
All the Technology but None of the Love - jacquesm
http://jacquesmattheij.com/all-of-the-tech-but-none-of-the-love/
======
cubano
I'm an old-timer, and I can totally see where Jacques was trying to go with
this essay, but in the end it pretty much missed the mark.

Personally, I think it's wonderful that the future I (we?) foresaw 25-30 years
ago has come alive, albeit with many odd and sometimes disconcerting twists
and nooks.

Remember the effort us lifers put into making tools that allowed "the masses"
access to programming, like BASIC, Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal and all of that?
How can we now, with any credibility, bemoan the very future so many of us
tried to build?

 _It’s a craft and an art, as much as people have been trying to make it into
an industry, without creativity you can’t make good software._

I'm a semi-professional musician, and I've been telling non-technical friends
for a lifetime that programming hits of the same creative notes that playing
guitar and writing music does, although they can never really feel what I'm
saying.

~~~
copsarebastards
> Remember the effort us lifers put into making tools that allowed "the
> masses" access to programming, like BASIC, Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal and
> all of that? How can we now, with any credibility, bemoan the very future so
> many of us tried to build?

I think the problem I see is that the future we tried to build _hasn 't_ come
to fruition. The future I was trying to build around the turn of the
millennium was one in which people had information to make educated decisions
and to achieve their goals. The actuality that has come about is that more
than ever people are falling for hype and being sidetracked from their goals.

It used to be that if you wanted to become a more educated voter, going online
would result in you landing on a few political-science related resources and
you'd end up reading some pretty hardcore theory: Bob Black, Michel Foucault,
Karl Marx. Maybe it was a bit extremist but you would actually have a
theoretical understanding of the issues. Now it's more likely you'll come
across carefully-crafted "grassroots" political blogs that hype one side or
the other without actually encouraging you to make an educated decision.

It used to be that if you wanted to bike across the country, Sheldon Brown's
webpage[1] would help you figure out how to do it. Now it's more likely that
you'll get distracted by Reddit and Facebook while your bike rusts.

I, for one, didn't work for this future. I don't give a fuck about cat
pictures and I'm actively against the advertising, astroturfing, and
distraction that social media results in. I think that while the internet
allows us to potentially make our lives better, the majority of people aren't
using it that way, and the future we have built makes most people's lives
worse.

[1] [http://sheldonbrown.com/tires.html](http://sheldonbrown.com/tires.html)

~~~
vitd
This reminds me of how people feel when they remember high school. Like many
technical people, I was picked on and had a lot of social problems. When I
think about those things, I feel like my life was horrible in high school.

But I also had really close friends who had similar experiences and when I
remember spending time with them, I think life was awesome in high school! I
had a band, and we threw parties for our nerd friends, and we played technical
pranks on each other. It was great!

These days, we have video available instantly on demand without
advertisements. But we also have crappy websites that try to throw up an
interstitial ad before you can even read the content. I find the tools make it
really easy for me to ignore ads and get at content that is as in-depth as I
want in just about any direction (for better or worse).

I'm a very cynical person overall, but I love where we are. I have a
supercomputer in my pocket that can get just about any piece of data I want
instantly. (I was video chatting with a friend while walking my dog the other
day! And it was no big deal!) I can also play scrabble with someone I've never
met in a country I'll never visit 10,000 miles away. If other people want to
keep track of which celebrity slept with whom, so be it. But I'm enjoying life
like never before, and it seems like most of what I can do is accessible to
most people (at least here in the US).

~~~
copsarebastards
> I'm a very cynical person overall, but I love where we are. I have a
> supercomputer in my pocket that can get just about any piece of data I want
> instantly. (I was video chatting with a friend while walking my dog the
> other day! And it was no big deal!) I can also play scrabble with someone
> I've never met in a country I'll never visit 10,000 miles away. If other
> people want to keep track of which celebrity slept with whom, so be it. But
> I'm enjoying life like never before, and it seems like most of what I can do
> is accessible to most people (at least here in the US).

I'm not down on talking about dogs or playing scrabble, but does doing these
things online instead of in person really improve your life? I mean, you're
not actually learning about this person's culture by playing scrabble with
them, or seeing life through their eyes. The internet enables these facile
interactions between people. Again, it's fun, but it's at best equivalent to
things we could do before. I play Scrabble too, but I don't think that playing
it on my phone with someone 10,000 miles away is any better than playing it
with my neighbor. If I couldn't play Scrabble on my phone it would be no loss
to me.

