
Fuck You Startup World (2016) - personjerry
https://medium.com/startup-grind/fuck-you-startup-world-ab6cc72fad0e
======
donmb
At least here in Germany, this culture seems to be over. It was declining and
after Corona, it has changed completely. More and more smaller companies also
value that you have family, friends and social life and home office becomes a
normal thing, thanks god.

But I agree with a lot of these points after working 5 years in a startup. The
biggest problem is that you try to increase your runway even though the
business model does not seem to work. Instead of making it profitable as soon
as possible, you try to grow and grow and hire people you don't even need.
This was the worst experience. And then letting those people go again is even
worse.

I hope that we get back to the ground and try to build solid and profitable
business in the future instead of blown up air castles with no value at all.

------
alpha_squared
This is probably going to earn me a mountain of downvotes and rebukes (all of
which I welcome so that I can learn!), but here goes nothing...

I'm fairly convinced that a lot of technical people are on the spectrum. I
don't mean this as an insult in any way whatsoever, though I'm sure many will
take it as such (sorry, in advance!). The raw, calculative persona of those
described as "10x developers" and "optimize all minutiae" seems to line up
with having difficulty empathizing with others and acknowledging emotions. In
many ways, I really envy the ability to execute to that degree.
Simultaneously, I think these are many of the same people who are taken
advantage of by others (e.g. founders, managers, investors) to further deepen
their pockets.

They're often immensely talented in technical realms and excel in sciences,
making computer science and software careers ideal places where they can
thrive. Their relative over-performance creates a tension on the opposite end
where others can't keep up to the same capacity. I think we've often chalked
it up to people being "quirky" and I think we're all familiar with Hollywood's
stereotypes about technical folk, but there is a lack of mental health
discussion in the US (and perhaps other places in the west). Am I completely
off-base in thinking this way? I'm certainly no psychologist, but I welcome
other perspectives on this.

~~~
EvilEy3
> I'm fairly convinced that a lot of sports people are on the spectrum. I
> don't mean this as an insult in any way whatsoever, though I'm sure many
> will take it as such (sorry, in advance!). The raw, calculative persona of
> those described as "10x sportsman" and "optimize all muscleai" seems to line
> up with having difficulty empathizing with others and acknowledging
> emotions. In many ways, I really envy the ability to execute to that degree.
> Simultaneously, I think these are many of the same people who are taken
> advantage of by others (e.g. founders, managers, investors) to further
> deepen their pockets.

They're often immensely talented in physical realms and excel in sports,
making sport careers ideal places where they can thrive. Their relative over-
performance creates a tension on the opposite end where others can't keep up
to the same capacity. I think we've often chalked it up to people being
"quirky" and I think we're all familiar with Hollywood's stereotypes about
sports folk, but there is a lack of mental health discussion in the US (and
perhaps other places in the west). Am I completely off-base in thinking this
way? I'm certainly no psychologist, but I welcome other perspectives on this.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The difference is sports people don't really run anything. They sport. In a
closed environment.

Software and start-ups are more like having to sports whatever you do, whether
you like it or not.

Buy take-out? Pick up your sportsy phone and sports the heck out of that!
Don't forget to tip your driver, because he's on minimum wage.

Order an airline ticket? So fast and sportsy! OK, so someone didn't sports
properly and some of these planes crashed, but let's just [cough] pretend the
pilots made mistakes.

Find somewhere to stay? Your accommodation choices have been so uniformly
sportsed you'll get a properly sportsed touch of local flavour, but you'll be
spared any unsettling cultural surprises.

Chat to friends? We've totally sportsed that up for you!

So now everything you do has been completely sportsed by people who just love
sportsing.

And this is good for you. And for everyone. And especially good for the
future.

No, really, it is.

------
JackPoach
Hmm, I kind of disagree. I don't personally find listed startup 'traditions'
necessarily bad. In fact, I love the fact that there are startups that are
just like that (maybe because I like whiskey too). BUT I think it's a problem
when startup culture is being copied. It's like saying 'the only cool music is
rap, we won't listed to jazz or classical music or heavy metal'. So yeah, let
there be more startups with their own authentic cultures (including totally
opposing ones) because the culture described is a problem only when it's not
your own, but you copy is because you want to be a cool kid too.

~~~
HeadsUpHigh
Hard to have authentic cultures when everyone is eating from the same VC plate
and everything is located in the same few areas.

