and maybe a little skill.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#88

Post by dtnewman »

cjs_ac wrote: post #20

Aside from the overarching thread of the current crop of CEOs struggling to come to terms with the fact that their empires are now all they'll ever be and it's up to others to continue innovating, I found these quotes interesting: > The Internet is no longer the world's great frontier, and the pool of unsatisfied wants that suddenly welled up as the world first came online is not what it once was. There once was no g…

> the fact that their empires are now all they'll ever be

Eh, Mark Zuckerberg is 40. Facebook is planting seeds in some pretty ambitious places (VR/AR + AI). To put that into perspective, Elon Musk is 53 now, but he was ~40 when the Falcon 9 first launched for SpaceX and the Model S was released at Tesla. In June 2012, when the S was released, Tesla was worth about 0.7% of what it is now. Elon Musk was certainly rich, but no where close to the wealthiest folks at the time. Similarly, at 40 years old (21 years ago) Jeff Bezos was worth about 100th of what he is now. Rich, but it wasn't clear that Amazon would ever come close to, say, Walmart, in terms of market cap.

Mark Zuckerberg's empire still has plenty of time to grow.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#89

Post by jeffbee »

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.

Re: The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

#90

Post by jackphilson »

masfuerte wrote: post #55
no_wizard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

would you mind giving a greater explanation of what they mean by this? I couldn't grok the meaning from context, other than the obvious its not really possible to simply startup half baked out of your house or something along those lines

It's saying that even just having a garage is a privilege.

Even the amount of agency you have is a privilege. Hard determinism.
Post reply on HN