
Uncanny Valley (2016) - ForHackernews
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/
======
malvosenior
Very well written but I’m afraid this is the natural outcome when someone who
doesn’t truly _love_ tech gets into the tech industry. Sure, office culture is
banal in the extreme but if you have a lifelong passion to be the best
developer possible, getting paid to code is not such an existentially crushing
experience.

I think we should question if blindly pushing people into tech actually
works/is a good idea or if it’s just a recipe for disaster for all involved.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" this is the natural outcome when someone who doesn’t truly love tech gets
into the tech industry"_

I had loved tech long before I started working in the industry, and when I
first started everything was fresh and new. I saw wide, interesting vistas
ahead of me. Learning whatever I had to learn was a joy, and I did it well.
Even offices themselves were new and different to me. I was impressed by their
opulence, access to cool tech that I couldn't afford on my own, by the
professionalism and competence of the people I worked with. I felt I could
learn a lot from them, and I did.

That lasted maybe a few years. Then I burnt out from overwork and from feeling
undervalued and treated like crap by people who didn't understand what I did
and thought themselves superior to me. People were lied to and manipulated for
profit, treated like replaceable widgets, and thrown out on a whim. Corporate
cheerleading speeches and "morale boosting" or "team building" activities were
nauseating, two-faced affairs where management pretended to believe in the
bullshit they were dishing out and their underlings pretended to love
swallowing it. No one was fooled, but the charade continued.

The grand technological vistas I had seen ahead of me had dwindled as I
learned and mastered the truly novel, interesting things I had to learn. What
was left to do became repetitive and boring, and I really couldn't care less
about being the cog in the machine that was designed to make the owners of the
company and other bigshots rich. Instead of being interesting and challenging,
over time I started viewing learning new tech as just an endless, tedious
chore of learning irrelevant minutia, and every time I've gone back in to the
industry after that first burn out, I've burnt out more and more.

Honestly, I don't know how some people keep up their enthusiasm for technology
over the decades, in the face of so much stress, corporate bullshit, and
endless repetition. I just get way too bored and fed up with all that before
long.

~~~
westoncb
I think this is inevitable as long as what you're using your tech knowledge
for does not relate to a goal you value. There can be intrinsic
interestingness in ideas, but there has to be a connection back to what they
might be used for.

For instance, when I first started learning to code I was interested in making
video games. Along the way there were all kinds of concepts in real-time
rendering which had intrinsic interest and which I enjoyed learning on their
own (e.g. even ones I never put into use). However, if it weren't for the
intensifying factor of what I _might_ use those ideas for, and without having
the potential applications in mind to get me through the boring parts—I don't
think I would've enjoyed learning the material all that much.

If you end up spending your time coding to develop things which you find
pointless, for people whom you don't respect, it may be even worse than mere
lack of motivation.

The only solution I've found is to earn money in other ways, while working on
tech things in my free time if/when I feel like it—or to find a position at a
small company that you believe in. I've found the first to much more doable so
far, but I do keep an eye out.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's one big reason I'm trying to pivot away from software industry.

I _love_ programming. I just hate the bullshit that usually comes with
_getting paid for programming_ in this industry.

Ironically, I program _both_ at work and after it - at work because it's
(still) a very cost-effective way of making money, and after to actually do
something that I care about.

------
JohnDeHope
I'm glad this resurfaced. The only thing I have in common with the author was
that we both work in tech, but that doesn't have much to do with their story.
It was so well written I couldn't put it down. I hope they're feeling better
now, a few years later.

~~~
QAPereo
In particular this resonates painfully, “This is a cozy home for believers in
bootstrapping and meritocracy, proponents of shallow libertarianism.“

And then...

 _VENTURE CAPITALISTS HAVE SPEARHEADED massive innovation in the past few
decades, not least of which is their incubation of this generation’s very
worst prose style. The internet is choked with blindly ambitious and
professionally inexperienced men giving each other anecdote-based instruction
and bullet-point advice. 10 Essential Start-up Lessons You Won’t Learn in
School. 10 Things Every Successful Entrepreneur Knows. 5 Ways to Stay Humble.
Why the Market Always Wins. Why the Customer Is Never Right. How to Deal with
Failure. How to Fail Better. How to Fail Up. How to Pivot. How to Pivot Back.
18 Platitudes to Tape Above Your Computer. Raise Your Way to Emotional Acuity.
How to Love Something That Doesn’t Love You Back. Sometimes it feels like
everyone is speaking a different language — or the same language, with
radically different rules. At our all-hands meeting, we are subjected to a pep
talk. Our director looks like he hasn’t slept in days, but he straightens up
and moves his gaze from face to face, making direct and metered eye contact
with everyone around the table. “We are making products,” he begins, “that can
push the fold of mankind.”_

I wonder if most people in that world understand how bizarre and grotesque it
is to everyone else looking in?

