
Next - ingve
http://warpspire.com/posts/next
======
crusso
_What happened to the idea of building great stuff that people are happy to
pay for? What happened to the idea of treating employees as people and not
legal entities to extort?_

Having owned and run my own service-oriented business that employed a few
people: For many of your customers and many of your employees, the naive and
sunny approach works great. You can provide great service and have happy
customers willing to pay you. You can have employees who are really friends
just helping you to provide that great service with whom you split the
proceeds. You can treat those customers and employees like everyday people.
All is wonderful.

Then you come across the bad apples. You come across the customers here and
there who don't want to pay you for great service, they want it for free. Even
worse are the customers for whom you provide great service, but they want you
to pay for some imagined problem that you caused for them because their
expectations for your service were completely different than what you clearly
provide.

Then on the employee side, there are those employees who thought that just
because I started the business that I was somehow wealthy and living the high
life. They didn't appreciate the year that I went without a salary or the risk
that entailed. They didn't appreciate that I was overall making much less
money than I could have if I had just gotten a regular day job. They didn't
care about the loans with my name on them that would ruin my finances if the
business went south.

When you come across a few of those bad apples, that's when all the rules and
lawyers come into place. Your nirvana of work and customer environment can
turn to crap if you don't have a little protection against the jerks. The
phrase "this is why we can't have nice things" surfaces time and again in the
face of those 1 in 20 sociopaths who interact with you as a business owner.

~~~
chrischen
Regarding the customers example, they generally always win.

~~~
odonnellryan
That's not true. You don't have to work with people like that.

~~~
crusso
Right. You have to learn to spot the trouble customers and let them know that
"it's not you, it's me" as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, the difficult customers are always the ones offering the most
money and general upside at first. They try to disguise how much they're going
to try to stick it to you by luring you in with big talk.

~~~
odonnellryan
You have to ignore the "big talk." Truth is money is worth some level of
aggravation: how much is for you to decide.

But these are usually the same people that don't have the money, in my
experience.

Sometimes you will have tough customers: but there's a difference between
working with someone who is a no-nonsense person and working with someone
who's impossible to work with.

------
lemming
Several things in this article resonated with me. One of the great things
about our industry is that most of us _do_ have a choice, as long as you're
willing to leave some money on the table. Advertising, finance or commerce
will always pay more than advancing the state of science, or other noble
goals.

 _What happened to the idea of building great stuff that people are happy to
pay for?_

I'm very happily doing this now, making developer tools. My users are very
happy to pay for the software I build, and I find building it very satisfying.
I'm lucky, but it's not like I'm some super-developer - I'm good at what I do,
but so are most people here. I'm lucky with my circumstances, but I think I'd
be doing something like this even if my circumstances were different.

Since I've lately been more concerned than previously about climate change,
I'm now investigating how I can help with that, despite having no background
in physical sciences. In my case, tooling for scientists is an obvious option,
but Bret has more ideas:
[http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange](http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange).

------
reustle
Could this title (currently "Next") be classified as clickbait? I'm on the
fence.

~~~
scribu
Not sure about being clickbait, but it's definitely not informative.

My suggestion, after reading it: "From Software To Permaculture"

~~~
ranit
> "From Software To Permaculture"

You might have missed the last part of the blog-post.

------
ranit
I admire the author's motivations and effort. Very well written indeed. Just
one thing:

> There’s also the unfortunate culture in technology that devalues everything
> unrelated to militant capitalism.

Please don't forget the myriad open-source contributors. I don't think the
culture in technology devalues them ... although do not appreciate enough.

~~~
coldtea
> _I don 't think the culture in technology devalues them ... _

Why would it? They provide for free (or close) 90% of the infrastructure
everybody uses to make money. The companies are glad those suckers exist --
but of course wont pitch in, except rarely...

------
twic
> There’s also the unfortunate culture in technology that devalues everything
> unrelated to militant capitalism.

> To work or participate in the technology industry is an exercise in
> minimizing manipulation (or, if you’d like to be rich, maximizing it). This
> feels shitty in a tremendously heavy way.

I wonder if Kyle has considered working somewhere that isn't Silicon Valley.
I'm in London, and i don't recognise this description in the companies i
worked with in my last few years of consulting, or interviewed with when i got
out of it. I doubt very much that London is any kind of shangri-la of
corporate enlightenment, so i would guess it's like that in most places.

------
Apocryphon
Regarding the civic engagements point, isn't that what Brigade is trying to
do? ([http://nationswell.com/brigade-voter-network-for-
politically...](http://nationswell.com/brigade-voter-network-for-politically-
minded/))

------
jaclaz
It is a bit "Waldeninsh", but I did enjoy reading it, very interesting points,
about life and computing, about the latter I appreciated the doubt expressed
in:

>It feels as though we’ve embraced the cloud a little too much the past decade
or so.

------
mxuribe
Very inspirational!

------
optimuspaul
I'm probably reading too much or not enough into this but this left a bad
taste in my mouth. It stuck me as the rantings of a hermit, disconnected from
reality, ranting about "end of the times" and things "have to change." A lot
of people are doing the things proposed in many different ways, but this is
written in a way that completely discounts their efforts. I would have
preferred to read about someone connecting with some of these efforts other
than the "out of touch" zealot on a soapbox.

~~~
erikpukinskis
The "end of times" is very real. The only permanent thing is change, right?
This time is coming to a close, and a new one is beginning.

And it is reasonable to think certain things "have to change". Unconscionable
violence is everywhere. Many of us see it and continue to do our jobs, but
have lost faith in our social structures. We are still here, but our bags are
packed ready to try something else when the time comes.

In the African/American community (to the extent there is such a thing) there
has been an understanding for some time that "a change is gonna come". A lot
of us still anticipate that and I don't think think that's out of touch with
reality. We know it will be a struggle to get there, but that doesn't mean
we're not going.

And one last point, on hermits and reality... Many of the tools you rely on
were built by hermits out of touch with "reality". Node.js was built by Ryan
Dahl, who thought a browser engine could be used to power I/O bound servers.
Linux was built by a guy who thought he'd just turn a student OS into a
production environment in his spare time. I heard Heroku's routing layer got
built when Orion Henry disappeared into the woods with it for a month. His job
title was "Mad Scientist".

These are not normal, plugged in people. But they have an important and very
real connection to reality.

~~~
optimuspaul
I guess my point was completely missed. I meant only to say that maybe the
message could have been more positive and highlighted solutions and how people
are already trying to affect real change for the better and not just ready for
when someone else does something.

I don't think it fair to say that Linus or Ryan where Hermits or out of tech
with reality. They saw an opportunity and acted. Let's be solution based, not
problem based.

