oh it's ok! they'll just become resentful embittered nazis
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I wonder how much it has to do, also, with the fact that YC has become an educational brand as powerful as some top schools. You already have the top school brand on your resume by virtue of dropping out of it, why wait another 3 years to add the next big educational brand
venture capital does some weird fucking things to your brain
I can’t fault anyone for switching away from a CS degree; a bunch of folks I’ve been very close with have had to drop their CS careers when they found out firsthand how racist and sexist their degree program and the field in general is. also, some of the best programmers I’ve worked with have had degrees in unrelated fields (the best one had a psychology degree) and were better off having not dealt with the bullshit that comes with getting a CS degree.
with that said, I’ve also met a very significant number of assholes who came in assuming they’d learn nothing, couldn’t handle not being the smartest person in the room, dropped out, and spent the next couple years grifting as a “startup co-founder”. these hustlers are almost always the worst engineers you can hire, because for them the hustle never stops — they have no learning process, because they already know everything.
YC has become an educational brand as powerful as some top schools
Sure, no school will prepare you for the amount of hype and grift the tech industry has to offer quite like reading Hacker News does.
As an educational institution I'd rate them somewhere between Prager U and UnIversity of Phoenix.
I think you've nailed it.
Found a startup, get paid C-level salaries for a few years, exit or not, repeat.
I’ve usually dealt with the less successful version, whose startups either crash and burn or end up buying them out for a very low price. after a few iterations of that, they’re ready to downgrade to a senior engineering position! if only they could find an interviewer who doesn’t see through their bullshit
Pretty sure I saw stories like this during the crypto boom.
Also, assume a VC tweeting = lying.
I have this semi-formed idea that there is an optimism bubble growing in certain tech disciplines. My usual lane is design and "front end" stuff but I think what you're scratching at here fits in there too.
When I say "optimism bubble" I'm referring to the mistaken conflation of "technology" and "products" and how that leads to this warped perception of virtue because technology, not products, is lazily considered representative of progress.
What does this person mean, I ask facetiously, by "opportunity" and "generational companies"? Are they referring to the chance of being an agent of positive impact on the world or are they talking about the chance to be on the cover of Forbes?
If they are talking about being on the cover of Forbes, what do they think OpenAI is? A technology or a product company? If they want to make a positive impact on the world, what does the 2-3 year window represent?
Edit: forgot to tie up the bubble stuff
The bubble bursts when everyone learns the wrestling is fake, so to speak.
Or the bubble bursts when everyone gets exhausted from pretending the wrestling is real, so to speak.
More pessimistically i'd call it the "hype train", a bubble promises an eventual pop. What usually happens is people on masse moving the newer and shinier model, apparently afflicted with amnesia about their previous buzz words.
I'd say it's the cancerous influence of VC funding, the grift gets the dough.
I agrée for VCs but what I forgot to say was I don’t really give a fuck about them. I’m thinking more about the people who work for them. The collective despair in the UX community is palpable as they divide into the ones who accept that they are glorified marketers and the ones who know that’s not what they signed up for
I have developer co-workers who play the role very convincingly ^^, especially for the LLM hype, and I remember more than one tech conference attending evangelizer (to be fair sometimes the tools or practices are actually good).
What’s the focus of UX despair these days? I haven’t touched frontend design or implementation for a long while now.
ahah! you fell into my little trap. It's not spam if you ask for it! haha
I wrote about it recently here https://fasterandworse.com/the-aura-of-care/
The summary explanation is that UX design/research has developed, over a long period, a posture of being the empathetic discipline that cares about people and exists to serve their needs - which is only compatible with capitalism as long as serving people's needs results in a higher return for the business.
Sorry, not a very eloquent summary this early in the morning...