I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this:
> As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park.
Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.
mandevil · 14h ago
The biggest thing is about "Amazon was started in a garage" is that Jeff Bezos had worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw (founded in 1989) from 1990-1994 (that's where he met MacKenzie, she was an admin staff, he was a finance guy). So he had hedge fund money already before he founded Amazon.
jimmydddd · 12h ago
Unpopular take. While I agree with the sentiment, I still think it took some fortitude to walk away from the golden handcuffs of a successful finance career to do an Internet startup at that time. Bezos said he ran the idea past his boss at the time, and the boss said something like "that's a good idea, but not for someone who already has a great job like you." So I do applaud him for that. Bloomberg made a similar transition.
000ooo000 · 4h ago
Suppose Bezos burns 80% of his net worth playing with his willy in his garage and decides to wrap it up. He goes straight back to his cushy HF job, 3 years behind in his career if he can't manage to market his experience as some kind of lofty journey landing him a better role than when he left. Let's not pretend it was brave - he had the foundations to take the risks and still come out just fine.
chneu · 10h ago
Nonsense. He had comfort and security to fall back on. His family was also loaded.
He wasn't walking away from anything. He would have been fine if it didn't work.
The reality is he had a safety net to fall back on. 99% of people do not.
Gud · 13h ago
Also his granddad was loaded.
steveBK123 · 13h ago
Yeah an unsurprisingly large percent of self-styled.. self-made billionaires certainly came from close to or actual millionaire backgrounds.
I suppose it shouldn't be terribly surprising as being successful requires hard work & a good idea. But it REALLY REALLY HELPS to also have a risk appetite, capital, and connections.. which are what coming from even moderate wealth provides.
wing-_-nuts · 12h ago
>it REALLY REALLY HELPS to also have a risk appetite, capital, and connections.. which are what coming from even moderate wealth provides.
I graduated in 2008, and I watched classmates make the 'insane' decision to risk it all and go off and try to found startups. Inevitably, some failed, but to my shock it wasn't the end of the world for them? In one case the 'bank of mom and dad' paid rent until they got back on their feet, and in the other, they moved into an ADU in their parent's back yard.
That's when it hit me that those folks took risks because they could afford to. I was worried about winding up sleeping under a bridge. That concern was as foreign to them as the thought of having a safety net to fall back on was to me.
"Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."
wing-_-nuts · 9h ago
Wow, this is a great analogy. I'm stealing it
hattmall · 5h ago
Except most entrepreneurs are from poor backgrounds. Maybe not in software but everything from lawn care to selling cocaine is entrepreneurship.
I thought it was his stepfather that gave him the ~$250k seed money (which is like $550k in today's money)
vjvjvjvjghv · 13h ago
And he comes from a well off family.
jgalt212 · 13h ago
He also drove a car cross-country to a new city to seek his fortune to leave his current city where he was already on his way to building a small fortune. sour grapes.
bsder · 12h ago
It also overlooks the fact that what Amazon was doing was outright illegal for years and they never got handed their ass on a platter.
For years, Amazon enabled everybody to bypass sales tax which gave Amazon a 4-8% advantage on books over brick and mortar that had to pay both rent and sales tax.
Quite a few of the "successful" tech companies followed this pattern: Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, etc. all engaged in blatantly illegal behavior to become big.
fallingknife · 9h ago
It was not illegal. Businesses are not required to charge sales tax in states where they have no operations.
mandevil · 8h ago
If you had said "were" instead of "are" this would be a true statement. Since South Dakota v. Wayfair in 2018, states have been allowed to charge sales taxes on businesses that have no operations in their state. That decision overturned 1992's Quill v. North Dakota, which held as you say. But that is no longer the law of the land.
The 5-4 majority in 2018 included two justices who were part of the unanimous holding in 1992 (Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas), voting to overturn their own decision from a quarter century before.
bsder · 4h ago
The people receiving stuff from Amazon were supposed to report and pay the sales tax.
If you or I aided and abetted widespread tax evasion, we would get our asses handed to us in court.
musicale · 4h ago
Regulatory entrepreneurship.
See also: PayPal, OpenAI, ...
nobody9999 · 10h ago
>For years, Amazon enabled everybody to bypass sales tax which gave Amazon a 4-8% advantage on books over brick and mortar that had to pay both rent and sales tax.
In 1992, SCOTUS ruled in Quill vs. North Dakota[0] that a business must have a "nexus" in a particular state to be required to collect sales taxes. I'd note that Amazon was founded in 1994.
And so, yes Amazon did have an advantage WRT sales taxes. But it wasn't, as you said, "outright illegal" until 2018 with SCOTUS' ruling in South Dakota vs. Wayfair Inc.[1] At which time, IIRC, Amazon continued collecting sales taxes that it had already been collecting in many states, as already it had nexuses (warehouses, distribution centers, etc.) in many places.
I'd note that I'm not "defending" Amazon here. They do plenty of shady stuff WRT pricing, as well as abusing their employees, suppliers and third-party sellers.
Why don't we take them to task for that stuff instead of making stuff up? Just sayin'
I just learned this quote now and I love it. Very true. Much of tech mythology, where we are told "started from nothing" actually started from a place of at least some capital and privilege.
threatofrain · 14h ago
From the immigrant perspective that was true for many, coming from another country where any status in the US is better. They may be privileged from the perspective of others who couldn't make it out, but from the US perspective it's something different.
shadowgovt · 14h ago
There is a pretty famous story from Saturday Night Live. The characters of the "two Wild and Crazy Guys" were based on an individual Steve Martin met in a bar in New York. He was an immigrant from a country in Eastern Europe and, delightfully inebriated and happy, was crowing about his new life in America. Among the things he mentioned (paraphrasing from memory of Martin describing the anecdote) "In my home country, I am doctor. Now, I sell washing machines. Is much better!"
pmichaud · 13h ago
I think in conversations like these most people on the successful side underestimate how valuable the starting advantages were, and most people not on the successful side overestimate how valuable the starting advantages were. Meanwhile almost everyone misunderstands what the advantages really are.
People will talk about the $300k loan Bezos started with and think "boy golly, with 300 THOUSAND dollars, I could do anything!" meanwhile millions of people with much more than that fritter it away on nothing, even if they are trying not to. It takes something more to be Bezos.
Whereas the proverbial Bezos will think about the grit and determination it took to march for decades through treacherous financial and political swamps, and think "would I have let a lack of an initial 300k stop me from even starting? Would I have failed to secure the capital and cooperation without that seed? Given the heroics I've pulled over the years? Hell no, that wouldn't have stopped me."
But here's the part that most people misunderstand. The 300k is a small advantage, it might have made a difference, and some cases might make THE difference, but it's only the most concrete, obvious advantage. The real thing is like this:
In my earliest memories I was pretty poor, but also in those memories both my parents were going to university, while my dad was packing fiberglass at a factory. Then they graduated and he got a job and we became suburban middle class, my dad staying at his big corporation for the rest of his life, while my mom more or less stayed at home although she went back to school and ended up about half way through a PhD program. I would think about what career I wanted as a child, and what school I might go to, that sort of thing.
Fast forward to my first wife who I met when I was 17. She is self described "british ghetto trash," and she emigrated because she couldn't escape her accent, in a phrase. She taught me what I didn't know about privilege, at a time before that was a term anyone was using for this purpose. The reality she knew in the council housing (ie projects) where she grew up was that her dad was a scam artist flake who floated in and out of her life without regard for the many promises he made, and whenever he pulled off a big one he'd show up and splash a little cash around before running off again. He was far from ashamed, he was a "2 types of people in this world!" type scammer. Her mom wasn't much better, basically scamming the government for benefits, working whatever angle she could but never actually "working working."
My ex never thought about careers or schools or anything. She thought about what scam she could pull to make it to next month. It was a weird series of events that brought her across the pond, and into university and beyond.
That's what Bezos had that my ex didn't have. He thought he belonged inside society, he thought he could do things and that people would let him. He thought that so very much that never even had to think it consciously. The same for her but opposite, the idea of participating in society at all, never mind changing it was utterly foreign to her experience.
I think it was crushingly more important than the 300k in terms of pivotal advantages. It sucks to start with bad cards, but it's much tougher to not be in the game in the first place.
solarmist · 13h ago
This is such a good point. People tend to focus on money as the main form of privilege, but that internalized sense of “I belong here” might matter even more. It’s not just confidence—it’s a kind of default assumption that you’ll be taken seriously, that you’ll have options, that failure won’t wreck your life.
I’ve seen it in startups too. Some founders take bold risks because they know, consciously or not, that if it doesn’t work out, they’ll be fine. Others carry the weight of “I can’t afford to screw this up,” and that changes how they operate. Even if they’re equally capable, the emotional cost of risk is just higher when you don’t have that built-in safety net.
And from the outside, those differences are invisible. Both people might succeed, but one was playing on easy mode and didn’t know it. The other had to brute-force their way through every step. That gap is real, and we don’t talk about it enough.
umbra07 · 4h ago
Can't you just as easily make the opposite argument?
Founders that have a safety net have less drive and motivation to give it their all, because they have a safety net. They simply just don't have the same pressure to not fail, because if they do - no biggie.
The founder with no safety net, no real backup, needs to give it his all, because he's doomed if his idea doesn't work out.
dkersten · 13h ago
It’s both.
Upbringing, background, mindset, social safety nets (eg knowing that if you fail, you’ll still be fine) — these things are huge and make a huge difference.
But 300k then is about 650k today, and just the time this would buy me alone would mean I’d be able to dedicate my full energy to a few projects that, while I don’t think could ever reach the scale of Amazon, would at least have the potential to make a reasonable return on that initial investment. The 300k is a huge boost that a lot of people don’t have access to.
But you’re absolutely right. If you’re not in the game at all, it’s very difficult to get in, and those other non-financial benefits are a big deal.
munificent · 13h ago
> He thought that so very much that never even had to think it consciously.
This is such a huge part of it. Our upbringing gives us our culture and the set of ideas and expectations that form our "default mode" thinking.
If your default mode assumption is that you are capable and have agency, that investing in a long-term project will reliably produce long-term value, and that risks are often worth taking, you are set up to try to build something amazing.
But if your default mode is that you are a pawn at the whims of other people, that whatever you try to build can be easily swept away by chance or bad actors, and that you've got no room to fail, then at best you'll just try to eke out a stable existence with as little risk taking as possible.
ryandrake · 12h ago
Plus, this isn't just a mindset that people have in their heads, some chip on their shoulder from their upbringing holding them back: It's their actual reality.
Some people do have agency to act, and the assurance that their actions will produce value, and they are in fact not in catastrophic danger. And some people really do not have agency, they are pawns largely under the control of others, and live on a knife's edge where everything they have might be swept away by things entirely outside of their control. These realities shape whether it is even possible to take the risks that are necessary to reach success.
pmichaud · 12h ago
I agree, although in a way that mirrors my opening statement from OP: I think people who don't have this disadvantage tend to underestimate how real it is, and those who have it tend to overestimate how real it is.
mrandish · 12h ago
> He thought he belonged... he thought he could do things and that people would let him.
This is a good point and, in the case of successful startup entrepreneurs, it may not rely solely on how much society grants or denies that belonging. Entrepreneurs tend toward a kind of selective irrationality in how they see themselves and in how they think others see them. Steve Jobs was always the first victim and/or beneficiary of his own reality distortion field. Internally, this lack of self-awareness would tend to help one ignore some of the emotional downsides of belonging being denied and externally to seize more belonging than is being granted - just through sheer chutzpah.
I've heard it said that many successful startup entrepreneurs feel all the insecurity of 'imposter syndrome' without processing any of the 'imposter' part. They tend to think they belong even when they objectively don't. While irrational, annoying and unhealthy, it's hard to imagine this doesn't have some advantages too.
the_snooze · 15h ago
Silicon Valley itself came about in no small part due to direct government support: Fairchild Semiconductor selling chips for weapons targeting, ARPANET leading to the Internet, Sergei Brin and Larry Page's PhD's very likely funded by NSF and other federal funders.
And now you have Silicon Valley "leaders" looking to tear down the public institutions that seeded the place.
jkaptur · 14h ago
Beyond "very likely", it's right there in the paper:
"The research described here was conducted as part of the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project, supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-94 11306. Funding for this cooperative agreement is also provided by DARPA and NASA, and by Interval Research, and the industrial partners of the Stanford Digital Libraries Project."
mpweiher · 15h ago
Pulling up the drawbridge behind them...
nonrandomstring · 13h ago
...and billions of taxpayer dollars, hundreds of years of European
science, standing on the shoulders of giants, thousands of years of
Greek, Arabic and Far Eastern mathematics.... The "self-made
industrialist" sketch is funny when it's Monty Python, but when I hear
whining SV bros claiming they built an empire from a
rolled-up-newspaper, it's so avoidantly ungrateful. Like some kid
"divorces" their own parents, disowns their lineage and declares
themselves a unique and special self-creation. The US would do well to
reconnect its Native American culture and have more respect for what
got everyone here.
tough · 15h ago
Look into bill gates mom ;)
wslh · 14h ago
There's no denying that Bill Gates was highly privileged, but his business acumen and early development achievements were also extraordinary. At least, two great factors combined. We can also include the initial team and cofounder.
shadowgovt · 14h ago
Fortune favors the
- brave
- prepared
- connected to vast sums of easily-accessed loaner money
Not necessarily equal measures to all three.
tough · 14h ago
Of course, there's many priviliged kids, doesn't take away from Bill's achievements, but all the -from the garage- bs is kinda of a bit of gaslighting to the real middle class no?
wslh · 14h ago
I agree that a major issue is the false narrative of equal opportunity and resilience. It's one thing to be resilient when you have a strong network and a safety net. It's entirely different when you're facing a free fall with nothing to catch you.
citizenpaul · 15h ago
I mean Bill Gates grandparents were buddies with the Rockerfellers. Even if Gates didn't directly get money from them simply being close to that level of influence and power gives you essentially freedom to print money with very little effort through effortless connections to whatever you need.
Oh you need advice from a $10,000 a day law firm for a difficult business situation? My dads friend John works at "prestigious law-firm" I'll get him to get us some feedback on the situation.
umbra07 · 4h ago
My grandmother's best friend was a princess. She still grew up somewhat impoverished (middle-lower class).
lostmsu · 14h ago
That particular bit is going to be "equalized" soon by AI
tough · 14h ago
You can't generate prestige tho, only the fake outputs.
In the case of law at least, it is true you can no side-step the 10k fee for a -consultancy- but lawyers and doctors will remain a human guarded work for long imho, at least in the sign-off phase, even if they use these tools to amplify their work
K0balt · 14h ago
This is a sort of perplexing subject for me. I grew up pretty poor. We had a well, but not running water. We flushed with a bucket, bathed out of a trash can-cum-water barrel. We subsistence hunted. We had vehicles that mostly ran, most of the time.
Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege.
Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk.
My parents prioritized one single thing above all others. Land. They bought land. Remote land, useless land, land wherever it was cheap.
They could have fixed the car, but instead bought an acre of land. We would go 100 miles from the nearest town to eke out a parcel of land in some Godforsaken place I haven’t been to since.
Because of that, and the skills I learned because I had to do everything myself, I have never had to pay rent. Because I knew how to live without luxury, I built a cabin when I was 16 on my parent’s land with salvaged lumber and fixtures and wire and things I got from demolishing houses. I raised three children in various iterations of that eventually 600 square foot house.
By that time I was successful in infotech, so we bought and rebuilt (ourselves) a 63 foot steel schooner and finished raising our children at many ports in the world, so that they would grow up with the same privilege of mind, but with broader horizons.
But I never forgot land. Land, not a house, land . Land is the key. Just a couple hundred square meters is fine.
You can still do exactly what I did today. You can buy land cheaply in many places in the world, including the USA. I just bought a half acre in Montana for $1200, with road access. (I sometimes buy cheap land sight unseen halfway across the world when drunk and bored at 3am, the results are kinda hit and miss, but it makes for a good excuse to travel to see what happens) On eBay there are many deals owner financed with nominal or zero down, with payments from 50 to a few hundred dollars a month.
You can still tear down old structures for people and get building supplies. You can get furniture and appliances curbside or on Craigslist, etc. I don’t need to, but I sometimes still do.
Every opportunity I took advantage of is still practical today. You can still buy land on fast food wages, you just won’t be able to live near a big city while you do it. That also was impossible in my youth. The sacrifices were substantial, the discomfort at times severe.
Nothing has changed except the expectations that people have about life and what they can or cannot do.
I was born into privilege for sure, but it was a privilege of a culture of independence and a deep understanding of the value of owning outright a place to stand.
Except those born into poverty in a truly hopeless place in the world, we suffer mostly from our attitudes and lack of knowledge, and belief in our ability to do reasonable things that other people don’t believe we can do, because they are not willing to.
thomassmith65 · 13h ago
That really deserves its own post. It's too interesting to be left as a comment.