~~~
potatolicious
> _" I mean, you're not actually learning about this person's culture by
> playing scrabble with them, or seeing life through their eyes... I play
> Scrabble too, but I don't think that playing it on my phone with someone
> 10,000 miles away is any better than playing it with my neighbor."_

I'd argue differently. Sure, me playing Scrabble with a guy from Albania isn't
really imparting any specific education about Albanian culture - but does it
need to?

More to the point, the non-tech world that existed before didn't offer any
specific education about Albanian culture, either.

One of the biggest problems we face in the modern age - if not _the_ biggest
problem - is the lack of empathy. We've become a society of sociopaths - maybe
we always were, but just found more and more destructive ways to manifest it.
Doxxings, bomb threats, death threats, and that's just the stuff that doesn't
involve shooting anyone or blowing anyone up.

If playing Scrabble with a guy from Albania, even without engaging in deep
philosophical or political learning, results in me having more empathy for
Albanians or just a _very_ shallow increase in understanding about their
people or culture, we're already better off.

Hell, just the _appreciation_ that they are people, just like us, who play the
same games as us, already moves us forward.

There's a particularly toxic post further down the thread that decries
"entryism" into the tech industry that is, IMO, symptomatic of the problem.
Apparently people who are different but share a common interest joining a
field is now an invasion of usurpers. This whole worldview rests upon
something that is fundamentally xenophobic and sociopathic - as if everyone
who wishes to join a group does so only for their own benefit and wishes to
disenfranchise whoever is already in the group.

And if playing Scrabble, or sharing animated gifs, or arguing about which
sports team is best, contributes to just a _tiny_ bit more understanding and
empathy, I'll call it a win.

------
marktangotango
This piece is rather tepid in my opinion. The author bemoans a future that
never came because of

>>an enormous influx of people into tech that are in it just for the money and
that couldn’t give a damn about how they achieve their goals.

He continues talking about how things were harder in the old days, and how
easy it is today, but paradoxically, too easy?

>>The barrier to entry was so high that those that made it across really knew
their stuff.

>>Of course that’s not what you want, you want all this to be as accessible as
possible but real creativity starts when resources are limited.

It all seems like a variation on a theme Alan Kay addressed some time ago[1]:

>>Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people
can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop
culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some
of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the
masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more
perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to
capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science
today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this
pop culture.

[1]
[http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523](http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523)

~~~
jacquesm
> He continues talking about how things were harder in the old days, and how
> easy it is today, but paradoxically, too easy?

It's easy to make crap and to dress it up as something good, people will pay
for it and will in the end be underwhelmed by what 'computers can do', whereas
it's _just_ as hard today as it was in the 80's to make something really good.
Unfortunately the crap will usually win out due to marketing.

~~~
brudgers
WordPerfect came with a beautifully printed manual in a cloth covered custom
ring binder and unlimited telephone support. It was a world of professionals
because release cycles were a year and customers were part of the business
community...as was WordPerfect.

Now everybody is a just consumer. The phrase "consumer community" may just
have been invented in this sentence. [1]

There are two sources of crap. One is businesses that deliberately make stuff
that sucks in the hopes that marks will buy it and keep their mouths shut out
of embarrassment over being taken as a rube. There's more of that in software
and everywhere else today.

The other source of crap is amateurs. There's more of that in software because
access has improved. The software is analogous to homeowner construction
projects. The roof is likely to leak, the walls be without insulation, and the
room shaped like a scalene triangle. HomeDepot's prices help make it happen.

