I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this:<p>> As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park.<p>Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.
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:<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>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 <i>Geoff</i>[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.<p>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 <i>before product design starts</i> so that the company doesn't build another version of The Angrifier.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-OlOP0BQ_U" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-OlOP0BQ_U</a>
Some potential causes of the scarcity of breakthroughs in the last 10 years:<p>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.<p>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.<p>3. Tech giants of the past 10 years were slurping the most promising talent with high salaries and burning them out.<p>4. Filters that sift new founders and hackers are created by people who don't deal with the problems most people deal with.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>I think with the LLM bubble bursts this will settle in better.
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?<p>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.
The link between DEI and the rest of the content of the article is not well-articulated at all.<p>Leaving aside whether one agrees with the premise, his argumentation is disjointed at best.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Articles as sloppy as this shouldn't get 230+ points on hackernews
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?
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.
This is bitter gibberish.<p>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.
"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."<p>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.<p>These are the same kind of "they just got lucky" arguments I see constantly to downplay the achievements of any specific group of people.
This reminds me of the adage: "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."<p>There are some insights there, but the article is tainted by envy and self-righteousness.
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.
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.<p>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 <i>people who hire.</i> It's <i>against them</i>, of course they're against it. They're against workers and labor rights in general, just like most owners.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>pc has an article about a related topic in my view: <a href="https://patrickcollison.com/fast" rel="nofollow">https://patrickcollison.com/fast</a><p>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?
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.
It's an inaccurate profiling.<p>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.
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.<p>For example:<p>- 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?<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>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.
I partly disagree, software still sucks and it's a great time to build.<p>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.
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.
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.
Insightful words from the Coldplay guy.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
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.<p>I mean I know why, but the antipathy underlying the article undermines an otherwise interesting point.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I am still writing other things that have long been invented, and they consistently give me inspiration.<p>Not sure if I missed the point of the article, but I react to what I read from it, after all.
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.<p>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.<p>Even large companies like Apple have got caught in all this. Imagine what they promised and what they haven't been able to deliver.<p>We need a grand reset but that needs to come from the young ones.<p>Stop doing leetcode. Go back to original engineering. Stop using JavaScript. Build software like Winamp.
It really does feel like most tech leaders are having an internal struggle that they externalize and make all of our problems.<p>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?<p>Same with Zuck's attempt at being "cool" now and don't even get me started on Benioff's whole weird "Aloha" thing.<p>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?