I have a lot of questions... who sells plots of land for that little money? Are there tax implications? Does anyone ever get on your case for upkeep?
You really should write a blog post. It definitely would hit the front page.
Edit
who sells plots of land for that little money?
Apparently: many people! I just did a web search. Little plots of land are much cheaper than I expected
K0balt · 13h ago
As far as upkeep, most of these lots are already in unimproved land, where everything around is also unimproved. Road access is usually at least there. So, no mandatory upkeep except looking at satellite photos once every couple of months. Some places have tax, I think an average would be maybe $50 a year, if any?
umbra07 · 4h ago
I don't know about little, but I regularly see plots of land (sometimes developed) in remote areas on Facebook Marketplace for really good prices. Or at least prices that seem compelling to me.
ryandrake · 13h ago
How does this land help you? What do you do with it? I'm totally lost on how a half acre in the middle of Montana does anything for you, if you already have somewhere to live. Do you just enjoy camping or something?
K0balt · 9h ago
Well, I did mention that I’m drunk at 3 am, buying land on eBay, right?
A few places I really like and have given to my kids or other family members for a second home spot or recreational getaway.
Two are located in places that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to live in full time, I let the neighbors “rent” them (for a a few pesos a year) to use for farming or whatever. One never knows how the world will shape up, maybe they come in handy. If not, maybe a grandkid can use it.
Others I have undoubtedly forgotten about and have been confiscated for taxes, I suppose.
The value I have seen generated for others by my reckless dalliances are more than worth the cost. I mean, one of the best ones only cost $300.
I could easily spend that on a night out, and no way that is going to fundamentally improve anyone’s life. It’s like gambling for the chance to make someone’s life better.
I have also been known to midnight purchase sailboats in places I want to visit. Sometimes you can get great deals on boats that the owners have left behind. Usually I’ll go there and tinker for a few weeks, enjoying myself and sailor culture, take it out sailing until I want to go home, then sell it for (usually) much more than I paid and I get a free vacation.
A few years ago I bought a 32’ roberts (comfortable, but a bit of a pig in chop) near San Fransisco. She was $900 with a great slip and a flaky outboard. I spent a week getting her in shape, 500 dollars on a one-season racing sail and another 300 getting it recut, bought a few sandbags because she seemed a bit tender with the heavy pilot house, and sailed around the canals for a few days, then spent a week cruising the bay. After that, I spent a few days at the municipal dock, 100 feet from million dollar condos in a fantastic part of town.
Great times and great street culture back then. I hear it has kinda gone downhill?
Anyway, I used it for a “vacation home” for a few years and sold her at a fair but beneficial price.
I’m a little more settled down now, raising a new batch of kids…but if there’s a secret to life, it’s to own land outright, and avoid debt at all cost. Buy it when you’ve earned it. Until then, buy what you can afford to own, where you can afford to live. The compromises you have to make will pay excellent dividends. /grandpa rant
Roritharr · 12h ago
This is gut-wrenching to read from Germany.
I grew up with a mentality of "you can't do that, there's a rule against that" and had to slowly break out of it as much as I could. Just knowing that there's people like you out there makes me happy. I applaud your freedom.
mrandish · 12h ago
> I grew up with a mentality of "you can't do that, there's a rule against that"
No matter how wealthy or poor your Western European upbringing may have been, being saddled with that worldview is, IMHO, the worst kind of disadvantage someone in otherwise fairly good circumstances can have because it's baked into your skull and how you see everything. I hope you've been able to overcome it.
moondistance · 14h ago
Where do you find/buy land? How do you vet purchases? Can you point to a few websites, etc.? Thanks!
K0balt · 13h ago
Just check eBay. If you want it to turn out good, it’s best to go and see. If we’re talking about $1200 parcels, it costs more to vet than to buy. Just look it over and judge the best you can on the information you can gather, and accept the 30 percent risk that it won’t be what you expected in some way or another. Or, go there. Not worth paying a title agency or any of that crap. Be sure of any tax burden (easily researched) and what the annual taxes, if any , will be.
bhaney · 13h ago
Do you have more advice for finding land to buy other than using ebay?
I've been looking for a while for a few acres of unimproved/secluded/wooded land within an hour or two drive away from me here in Kansas, mostly just for bushcrafting or tooling around. The only place I really know to check is Zillow, and while there are a few listings in my distance range, they're typically upwards of $10k/acre. I just checked ebay and saw parcels priced much closer to what I'd expect for unimproved land out in the middle of nowhere, but I couldn't find any in my middle of nowhere, just several states away.
I'm pretty sure there's tons of completely unused land all over the place here that people would be willing to get rid of for cheap, but I have no idea how to find those people. I've considered just going to every small town within an hour of me and posting a "will buy" ad on whatever bulletin boards I'm allowed to post stuff on, but for now I'm still holding out hope that there's a better way. Tips?
hattmall · 5h ago
An absurd amount of land is held by people that don't even know it. They aren't looking to sell generally. Lots of inherited and placed in trusts over generations.
Use q public, or whatever is in your area and search for land recently acquired by an estate. Pretty much that means the owner died, there was no clear line of inheritance do typically a distant relative or random person is selling the estate. Try to buy it.
The other is legal notices and government bid sites. You can buy tax owed land, laws vary by state.
K0balt · 8h ago
Well, the trick to finding it cheap is to not look for anything/anywhere specific, so I doubt I can help with that. It’s not that I am good at it, it’s that when I’m momentarily bored, I’m not in a picky mood. If it’s cheap and I can imagine a life there, no matter how humble, and it makes me smile, then my wife is probably going to be asking me questions I don’t have good answers for and I’m going to have to work on a reasonable explanation that doesn’t sound like I’ve finally gone off the deep end.
It’s pretty much all eBay for me or local equivalents in other countries. So many rabbit holes.
moondistance · 13h ago
Thanks :)
readthenotes1 · 13h ago
Food and shelter security, famuky that was inclined to help more than hurt.
That's your main privilege...
K0balt · 13h ago
I had to build my own shelter security and ensure my own food security as of 16, but yes, i did have that advantage growing up, and as I saw it essential to have and possible to create myself, I did so.
Those things are achievable IF you are willing to give up luxuries that you may see as essential. (the kind of job you want, comfort, etc). But if you are willing to forgo those things for a few years , you can build a resource base so that you will never have to be worried about those things ever again in your life. You will always have a fallback.
The main thing you get from having a "place", even if you don't live there, but a place... is the ability to tolerate risk. Without risk tolerance, there are very few ways forward where you do not exist at the charity of someone or something you cannot control - a life where inherently you are forced to work for priorities that are not your own, and be placated by trappings of wealth that you do not really have.
foobarian · 14h ago
... I think I just found my new hobby! :-D
K0balt · 13h ago
It beats playing the lottery. And it makes a fun excuse to go places. Low expectations are your friend, that way you get pleasant surprises instead of disappointment.
All part of my strategy of success through lowered expectations. Im finding that this decade has made me an accidental optimist lol, but these days I can pontificate well insulated from the outcome.
no_wizard · 15h ago
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
monknomo · 15h ago
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)
oceanplexian · 14h ago
Nah, I'll correct the record because anyone who worked hard enough absolutely had access to "that level of resources"
My grandparents, First generation immigrants without a college degree bought a beautiful single family house in 1960s Northern California on a working class salary. In fact they lived across the street from George Lucas (My grandmother knew his parents). They too, were a completely average, middle class family. Not any different from Steve Jobs or the hundreds of other success stories.
Over the course of the 80s, 90s, and 00s, the same city and cities like it became notorious for crime and gang violence, homes became unaffordable, and the conditions that allowed someone to "start a company out of a garage" was wiped out as society stratified into the super rich and the super poor. Which should serve as a cautionary tale of any place that is thinking of emulating the California success story.
BobaFloutist · 13h ago
Right, but having parents that worked hard enough to get that level of resources is another kind of luck.
jacobsenscott · 15h ago
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.
throwaway-blaze · 14h ago
Is the contrapositive also true? If Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos had been dirt poor in childhood rather than solidly middle class, would they not have had success? I.e. how much weight should we put on the things out of their control vs within their control?
bluefirebrand · 14h ago
It is impossible to know of course, but it is probably fair to say that if they had been born dirt poor they would have been much less likely to have the kind if incredible success that they did have
People like to say that success is right time, right place, but that's
not all there is to it. You also need sufficient resources to take advantage of opportunity
Sitting on a gold mine does not matter if you don't have a shovel
Having a shovel doesn't matter if you don't know where to dig
And you need to have enough time ('runway' in startup speak) to actually try digging for gold in the first place
ryandrake · 13h ago
The cartoon "On A Plate"[1] comes to mind in this discussion.
Few would suggest anyone having time, a place, necessities covered well enough, and few distractions is going to be ensured success.
But with those things, someone who also has ideas, insights, a strong work ethic (or often much better, a strong natural enthusiasm for something useful) has much better chances.
tdrz · 13h ago
I got a lot of freebies from my parents and never been able to build a multi-billion dollar company.
I do believe you need someone to have your back for the basics, but there's much more to it.
mixmastamyk · 15h ago
Yes, though in the eighties and somewhat to the nineties you could own a home with modest job.
FuriouslyAdrift · 13h ago
That was the era before globalization hollowed out the middle class
mixmastamyk · 12h ago
Ok, though believe the major factor was a refusal to build enough new housing.
PeterFBell · 15h ago
If you live with your parent in a double wide in a trailer park and need to work at the local Target every night since high school to make enough money to help pay for groceries for the family, you might have a harder time working 100 hour weeks on the off chance that you'll raise a round and start a company. You probably also don't know many VC's or live too close to where they hang out.
Anyone can start a billion dollar business. Anyone who does so is probably extremely smart and extremely hard working. There are some very smart, hard working folks for whom the path to starting a company is harder than for others.
ryandrake · 15h ago
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.
mbrumlow · 15h ago
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 very large common group they belonged to.
ryandrake · 14h ago
> They clearly did something different
Survivorship bias that results from looking back at the winners. If we asked 1000 people to flip a coin 10 times, probability says one will end up flipping heads 10 times in a row. Looking only backwards after the fact, what did he do different? Is he just a better coin flipper?
There is likely a person in their 20s right now who in 40 years we will look back on because they founded the world's first $100T company. Who is it? If we knew it was deterministic and that some "thing they did" caused success, we would all just do that thing.
dgfitz · 14h ago
I think the point is, most people don't even flip the coin, you're making a false equivalence.
bluefirebrand · 13h ago
Realistically most people don't get many opportunities to flip the coin
Then many who do get that chance choose not to, they choose a less risky path
It is very few people who even can attempt to flip the coin ten times
And "the 1%" can flip it as many times as they want until it lands on heads 10 times in a row
ryandrake · 12h ago
Instead of coin flipping, I look at it like a baseball game:
Most people are never even given an at-bat. They're born without money/opportunity (on the bench), and they will have to stay on the bench for life.
Some working / middle class people get one or two at-bats. They swing and maybe hit the home run, but maybe instead have a safe base hit or they strike out. That was their chance. Afterwards they're out of money/opportunity.
The top 0.1% or so get as many at-bats as they want. Their parents own the team and the ballpark so they just keep swinging until they get their home run, and then spend the rest of the game talking about how life is a meritocracy, and you succeed by being the best.
dgfitz · 10h ago
How quickly we forget being teenagers and young adults.
Computers, and knowledge in general, is the the most accessible it’s ever been, in the history of mankind.
So you’re claiming that the trillions of dollars that have been spent trying to uplift the youth of yesteryear were a complete an utter waste?
Or has social media been the somma Huxley was talking about all along?
Nothing stops anyone from reading and learning, having hope for the future, and pursuing it. WhatsApp had a staff of like 15-25 people. Linux wa started by some dork with an idea and a lot of time.
Treating the world like victims that need protecting isn’t the play.
bluefirebrand · 10h ago
> So you’re claiming that the trillions of dollars that have been spent trying to uplift the youth of yesteryear were a complete an utter waste
Well, take a look around?
The youth cannot buy homes. They aren't starting families. The wealth gap between the older and younger generations is enormous
Do you really think we have been successful in "uplifting the youth"?
Most people don’t want to end up in debt in the likely case that the coin-flipping doesn’t succeed.
jacobsenscott · 15h ago
Random chance, and maybe a little skill.
bluefirebrand · 14h ago
Don't forget connections
Having well connected parents and family is huge, and a big part of why a lot of these people are so wildly successful
FuriouslyAdrift · 13h ago
That's how Elizabeth Holmes went from a rando Stanford drop out to a "billionaire"
Her father was head of a Federal govt agency at one point and a VP at Enron (I know, I know).
Also, a direct descendant of the Fleischmann yeast family.
Her mother also had worked as a Congressional aide.
shadowgovt · 14h ago
There is only but so much room in the capital ecosystem for billionaires, even when you factor in creation of wealth through resource-extraction and refinement or labor.
We hear much from the Jobs and Gates of society, and little from the other garage-folk who just didn't make it: they ran out of time, ran out of steam, ran out of funding, or were doing something that would have worked great and made them billionaires if Apple hadn't hit the market three months sooner than them.
Billionaires in garages are a confirmation-bias story.
indoordin0saur · 14h ago
These successes come from the middle-class, not the working classes. You could take it further and note that even just owning a home as a young person isn't really attainable for the middle-class anymore. Things were simply easier back then.
masfuerte · 15h ago
It's saying that even just having a garage is a privilege.
mensetmanusman · 15h ago
Even being able to type in a comment box is a privilege, as is life.
groby_b · 15h ago
Meanwhile, you're missing the wider point: You don't get to claim "everybody can do this from nothing" if the "nothing" is actually a substantial amount of implicit access to resources.
Nobody (well, few) begrudge that privilege, but you cannot have a reasonable discussion about what led to success by leaving out major factors.
jackphilson · 15h ago
Even the amount of agency you have is a privilege. Hard determinism.
boringg · 13h ago
What are you trying to imply - sounds like your trying to make a broad but vague statement.
mensetmanusman · 15h ago
Ain’t no trailer parks without engineers and mechanics designing trailers.
Everyone is connected; the growth of the world economy has brought nearly 90% of people out of global poverty in under a century.
twen_ty · 15h ago
That also created the biggest singular transfer of wealth. So your argument is that the peasants are no longer starving and well fed. If that's the ambition level you're happy to live by then there's no further comment.
kevinventullo · 15h ago
Whoosh
dzink · 15h ago
Some potential causes of the scarcity of breakthroughs in the last 10 years:
1. "What got you here won't get you there." The problems that need solved today might require a different mindset/level of experience and that may not be in people with enough time or circumstances to build, or enough likeness to the old model be funded by VCs.
2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM.
3. Tech giants of the past 10 years were slurping the most promising talent with high salaries and burning them out.
4. Filters that sift new founders and hackers are created by people who don't deal with the problems most people deal with.
7. Hackers at hackathons are not dealing with problems most people deal with. A number of hackathons I've participated in had very similar solutions pitched - you could name the categories, and see them all over again in each hackathon years apart. Usually catering to the tech or the sponsors instead of actual products anyone wanted to use.
stuxnet79 · 15h ago
> 2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM.
Not enough is said about this. It's almost comical when you think about it. As technologists we are both complicit and victims. I've spent half a decade in one of these 'attention economy' companies and let me tell you the amount of money, talent and resources that our industry deploys to forcefully grab and monetize users' attention is staggering.
Recently I've shifted to using single-use, fit-for-purpose devices (Kobo ereader hacked with KOReader, KingJim Pomera DM250 digital memo) for my day-to-day and it was like a weight that I never knew was there was magically lifted away. If capitalism could find a way to produce such devices at scale, not only would it be a public health win, it would be a massive boost to the economy long-term.
But with most corporation's incessant focus on short term metrics I'm not holding my breath that this will ever be a reality.
layer8 · 12h ago
Good points, but what happened to 5 and 6?
dzink · 11h ago
A test of who is paying attention :) and #2
GoatInGrey · 12h ago
#2 happened!
cjs_ac · 15h ago
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 graphical operating system, no decent web browser, no search engine that could find what you were looking for. The basic amenities are now there. Of course there is still much room for innovation, but merely being able to write a computer program and understand what computer networks are good for is no longer the superpower it once was. If you're young enough to pound Red Bulls all night, you're probably not old enough to have the breadth of knowledge required to launch a great software product.
> Maybe most of the critical things that can be created by one guy typing furiously are gone, and the opportunities that remain require expertise and wisdom from a bunch of different people.