People are expressing their ideas more often. Most ideas are bad. The
execution of laypeople is often poor.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/webhp#q=%22consumer+community%22](https://www.google.com/webhp#q=%22consumer+community%22)

------
CmonDev
Especially funny when people quit "soul-crushing" corporate enterprise to work
unpaid overtime producing unmaintainable code (because it's about quit exit)
for junk equity.

I mean even their technology choices fit it - always dynamic, the "scriptier"
the better, just ship it!

~~~
Delmania
I can agree with this sentiment. There's a big narratives on HN about
corporate drones using C# and Java to implement specifications from on high
versus the elite hackers using cool languages such as Clojure, Ruby, Python
etc. The truth, of course, is that narrative is not 100% accurate. I think it
really boils down to the individual's interest in technology and willingness
to engage in the workplace. Those who develop software as a profession,
regardless of the workplace, will seek to engaged and active in the technology
being used, even if it just means debating with coworkers. Those who are in
technology for a job, on the other hand, will simply do what is asked of them
without thought. Despite claims to the obvious, both paths are valid.

~~~
mattgreenrocks
Some of the best experiences I've had developing have been with the uncool
languages where we've had the ability to design the system end-to-end, get
feedback from stakeholders, and adjust as necessary. Crunch was rare because
we knew the system in and out, and could easily manage our technical debt as
we went. These days, everyone [here] thinks programming is little more than
throwing as many ready-made pieces at a problem and duct-taping them together
to call it a solution, because productivity and don't reinvent the wheel and
community.

The result is mediocre products with bog-standard interfaces (productivity),
suboptimal architectures (so devs are easily replaced), and speed prized over
quality. We cling to design fads, rather than creating original designs.

In short, it reflects a culture-wide lack of ambition. It's easy to create a
cat picture sharing app. It's not easy to think beyond that because we're
mentally beholden to the idea that there isn't enough money, and we need to
get ours now, and then we can go after our big ideas.

Tech was supposed to be transformative. Now it asks us to be impressed with
business models that prey on addictive behaviors, advertising, and annoying
users because we lack the imagination and will to do anything better.

------
calinet6
To be blunt, I don't think this perspective is accurate or well thought out,
and it comes in the form of an emotional attack which is not likely to be well
received as an argument.

Inevitably when a sector grows, you're bound to have a diversity of approaches
and types of people involved, and in most cases that diversity is a
_profoundly good thing_. It means that not only are there people who are in
the work for the zen-like essence ('love of technology' as you put it), but
also those who can apply that work to other fields and areas of knowledge.

And capitalism (which appears to be the true target of attack here) has its
flaws and abstracts away the love in favor of a general approach to value—but
it also allows resources to be condensed and put toward big problems that
would not otherwise be possible. Sometimes it ends up just extracting wealth
from a triviality, but often it is a complex mix of value for a complex mix of
people, and sometimes something truly profound and major comes of it.

I suggest that there's something else going on here; some personal frustration
or observation that is likely true in the right context, but I think it needs
development and focus to be a more universal critique.

~~~
yummyfajitas
A diversity of approaches, tempered by capitalism, can be beneficial.

But that's not the same thing as entryism, which unfortunately we have in
tech. Entryism is when diverse approaches don't attempt to win in the field of
capitalism - instead, they attempt to parasitically take over the capitalistic
winners.

Capitalistic diversity would consist of MBAs, SJWs, and all the other entrants
building their own companies. Then customers could pick the winner. In
contrast, entryism consists of some company (e.g. Google) "winning", and then
the MBAs, SJWs, etc joining google and changing it from the inside.

In fact, entryism is very difficult to combat capitalistically. The problem is
simply that creative destruction can't necessarily kill the entrants. For
example, suppose the MBAs destroy MS. Then what happens - do they vanish
forever, never to kill again, with MBA-ism as a disgraced ideology? Or do they
simply shift jobs to Google and Apple and try to do it again?

See these two articles for more on entryism and boundaries:
[http://www.moreright.net/notes-on-
boundaries/](http://www.moreright.net/notes-on-boundaries/)
[http://www.moreright.net/entryism-as-containment-
failure/](http://www.moreright.net/entryism-as-containment-failure/)
(Moreright has other articles on the topic, mostly focused on how neoreaction
has avoided entryism. To a certain extent tech does the same thing by being a
bunch of low status nerds, repelling people who don't really like tech.)

