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What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

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Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your writing reads like you have a chip on your shoulder. It beats around the bush, but you should just come out an say that you don't like people over a certain age. But be careful, because there's a good chance you will soon be that age (or older) and start griping at younger people who don't seem to hold your viewpoint. Your account is 20 minutes old with only 2 comments, both of which are inflammatory. Please tak…

Good lord! Don't confuse envy with hatred. I don't hate old people, I envy them! I envy Wedge Martin who got into tech in a time when it was professionally acceptable and viable to drill down into details. I envy a time when you could have a career based on fundamentals rather than buzzwords and rapidly learning frameworks. I have tremendous respect for greybeard, which is precisely why I recognize that greybears are…

Try playing a game called "Nomic".

The initial rules of Nomic are such that any game of Nomic can be subsequently remodeled into any other rules-based game. It can also simulate the functioning of real-world political structures.

The one unwritten rule of Nomic that cannot be repealed--the one that makes the game fun to play--is that you can stop playing Nomic.

Real life is not so forgiving. You start playing on the day you are born, and you can't stop until the day you die. The people who make the rules have already changed the rules such that you are not allowed to change or ignore the rules. If you try, other people who still follow those rules can receive bonus points for impeding you for as long as you are in violation of the rules.

That's not strictly true. The public set of rules are set up so that you cannot change or ignore them, but there are also multiple secret sets of rules that can be used to change both the public set of rules and the secret sets of rules. But most of those secret sets of rules have rules that prevent people who know about them from revealing anything about them to those who don't.

You couldn't design a game that sadistic. No one would ever start playing it. But here we are, still taking our turns, trying to figure out how to win.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is application specific. The same points are often made about programming, and there are certainly circumstances where you need to know how your code is compiled to assembly, or how the kernel works, for many, this isn't an issue. Sure, if you need to hit a target 30fps or 60fps in a game, then that implies what much be understood in the whole stack. Since 99+% of all startup ideas will fail, it makes no…

> You should consider the first version a throwaway. If you start out knowing that you are writing something that will be trashed, why would you invest yourself in it? It's hard to tell someone to build something that will be thrown away; to trade the time they can never get back for something that will most likely fail. That will almost certainly _not_ get their best work - which means your odds of success go down;…

You should be investing yourself into the problem being solved, not the particular snapshot of what a solution looks like right now.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is application specific. The same points are often made about programming, and there are certainly circumstances where you need to know how your code is compiled to assembly, or how the kernel works, for many, this isn't an issue. Sure, if you need to hit a target 30fps or 60fps in a game, then that implies what much be understood in the whole stack. Since 99+% of all startup ideas will fail, it makes no…

> You should consider the first version a throwaway. If you start out knowing that you are writing something that will be trashed, why would you invest yourself in it? It's hard to tell someone to build something that will be thrown away; to trade the time they can never get back for something that will most likely fail. That will almost certainly _not_ get their best work - which means your odds of success go down;…

You should be investing yourself into the problem being solved, not the particular snapshot of what a solution looks like right now.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is application specific. The same points are often made about programming, and there are certainly circumstances where you need to know how your code is compiled to assembly, or how the kernel works, for many, this isn't an issue. Sure, if you need to hit a target 30fps or 60fps in a game, then that implies what much be understood in the whole stack. Since 99+% of all startup ideas will fail, it makes no…

> You should consider the first version a throwaway. If you start out knowing that you are writing something that will be trashed, why would you invest yourself in it? It's hard to tell someone to build something that will be thrown away; to trade the time they can never get back for something that will most likely fail. That will almost certainly _not_ get their best work - which means your odds of success go down;…

You should be investing yourself into the problem being solved, not the particular snapshot of what a solution looks like right now.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is application specific. The same points are often made about programming, and there are certainly circumstances where you need to know how your code is compiled to assembly, or how the kernel works, for many, this isn't an issue. Sure, if you need to hit a target 30fps or 60fps in a game, then that implies what much be understood in the whole stack. Since 99+% of all startup ideas will fail, it makes no…

> You should consider the first version a throwaway. If you start out knowing that you are writing something that will be trashed, why would you invest yourself in it? It's hard to tell someone to build something that will be thrown away; to trade the time they can never get back for something that will most likely fail. That will almost certainly _not_ get their best work - which means your odds of success go down;…

You should be investing yourself into the problem being solved, not the particular snapshot of what a solution looks like right now.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is application specific. The same points are often made about programming, and there are certainly circumstances where you need to know how your code is compiled to assembly, or how the kernel works, for many, this isn't an issue. Sure, if you need to hit a target 30fps or 60fps in a game, then that implies what much be understood in the whole stack. Since 99+% of all startup ideas will fail, it makes no…

> You should consider the first version a throwaway. If you start out knowing that you are writing something that will be trashed, why would you invest yourself in it? It's hard to tell someone to build something that will be thrown away; to trade the time they can never get back for something that will most likely fail. That will almost certainly _not_ get their best work - which means your odds of success go down;…

It's a different perspective that believes most (tech) businesses these days are not failing because of their codebase. It's the school of thought that believes the effort invested in exceeding the Pareto principle in writing code will only have a marginal effect on likelihood of success.

Cutting corners during development may build technical debt, but for the first N iterations, it also saves time. The argument goes that it's more important to get more versions in front of your customers than to build the perfect codebase off the bat.

Also, in any startup, you're going to need to significantly adjust the codebase as your business changes products (pivots). All the effort invested up front on a feature that isn't relevant is essentially wasted.

Speed of iteration is the primary objective (to people who think this way).

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