The tech companies that became big after 2008 solved problems with the same spirit as Jeremy Clarkson asking, 'How hard can it be?' and proceeding to build an electric car with a moustache called Geoff[0]. Those companies - Uber, AirBnB, Meta, Twitter, and so on - waded into very complex problem spaces, waved the magic wand of software, and used vast amounts of venture capital to obliterate the traditional solutions to these problems before anyone could realise how unsatisfactory these new solutions were. So now governments are coming up with all sorts of regulations - some of which are completely inappropriate - in an attempt to get these companies to stop being so irresponsible with the fabric of society, so everyone is now even more upset.
The days when a person who can build stuff and a person who can sell stuff were all you needed to start a startup are gone. There's a third role that's crucial now: the person who has deep understanding of the problem before product design starts so that the company doesn't build another version of The Angrifier.
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.
tough · 15h ago
Most of the big unicorns of the past cycle, uber, airbnb, etc, where mostly plays on -we can do illegal shit- and grow faster than laws close us up
groby_b · 14h ago
The problem any realistic assessment will have to struggle with is that they did illegal shit, exploited existing loopholes and created a better experience.
Taxis before Uber were a shit show. The worst Uber drive you had would still be aboce median for the pre-Uber taxi experience.
Same goes for finding a place to stay before AirBnB if you wanted anything outside a chain hotel.
That doesn't justify all they did, but it also points out that the market was stuck in a local minimum. Breaking out of that is a successful achievement. (We can debate if it was worth the costs. We can debate if the costs needed to be as high as they are, or if that was an outflow of using VC money. There are many debates to be had).
But "all because illegal" is intellectually irresponsible reductionism.
tough · 14h ago
sorry, you make a great point and I didn't mean to diminish their breakthrough's, but not all of us can allow to not even care about laws in the first place,was my main point.
Easier done with VC's money tho
PaulHoule · 15h ago
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?"
dasil003 · 14h ago
I think you misunderstand how two-side consumer marketplaces are bootstrapped from a startup perspective. It's not really about cost of development or legal compliance. Initially it's just about getting users on both sides of the marketplace. This can't be done with a complex product, in fact it needs to be dead simple.
Also, it's baffling to me that you consider fleets refilling vending machines to be a harder problem than what Uber did. Sure maybe it's harder in a leetcode sense, but the economics are much easier to reason about, and customer acquisition in B2B vs B2C is much more straightforward. The idea that you could build a random MVP and have 20% chance of success is laughably naive. I estimate thousands of attempts at this (I know of at least 3-4 personally), it's not easy to be Uber (or even Lyft).
PaulHoule · 14h ago
I agree with you. My point was that Uber and AirBNB's success was not about technology but rather the attitude about business.
VC leads in the Bay Area because VCs there will get behind high risk/high reward ventures that others won't.
At certain times and places it has been relatively easy to reach consumers. Circa 2001 we got a list of 10,000 emails in a developing country that got a better >20% response rate to join a voice chat service. I saw amazing success stories with SEO. There was a time that companies like King could get games to spread virally on Facebook. Those kind of opportunities have dried up as the gatekeepers have been able to capture more value out of their ecosystems.
But yeah, you're right, marketing is often 100x the work that people think it will be.
dtnewman · 15h ago
> 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.
chiffre01 · 13h ago
I put Facebook in the same category as Google. They have all of these flashy projects, but at the end of the day they never get beyond serving advertisements. It's their core competency and always will be.
dtnewman · 11h ago
- Amazon made AWS
- Microsoft went from Operating Systems to a cloud company
- Even Google has Waymo, which might develop into a large company by itself
- Apple was founded in 1976. They really weren't the powerhouse that they are until the iPhone came out.
- Netflix went from mailing DVDs to streaming
Of course most pivots don't work and there's selection bias here. BUT, it's not unheard of for business models to change. And it certainly helps that Zuck is the original founder and has controlling shares.
boringg · 13h ago
Most companies are like that. Look at their core competency and how much room that market has to grow. It's definitely the exception for company to go into a completely different vertical and excel there.
Ericson2314 · 16h ago
Yup that's right. The best frontier for b2c now is, what, say shipping an b/w e-ink phone in America so we can be less addicted? What's gone is gone.
There is more to do b2b, a lot more, but it is far less culturally relevant. It probably dovetails with people who aren't professional generalist programmers doing more programming as part of their job. That's a somewhat fractured conversation almost by definition.
I think with the LLM bubble bursts this will settle in better.
jglamine · 15h ago
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 evidence for either.
g_sch · 14h ago
The author is pretty upfront that the conclusion was meant as a reference to a character in the movie "Hoosiers", not that any of the personalities named were literally drunks or bad fathers.
jglamine · 14h ago
IDk, I feel like they're doing the thing where you list people they don't like, then list other worse people and kind of imply the first set are related / just as bad as the second set.
It's a motte and bailey where if people accuse you of doing that you retreat to saying "no see they're separate lists".
arduanika · 12h ago
Maybe the author just forgot which three interchangeable white guys he named at the top of the article, up there with the DEI topic that he broached but then never came back to. Maybe he thought he had written "Elon Musk", about whom the bad father parallel is a little easier to insinuate from the public record.
Or maybe whenever he reads a headline about a billionaire, he just files it under one golem in his head called Zuckermuskezosdriessen. A golem which also includes James Damore (???).
After all, we're dealing with someone who writes sentences like, "the vast majority of your fellow students were men, and they were more or less all the same person as you." This is not an author who sees two people of the same demographic as separate individuals whose sins need to be litigated individually. If Musk is a bad father, what should it matter that Zuck seems to be a fine one?
Sloppy thinking, sloppy writing.
eej71 · 15h ago
The Free Press recently did an interview with him.
Nothing screams "merit" like retiring to Luxembourg after having never had a real job.
jglamine · 14h ago
This is speculation, but I suspect he may have gotten a settlement from Google. Any settlement would likely include a gag-order.
It would explain the early retirement + lack of work history.
But yes, family money is also a possibility.
layer8 · 12h ago
Paywalled, unfortunately.
tristor · 11h ago
I would love to read it but it's paywalled behind a subscription and they've been able to break the way archivers like archive.is strip paywalls.
jeffbee · 15h ago
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.
jglamine · 14h ago
I think that's uncharitable. He was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special. Sure he went to Harvard, maybe he had wealthy parents (IDK his background) but neither of those are crimes.
I don't think he's the activist people make him out to be. He went on a few podcasts early on but has generally kept a low profile. I'm not under the impression he's doing the paid speaker / podcast circuit. Probably just living his life.
After he was cancelled probably nobody wanted to hire him, maybe he left tech completely.
But yes, agree it was weird to include him next to the other names. He's not like, a billionaire founder.
acdha · 14h ago
> was a regular SWE who got cancelled. Granted I have not followed him closely but I haven't seen him claim to be a genius or special.
He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. It wasn’t just that he was wrong about the biology (to be clear, he was[1]) but that he wanted to have a public forum where he could say that some of his colleagues were less qualified.
If he’d just been some guy wrong in the internet on his own time, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been fired. Doing it at work in public changes things because any future lawsuit alleging discrimination could cite that as tacit approval. Whatever Google’s senior management felt about the merits of the piece, I’m sure their lawyers were saying it’d be a lot cheaper to hire another early-career engineer. The NLRB upheld the firing, too, so it’s not like good lawyers haven’t reviewed it.
(To be clear, I don’t think he’s Satan or anything - just some young guy who got some bad science out of the manosphere and had an unfortunately high-profile learning experience about why boundaries between your personal and professional lives are important)
>He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified
He never said that in his letter. The memo was published unredacted. You can definitely disagree with what he said and there are many reasons to do so, but you should at least reference his actual statements and arguments when doing that.
> but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to.
That is also not true. My understanding is the memo was a report in response to a request from a committee he was part of and wasn't intended to be more widespread. It was leaked inside Google and then outside Google and then people demonized him and he got fired. That's pretty much the high-level set of events. He definitely did not write this after being explicitly told not to, especially "repeatedly" per basically every piece of evidence about the entire kerfuffle.
I'm not a Damore apologist either, but like the sibling it really pisses me off when I see someone just straight up strawmanning or lying about what someone else did to smear them. The man was already blackballed from the entire tech industry and had to leave the country after being fired, mostly for saying factually true statements that are controversial because of the color he (and others) added to them. Isn't that enough? Do you have to lie about what he said, when it was published publicly and anyone can read it for themselves?
jeffbee · 10h ago
> The memo was published unredacted.
As a matter of basic media literacy you should realize that you have no rational basis for this claim.
> That's pretty much the high-level set of events.
The entire rest of your comment is pure fiction, by the way.
tristor · 10h ago
> As a matter of basic media literacy you should realize that you have no rational basis for this claim.
> The entire rest of your comment is pure fiction, by the way.
What part, specifically? The part where he's living outside the US (in Luxembourg per an article linked in another comment in this larger thread)? The part about him being fired from Google? The part about him being blackballed in the tech industry?
Seriously, the dude is as cancelled as it is possible to get, what more do you want? Argue against his actual statements, if you choose to do so, but don't be a blatant liar. This is the Internet, the Internet is forever, anybody can look this stuff up.
jeffbee · 10h ago
A guy leaks a doc to Gizmodo, same guy authenticates it, and that works for you?
tristor · 10h ago
Damore is not the one that leaked the doc to Gizmodo, as far as I am aware. The controversy that ultimately lead to him being fired, cancelled, blackballed, and literally leaving the country were directly a result of the internal memo intended for an internal audience becoming public. It would seem the height of stupidity for him to leak the memo himself. He confirmed its authenticity because he was given the opportunity to provide a public response to the comments people had made on it, which is posted at the end of the version I linked.
What's your claim here? That the published memo is fake? That Damore didn't write the things he said that he wrote, and that he suffered serious consequences for having written?
Like what's your play?
llm_nerd · 12h ago
Man, I really don't want to be a Damore apologist, but-
"that women were innately less qualified"
He never said that, though. If you have to grossly misrepresent his argument like that, you've demonstrated that you have no good faith retort and have lost the argument at the outset.
His paper was about on the average traits. That if you've split humans into various subsets -- for instance ethnicity, sex, age, etc -- each group has average and percentile traits on a variety of axes, whether it's aptitudes or intelligence spread (e.g. the variability hypothesis), musculature, long distance running, etc. These traits have negligible applicability to any individual person or subset, but if you're selecting from the whole set for exceptional extremes, you likely will get a set that doesn't demographically represent the whole.
NBA/NFL/NHL/MLB players. Nobel prize winners. Top mathematicians. Long distance runners. And so on.
Damore's mistake was that a) there was no value in publishing this, b) he is on the spectrum and didn't realize how dangerous this absolute statement of fact was.
You say that he had bad science, but then you link to a piece that says that it's "politically naive, and at worst dangerous". Which is precisely the sort of tired "but it isn't socially acceptable" sort of response that is just boorish and unproductive.
I get why Google fired him. They pretty much had to (though I would argue that he could have contested it as punishing his handicap). But for all his folly, when people have to misrepresent what he said, or do the "it's bad science because I don't like it"....meh.
acdha · 9h ago
The problem with the averages argument is not that it’s wrong but that the established biological causes have been for basic low-level things like grip strength but not for higher level cognitive behaviour, especially at the level of software engineering at Google which combines a number of different advanced skills – and there’s a fair variation in the mix of skills equally successful people use, too. Running is a much simpler, highly physical skill which was highly relevant to our evolutionary history whereas being a senior engineer involves a mix of cognitive skills developed over a longer time in a highly social environment, and there just isn’t high-quality data linking those skills to innate biological traits at the level needed to explain the current outcomes.
Complex behavior is very hard to link to underlying biology because our brains are incredibly plastic and actual researchers spend a lot of time looking for ways to tease out the complex interplay between genes and training. I used to support some neuroscience labs which studied things like this but the researchers were careful to note the difference in confidence between the effects they measured and the attempts to identify the underlying biology (e.g. maybe undergrad men could track more moving objects than women, but if monkeys didn’t show an effect you might want to check things like how many hours they spent playing ball sports or video games). Everyone was generally of the opinion that there were innate differences, but that they couldn’t be anywhere near the magnitude we see with athletic performance because too many well-crafted studies have been done to miss something big.
When you’re looking at those bell curves, it’s important to remember that even if you ignore the questions about the methodology for things like personality traits the overlap is tighter than shown, and contrary to one of his foundational claims, there’s enough cultural variation to suggest that the effect is not biological in origin. The first piece I linked discusses at some length how he was thrown off by the Wikipedia summary of a meta-analysis paper on personality traits which found very limited effects, with one analysis within the margin of error. That pattern continues for the few claims he makes in enough detail to assess: inconclusive data, mistakes cribbed from intermediary sources, or failing to link a very low level behaviour to success at a company like Google.
That last part is really important to think about with all of the evo-psych stories which claim our social dynamics of today are based on our evolutionary history without considering just how different the skills we use to work in offices developing software are from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle – anyone at Google is working with more people than was common in most of our evolutionary history!
arduanika · 13h ago
Where does this "they" come from? You seem to know a lot about the guy. Do you have some information about his gender that's not public to the rest of us?
jeffbee · 12h ago
You comment seems pretty hostile but since prescriptive English usage is the greatest of all possible topics, I choose to view your question favorably. "They" is accepted in written American English with a singular antecedent when gender is irrelevant, unknown, or when gender neutrality is preferred by the referent.
HTH.
arduanika · 10h ago
Hmm, so which of those three cases are we in? To his critics, his gender sure doesn't seem irrelevant, and in fact the whole gist of his odd appearance in TFA is to lump him together with all males, who the author sees as "more or less all the same person". And his gender is certainly not unknown.
Which is why I ask, do you know something different about what gender this referent prefers?
Or, did you just trot out this overly academic tripartite definition out of pure snark, with no intention of defending your asinine usage of "they" as a valid instance of any of the three cases?
HTH indeed.
FWIW, I don't love what Damore did, and I think he was sort of naive and inconsiderate. But if his critics can't be bothered to go further than ad hominems and passive-aggressive misgendering, as you've done here, it feels like a point in his favor.
llm_nerd · 13h ago
>Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry?
It seems you've contrived a strawman that unless you know what they've done specifically in open source, they don't matter. I assure you that almost no one agrees with you.
This and the other post of yours about Damore are super weird, and you seem incredibly bitter about the guy. Weird stuff.
Damore's appearance in this piece is bizarre. He was an SWE at Google that made speculations about diversity targets, not realizing, courtesy of being the spectrum, that it was a massive taboo. For this guy to lump him in with Andreeson and Zuckerberg in his bizarre ageism screed is absolutely bizarre, and makes it seem like it was some LLM generation or something.
m_dupont · 13h ago
The link between DEI and the rest of the content of the article is not well-articulated at all.
Leaving aside whether one agrees with the premise, his argumentation is disjointed at best.
He is attributing various symptoms of these tech leaders behaviour to them clinging to a bygone world, however he hasn't really articulated any of these symptoms beyond them thinking that "DEI" is the cause of all their problems.
He can't even back it up with a single quote or published piece from one of these tech moguls which displays the opinions that he characterizes them to have.
Articles as sloppy as this shouldn't get 230+ points on hackernews
wing-_-nuts · 12h ago
>The link between DEI and the rest of the content of the article is not well-articulated at all.
It felt like a lazy generic swipe at 'tech bros'.
alchemyzach · 15h ago
The idea that success often depends on luck, right place/time, and other circumstances often outside one's control, is definitely true. Not sure how this validates the DEI movement though? Still a largely toxic and unserious movement that has good intentions but ultimately harms institutions and wastes time and resources.
an0malous · 15h ago
I think the OP’s idea is that DEI is a scapegoat for diminishing growth, and the real cause is just that the low hanging fruit is gone
mrandish · 13h ago
While I think the TFA makes some interesting points, I too felt the DEI reference was tangential. The point that I felt TFA missed is that none of this was fundamentally unique to the dotcom era. Random factors like "right place/time" have always applied at the birth of new industries whether dotcom era, 1970s microcomputers or 19th century punch card tabulating devices. Historically, new industries that quickly emerged from not existing to being consequential, had early players who achieved outsized gains and pole position during a limited window of time when a couple of reasonably clever outliers could choose to speculatively pour unreasonable amounts of time, energy and whatever environmental resources were at their disposal into delivering early value.
Usually the choice to pour too much into an unproven, nascent prospect was objectively a bad idea, poor investment or, at least, not prudent. We know this because other smarter, more sober people looked at the opportunity during those early moments and made wiser choices, which only seem unwise in hindsight. It's also usually the case that those early zealots taxed their available environmental resources (whether spousal support, parental savings, current employer latitude, etc) to the point of unfair burden, if not abusive burden. Sometimes those unwilling 'resource investors' were repaid and sometimes not. And, of course, even having environmental resources to tap (and unfairly burden) in the first place has always been a matter of luck.