~~~
calinet6
That's fascinating, thanks for the links and the insight.

------
santacluster
Especially in recent years I've encountered a growing number of entrepreneurs
who proudly called their companies _tech_ start-ups, but who had no affection
for technology whatsoever.

But worse, they actively seemed to dislike the kind of people that do love
tech, i.e. nerds, hackers, engineers and such. These were young kids, the
stereotypical "cool" start-up founders, but the way they talked about
engineers and engineering made you think you were talking to 50 year old
pointy haired bosses with not an ounce of respect for technology.

And they keep saying completely the opposite, they keep saying "we love tech",
and they actually seem to mean it. Except everything else they do or say
indicates the opposite. They just like to _use_ tech, but are completely
uninterested in the process of developing tech.

These people aren't just greedy cunts who are in it for the money. These are
people who have grown up in a world where consuming technology has become so
normal and easy that they simply don't get that creating technology is a
totally different process.

And I'm not yet sure whether these people should be avoided or educated.

~~~
Wilya
Half of the companies that are routinely called tech startups these days don't
have much to do with technology and engineering.

They want to be called tech startups, because tech is cool, and they have an
app, because apps are cool, but their core business has nothing to do with
tech.

~~~
VLM
What was called tech in 1995 used 1990s technology, pretty exciting at that
time.

Whats called tech in 2015 generally means uses the same 1990s technology with
some numerical metric improvements but nothing fundamentally unrecognizable by
someone in the 90s, coupled with 2015 business model, 2015 financialization,
2015 art and styling, and 2015 marketing.

Unfortunately both types of companies are called tech. I think the author is
basically bored with the 90s and wants 2010s technology jobs.

Wheres the companies doing 2015 tech in a 2015 company? Not, in general, in
"tech".

I think my father in 1975 would have been pretty mystified by my 1995 desktop
and programming. So you guys aren't running batched punchcards anymore, OK
then. Object oriented derivative of C instead of cobol, interesting. WIMP GUI,
very interesting despite unproductive. On the other hand imagine how bored
someone from 1995 would be when introduced to 2015 desktop, after the initial
irrelevant numerical surprises, which wouldn't even be a surprise despite
every generation thinking they're the first to ever discover / appreciate
Moore's law. Dominant corporate language is still a OO C derivative, although
different, whatever. Tired old WIMP GUI still got the start button in the
lower left corner, eh?

------
brudgers
There's a tremendous amount of love in the world of technology. I'm writing in
Firefox on Linux on HN. I spent all morning writing a post organized in Trello
using Emacs. Each is excellent because of people who are motivated to create
something that make the world suck less. And not just some little corner of
it, but as much of it as kind find its way to the door.

That's not to say the world of technology hasn't found new ways to suck.
Yesterday I got an email from Sasan Goodarzi General Manager, Intuit TurboTax.
He was offering a coupon in exchange for adding suck to TurboTax. Intuit took
the Schedule C out of the Deluxe skew.

I replied (probably into the void). I've been using the TurboTax for more than
two decades. The reasons are a trust of Intuit and the faith that using it
this year would make life easier next year because I could import one return
into the other. The product was deliberately made worse. The reasons for using
it are gone. Intuit doesn't care. I'm not sufficiently profitable. Beyond this
I'm not even going to rant about them making the world suck.

In the 1980's everyone used Basic because a C compiler was $600. Rexx for the
Amiga was $100. And Lisp? Buy a Lisp Machine.