------
rhaps0dy
This is intriguing and aesthetic and I've read it until the end because of
that, but I didn't understand it. Is this the story of the author, who quit a
startup? Why did she quit? She writes that she believed in her company's work,
and was good at her own work, and liked it. However in the end she says she
actually means the opposite. Why?

I'm quite confused :\

~~~
bribroder
The author is reflecting on opportunity costs and the dysphoria generated by
an anxiety-inducing rewards system which pays out randomly huge amounts to
people who don't seem to deserve it, while inflicting a lack of control and
ownership on others. The title reference to the "uncanny valley" points out
that working for a Silicon Valley startup is marketed as a fulfilled
lifestyle, providing a sense of accomplishment in solving real problems and
just about everything you could imagine if you work hard enough. But it turns
out to be an illusion, eerily close to the real thing yet ultimately
unsatisfying and false.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)

To make things worse, the startup life is so seductive and demanding that it
excludes a lot of other potentially rewarding life choices which the author's
peers enjoy. The author feels that startup workers are victims of operant
conditioning and lack real independent agency in their lives.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning)

It's been pointed out that unpredictable rewards really screw up brains,
causing them to obsess over the payout despite the overall returns being low.
The author feels that startups and gambling have a lot in common.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop)

In the author's case, the conditioning is so strong that, when she thinks back
on her experience with the startup, she's still seeing herself as part of it
even three years later and she still feels the same compulsion.

~~~
rhaps0dy
Interesting. I see how that can follow, for example, from the bit about her
friend who won the hackathon lottery. Also from the "What is it like to be
fun? What is it like to feel like you’ve earned this?", though she writes that
when she's talking with a developer who isn't actually in silicon valley.

It still seems like a bit of a stretch to infer that from the text, this
feeling upset because of her own brain being manipulated by random rewards
making the payoff seem higher. But it's a self-consistent interpretation and
better than any that I have so I'll take it.

Thank you for taking the time to write it!

------
kawera
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11565691)

------
staplers
This reads like an updated version of American Psycho. Love it.

------
true_tuna
Nice

------
cyberpunk0
To author: It appears the realization is setting in now that most of the VC
landscape is a fugazi, a playground for the mindless rich pissing away
millions on trends they can't see the hearts of, on overdeveloping asinine
apps and gadgets blind by their pointlessness and lack of need amongst the
growing sea of world problems, and on lavish offices and 100 engineers to
over-engineer and over-complicate every code base as long as the new hires
only come from ${MIT, Stanford, CalTech} after having been privileged with the
means to attend. To you and your melancholy, wading through the quagmire of
self absorbed executives seeking to get rich, those false prophets whose only
aim is as much money as their ravenous actions can exploit, to you I say
welcome to the reality the rest of us have been living our entire lives,
welcome to your disillusionment.

~~~
dang
Would you please not rant like this here? It isn't that you're wrong; it's
that even if right, this is not in the spirit of intellectual curiosity which
motivates HN
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)).
Ginning up rage is a different thing, and the two are not compatible.

Take out the rage and it becomes plain that what you've written here is too
generic to have much substance. Curiosity requires a gentler touch and a more
specific one.

For example, if you have personal experience with things related to the
article, sharing something about those, the way you would to peers in a good
discussion, would make for an entirely better comment.

~~~
the_cat_kittles
disagree- it reads in an interesting way, cultivating a mood that wouldn't
exist if you just stated the "facts". its also, i would say, in thematic
agreement with the linked article.

~~~
dang
Quite right, but it's a tradeoff. We have years of experience with the effects
posts like that have on HN, and they're dreadful.

I puzzled over this dynamic for years but it seems clear to me now: the issue
is genre/medium fit. In the case of the GP comment, the genre is the diatribe.
A scathing diatribe in a small literary salon or journal, like n+1, is one
thing; on a large, public, internet forum it's another. In the first case it's
interesting and leads to interesting responses. In the second it's a fast
track to the bottom of the barrel, a snake in Snakes and Ladders.

Imagine if anyone who felt like it could reply to any n+1 piece and n+1 had to
publish all of them as new pieces without editing. What would happen to
quality? It would tank. Personal projection, simple misunderstanding,
dimwittedness, windbaggery, reversion to the mean: every known factor would
work against you. Extrapolate further and this would kill n+1.

In both cases—a small literary forum and a large internet one—the goal is more
complex, more interesting formations, but the way to get them could not be
more different. The more I learn about this, the more I appreciate McLuhan.
Most of the issues on HN derive from the medium, not what people post to it.

~~~
the_cat_kittles
i give you a lot of credit for writing this out. very thoughtful, thanks.