There's an historical record bias here because if we double-click as deeply into the circumstances around other early market entrants, such as a Herman Hollerith and punch card tabulating, we often find similar patterns of abdicating current responsibilities to make unwise leaps into months of furious work to realize some speculative vision, enabled by unfairly (or abusively) burdened family, friends or employers whose existence was random luck. On top of that, there's selection bias at work. Because whether we're talking about Zuckerberg, Gates/Allen, Jobs/Woz, Hollerith or Gutenberg - we're only talking about them because they are the black swan exceptional outliers. The vast majority of the time this pattern ends in unrecorded ignominy or tragedy, existing only as cautionary tales about the distant relative who squandered whatever job or prospects they had, along with their money, family's money and finally the patience of all around them in the pursuit of some crazy dream which never panned out.
The more interesting question is whether this repeating pattern of irrationally abdicating responsibilities to chase speculative dreams in unhealthily unbalanced ways enabled by unfairly burdening environmental resources is, on the whole, net bad or good. And I think that depends on the scope by which we measure. On an individual, family or community level its almost certainly net bad. However, on a societal level it could be net positive. The thorny issue is that the pattern involves abuse of unwilling others to whom rewards may not flow, even in the unlikely event it doesn't end in tragedy. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to eliminate the possibility of unfairness toward others or the overall ambient unfairness of 'winning' by leveraging environmental luck.
larusso · 15h ago
I often contemplated about people like Zuckerberg who had massive success with the first thing they built and then have to come to terms that not everything they touch turns to gold. I wonder what kind of feeling that must be if your greatest success happened in your 20th. How do you measure your successes then?
GoatInGrey · 12h ago
This dynamic has been explored extensively in the creative fields. Most namely with the music industry and the "sophomore album curse".
larusso · 11h ago
Interesting. Never heard that term. Will check it out thanks.
dougb5 · 12h ago
My cynical answer: I think they reframe their history to see it as a series of ever-larger successes -- with some setbacks maybe. They avoid introspection that might lead to the unpleasant conclusion that they have actually gone off the rails and caused societal harm since their initial success. By and large their net worth has continued to increase, and that's the measure that they're comfortable with associating with success, and they see that as validation. Plus, they are surrounded by people who have the same incentives to lie to themselves and to each other.
fidotron · 15h ago
This is bitter gibberish.
Advancement has always been made by standing on the shoulders of giants, and that enables small teams to execute different things in different eras. If you can't see what the changes are today you would have been no better off in another time.
shadowgovt · 15h ago
There are, however, such things as breakthrough eras and consolidation / comprehension eras.
Physics hasn't been the same since Einstein's era. While breakthroughs have happened, the fundamental reframing of the way we comprehend the world that happened with the one-two punch of the theories of relativity and the experimental evidence for the quantum model have patterned the world in which we now live, but understanding that pattern is the new work.
Similarly, I think a good case can be made that the one-two punch of the implementation of the Internet as a fabric and the web as a killer app is now finished work. While the remaining work is real, valid, and valuable, it is of different kind to the creation of the new pattern; consolidation and comprehension of the pattern is the work of the day, and that's not nearly as glamorous, sexy, or profitable (to reputation or pocketbook).
It's fine for there to be eras of great opportunity and eras of not, so long as we respect which we're in.
(Google is great as a case-study for this concept. The circumstances that birthed Google are now actively suppressed in the ecosystem... Mostly by Google. The positive feedback loop of great-search-breeds-great-search-data that birthed Google doesn't leave room for multiple Googles because human attention and time is finite; this is evidenced by Bing being unable to draw users despite huge monetary investment and just as much technical competence. But they can't draw the users because they aren't already better than Google.
As consequence, two guys in their garage can make something but it won't be a Google-scale search engine. Meanwhile, the small, scrappy search engine is now a huge behemoth with 8.5 billion daily searches, and that amount of real human contact implies real human responsibility... if Google goes offline, people will literally die from lack of access to information, so they can't take the kind of risks they used to be able to.
Young systems have different features than old systems. Young ten-person companies have different behavior than old 100,000-person Fortune 500s. Young people have different wants and capabilities than older people. Making the transition is key. Failure to make the transition causes pain not only to the one failing but to the ones interacting with them).
systemstops · 13h ago
"If these are the conditions under which passionate creative problem solving thrives, then of course we must recover them to make software great again. But they are not."
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously those conditions lead to incredible thriving in the past. This guy is basically arguing that because it doesn't work now (in a super diverse globalized world) that it never actually worked.
These are the same kind of "they just got lucky" arguments I see constantly to downplay the achievements of any specific group of people.
munificent · 12h ago
There is an infinitely long list of things that were part of the environment when that kind of passionate creative problem solving in software was thriving.
What the author is saying is that not all of those properties were causative to make software great again.
Do we need people to have enough of a safety net to take risks with entrepreneurship? Yes. Do we need enough regulation to prevent entrenched companies from using regulatory capture to stifle competition while having little enough regulation that small companies can spin up and be nimble? Yes.
Do we need to be listening to N'Sync, wearing JNCOs, watching Beavis and Butthead, and drinking Crystal Pepsi? Probably not. Those were in the air, but not causative.
And, certainly, I see little evidence to support the implicit claim in "anti-woke" that somehow sexism, homophobia, and racism were causative factors that enabled entrepreneurialism to thrive a few decades ago.
systemstops · 8h ago
People still argue what things made a small city state (Athens) suddenly become the cornerstone of western civilization. That fact is that we have these explosions of human potential where certain groups of people in certain environments make massive leaps, and we don't what the magic sauce is. It's great when it happens, but It's foolish to think that we can somehow socially engineer the same results through brute force, which is the problem with DEI thinking. That is also why so many companies are silently ditching those policies.
munificent · 8h ago
DEI is not about brute forcing an environment for success, at all. That's not the goal even a little bit.
DEI is about recognizing that our culture has placed some people at a disadvantage by virtue of properties they have no control over and attempting to remedy that imbalance.
systemstops · 5h ago
Based on the theory that gaps between groups are caused by systemic factors. The gaps exist, so an explanation and fix is needed, which is morally commendable. The problem is that the theory is far too overconfident and completely ignores the fact that the gaps also show up in cognitive testing.
munificent · 5h ago
The foundational document of our nation's government literally treats Native Americans as non-people and slaves (who were overwhelmingly of African descent) as 3/5 of a person.
The majority of Black people in the US are literally descended from people who were brought here as slaves. Half of the country was so attached to the idea of being able to own Black people and treat them as property that they started a civil war to hold onto it.
This is the country that was founded on enslaved Black people, created the Trail of Tears, and placed Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.
It shouldn't be very hard to figure out an explanation for why certain races in the US have historically been at a disadvantage.
PaulHoule · 15h ago
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.
MeetingsBrowser · 15h ago
Both of the women mentioned have been accused of creating the type of environment mentioned in this blog post.
I won't disagree. I'd say that gendered narratives such as "it would be better if women ran things" or "human progress depends on masculine energy" are not helpful and frequently pernicious.
alchemyzach · 15h ago
I agree with you in spirit but naming women who were appointed positions inside of companies famously founded by men is not helping
argomo · 16h ago
Nice take. Don't let the DEI lead-in sway you from reading this observation about tech moguls trying to reclaim their glory days.
bradford · 14h ago
I agreed with a lot in the article, but I was a bit baffled by the DEI name-drop in the opening.
> "... the guys who had big tech startup successes in the 90s and early aughts think that 'DEI' is the cause of all their problems."
Who is the author referring to here?
(I realize that DEI has been rolled back at some companies, and Zuckerberg in particular has derided it, yet I still feel like the author is referring to some commonly accepted knowledge that I'm out of the loop on.)
dalyons · 11h ago
certainly Andreessen has gone on many public rants about how he thinks dei and other "woke" initiatives are killing american tech innovation. Here's one interview - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-t... About halfway through he really lets it fly
PaulHoule · 16h ago
Eh, the rest of us who are really old are reminiscing the Apple ][ or the PDP-11 or the IBM 360 in the case of a former coworker who is pushing 70.
Funny I am known for being a steady, slow and dependable hand in real life but I team up with youngsters to win hackathons, I drive them nuts with my insistence on minimal and viable but my ability to go up on stage and demo something broken and make it look great carries the weekend -- good 'old fashion startup veteran skills.
jparishy · 15h ago
To me this seems pretty apt, and probably more generalizable. The world is claimed. There is no glory to come from being the first anymore, and that is too big a bummer for a lot of Great Men. I think future progress will be the composition of skills, as mentioned in the article. Or we go backwards and just take things from each other.
these things were done by many people with a great vision for the collective, even if lead by one person. maybe not altruistic things but provided more good than they did hoard value. where is the vision anymore?
arduanika · 12h ago
> The world is claimed.
Isn't it such a strange coincidence that you can imagine all of the things that have ever been invented in the past, and none of the things that will be invented in the future?
alchemyzach · 15h ago
"Or we go backwards and just take things from each other."
This is the DEI movement in a nutshell. A bunch of people driven by fear and anxiety and anger into demanding they be handed things for free instead of working for them. Which is why it's ironic that the article seems to validate the DEI movement
bananalychee · 15h ago
This reminds me of the adage: "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."
There are some insights there, but the article is tainted by envy and self-righteousness.
alganet · 13h ago
It's an inaccurate profiling.
Instead, the gang you describe is aspiring to migrate into well known high visibility disputes such as climate change, gender issues, politics reform. They genuinely think they can help, but the inner principal motive is to be noticed as quickly as possible as "a big stakes kind of person". The more famous and loud the issues they can touch, the better. They will only talk about what appeals to newer generation struggles.
quadhome · 14h ago
Rich men age into conservatism. Tale as old as time.
9rx · 11h ago
The opposite is taking place with a couple of notable old rich men in particular, though. They aren't hesitant of change at all. They want to see everything change and are doing all they can to see that change happens. It is the rest of the world that has become conservative in light of their actions, praying they will stop.
arduanika · 13h ago
"There once was[...] no search engine that could find what you were looking for."
What's old is new again.
arnaudsm · 15h ago
I partly disagree, software still sucks and it's a great time to build.
The #1 OS is slow and crashes all the time. The #1 email client takes 10s to load on my mother's laptop. Most popular products are slow, buggy, filled with spam, & filled with dark patterns. Enshittification won. FAANGs are the new IBM. Let's build better stuff.
swatcoder · 15h ago
Unfortunately, we've reached the point where a generation of new adults take janky technology as normal, both as consumers and producers.
Their entire life was in an environment where nothing was stable or cohesive or efficient and everything was either "free" or rented. They don't recognize what they're missing or why it might matter.
So as consumers they don't know to care when you build better stuff, and as producers they don't even know what it means to build better stuff. And soon these people will graduate into leadership and management with the same understanding of the world.
Surely, there's plenty of opportunity for the rest of us to keep quietly rescuing these janky projects from disaster, shoring them up as their sloppy compromises overtake them, but unfortunately it's very possible that it'll be a long while still before a strong and viable demand for "better stuff" returns.
ryandrake · 15h ago
> Surely, there's plenty of opportunity for the rest of us to keep quietly rescuing these janky projects
Once our generation (the rest of us) is in the ground, there will be nobody alive that even remembers that software can be made with high quality. Nobody who's ever seen really fast performing software, software that didn't crash unexpectedly, software that didn't eat your battery and storage space, software that wasn't exploitable by a 14 year old in their basement, software that didn't leak personal information all over the world. No developers who have counted CPU cycles or took the time and effort to keep a for loop in a single page of memory. Neither developers nor consumers will even believe that software can be great.
pixl97 · 11h ago
>Once our generation (the rest of us) is in the ground, there will be nobody alive that even remembers that software can be made with high quality.
Please tell me, when was this mythical era? Most software has sucked and been balls forever. Windows, why is my screen blue? MacOS, why do I have a bomb icon? Linux/Unix, why don't I have desktop apps and why doesn't my sound card work?
Almost all corporate/sold software is laden with too many untested features, and always has been. Fast purpose built software is uncommon as your average user wants features.
arnaudsm · 15h ago
That's a scary scenario but you may be right
an0malous · 14h ago
The previous startup waves were built on top of expanded Internet access, mobile phones, and virtualization. This allowed low capitalized startups to create 10x better software. What you’re describing is marginally better software, you’re not going to beat Gmail by making it 10s faster. No one really cares about dark patterns and spam.
There will eventually be new waves that create opportunities for startups again, LLMs are like that in some cases, but I’d argue that mobile phones were by far a larger disruptive innovation than LLMs so far.
arnaudsm · 14h ago
You're correctly describing the most common mindset in tech entrepreneurs.
Chasing the last shiny trend instead of caring about quality.
Apple is the best example that doing the opposite can be immensely successful.
an0malous · 13h ago
When Apple was a startup they were riding the personal computing wave, when they created the iPod and iPhone they were no longer a startup. Sure, if you have a billion dollars and thousands of engineers you can create your own waves.
I don’t think that ignoring these foundational innovations or trying to work against trends is generally good advice for startups though, it’s easy to think you’re really clever and smart and different but meanwhile the team that did “Airbnb for dogs” has sold for $1B
arnaudsm · 12h ago
It's probably a combination of both innovation and quality. Respecting your users matters.
tart-lemonade · 14h ago
You'll have a much harder time breaking into the market with things like a new OS because you have so much more ground to cover today than you would had you started back in the 90s. It's not enough to have a half-decent GUI and a web browser: you'll never get any corporate customers without a significant amount of security hardening, and you'll have to have an extremely compelling reason for them to switch even their servers over (which are run by IT people, who are much easier to train on new technologies than the rest of the workforce), much less their desktop fleets.
Consider how many businesses are built around Excel and either cannot re-create their workflows in LibreOffice Calc/Google Sheets or don't see the value proposition in doing so. You can argue till you're blue in the face that business critical processes shouldn't rely on Excel, and you'd be right, but good luck convincing the people who matter most that they need to change something that still works well enough (especially if they're not privy to the behind-the-scenes work required to integrate other systems with Excel). It's not like Excel is the only thing keeping them hooked on Office.
When it comes to other, less ambitious projects, like email software (not even hosting, just an email client; hosting is its own can of worms), you're competing against companies that either give it away for free or include it in a bundle of other applications businesses really want, like O365. I pay for Shortwave because I loved Inbox by Google that much, but it's a very niche product. I doubt the average person loved Inbox enough to trust a third party with their emails so they can get that experience back, much less pay said third party when the Gmail web interface is good enough for most tasks.
There's a reason we can describe companies like MS as being entrenched: there are no real competitors left. Enshittification works because people aren't inclined to switch without significant upsides. If your selling point is not being actively hostile to your users, why should I believe you will resist doing the same when you IPO or get bought out?
whstl · 15h ago
Yeah, the “it was easy back then” sounds bitter and inversely correlates success with problem difficulty.
It is getting a little tiring to hear that building software is a superhuman endeavor and that almost nothing new can be built and nothing can be replaced.
If anything, this attitude plays right into what the people criticized in the article want everyone to think. “Just give up, there won’t ever be another Marc Andreesen or Mark Zuckeberg”
wayeq · 14h ago
> Let's build better stuff.
What usually happens next is that 99% of that "better-ness" value then gets clawed back by the creator and monetized, and then users are left with something roughly comparable to the product it was supposed to supplant. E.g. "we're gaining users left and right, how many ads do you think they will tolerate without abandoning us?"
arnaudsm · 14h ago
It's the pressure of the investors that leads to enshittification. Bootstraped and family businesses are less likely to do it.
riku_iki · 15h ago
> I partly disagree, software still sucks and it's a great time to build.
you can build great software, but the bigger challenge is to defeat network effect of preoccupied/monopolized market.
arnaudsm · 15h ago
I agree, the monopolistic practices are concerning, especially against the open internet.
pimlottc · 13h ago
If you’re talking about open source and the advancement of technology, I agree.
If you’re talking about starting a business, the market has shown that it largely doesn’t care about those things.
HKH2 · 15h ago
It's not clear if you mean #1 in quality or popularity. I'll assume you mean the latter. Is Windows really that unstable?
arnaudsm · 15h ago
I meant popularity. My brand new Win11 laptop freezes or crashes all the time. My relatives laptops too. It's slower every year, even on high-end hardware.
pixl97 · 11h ago
"New" Windows laptops have always crashed unless you carefully purchase your units carefully and generally remove any manufacture trash installed with them. Consumer laptops are especially bad. Meanwhile I've purchased and supported thousands of business grade laptops with a much lower rate of incidents, but they are typically more conservative with the cutting edge hardware and have better bios/uefi support.
voidspark · 15h ago
Maybe a hardware defect.
I’ve been running windows 11 on a couple of pcs for at least a year and never seen it crash once.
Recommend using an AME Wizard playbook to decrapify it
"AME 11
Official Ameliorated Playbook for Windows 11. Cutting the tumor out of your OS."
hx8 · 15h ago
If enshittification can be avoided, why aren't we seeing a wave of no dark patterns software crushing it?