Today, the mountain of love that is Ruby is free. The heap that is Rails,
that's free. The pile that is Racket, free as well. Audacity, Gimp, Mono, etc.
- love is winning. Lots of businesses suck and now there are lots of software
businesses.

Yet even Darth MicroSoft is serious about producing open source projects. What
more evidence could there be?

------
henrik_w
FWIW, I've been programming for about as long as the OP, and I still enjoy the
creativity very much [0]. I also think that those of us who enjoy SW
development are incredibly lucky in that we can get paid quite well doing what
we love [1].

[0] [http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-
coding/](http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/)

[1] [http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-
dev...](http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-developer-is-
a-great-career-choice/)

------
peri
Unsurprisingly, I disagree with a lot of the tenor of the comments so far on
this article on HN. It might be memories of various international issues in
the 80s and 90s, or just my personal bit of growing up, but I think the tenor
of this post is spot on.

Of course, this is my judgement as a contralto in French, so _shrug_

------
getdavidhiggins
It's opportunism gone awry. We're in another tech bubble where founders are
flush with investor money, and don't know how to spend it correctly. They buy
a .IO TLD because it's trendy, stock the office fridge with expensive
beverages designed to burn out their colleagues, spin up servers on AWS like
Apache is going out of fashion, sign up to any number of SaaS solutions
designed to offload and streamline workflow so much that no work actually gets
done, and ultimately - piss the money away, lose customers, and become another
has been startup. Related:

What bums me out about the tech industry:

[http://blog.shutdown.com/](http://blog.shutdown.com/)

Son, It’s Time We Talk About Where Start-Ups Come From:

[http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/son-its-time-we-talk-
abou...](http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/son-its-time-we-talk-about-where-
start-ups-come-from)

Similar HN thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8845809](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8845809)

------
j_baker
There's one thing I would add to the equation:

((1-p) * s * e) + r < (m-c)*t

r is the additonal compensation package that companies offer to employees of
an acquired company.

In an acquihire, the bulk of the proceeds go to the employees, and it's not in
the form of equity payments (which are usually not worth the paper they're
written on). Instead, companies offer employees other incentives to come on
board.

------
teddyh
It’s not too late in 2015 to get started in computers. People who got started
in the 1990’s feel that way because they started in assembly language and
compilers and all that, and how could anyone starting now possibly learn all
that?

What they don’t realize is that people who got started in computers in the
1960’s feel that since _they_ started with soldering and electronics and radio
and circuits, nobody could possibly learn all _that_.

It’s easy to start in computers at any time. You simply ignore all the stuff
that’s too low level to be worth your time to get bogged down in.

------
spenrose
[Edit: I regret this comment. See my reply to Jacques below.]

Jacques regularly posts wonderful material that fits HN perfectly. Let's say
for rhetorical purposes that this post happens to be a stinker. Question: is
its prominence on HN a failure mode (HN is a filter: alpha geek can overcome
the filter to get any crap in front of our eyeballs) or a success mode (HN is
a community, and Jacques and his fans are a big part of the community)?

~~~
jacquesm
Would it be asking too much to be specific?

I think I covered why what was left on the table after ripping out the heart
was less than pretty in the introduction but after being specifically
requested to post it anyway (see:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8846177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8846177))
I'm surprised at the level of vitriol this post generates.

~~~
spenrose
First, my apologies for not remembering that you might read my comment.
Second, more apologies for writing "alpha geek can overcome the filter" when
what I should have said was very different: "HN readers upvote alpha geek
material because of the source not the material." Finally, I went back and
forth on whether to add my own opinion, which is that it SHOULD have been
upvoted and discussed, because you and your fans (among whom I count myself)
are an important part of the community. Thank you for your many wonderful
essays. I look forward to the next one.

~~~
jacquesm
Not looking for any apology, just wondering why you think it is 'crap' beyond
the surgery aftereffects. What better way to learn than to listen to your
critics?

------
dgreensp
By conflating the "state of computing" with the "state of the Valley," the
author just spreads Valley-centrism.

To the decline or marginalization of hacker culture within tech: Computers and
tablets today are proprietary and very complex, unfortunately. Also, there's
lots of money to be made in tech now -- but of course there is! (Good old
high-paying jobs I mean, not freshly-funded founders trying to rip you off.)
An essay on this topic might examine how we can keep hacking alive, or change
the world as hackers rather than as entrepreneurs. What aren't we doing with
today's hardware that we could be? Also, there are thriving hacker and maker
communities if that's your thing.

~~~
jacquesm
I don't even remember when I last visited the valley, it must have been 2001
or so. Consider this post written with as the backdrop Bucharest, Romania,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Berlin, Germany. Feel free to leave the valley
entirely out of it.

~~~
dgreensp
I should have called it start-up culture, but I usually call it Valley
culture. Two guys with a slide deck and an idea who call themselves the CEO
and the CTO and are looking for a series A raise? Silicon Valley invented that
and exported it. It's spread far and wide now, but it's still a small and
self-absorbed world compared to all the other stuff going on in tech.

A lot of the innovation on hardware, browsers, and programming languages is
coming from big companies, academia, and open source projects. And there's
still a lot of hacking. It's just a matter of what crowd you hang out in
mostly.

I guess I don't see a direct connection between hardware hacking back in the
day and wannabe entrepreneurs. I knew a lot of hardware hackers at MIT, and
it's just a different crowd from the web start-up crowd. And engineers at
Google, Mozilla, or Apple, say, are inventing the future while knowing very
little about start-ups.

------
stainednapkin
If you consider the concept of abstraction, it seems inevitable that people
eventually stop caring much about how or why the black box works. Then
consider how many layers of abstraction have been agglutinated over the years.

It makes sense that it's confusing now.

------
chicofarm
What I find is that context is decisive. I am only as passionate about the
technology as what the technology is helping to accomplish and quality of
relationship I have with developed and maintained with the user community.

------
pekk
_Please do not become one of those people in tech that are just in it for the
money but that actually hate the technology itself._

This needs to be said to HN.

------
johngalt
'A sea of pretenders piling on to get rich quick' is exactly how I would have
described the dotcom bubble.

------
tel
Your twitter link is ad blocked. Might be nice to just put a normal link?

------
thaumaturgy
No vitriol from me, but I do want to try to change your perspective a bit, and
it starts with this:

The world is what you experience.

Start with HN: reading HN too much can really warp your views on what the tech
world is like. HN tends to feature political topics and young tech companies
that are good at marketing. But that's far from what's actually going on; it's
even far from what YCombinator is doing. For instance, there was a post on the
YC blog just yesterday about a really neat thing that a YC-funded biotech
startup has done ([http://blog.ycombinator.com/one-codex-yc-s14-wins-the-
cdcs-n...](http://blog.ycombinator.com/one-codex-yc-s14-wins-the-cdcs-no-
petri-dish-challenge)) -- and it was posted to HN and went basically nowhere.
So, be aware that HN is distorting the tech world a bit.

Along the same lines, you only heard about Dennis, the owner of Klippers
barbershop, because someone took the time to sing his ballad. Before January
19, you probably didn't know he existed. Well, there are _a lot_ of people out
there, just like Dennis, except nobody's written about them yet.

One of the things I appreciate about my business is that I meet such a wide
variety of other businesses and people all the time, and it helps to re-adjust
how I see the world.

For every "github announcement of some two bit project with a catchy name and
a super nicely designed logo but only an initial commit of a blank page", I
bet there are at least two github projects that have gone unannounced that are
labors of love by some developer somewhere just trying to improve something.
For every "[company] with two people, non-technical co-founders looking for a
‘first hire’ at a terribly low salary and with 0.05% stock to create their
‘vision’ which will surely ‘change the world’", I bet there's at least two
companies full of really smart people who have been fighting the good fight to
actually change the world. (My go-to example for this is always HN's own
daniellefong, of [http://lightsailenergy.com/](http://lightsailenergy.com/),
which YC declined to fund years ago.)

We have arduino and Beagleboard and quadcopters and all kinds of fun things
now, and kids love them, and these represent "toy computing" in exactly the
same way that the Commodore did when I was young -- only now the computers can
fly, swim, crawl, and roll.

I think your advice to avoid crap projects is good, but ... even then, I think
that helping people cultivate "a job is just a job" attitude might be better.
Go to work, do a good job, get paid ... then go home and do what you really
love. The part of crap work that really screws people over is that we invest
so much of our self-worth in our jobs. You can "keep the love for the tech
alive" _at home_ , and still work for the "get rich quick types" \-- just make
sure you get paid.

I guess I'm not feeling very curmudgeonly today. I don't think a few comments
from a few people that are unhappy with the way their parts of the world has
turned out actually means things are all that bad. Things actually seem pretty
good to me still.

------
alphydan
> If ((1-p) * s * e) < (m-c)*t

Because `p`, `e` and `t` are so easy to estimate ...