Enshittification is mostly just the process of not running on VC Capital and generating sustainable revenue sources.
arnaudsm · 15h ago
Users have inertia, it takes years for superior products to win.
VC capital is useful for speed & innovation, but most of the time leads to bloat & rent-seeking. Does DocuSign need 7,000 employees? My journey of bootstrapped entrepreneurship has been much more sustainable and respectful to my users.
hx8 · 15h ago
I think if superior products always win then we wouldn't have so many BigCo Enshittified products that have been terrible for 15+ years.
arnaudsm · 15h ago
Schumpeter's cycle of destructive creation usually takes 15 years in software.
IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook. They were all the cool underdogs for a decade, then slowly decline in quality.
ivape · 15h ago
I am kind of with you, I do think the notion of a lone developer not collaborating is going to be the norm with AI. We just don't need to collaborate anymore.
arnaudsm · 15h ago
Good question, AI coding is currently limited by how fast you can review it. I still see Gemini 2.5 Pro output insane vulnerabilities once in a while.
You may get a 2x speedup, but humans are still the bottleneck.
dsign · 15h ago
Without any hard data about anything, this is just a speculative rant. Go and read my books if you want one of those. But I do agree on one thing: we are lacking a new frontier, a meaningful one. My hope for the years I have left is to see one.
memhole · 15h ago
This is part of what I feel keeps driving AI/LLMs. The hope that there’s a new frontier to cash in on.
layer8 · 12h ago
If cashing in on is the primary motivation, then it’s all meaningless anyway.
munificent · 12h ago
And before that, crypto.
9rx · 15h ago
There are plenty of frontiers to explore. What we lack is people crazy enough to try.
But that always happens when times are good. Crazy emerges out of desperation.
languagehacker · 15h ago
Insightful words from the Coldplay guy.
In all seriousness, there is definitely the comfortable lie of nostalgia playing into a lot of the dudes approaching (or squarely in) middle age as far as tech goes.
It's truly a bummer that they're expressing the internalization of the wrong lessons. Instead of standing up against decades of enshittification, they're complaining about having to say "allowlist" instead of "blacklist", and still erroneously believing that the right hackathon will solve their company's existential problems.
I got the best monkeys and the best typewriters, so if I let them do what they want in this "meritocracy" I created, it will definitely make the next Hamlet, right?
jlos · 15h ago
Why is James Damore listed alongside Andreesen and Zuckerberg? Andreesen and Zuckerberg have hundreds of billions at their disposal and Damore was an employee fired for giving feedback on a company diversity program.
I mean I know why, but the antipathy underlying the article undermines an otherwise interesting point.
Johanx64 · 12h ago
Because the author can't help himself. Obviously. These guys always let their convictions screech out.
The opening statement makes it sound like it's only the wealthy "tech-bros" that are rubbed the wrong way by DEI.
(in my recollection of it, the wealthy techbros were the first ones on the uptake of the whole DEI swindle. It's just that it's not the direction the wind blows these days)
chaseadam17 · 15h ago
I imagine what these guys miss is the freedom of obscurity. Tech has gone from being ignored to being ridiculed and regulated. Like a company getting more bureaucratic as it scales, it makes sense to professionalize a sector as its influence grows. The problem is that professionalization is often the enemy of innovation. If you care about having the freedom to innovate, this leaves you with three options: be the angry old man yelling at the clouds, constructively try to improve the process of professionalization from within or quietly go innovate elsewhere. The problem with the last option is that there aren’t too many places left to go and it’s hard to start over, which is why I think Elon and others take to some combination of the first two.
agentultra · 15h ago
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...
chaseadam17 · 15h ago
I disagree. I believe we’ve had far less progress in real world engineering in the past 50 years than the 50+ prior.
spencerflem · 15h ago
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.
Lithium-ion batteries didn't practically exist in 1975.
Modern blue LEDs (and thus white LEDs) didn't exist until 1990.
The entire personal computing industry. The Internet. Search engines. LLMs. Cellular networks. Neodymium magnets. Reusable orbital launch vehicles. Genetically modified crops. mRNA vaccines. CRISPR.
agentultra · 13h ago
It's quite the feat that capital holders have pulled off with software, being able to run amok in the public sphere wrecking anything they want with little over-sight or regulation.
... or cough "innovation"
treis · 15h ago
I don't think they miss anything. These guys are at the apex of their power and are shaping the world at just about the highest level. This all seems like copium to explain why they're doing stuff the author doesn't like.
ChrisMarshallNY · 13h ago
> The hackathon is the proof that people believe this can work, and it is the proof that it doesn't.
A good TL;DR for the essay.
hackrmn · 15h ago
Ironically, perhaps, I just read the article while taking a micro-break from writing a triangle rasterizer (aliased, aka pixel-art / retro) in WebAssembly. It'll probably feature rendering performance orders of magnitude slower than a graphics card from 20 years ago, and I am well aware of it but the truth is I am not doing it because I am still nurturing a dream of becoming one of the rich rock stars of IT from an era that passed me by those same 20 years ago. No, it's just that I find it pleasurable to do these things, exactly because I don't need to stay competitive doing it -- well, not against hordes of very capable software engineers churning all kind of useful _valuable_ systems. Not the least because I am doing the things I do like the above, during my spare time, and I have reasons to believe there's plenty need for the artistic pet projects done in spare time on intake of inspiration.
So yeah, just reminding everyone that not everything is about fierce competition -- if artists can chain smoke and drink their life through ups and downs of patronage, so can everyone else.
Noone says we should stop being responsible, but all the responsibility and adulting without play is much, much worse, in my opinion, than the alternative. It just so happens that I relax writing code.
I am still writing other things that have long been invented, and they consistently give me inspiration.
Not sure if I missed the point of the article, but I react to what I read from it, after all.
renewiltord · 15h ago
When did this style of psychoanalysis become popular? Everyone now uses these terms and instead of coming off like an informed take it just sounds like "I'm just trying to insult other people". At some point, the online forum take of "all the successful guys are sad and I'm not as successful because I'm well-adjusted" has gotten boring. I get that people want to feel better about their lives but this is just embarrassing.
MeetingsBrowser · 15h ago
This comment kind of comes off as "I'm just trying to insult other people".
renewiltord · 14h ago
Hmm, fair enough. I was trying to insult the observed behaviour whereas he was trying to insult the implied behaviour and I would expect them to be different (because the latter is guesswork) but I suppose it seems the same way to you. Ah well.
pessimizer · 15h ago
It's weird how the first sentence promises that we'll learn the answer to why successful tech people blame DEI for something, and then never mentions DEI again.
Being anti-"DEI" is a trendy hobby for most, a serious concern for others, but for "Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, and James Damore" it's literally the default, because DEI is a patchwork of inconsistent restrictions of various and often dubious authority placed on people who hire. It's against them, of course they're against it. They're against workers and labor rights in general, just like most owners.
You might as well say that oil companies are against environmental policies because the world has changed and they can no longer do what they used to do, and maybe they just got lucky anyway... or instead assume that most people are against regulations that restrict them from doing things that they might want to do.
edit: I suspect this might be a covert explanation about why this particular technologist is less enamored by the future possibilities of their chosen career than they were when they started it, just (for some reason) projected onto celebrities who have already been massively successful.
munificent · 15h ago
I believe there is an implicit answer here, but I agree that the author didn't tie the threads together as clearly as they could have.
What they are saying is that tech moguls have a period in their life where they felt they were at their best, living their glory days. They are latching on to and trying to recreate that environment, including superficial properties that environment had that don't actually have anything to do with why it was such a formative period for them.
One attribute of programming back in the 90s is... it was mostly non-poor white guys.
Now, obviously anyone with a certain level of maturity and wisdom would realize that the demographic monoculture of the 90s was an effect of the fact that computers were still relatively rare and expensive in the 80s, and those most people who had access to them back them came from a certain level of privilege. Being wealthy, white, and male all increased the odds that you were able to spend your endless summers PEEKing and POKing on an Apple IIe while other less fortunate people didn't have a computer or had to work.
Being wealthy, white, and male didn't cause people to be better hackers. Having economic stability is what gave people the freedom to become better hackers. It's just that that level of economic stability has historically not at all been uniformly distributed across people in the US. Thus anti-DEI measures are counterproductive. Going forward, society has a moral and rational incentive to extend that opportunity to as many people as possible, regardless of their anatomy or skin color because that's how society gets the most out of all of its members.
geephroh · 15h ago
I wish I could have said it as well as you have here.
badpun · 14h ago
> Being wealthy, white, and male all increased the odds that you were able to spend your endless summers PEEKing and POKing on an Apple IIe while other less fortunate people didn't have a computer or had to work.
How do you figure being male help one's chances with that?
munificent · 13h ago
I think it's a combination of a few factors:
* Girls are often put under more social obligations than boys. Look around and you'll find lots of stories where girls are expected to help out with the housework while their brothers are given free reign to do what they feel like.
* I deeply believe that representation matters. Many girls probably never even considered that computers were a thing they might enjoy because they never saw other girls being into it.
* This less true today, but there has historically been a lot of pressure on girls and boys to do gendered activities, and tech was male coded. Parents would tell their daughters to play with dolls, not videogames. (And videogames are very often the pathway into programming.) Peers would make fun of girls that were interested in nerd stuff.
* For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, male nerd culture has often been outright hostile to females entering the space. Girls trying to join programming clubs, take CS classes, etc. would frequently get harassed by guys. (You can look at Gamergate as an extreme example of this.)
Meanwhile, male found it easy to think of being into computers because almost everyone you saw using a computer was a male like them. They were given ample free time, and faced few headwinds when expressing an interest in tech.
yowlingcat · 11h ago
You can make a critique of the flimsier parts of anti-DEI fashions with substance but I don't think this is one of them. There are so many questionable assumptions and strawmen layered into the end conclusion that it's hard to tell whether the objection is with morality or taste.
For example:
- Responsible people have responsibilities -- what is this tautology supposed to mean? That they can no longer value vitality or views on what style of life makes it worth living?
- The internet is no longer the world's great frontier -- according to whom? It is certainly the case that the old frontiers of the internet have either imploded or been thoroughly domesticated, but the internet is now thousands or millions of times larger than in its early days, so it's hard to say that frontiers (plural) are gone rather than one is simply not trying hard enough to find them.
- Chance is a great factor in success - a belief to be sure but not an observation; chance is often a factor in success, but it's not often a factor in downward mobility (which is extraordinarily common across the classes). It's easy to blame chance for negative outcomes, but it's hard to fully test and regularly exercise (or gradually expand) the limits of what is in one's control.
- Long gone are the days of the solo "great mover" - how does this couch with solopreneurs vibe coding their way with gen AI to large independent businesses and lean organizations that have very quickly built the highest revenue/employee at the highest growth rates in history? If anything, individuals are inordinately empowered with tools today that didn't actually exist in usable form 3-6 months ago nevermind a year ago.
For a piece of writing that talks so confidently about how stuck in the past others are, it's hard not to question whether the author themself is stuck in the past in some way.
dvfjsdhgfv · 14h ago
It loosely reminds me of the move "The World's End".
danielovichdk · 14h ago
Great piece of writing. Thank you.
ilrwbwrkhv · 15h ago
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 but that needs to come from the young ones.
Stop doing leetcode. Go back to original engineering. Stop using JavaScript. Build software like Winamp.
monknomo · 15h ago
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 have sort of come to that believe anti-trust may be the solution to finding more successes and enabling better products
ryandrake · 15h ago
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.
cruzcampo · 16h ago
It really does feel like most tech leaders are having an internal struggle that they externalize and make all of our problems.
Have you seen Musks Twitter timeline? That guy is so chronically online and desperate to be liked that it's just sad. How can you be the richest man in the world and yet so deeply pathetic?
Same with Zuck's attempt at being "cool" now and don't even get me started on Benioff's whole weird "Aloha" thing.
Deeply insecure, unhappy people, despite having all the wealth in the world. And they're gonna make sure all of us are just as unhappy, because if they can't buy happiness, why should anyone else have it?
cogman10 · 16h ago
My theory is that it's the absurd wealth in the first place that makes these people completely unhinged.
Imagine you are in a situation where nobody you interact with will ever tell you something you don't want to hear. Everyone tries their best to only appease you and tell you that you are the best most brightest person. These people also all depend on your money for their own aspirations (that mysteriously never pan out).
It's basically the same thing that happens to dictators. They become unhinged. Their craziest ideas receive no pushback so they go ahead and implement every whim.
What they all need are good real friends, yet that's the one thing that's impossible for them to gain if they didn't already have it before they became rich.
And they are likely even aware of this dynamic which is why they view everyone in the world as being just in it for the money. So why not do everything in your power to horde more since that's what everyone else you interact with is doing?
bradleyjg · 15h ago
What they all need are good real friends, yet that's the one thing that's impossible for them to gain if they didn't already have it before they became rich.
Even that isn’t a guarantee because friend dynamics often change with relative wealth disparities.
You probably need friends that are also very rich.
cogman10 · 15h ago
> Even that isn’t a guarantee because friend dynamics often change with relative wealth disparities.
> You probably need friends that are also very rich.
I don't disagree.
There's a Wendover youtube I recently watched that's tangentially about this [1]. Why do all the rich people have Yachts? His contention it's not because they like having big boats but rather because every other rich person does and that is your real social circle. If you don't fit in with them, you'll basically be friendless.
That also goes into why all rich people end up with private jets, because to interact with your social circle you basically have a packed calendar flying across the globe for rich people social events.
However, it's an insular group of people all subject to the same problem of generally being surrounded by yesmen. Further, it's not like these rich people aren't also trying to shmooze each other. Their businesses are still trying to make money and they often need to work with one another. So hard for these people to actually be friends.
> You probably need friends that are also very rich.
So they’re left to just chase whose partner they can snag or whose yacht is bigger? Sounds delightful. You’d think therapy would be more capital efficient. The hedonic arena is a trap for the emotionally unsound and perpetually unfulfilled.
jrowen · 16h ago
Insecurity is often (always?) the driver of achievement. Some sort of deep-seated pathology is basically required to build the empires they have.
Ericson2314 · 16h ago
I'm not sure that's true, but even if it is, it is a sort of bipolar mix insecurity with hope and excitement.
The mid-life crisis insecurity doesn't have the hope and the rush in the same way. It has a lot more dread and angst.
jrowen · 4h ago
The realization that you achieved as much as one could hope to achieve and you still didn't find contentment.
That's honestly, to me, the saddest thing about the mega-rich. They don't know when, or how, to stop. There's no goal state where they can say "ok I made it, I can turn it off and enjoy life now, or at least stop fighting tooth and nail to hoard even more bigger numbers."
henry2023 · 15h ago
Competition, not insecurity drives achievement and people who are very competitive in one skill usually will lack a ton in most other skills.
mchlbnnn · 15h ago
For individuals, though, might competitiveness often be driven by insecurity, and the point stands?
whatnow37373 · 15h ago
Point is that competition is fueled by insecurity. If you are happy, truly content, with yourself you will find competing extraordinarily tiresome and unnecessary. Not saying it’s good for society by the way. I think our civilization needs the pathologically insecure to be disruptive and create room for innovation. Related traits are narcissism and psychopathy. Painful, but useful, in small doses.
Musk, Altman, Bezos they are basically caricatures.
swatcoder · 15h ago
You're right about the individuals you're calling out, as well as some others, but I don't think it's fair to say "most" tech leaders.
It's just a few of the most troubled celebrity wealth-addicts making public the inherent ego-fragility that tends to drive addiction in the first place.
Meanwhile, there's still sooo many other tech leaders just trying to develop whatever vision they have for their business, industry, career, etc
Not all tech or business leaders are addicts, but some are, and as a society we tend to enable and even celebrate their addiction for whatever reason. Because of that, and because of power that comes with wealth, some of them wreak havoc as they use that power to manifest their very deep troubles in the public sphere.
And it's not a new phenemonom, nor particular to the tech industry. You can see it happen again and again and again throughout history.
drewcoo · 15h ago
> It really does feel like most tech leaders are having an internal struggle that they externalize and make all of our problems.
A lot of times people create problems and can't take responsibility for their own actions, so they blame externalities. That's what the author was saying about blaming DEI.
KerrAvon · 15h ago
> Benioff's whole weird "Aloha" thing
I'll defend Benioff here, a little. The O'hana thing isn't a new, desperate COVID-fried-divorced-billionaire invention; it dates, I believe, from the establishment of Salesforce, decades ago. I think it was sincere at the time.
> As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park.
Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.
He wasn't walking away from anything. He would have been fine if it didn't work.
The reality is he had a safety net to fall back on. 99% of people do not.
I suppose it shouldn't be terribly surprising as being successful requires hard work & a good idea. But it REALLY REALLY HELPS to also have a risk appetite, capital, and connections.. which are what coming from even moderate wealth provides.