~~~
john_b
You can use averages in your area as a baseline, weighing more heavily towards
any startups of a similar nature.

You can also do a sensitivity analysis and determine what the room for error
is in those quantities.

Startups are a form of speculation, you shouldn't expect the same sort of
certainty that you'd get from wage labor.

~~~
alphydan
Easy then! Let's do photo sharing apps in 2014.

\- p: at seed stage (90% failure?) \- e: average exit. Should I make the
average including instagram, flikr, ... or is 2015 dead for photo sharing
apps? What about all the apps with a medium (but undisclosed) exit? How does
the calculation change if it's 2009? \- t: 2 years because ... _instagram_. Or
will it never happen again?

I think the key is that those values are 100% unknown if you're joining an
actual startup. _e_ is unknown, because you're at the beginning of a trend,
_t_ is unknown too, because it's too early to know and could be 5 or 10 in
your industry.

Could you give me the value of p,e,t for the fourth engineer at Instagram in
2010? (for my area, in data for solar lead generation I don't know of any
public exit, let alone the average _t_).

~~~
jacquesm
The funny thing is that an outlier such as instagram will not actually change
the averages all that much.

But feel free to totally ignore that part of the post if you feel that that
serves you best. And more power to you if you get to actually make bank that
way.

But for the people that are capable of making their own way I strongly believe
that their best interest lies in doing what they love best and charting their
own path, eventually possibly founding their own company where they have a
direct say in the success or failure rather than an indirect one and where
their chances of getting screwed over are far lower.

~~~
alphydan
> The funny thing is that an outlier such as instagram will not actually
> change the averages all that much.

The problem I see is access to the data to build that average. But I think we
agree on everything else.

I'm a scientist/engineer and became a founder. I'm also distrustful when I
meet the typical MBA starting a _tech company_ to get rich quick. I'm just
arguing that the uncertainties in that inequality will require some other way
to make the decision (Is the pay fair (considering the market rate, the
funding, the revenue)? I'm I a valued member of the team? Do I believe in the
mission? etc).

~~~
jacquesm
Sounds like a project to me, on to crawling crunchbase.

------
lnanek2
I wonder if he can actually make it as a modern developer instead of an aged
consultant. He bemoans things like logos and holds up his ugly page as
perfection, but in the modern ecosystem there will often be four or five apps
that do the same thing as you and design and looking good actually makes
people happy and lets you get more users, the only thing that counts.

He started in a time where if you just made something work people thought you
were awesome. Now you have to make it work, make it look good, have a better
user experience than everyone else, charge less money (often meaning funded
startups instead of bootstrapping), not eat up battery or data plans, etc..
His dislike of design doesn't really make me think he has much of a chance any
more.

~~~
yummyfajitas
A charitable interpretation or his claims is that if instead or competing on
logos and marketing, we instead competed on functionality and moving forward,
the industry would be better.

I tend to agree. Its one of the reasons I'm being lured towards finance -
thats a place where the best tech actually makes you win, marketers be damned.