I graduated in 2008, and I watched classmates make the 'insane' decision to risk it all and go off and try to found startups. Inevitably, some failed, but to my shock it wasn't the end of the world for them? In one case the 'bank of mom and dad' paid rent until they got back on their feet, and in the other, they moved into an ADU in their parent's back yard.
That's when it hit me that those folks took risks because they could afford to. I was worried about winding up sleeping under a bridge. That concern was as foreign to them as the thought of having a safety net to fall back on was to me.
"Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.
Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Binladin_Group
For years, Amazon enabled everybody to bypass sales tax which gave Amazon a 4-8% advantage on books over brick and mortar that had to pay both rent and sales tax.
Quite a few of the "successful" tech companies followed this pattern: Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, etc. all engaged in blatantly illegal behavior to become big.
The 5-4 majority in 2018 included two justices who were part of the unanimous holding in 1992 (Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas), voting to overturn their own decision from a quarter century before.
If you or I aided and abetted widespread tax evasion, we would get our asses handed to us in court.
See also: PayPal, OpenAI, ...
In 1992, SCOTUS ruled in Quill vs. North Dakota[0] that a business must have a "nexus" in a particular state to be required to collect sales taxes. I'd note that Amazon was founded in 1994.
And so, yes Amazon did have an advantage WRT sales taxes. But it wasn't, as you said, "outright illegal" until 2018 with SCOTUS' ruling in South Dakota vs. Wayfair Inc.[1] At which time, IIRC, Amazon continued collecting sales taxes that it had already been collecting in many states, as already it had nexuses (warehouses, distribution centers, etc.) in many places.
I'd note that I'm not "defending" Amazon here. They do plenty of shady stuff WRT pricing, as well as abusing their employees, suppliers and third-party sellers.
Why don't we take them to task for that stuff instead of making stuff up? Just sayin'
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quill_Corp._v._North_Dakota
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Dakota_v._Wayfair%2C_Inc.
People will talk about the $300k loan Bezos started with and think "boy golly, with 300 THOUSAND dollars, I could do anything!" meanwhile millions of people with much more than that fritter it away on nothing, even if they are trying not to. It takes something more to be Bezos.
Whereas the proverbial Bezos will think about the grit and determination it took to march for decades through treacherous financial and political swamps, and think "would I have let a lack of an initial 300k stop me from even starting? Would I have failed to secure the capital and cooperation without that seed? Given the heroics I've pulled over the years? Hell no, that wouldn't have stopped me."
But here's the part that most people misunderstand. The 300k is a small advantage, it might have made a difference, and some cases might make THE difference, but it's only the most concrete, obvious advantage. The real thing is like this:
In my earliest memories I was pretty poor, but also in those memories both my parents were going to university, while my dad was packing fiberglass at a factory. Then they graduated and he got a job and we became suburban middle class, my dad staying at his big corporation for the rest of his life, while my mom more or less stayed at home although she went back to school and ended up about half way through a PhD program. I would think about what career I wanted as a child, and what school I might go to, that sort of thing.
Fast forward to my first wife who I met when I was 17. She is self described "british ghetto trash," and she emigrated because she couldn't escape her accent, in a phrase. She taught me what I didn't know about privilege, at a time before that was a term anyone was using for this purpose. The reality she knew in the council housing (ie projects) where she grew up was that her dad was a scam artist flake who floated in and out of her life without regard for the many promises he made, and whenever he pulled off a big one he'd show up and splash a little cash around before running off again. He was far from ashamed, he was a "2 types of people in this world!" type scammer. Her mom wasn't much better, basically scamming the government for benefits, working whatever angle she could but never actually "working working."
My ex never thought about careers or schools or anything. She thought about what scam she could pull to make it to next month. It was a weird series of events that brought her across the pond, and into university and beyond.
That's what Bezos had that my ex didn't have. He thought he belonged inside society, he thought he could do things and that people would let him. He thought that so very much that never even had to think it consciously. The same for her but opposite, the idea of participating in society at all, never mind changing it was utterly foreign to her experience.
I think it was crushingly more important than the 300k in terms of pivotal advantages. It sucks to start with bad cards, but it's much tougher to not be in the game in the first place.
I’ve seen it in startups too. Some founders take bold risks because they know, consciously or not, that if it doesn’t work out, they’ll be fine. Others carry the weight of “I can’t afford to screw this up,” and that changes how they operate. Even if they’re equally capable, the emotional cost of risk is just higher when you don’t have that built-in safety net.
And from the outside, those differences are invisible. Both people might succeed, but one was playing on easy mode and didn’t know it. The other had to brute-force their way through every step. That gap is real, and we don’t talk about it enough.
Founders that have a safety net have less drive and motivation to give it their all, because they have a safety net. They simply just don't have the same pressure to not fail, because if they do - no biggie.
The founder with no safety net, no real backup, needs to give it his all, because he's doomed if his idea doesn't work out.
Upbringing, background, mindset, social safety nets (eg knowing that if you fail, you’ll still be fine) — these things are huge and make a huge difference.
But 300k then is about 650k today, and just the time this would buy me alone would mean I’d be able to dedicate my full energy to a few projects that, while I don’t think could ever reach the scale of Amazon, would at least have the potential to make a reasonable return on that initial investment. The 300k is a huge boost that a lot of people don’t have access to.
But you’re absolutely right. If you’re not in the game at all, it’s very difficult to get in, and those other non-financial benefits are a big deal.
This is such a huge part of it. Our upbringing gives us our culture and the set of ideas and expectations that form our "default mode" thinking.
If your default mode assumption is that you are capable and have agency, that investing in a long-term project will reliably produce long-term value, and that risks are often worth taking, you are set up to try to build something amazing.
But if your default mode is that you are a pawn at the whims of other people, that whatever you try to build can be easily swept away by chance or bad actors, and that you've got no room to fail, then at best you'll just try to eke out a stable existence with as little risk taking as possible.
Some people do have agency to act, and the assurance that their actions will produce value, and they are in fact not in catastrophic danger. And some people really do not have agency, they are pawns largely under the control of others, and live on a knife's edge where everything they have might be swept away by things entirely outside of their control. These realities shape whether it is even possible to take the risks that are necessary to reach success.
This is a good point and, in the case of successful startup entrepreneurs, it may not rely solely on how much society grants or denies that belonging. Entrepreneurs tend toward a kind of selective irrationality in how they see themselves and in how they think others see them. Steve Jobs was always the first victim and/or beneficiary of his own reality distortion field. Internally, this lack of self-awareness would tend to help one ignore some of the emotional downsides of belonging being denied and externally to seize more belonging than is being granted - just through sheer chutzpah.
I've heard it said that many successful startup entrepreneurs feel all the insecurity of 'imposter syndrome' without processing any of the 'imposter' part. They tend to think they belong even when they objectively don't. While irrational, annoying and unhealthy, it's hard to imagine this doesn't have some advantages too.
And now you have Silicon Valley "leaders" looking to tear down the public institutions that seeded the place.
https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatom...
"The research described here was conducted as part of the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project, supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-94 11306. Funding for this cooperative agreement is also provided by DARPA and NASA, and by Interval Research, and the industrial partners of the Stanford Digital Libraries Project."
- brave
- prepared
- connected to vast sums of easily-accessed loaner money
Not necessarily equal measures to all three.
Oh you need advice from a $10,000 a day law firm for a difficult business situation? My dads friend John works at "prestigious law-firm" I'll get him to get us some feedback on the situation.
In the case of law at least, it is true you can no side-step the 10k fee for a -consultancy- but lawyers and doctors will remain a human guarded work for long imho, at least in the sign-off phase, even if they use these tools to amplify their work
Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege.
Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk.
My parents prioritized one single thing above all others. Land. They bought land. Remote land, useless land, land wherever it was cheap.
They could have fixed the car, but instead bought an acre of land. We would go 100 miles from the nearest town to eke out a parcel of land in some Godforsaken place I haven’t been to since.
Because of that, and the skills I learned because I had to do everything myself, I have never had to pay rent. Because I knew how to live without luxury, I built a cabin when I was 16 on my parent’s land with salvaged lumber and fixtures and wire and things I got from demolishing houses. I raised three children in various iterations of that eventually 600 square foot house.
By that time I was successful in infotech, so we bought and rebuilt (ourselves) a 63 foot steel schooner and finished raising our children at many ports in the world, so that they would grow up with the same privilege of mind, but with broader horizons.
But I never forgot land. Land, not a house, land . Land is the key. Just a couple hundred square meters is fine.
You can still do exactly what I did today. You can buy land cheaply in many places in the world, including the USA. I just bought a half acre in Montana for $1200, with road access. (I sometimes buy cheap land sight unseen halfway across the world when drunk and bored at 3am, the results are kinda hit and miss, but it makes for a good excuse to travel to see what happens) On eBay there are many deals owner financed with nominal or zero down, with payments from 50 to a few hundred dollars a month.
You can still tear down old structures for people and get building supplies. You can get furniture and appliances curbside or on Craigslist, etc. I don’t need to, but I sometimes still do.
Every opportunity I took advantage of is still practical today. You can still buy land on fast food wages, you just won’t be able to live near a big city while you do it. That also was impossible in my youth. The sacrifices were substantial, the discomfort at times severe.
Nothing has changed except the expectations that people have about life and what they can or cannot do.
I was born into privilege for sure, but it was a privilege of a culture of independence and a deep understanding of the value of owning outright a place to stand.
Except those born into poverty in a truly hopeless place in the world, we suffer mostly from our attitudes and lack of knowledge, and belief in our ability to do reasonable things that other people don’t believe we can do, because they are not willing to.
I have a lot of questions... who sells plots of land for that little money? Are there tax implications? Does anyone ever get on your case for upkeep?
You really should write a blog post. It definitely would hit the front page.
Edit
Apparently: many people! I just did a web search. Little plots of land are much cheaper than I expectedA few places I really like and have given to my kids or other family members for a second home spot or recreational getaway.
Two are located in places that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to live in full time, I let the neighbors “rent” them (for a a few pesos a year) to use for farming or whatever. One never knows how the world will shape up, maybe they come in handy. If not, maybe a grandkid can use it.
Others I have undoubtedly forgotten about and have been confiscated for taxes, I suppose.
The value I have seen generated for others by my reckless dalliances are more than worth the cost. I mean, one of the best ones only cost $300.
I could easily spend that on a night out, and no way that is going to fundamentally improve anyone’s life. It’s like gambling for the chance to make someone’s life better.
I have also been known to midnight purchase sailboats in places I want to visit. Sometimes you can get great deals on boats that the owners have left behind. Usually I’ll go there and tinker for a few weeks, enjoying myself and sailor culture, take it out sailing until I want to go home, then sell it for (usually) much more than I paid and I get a free vacation.
A few years ago I bought a 32’ roberts (comfortable, but a bit of a pig in chop) near San Fransisco. She was $900 with a great slip and a flaky outboard. I spent a week getting her in shape, 500 dollars on a one-season racing sail and another 300 getting it recut, bought a few sandbags because she seemed a bit tender with the heavy pilot house, and sailed around the canals for a few days, then spent a week cruising the bay. After that, I spent a few days at the municipal dock, 100 feet from million dollar condos in a fantastic part of town.
Great times and great street culture back then. I hear it has kinda gone downhill?
Anyway, I used it for a “vacation home” for a few years and sold her at a fair but beneficial price.
I’m a little more settled down now, raising a new batch of kids…but if there’s a secret to life, it’s to own land outright, and avoid debt at all cost. Buy it when you’ve earned it. Until then, buy what you can afford to own, where you can afford to live. The compromises you have to make will pay excellent dividends. /grandpa rant
I grew up with a mentality of "you can't do that, there's a rule against that" and had to slowly break out of it as much as I could. Just knowing that there's people like you out there makes me happy. I applaud your freedom.
No matter how wealthy or poor your Western European upbringing may have been, being saddled with that worldview is, IMHO, the worst kind of disadvantage someone in otherwise fairly good circumstances can have because it's baked into your skull and how you see everything. I hope you've been able to overcome it.
I've been looking for a while for a few acres of unimproved/secluded/wooded land within an hour or two drive away from me here in Kansas, mostly just for bushcrafting or tooling around. The only place I really know to check is Zillow, and while there are a few listings in my distance range, they're typically upwards of $10k/acre. I just checked ebay and saw parcels priced much closer to what I'd expect for unimproved land out in the middle of nowhere, but I couldn't find any in my middle of nowhere, just several states away.
I'm pretty sure there's tons of completely unused land all over the place here that people would be willing to get rid of for cheap, but I have no idea how to find those people. I've considered just going to every small town within an hour of me and posting a "will buy" ad on whatever bulletin boards I'm allowed to post stuff on, but for now I'm still holding out hope that there's a better way. Tips?
Use q public, or whatever is in your area and search for land recently acquired by an estate. Pretty much that means the owner died, there was no clear line of inheritance do typically a distant relative or random person is selling the estate. Try to buy it.
The other is legal notices and government bid sites. You can buy tax owed land, laws vary by state.
It’s pretty much all eBay for me or local equivalents in other countries. So many rabbit holes.
That's your main privilege...
Those things are achievable IF you are willing to give up luxuries that you may see as essential. (the kind of job you want, comfort, etc). But if you are willing to forgo those things for a few years , you can build a resource base so that you will never have to be worried about those things ever again in your life. You will always have a fallback.
The main thing you get from having a "place", even if you don't live there, but a place... is the ability to tolerate risk. Without risk tolerance, there are very few ways forward where you do not exist at the charity of someone or something you cannot control - a life where inherently you are forced to work for priorities that are not your own, and be placated by trappings of wealth that you do not really have.
All part of my strategy of success through lowered expectations. Im finding that this decade has made me an accidental optimist lol, but these days I can pontificate well insulated from the outcome.
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)
My grandparents, First generation immigrants without a college degree bought a beautiful single family house in 1960s Northern California on a working class salary. In fact they lived across the street from George Lucas (My grandmother knew his parents). They too, were a completely average, middle class family. Not any different from Steve Jobs or the hundreds of other success stories.
Over the course of the 80s, 90s, and 00s, the same city and cities like it became notorious for crime and gang violence, homes became unaffordable, and the conditions that allowed someone to "start a company out of a garage" was wiped out as society stratified into the super rich and the super poor. Which should serve as a cautionary tale of any place that is thinking of emulating the California success story.
People like to say that success is right time, right place, but that's not all there is to it. You also need sufficient resources to take advantage of opportunity
Sitting on a gold mine does not matter if you don't have a shovel
Having a shovel doesn't matter if you don't know where to dig
And you need to have enough time ('runway' in startup speak) to actually try digging for gold in the first place
1: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/the-wireless/373065/the-pencilswo...
Few would suggest anyone having time, a place, necessities covered well enough, and few distractions is going to be ensured success.
But with those things, someone who also has ideas, insights, a strong work ethic (or often much better, a strong natural enthusiasm for something useful) has much better chances.
I do believe you need someone to have your back for the basics, but there's much more to it.
Anyone can start a billion dollar business. Anyone who does so is probably extremely smart and extremely hard working. There are some very smart, hard working folks for whom the path to starting a company is harder than for others.
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 very large common group they belonged to.
Survivorship bias that results from looking back at the winners. If we asked 1000 people to flip a coin 10 times, probability says one will end up flipping heads 10 times in a row. Looking only backwards after the fact, what did he do different? Is he just a better coin flipper?
There is likely a person in their 20s right now who in 40 years we will look back on because they founded the world's first $100T company. Who is it? If we knew it was deterministic and that some "thing they did" caused success, we would all just do that thing.
Then many who do get that chance choose not to, they choose a less risky path
It is very few people who even can attempt to flip the coin ten times
And "the 1%" can flip it as many times as they want until it lands on heads 10 times in a row
Most people are never even given an at-bat. They're born without money/opportunity (on the bench), and they will have to stay on the bench for life.
Some working / middle class people get one or two at-bats. They swing and maybe hit the home run, but maybe instead have a safe base hit or they strike out. That was their chance. Afterwards they're out of money/opportunity.
The top 0.1% or so get as many at-bats as they want. Their parents own the team and the ballpark so they just keep swinging until they get their home run, and then spend the rest of the game talking about how life is a meritocracy, and you succeed by being the best.
Computers, and knowledge in general, is the the most accessible it’s ever been, in the history of mankind.
So you’re claiming that the trillions of dollars that have been spent trying to uplift the youth of yesteryear were a complete an utter waste?
Or has social media been the somma Huxley was talking about all along?
Nothing stops anyone from reading and learning, having hope for the future, and pursuing it. WhatsApp had a staff of like 15-25 people. Linux wa started by some dork with an idea and a lot of time.
Treating the world like victims that need protecting isn’t the play.
Well, take a look around?
The youth cannot buy homes. They aren't starting families. The wealth gap between the older and younger generations is enormous
Do you really think we have been successful in "uplifting the youth"?
That’s me, asking the same thing.
Having well connected parents and family is huge, and a big part of why a lot of these people are so wildly successful
Her father was head of a Federal govt agency at one point and a VP at Enron (I know, I know).
Also, a direct descendant of the Fleischmann yeast family.
Her mother also had worked as a Congressional aide.
We hear much from the Jobs and Gates of society, and little from the other garage-folk who just didn't make it: they ran out of time, ran out of steam, ran out of funding, or were doing something that would have worked great and made them billionaires if Apple hadn't hit the market three months sooner than them.
Billionaires in garages are a confirmation-bias story.
Nobody (well, few) begrudge that privilege, but you cannot have a reasonable discussion about what led to success by leaving out major factors.
Everyone is connected; the growth of the world economy has brought nearly 90% of people out of global poverty in under a century.
1. "What got you here won't get you there." The problems that need solved today might require a different mindset/level of experience and that may not be in people with enough time or circumstances to build, or enough likeness to the old model be funded by VCs.
2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM.
3. Tech giants of the past 10 years were slurping the most promising talent with high salaries and burning them out.
4. Filters that sift new founders and hackers are created by people who don't deal with the problems most people deal with.
7. Hackers at hackathons are not dealing with problems most people deal with. A number of hackathons I've participated in had very similar solutions pitched - you could name the categories, and see them all over again in each hackathon years apart. Usually catering to the tech or the sponsors instead of actual products anyone wanted to use.
Not enough is said about this. It's almost comical when you think about it. As technologists we are both complicit and victims. I've spent half a decade in one of these 'attention economy' companies and let me tell you the amount of money, talent and resources that our industry deploys to forcefully grab and monetize users' attention is staggering.
Recently I've shifted to using single-use, fit-for-purpose devices (Kobo ereader hacked with KOReader, KingJim Pomera DM250 digital memo) for my day-to-day and it was like a weight that I never knew was there was magically lifted away. If capitalism could find a way to produce such devices at scale, not only would it be a public health win, it would be a massive boost to the economy long-term.
But with most corporation's incessant focus on short term metrics I'm not holding my breath that this will ever be a reality.
> 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 graphical operating system, no decent web browser, no search engine that could find what you were looking for. The basic amenities are now there. Of course there is still much room for innovation, but merely being able to write a computer program and understand what computer networks are good for is no longer the superpower it once was. If you're young enough to pound Red Bulls all night, you're probably not old enough to have the breadth of knowledge required to launch a great software product.
> Maybe most of the critical things that can be created by one guy typing furiously are gone, and the opportunities that remain require expertise and wisdom from a bunch of different people.
The tech companies that became big after 2008 solved problems with the same spirit as Jeremy Clarkson asking, 'How hard can it be?' and proceeding to build an electric car with a moustache called Geoff[0]. Those companies - Uber, AirBnB, Meta, Twitter, and so on - waded into very complex problem spaces, waved the magic wand of software, and used vast amounts of venture capital to obliterate the traditional solutions to these problems before anyone could realise how unsatisfactory these new solutions were. So now governments are coming up with all sorts of regulations - some of which are completely inappropriate - in an attempt to get these companies to stop being so irresponsible with the fabric of society, so everyone is now even more upset.
The days when a person who can build stuff and a person who can sell stuff were all you needed to start a startup are gone. There's a third role that's crucial now: the person who has deep understanding of the problem before product design starts so that the company doesn't build another version of The Angrifier.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-OlOP0BQ_U
Taxis before Uber were a shit show. The worst Uber drive you had would still be aboce median for the pre-Uber taxi experience.
Same goes for finding a place to stay before AirBnB if you wanted anything outside a chain hotel.
That doesn't justify all they did, but it also points out that the market was stuck in a local minimum. Breaking out of that is a successful achievement. (We can debate if it was worth the costs. We can debate if the costs needed to be as high as they are, or if that was an outflow of using VC money. There are many debates to be had).
But "all because illegal" is intellectually irresponsible reductionism.
Easier done with VC's money tho
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?"
Also, it's baffling to me that you consider fleets refilling vending machines to be a harder problem than what Uber did. Sure maybe it's harder in a leetcode sense, but the economics are much easier to reason about, and customer acquisition in B2B vs B2C is much more straightforward. The idea that you could build a random MVP and have 20% chance of success is laughably naive. I estimate thousands of attempts at this (I know of at least 3-4 personally), it's not easy to be Uber (or even Lyft).
VC leads in the Bay Area because VCs there will get behind high risk/high reward ventures that others won't.
At certain times and places it has been relatively easy to reach consumers. Circa 2001 we got a list of 10,000 emails in a developing country that got a better >20% response rate to join a voice chat service. I saw amazing success stories with SEO. There was a time that companies like King could get games to spread virally on Facebook. Those kind of opportunities have dried up as the gatekeepers have been able to capture more value out of their ecosystems.
But yeah, you're right, marketing is often 100x the work that people think it will 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.
Of course most pivots don't work and there's selection bias here. BUT, it's not unheard of for business models to change. And it certainly helps that Zuck is the original founder and has controlling shares.
There is more to do b2b, a lot more, but it is far less culturally relevant. It probably dovetails with people who aren't professional generalist programmers doing more programming as part of their job. That's a somewhat fractured conversation almost by definition.
I think with the LLM bubble bursts this will settle in better.
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 evidence for either.
It's a motte and bailey where if people accuse you of doing that you retreat to saying "no see they're separate lists".
Or maybe whenever he reads a headline about a billionaire, he just files it under one golem in his head called Zuckermuskezosdriessen. A golem which also includes James Damore (???).
After all, we're dealing with someone who writes sentences like, "the vast majority of your fellow students were men, and they were more or less all the same person as you." This is not an author who sees two people of the same demographic as separate individuals whose sins need to be litigated individually. If Musk is a bad father, what should it matter that Zuck seems to be a fine one?
Sloppy thinking, sloppy writing.
https://www.thefp.com/p/google-memo-james-damore-vindication...
Basically he has kept a very low profile.
It would explain the early retirement + lack of work history.
But yes, family money is also a possibility.
I don't think he's the activist people make him out to be. He went on a few podcasts early on but has generally kept a low profile. I'm not under the impression he's doing the paid speaker / podcast circuit. Probably just living his life.
After he was cancelled probably nobody wanted to hire him, maybe he left tech completely.
But yes, agree it was weird to include him next to the other names. He's not like, a billionaire founder.
He did more than that. It wasn’t that he had the opinion that women were innately less qualified but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to. It wasn’t just that he was wrong about the biology (to be clear, he was[1]) but that he wanted to have a public forum where he could say that some of his colleagues were less qualified.
If he’d just been some guy wrong in the internet on his own time, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been fired. Doing it at work in public changes things because any future lawsuit alleging discrimination could cite that as tacit approval. Whatever Google’s senior management felt about the merits of the piece, I’m sure their lawyers were saying it’d be a lot cheaper to hire another early-career engineer. The NLRB upheld the firing, too, so it’s not like good lawyers haven’t reviewed it.
(To be clear, I don’t think he’s Satan or anything - just some young guy who got some bad science out of the manosphere and had an unfortunately high-profile learning experience about why boundaries between your personal and professional lives are important)
1. https://medium.com/@tweetingmouse/the-truth-has-got-its-boot... https://www.wired.com/story/the-pernicious-science-of-james-...
He never said that in his letter. The memo was published unredacted. You can definitely disagree with what he said and there are many reasons to do so, but you should at least reference his actual statements and arguments when doing that.
> but that he tried to repeatedly discuss that at work after being told not to.
That is also not true. My understanding is the memo was a report in response to a request from a committee he was part of and wasn't intended to be more widespread. It was leaked inside Google and then outside Google and then people demonized him and he got fired. That's pretty much the high-level set of events. He definitely did not write this after being explicitly told not to, especially "repeatedly" per basically every piece of evidence about the entire kerfuffle.
I'm not a Damore apologist either, but like the sibling it really pisses me off when I see someone just straight up strawmanning or lying about what someone else did to smear them. The man was already blackballed from the entire tech industry and had to leave the country after being fired, mostly for saying factually true statements that are controversial because of the color he (and others) added to them. Isn't that enough? Do you have to lie about what he said, when it was published publicly and anyone can read it for themselves?
As a matter of basic media literacy you should realize that you have no rational basis for this claim.
> That's pretty much the high-level set of events.
The entire rest of your comment is pure fiction, by the way.
Cool story. Here's a rational basis, a link to the unredacted memo that was leaked to Gizmodo and published online, confirmed to be legitimate by James Damore: https://web.archive.org/web/20170809021151/https://diversity...
> The entire rest of your comment is pure fiction, by the way.
What part, specifically? The part where he's living outside the US (in Luxembourg per an article linked in another comment in this larger thread)? The part about him being fired from Google? The part about him being blackballed in the tech industry?
Seriously, the dude is as cancelled as it is possible to get, what more do you want? Argue against his actual statements, if you choose to do so, but don't be a blatant liar. This is the Internet, the Internet is forever, anybody can look this stuff up.
What's your claim here? That the published memo is fake? That Damore didn't write the things he said that he wrote, and that he suffered serious consequences for having written?
Like what's your play?
"that women were innately less qualified"
He never said that, though. If you have to grossly misrepresent his argument like that, you've demonstrated that you have no good faith retort and have lost the argument at the outset.
His paper was about on the average traits. That if you've split humans into various subsets -- for instance ethnicity, sex, age, etc -- each group has average and percentile traits on a variety of axes, whether it's aptitudes or intelligence spread (e.g. the variability hypothesis), musculature, long distance running, etc. These traits have negligible applicability to any individual person or subset, but if you're selecting from the whole set for exceptional extremes, you likely will get a set that doesn't demographically represent the whole.
NBA/NFL/NHL/MLB players. Nobel prize winners. Top mathematicians. Long distance runners. And so on.
Damore's mistake was that a) there was no value in publishing this, b) he is on the spectrum and didn't realize how dangerous this absolute statement of fact was.
You say that he had bad science, but then you link to a piece that says that it's "politically naive, and at worst dangerous". Which is precisely the sort of tired "but it isn't socially acceptable" sort of response that is just boorish and unproductive.
I get why Google fired him. They pretty much had to (though I would argue that he could have contested it as punishing his handicap). But for all his folly, when people have to misrepresent what he said, or do the "it's bad science because I don't like it"....meh.
Complex behavior is very hard to link to underlying biology because our brains are incredibly plastic and actual researchers spend a lot of time looking for ways to tease out the complex interplay between genes and training. I used to support some neuroscience labs which studied things like this but the researchers were careful to note the difference in confidence between the effects they measured and the attempts to identify the underlying biology (e.g. maybe undergrad men could track more moving objects than women, but if monkeys didn’t show an effect you might want to check things like how many hours they spent playing ball sports or video games). Everyone was generally of the opinion that there were innate differences, but that they couldn’t be anywhere near the magnitude we see with athletic performance because too many well-crafted studies have been done to miss something big.
When you’re looking at those bell curves, it’s important to remember that even if you ignore the questions about the methodology for things like personality traits the overlap is tighter than shown, and contrary to one of his foundational claims, there’s enough cultural variation to suggest that the effect is not biological in origin. The first piece I linked discusses at some length how he was thrown off by the Wikipedia summary of a meta-analysis paper on personality traits which found very limited effects, with one analysis within the margin of error. That pattern continues for the few claims he makes in enough detail to assess: inconclusive data, mistakes cribbed from intermediary sources, or failing to link a very low level behaviour to success at a company like Google.
That last part is really important to think about with all of the evo-psych stories which claim our social dynamics of today are based on our evolutionary history without considering just how different the skills we use to work in offices developing software are from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle – anyone at Google is working with more people than was common in most of our evolutionary history!
HTH.
Which is why I ask, do you know something different about what gender this referent prefers?
Or, did you just trot out this overly academic tripartite definition out of pure snark, with no intention of defending your asinine usage of "they" as a valid instance of any of the three cases?
HTH indeed.
FWIW, I don't love what Damore did, and I think he was sort of naive and inconsiderate. But if his critics can't be bothered to go further than ad hominems and passive-aggressive misgendering, as you've done here, it feels like a point in his favor.
It seems you've contrived a strawman that unless you know what they've done specifically in open source, they don't matter. I assure you that almost no one agrees with you.
This and the other post of yours about Damore are super weird, and you seem incredibly bitter about the guy. Weird stuff.
Damore's appearance in this piece is bizarre. He was an SWE at Google that made speculations about diversity targets, not realizing, courtesy of being the spectrum, that it was a massive taboo. For this guy to lump him in with Andreeson and Zuckerberg in his bizarre ageism screed is absolutely bizarre, and makes it seem like it was some LLM generation or something.
Leaving aside whether one agrees with the premise, his argumentation is disjointed at best.
He is attributing various symptoms of these tech leaders behaviour to them clinging to a bygone world, however he hasn't really articulated any of these symptoms beyond them thinking that "DEI" is the cause of all their problems.
He can't even back it up with a single quote or published piece from one of these tech moguls which displays the opinions that he characterizes them to have.
Articles as sloppy as this shouldn't get 230+ points on hackernews
It felt like a lazy generic swipe at 'tech bros'.
Usually the choice to pour too much into an unproven, nascent prospect was objectively a bad idea, poor investment or, at least, not prudent. We know this because other smarter, more sober people looked at the opportunity during those early moments and made wiser choices, which only seem unwise in hindsight. It's also usually the case that those early zealots taxed their available environmental resources (whether spousal support, parental savings, current employer latitude, etc) to the point of unfair burden, if not abusive burden. Sometimes those unwilling 'resource investors' were repaid and sometimes not. And, of course, even having environmental resources to tap (and unfairly burden) in the first place has always been a matter of luck.
There's an historical record bias here because if we double-click as deeply into the circumstances around other early market entrants, such as a Herman Hollerith and punch card tabulating, we often find similar patterns of abdicating current responsibilities to make unwise leaps into months of furious work to realize some speculative vision, enabled by unfairly (or abusively) burdened family, friends or employers whose existence was random luck. On top of that, there's selection bias at work. Because whether we're talking about Zuckerberg, Gates/Allen, Jobs/Woz, Hollerith or Gutenberg - we're only talking about them because they are the black swan exceptional outliers. The vast majority of the time this pattern ends in unrecorded ignominy or tragedy, existing only as cautionary tales about the distant relative who squandered whatever job or prospects they had, along with their money, family's money and finally the patience of all around them in the pursuit of some crazy dream which never panned out.
The more interesting question is whether this repeating pattern of irrationally abdicating responsibilities to chase speculative dreams in unhealthily unbalanced ways enabled by unfairly burdening environmental resources is, on the whole, net bad or good. And I think that depends on the scope by which we measure. On an individual, family or community level its almost certainly net bad. However, on a societal level it could be net positive. The thorny issue is that the pattern involves abuse of unwilling others to whom rewards may not flow, even in the unlikely event it doesn't end in tragedy. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to eliminate the possibility of unfairness toward others or the overall ambient unfairness of 'winning' by leveraging environmental luck.
Advancement has always been made by standing on the shoulders of giants, and that enables small teams to execute different things in different eras. If you can't see what the changes are today you would have been no better off in another time.
Physics hasn't been the same since Einstein's era. While breakthroughs have happened, the fundamental reframing of the way we comprehend the world that happened with the one-two punch of the theories of relativity and the experimental evidence for the quantum model have patterned the world in which we now live, but understanding that pattern is the new work.
Similarly, I think a good case can be made that the one-two punch of the implementation of the Internet as a fabric and the web as a killer app is now finished work. While the remaining work is real, valid, and valuable, it is of different kind to the creation of the new pattern; consolidation and comprehension of the pattern is the work of the day, and that's not nearly as glamorous, sexy, or profitable (to reputation or pocketbook).
It's fine for there to be eras of great opportunity and eras of not, so long as we respect which we're in.
(Google is great as a case-study for this concept. The circumstances that birthed Google are now actively suppressed in the ecosystem... Mostly by Google. The positive feedback loop of great-search-breeds-great-search-data that birthed Google doesn't leave room for multiple Googles because human attention and time is finite; this is evidenced by Bing being unable to draw users despite huge monetary investment and just as much technical competence. But they can't draw the users because they aren't already better than Google.
As consequence, two guys in their garage can make something but it won't be a Google-scale search engine. Meanwhile, the small, scrappy search engine is now a huge behemoth with 8.5 billion daily searches, and that amount of real human contact implies real human responsibility... if Google goes offline, people will literally die from lack of access to information, so they can't take the kind of risks they used to be able to.
Young systems have different features than old systems. Young ten-person companies have different behavior than old 100,000-person Fortune 500s. Young people have different wants and capabilities than older people. Making the transition is key. Failure to make the transition causes pain not only to the one failing but to the ones interacting with them).
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously those conditions lead to incredible thriving in the past. This guy is basically arguing that because it doesn't work now (in a super diverse globalized world) that it never actually worked.
These are the same kind of "they just got lucky" arguments I see constantly to downplay the achievements of any specific group of people.
What the author is saying is that not all of those properties were causative to make software great again.
Do we need people to have enough of a safety net to take risks with entrepreneurship? Yes. Do we need enough regulation to prevent entrenched companies from using regulatory capture to stifle competition while having little enough regulation that small companies can spin up and be nimble? Yes.
Do we need to be listening to N'Sync, wearing JNCOs, watching Beavis and Butthead, and drinking Crystal Pepsi? Probably not. Those were in the air, but not causative.
And, certainly, I see little evidence to support the implicit claim in "anti-woke" that somehow sexism, homophobia, and racism were causative factors that enabled entrepreneurialism to thrive a few decades ago.
DEI is about recognizing that our culture has placed some people at a disadvantage by virtue of properties they have no control over and attempting to remedy that imbalance.
The majority of Black people in the US are literally descended from people who were brought here as slaves. Half of the country was so attached to the idea of being able to own Black people and treat them as property that they started a civil war to hold onto it.
This is the country that was founded on enslaved Black people, created the Trail of Tears, and placed Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.
It shouldn't be very hard to figure out an explanation for why certain races in the US have historically been at a disadvantage.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/former-spacex-engineer-essay...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg#Allegations
> "... the guys who had big tech startup successes in the 90s and early aughts think that 'DEI' is the cause of all their problems."
Who is the author referring to here?
(I realize that DEI has been rolled back at some companies, and Zuckerberg in particular has derided it, yet I still feel like the author is referring to some commonly accepted knowledge that I'm out of the loop on.)
Funny I am known for being a steady, slow and dependable hand in real life but I team up with youngsters to win hackathons, I drive them nuts with my insistence on minimal and viable but my ability to go up on stage and demo something broken and make it look great carries the weekend -- good 'old fashion startup veteran skills.
pc has an article about a related topic in my view: https://patrickcollison.com/fast
these things were done by many people with a great vision for the collective, even if lead by one person. maybe not altruistic things but provided more good than they did hoard value. where is the vision anymore?
Isn't it such a strange coincidence that you can imagine all of the things that have ever been invented in the past, and none of the things that will be invented in the future?
This is the DEI movement in a nutshell. A bunch of people driven by fear and anxiety and anger into demanding they be handed things for free instead of working for them. Which is why it's ironic that the article seems to validate the DEI movement
There are some insights there, but the article is tainted by envy and self-righteousness.
Instead, the gang you describe is aspiring to migrate into well known high visibility disputes such as climate change, gender issues, politics reform. They genuinely think they can help, but the inner principal motive is to be noticed as quickly as possible as "a big stakes kind of person". The more famous and loud the issues they can touch, the better. They will only talk about what appeals to newer generation struggles.
What's old is new again.
The #1 OS is slow and crashes all the time. The #1 email client takes 10s to load on my mother's laptop. Most popular products are slow, buggy, filled with spam, & filled with dark patterns. Enshittification won. FAANGs are the new IBM. Let's build better stuff.
Their entire life was in an environment where nothing was stable or cohesive or efficient and everything was either "free" or rented. They don't recognize what they're missing or why it might matter.
So as consumers they don't know to care when you build better stuff, and as producers they don't even know what it means to build better stuff. And soon these people will graduate into leadership and management with the same understanding of the world.
Surely, there's plenty of opportunity for the rest of us to keep quietly rescuing these janky projects from disaster, shoring them up as their sloppy compromises overtake them, but unfortunately it's very possible that it'll be a long while still before a strong and viable demand for "better stuff" returns.
Once our generation (the rest of us) is in the ground, there will be nobody alive that even remembers that software can be made with high quality. Nobody who's ever seen really fast performing software, software that didn't crash unexpectedly, software that didn't eat your battery and storage space, software that wasn't exploitable by a 14 year old in their basement, software that didn't leak personal information all over the world. No developers who have counted CPU cycles or took the time and effort to keep a for loop in a single page of memory. Neither developers nor consumers will even believe that software can be great.
Please tell me, when was this mythical era? Most software has sucked and been balls forever. Windows, why is my screen blue? MacOS, why do I have a bomb icon? Linux/Unix, why don't I have desktop apps and why doesn't my sound card work?
Almost all corporate/sold software is laden with too many untested features, and always has been. Fast purpose built software is uncommon as your average user wants features.
There will eventually be new waves that create opportunities for startups again, LLMs are like that in some cases, but I’d argue that mobile phones were by far a larger disruptive innovation than LLMs so far.
Apple is the best example that doing the opposite can be immensely successful.
I don’t think that ignoring these foundational innovations or trying to work against trends is generally good advice for startups though, it’s easy to think you’re really clever and smart and different but meanwhile the team that did “Airbnb for dogs” has sold for $1B
Consider how many businesses are built around Excel and either cannot re-create their workflows in LibreOffice Calc/Google Sheets or don't see the value proposition in doing so. You can argue till you're blue in the face that business critical processes shouldn't rely on Excel, and you'd be right, but good luck convincing the people who matter most that they need to change something that still works well enough (especially if they're not privy to the behind-the-scenes work required to integrate other systems with Excel). It's not like Excel is the only thing keeping them hooked on Office.
When it comes to other, less ambitious projects, like email software (not even hosting, just an email client; hosting is its own can of worms), you're competing against companies that either give it away for free or include it in a bundle of other applications businesses really want, like O365. I pay for Shortwave because I loved Inbox by Google that much, but it's a very niche product. I doubt the average person loved Inbox enough to trust a third party with their emails so they can get that experience back, much less pay said third party when the Gmail web interface is good enough for most tasks.
There's a reason we can describe companies like MS as being entrenched: there are no real competitors left. Enshittification works because people aren't inclined to switch without significant upsides. If your selling point is not being actively hostile to your users, why should I believe you will resist doing the same when you IPO or get bought out?
It is getting a little tiring to hear that building software is a superhuman endeavor and that almost nothing new can be built and nothing can be replaced.
If anything, this attitude plays right into what the people criticized in the article want everyone to think. “Just give up, there won’t ever be another Marc Andreesen or Mark Zuckeberg”
What usually happens next is that 99% of that "better-ness" value then gets clawed back by the creator and monetized, and then users are left with something roughly comparable to the product it was supposed to supplant. E.g. "we're gaining users left and right, how many ads do you think they will tolerate without abandoning us?"
you can build great software, but the bigger challenge is to defeat network effect of preoccupied/monopolized market.
If you’re talking about starting a business, the market has shown that it largely doesn’t care about those things.
I’ve been running windows 11 on a couple of pcs for at least a year and never seen it crash once.
Recommend using an AME Wizard playbook to decrapify it
https://revi.cc/
https://atlasos.net/
based on AME Wizard
https://ameliorated.io/
"AME 11 Official Ameliorated Playbook for Windows 11. Cutting the tumor out of your OS."
Enshittification is mostly just the process of not running on VC Capital and generating sustainable revenue sources.
VC capital is useful for speed & innovation, but most of the time leads to bloat & rent-seeking. Does DocuSign need 7,000 employees? My journey of bootstrapped entrepreneurship has been much more sustainable and respectful to my users.
IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook. They were all the cool underdogs for a decade, then slowly decline in quality.
You may get a 2x speedup, but humans are still the bottleneck.
But that always happens when times are good. Crazy emerges out of desperation.
In all seriousness, there is definitely the comfortable lie of nostalgia playing into a lot of the dudes approaching (or squarely in) middle age as far as tech goes.
It's truly a bummer that they're expressing the internalization of the wrong lessons. Instead of standing up against decades of enshittification, they're complaining about having to say "allowlist" instead of "blacklist", and still erroneously believing that the right hackathon will solve their company's existential problems.
I got the best monkeys and the best typewriters, so if I let them do what they want in this "meritocracy" I created, it will definitely make the next Hamlet, right?
I mean I know why, but the antipathy underlying the article undermines an otherwise interesting point.
The opening statement makes it sound like it's only the wealthy "tech-bros" that are rubbed the wrong way by DEI.
(in my recollection of it, the wealthy techbros were the first ones on the uptake of the whole DEI swindle. It's just that it's not the direction the wind blows these days)
Car crash death rates in the US have been declining for 50 years in both total number and per-capita rates (except for an uptick that started in 2020, presumably some knock-on effects from covid): https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... -- 40,990 deaths in 2023 vs. 54,052 deaths in 1973; 12.06 vs 25.51 per 100k population
Car fuel efficiency has ~doubled since 1975: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1237-may-...
Airline fuel efficiency has quadrupled since 1975: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft#/medi...
Corn yields per acre have doubled since 1975: https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTren...
Lithium-ion batteries didn't practically exist in 1975.
Modern blue LEDs (and thus white LEDs) didn't exist until 1990.
The entire personal computing industry. The Internet. Search engines. LLMs. Cellular networks. Neodymium magnets. Reusable orbital launch vehicles. Genetically modified crops. mRNA vaccines. CRISPR.
... or cough "innovation"
A good TL;DR for the essay.
So yeah, just reminding everyone that not everything is about fierce competition -- if artists can chain smoke and drink their life through ups and downs of patronage, so can everyone else.
Noone says we should stop being responsible, but all the responsibility and adulting without play is much, much worse, in my opinion, than the alternative. It just so happens that I relax writing code.
I am still writing other things that have long been invented, and they consistently give me inspiration.
Not sure if I missed the point of the article, but I react to what I read from it, after all.
Being anti-"DEI" is a trendy hobby for most, a serious concern for others, but for "Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, and James Damore" it's literally the default, because DEI is a patchwork of inconsistent restrictions of various and often dubious authority placed on people who hire. It's against them, of course they're against it. They're against workers and labor rights in general, just like most owners.
You might as well say that oil companies are against environmental policies because the world has changed and they can no longer do what they used to do, and maybe they just got lucky anyway... or instead assume that most people are against regulations that restrict them from doing things that they might want to do.
edit: I suspect this might be a covert explanation about why this particular technologist is less enamored by the future possibilities of their chosen career than they were when they started it, just (for some reason) projected onto celebrities who have already been massively successful.
What they are saying is that tech moguls have a period in their life where they felt they were at their best, living their glory days. They are latching on to and trying to recreate that environment, including superficial properties that environment had that don't actually have anything to do with why it was such a formative period for them.
One attribute of programming back in the 90s is... it was mostly non-poor white guys.
Now, obviously anyone with a certain level of maturity and wisdom would realize that the demographic monoculture of the 90s was an effect of the fact that computers were still relatively rare and expensive in the 80s, and those most people who had access to them back them came from a certain level of privilege. Being wealthy, white, and male all increased the odds that you were able to spend your endless summers PEEKing and POKing on an Apple IIe while other less fortunate people didn't have a computer or had to work.
Being wealthy, white, and male didn't cause people to be better hackers. Having economic stability is what gave people the freedom to become better hackers. It's just that that level of economic stability has historically not at all been uniformly distributed across people in the US. Thus anti-DEI measures are counterproductive. Going forward, society has a moral and rational incentive to extend that opportunity to as many people as possible, regardless of their anatomy or skin color because that's how society gets the most out of all of its members.
How do you figure being male help one's chances with that?
* Girls are often put under more social obligations than boys. Look around and you'll find lots of stories where girls are expected to help out with the housework while their brothers are given free reign to do what they feel like.
* I deeply believe that representation matters. Many girls probably never even considered that computers were a thing they might enjoy because they never saw other girls being into it.
* This less true today, but there has historically been a lot of pressure on girls and boys to do gendered activities, and tech was male coded. Parents would tell their daughters to play with dolls, not videogames. (And videogames are very often the pathway into programming.) Peers would make fun of girls that were interested in nerd stuff.
* For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, male nerd culture has often been outright hostile to females entering the space. Girls trying to join programming clubs, take CS classes, etc. would frequently get harassed by guys. (You can look at Gamergate as an extreme example of this.)
Meanwhile, male found it easy to think of being into computers because almost everyone you saw using a computer was a male like them. They were given ample free time, and faced few headwinds when expressing an interest in tech.
For example:
- Responsible people have responsibilities -- what is this tautology supposed to mean? That they can no longer value vitality or views on what style of life makes it worth living?
- The internet is no longer the world's great frontier -- according to whom? It is certainly the case that the old frontiers of the internet have either imploded or been thoroughly domesticated, but the internet is now thousands or millions of times larger than in its early days, so it's hard to say that frontiers (plural) are gone rather than one is simply not trying hard enough to find them.
- Chance is a great factor in success - a belief to be sure but not an observation; chance is often a factor in success, but it's not often a factor in downward mobility (which is extraordinarily common across the classes). It's easy to blame chance for negative outcomes, but it's hard to fully test and regularly exercise (or gradually expand) the limits of what is in one's control.
- Long gone are the days of the solo "great mover" - how does this couch with solopreneurs vibe coding their way with gen AI to large independent businesses and lean organizations that have very quickly built the highest revenue/employee at the highest growth rates in history? If anything, individuals are inordinately empowered with tools today that didn't actually exist in usable form 3-6 months ago nevermind a year ago.
For a piece of writing that talks so confidently about how stuck in the past others are, it's hard not to question whether the author themself is stuck in the past in some way.
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 but that needs to come from the young ones.
Stop doing leetcode. Go back to original engineering. Stop using JavaScript. Build software like Winamp.
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 have sort of come to that believe anti-trust may be the solution to finding more successes and enabling better products
Have you seen Musks Twitter timeline? That guy is so chronically online and desperate to be liked that it's just sad. How can you be the richest man in the world and yet so deeply pathetic?
Same with Zuck's attempt at being "cool" now and don't even get me started on Benioff's whole weird "Aloha" thing.
Deeply insecure, unhappy people, despite having all the wealth in the world. And they're gonna make sure all of us are just as unhappy, because if they can't buy happiness, why should anyone else have it?
Imagine you are in a situation where nobody you interact with will ever tell you something you don't want to hear. Everyone tries their best to only appease you and tell you that you are the best most brightest person. These people also all depend on your money for their own aspirations (that mysteriously never pan out).
It's basically the same thing that happens to dictators. They become unhinged. Their craziest ideas receive no pushback so they go ahead and implement every whim.
What they all need are good real friends, yet that's the one thing that's impossible for them to gain if they didn't already have it before they became rich.
And they are likely even aware of this dynamic which is why they view everyone in the world as being just in it for the money. So why not do everything in your power to horde more since that's what everyone else you interact with is doing?
Even that isn’t a guarantee because friend dynamics often change with relative wealth disparities.
You probably need friends that are also very rich.
> You probably need friends that are also very rich.
I don't disagree.
There's a Wendover youtube I recently watched that's tangentially about this [1]. Why do all the rich people have Yachts? His contention it's not because they like having big boats but rather because every other rich person does and that is your real social circle. If you don't fit in with them, you'll basically be friendless.
That also goes into why all rich people end up with private jets, because to interact with your social circle you basically have a packed calendar flying across the globe for rich people social events.
However, it's an insular group of people all subject to the same problem of generally being surrounded by yesmen. Further, it's not like these rich people aren't also trying to shmooze each other. Their businesses are still trying to make money and they often need to work with one another. So hard for these people to actually be friends.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBNcYxHJPLE
So they’re left to just chase whose partner they can snag or whose yacht is bigger? Sounds delightful. You’d think therapy would be more capital efficient. The hedonic arena is a trap for the emotionally unsound and perpetually unfulfilled.
The mid-life crisis insecurity doesn't have the hope and the rush in the same way. It has a lot more dread and angst.
That's honestly, to me, the saddest thing about the mega-rich. They don't know when, or how, to stop. There's no goal state where they can say "ok I made it, I can turn it off and enjoy life now, or at least stop fighting tooth and nail to hoard even more bigger numbers."
Musk, Altman, Bezos they are basically caricatures.
It's just a few of the most troubled celebrity wealth-addicts making public the inherent ego-fragility that tends to drive addiction in the first place.
Meanwhile, there's still sooo many other tech leaders just trying to develop whatever vision they have for their business, industry, career, etc
Not all tech or business leaders are addicts, but some are, and as a society we tend to enable and even celebrate their addiction for whatever reason. Because of that, and because of power that comes with wealth, some of them wreak havoc as they use that power to manifest their very deep troubles in the public sphere.
And it's not a new phenemonom, nor particular to the tech industry. You can see it happen again and again and again throughout history.
A lot of times people create problems and can't take responsibility for their own actions, so they blame externalities. That's what the author was saying about blaming DEI.
I'll defend Benioff here, a little. The O'hana thing isn't a new, desperate COVID-fried-divorced-billionaire invention; it dates, I believe, from the establishment of Salesforce, decades ago. I think it was sincere at the time.