------
sgtnoodle
Very sensational, but how is this much different than the humor in Silicon
Valley the rant makes fun of? Maybe the irony is intentional. I personally sit
on an exercise ball at work because I like to bounce up and down. I developed
that preference while programming spaceships at SpaceX. The over the top
parties there were a lot of fun. Low key responsible parties are fun too; I
recall after a funding round at Zipline we took half an hour to eat an ice
cream cake then went back to work. The comments about coworkers drinking
soylent is spot on.

~~~
randycupertino
I just ordered a mini trampoline to bounce up and down at my standing desk.
Pretty excited, actually.

------
greenyoda
Originally from 2016. For those interested, these were the major discussions:

2016:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12682944](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12682944)

2018:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17002651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17002651)

------
29athrowaway
I watched the 2018 German film "The Wave" about some students that spend a
week learning about fascism by gradually becoming fascists without knowing it.

And it's similar to a startup:

\- One of the first stages in their indoctrination is wearing a uniform. In
startups you get company t-shirts.

\- Then there's the autocracy... a central figure that has supreme power, the
movement leader. In a startup, you have the founders.

\- And once startups become a cohesive group, they become a groupthink
collective that thinks they're the invincible chosen few destined to rule the
world.

------
nicbou
It was an entertaining read. The mixture of valid criticism and bitterness was
funny.

Sure, there are some crazy people in the field, but in the end, most of my
friends would kill for the conditions I had at tech companies. As long as you
remind yourself that it's just a job, it's a pleasant experience.

------
peteforde
Does this really deserve a rehash?

I hope this guy found his true passion as an alpaca rancher. All humour aside,
it's clear that the feeling is probably mutual.

------
bryanrasmussen
>Fuck reading a book a week. No one can read that fast. Let me repeat that -NO
ONE CAN FUCKING READ THAT FAST. How about actually reading that god damn
book?!

I used to read a book a day (sometimes 2 days when books were really big or
half a day when really small - like I could get through 2 Narnia books a day)
- however that was in my teens when I didn't do my schoolwork and just read,
or in my twenties when I was a committed non-productive member of society.

Recently I read a lot of Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Puddn'head
Wilson, Life on the Mississippi) I think it took about 3-4 weeks, so yeah a
book a week. Luckily I have an e-reader now so I could get it in otherwise
yeah I wouldn't have managed it.

In short - that got on my nerves and I think this person with their swearing
judgements of other people should actually try reading a bit themselves.

~~~
Jnr
Audio books is not technically reading yourself, but with those you can easily
go through one book a week. They don't really work for me personally, but some
of my friends listen to audio books all the time.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
since I can do a book a week (approximately) using an ereader and reading
whenever I have a spare moment during the day that's not my point, my point is
where does he get this nobody can read a book a week thing (since I could read
a book a day when I did not have the troubling concerns of employment and
family and still a book a week now that I do have these concerns.)

The average reading speed is about 55 pages per hour, 8 hours a day or 8 hours
a week - 440 pages.

Pretty much anyone can read fast enough to read a book a week.

------
Uhhrrr
I notice he doesn't say, "Fuck you for solving your customers' problems and
making them insanely happy."

He's talking about the cargo cult parts.

~~~
mkarliner
That's because solving customers problems is so rarely a goal.

------
WWLink
>Fuck you productivity freaks. You try to make me feel bad because I woke up
“only” at 6AM.

What's so terrible about getting up sometime between 8 and 9am? :o

~~~
HenryBemis
You obviously don't have kids :)

I guess that many of those "productivity freaks" have toddlers, they tend to
wake up at 6.30-7. So waking up at 6 is the one hour in your day that is yours
and yours alone. So they wake up at 5-6am, to have a couple of "good hours".
Because after the morning preparations and a 40min drive to get the kids to
school, your mind is less 'fresh' than what it was at 6am.

It's a practical thing (for those who find it to be). Not a panacea for all.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
When did computer geeks and programmers, professionals of one of the least
physical occupations, become so aggressive, at least verbally? This article
sounds rather like my 16 year old friends who had a punk band with song lyrics
where they "fucked" the police, the politicians, the church and basically
everybody else. So much pent-up anger, I expect from a teenage punk band, but
an article on technology? I don't really get it.

Not to say that, knowing we're all nerds here, this kind of tone sounds,
frankly, a little ridiculous. I'm compelled to whisper "when you make a fist,
you wanna keep your thumb on the outside".

------
squibbles
> I never had to shift a bit in a C array in my life!

I have done (and continue to do) quite a bit of work involving bit shifting,
along with various other bitwise operations. Is it really that unusual? Should
I feel guilty?

Humor aside, I am genuinely curious to what extent other people are familiar
or experienced with low-level bitwise operations.

~~~
lagadu
I imagine that very few people who work with higher abstraction level
languages (java, c#, go, js) are experienced at all with that.

~~~
daerogami
C# developer here. Bit shifting is super useful for defining flags and flags
are awesome. In the web app world, I don't really come across the need for bit
shifting outside of flags. If I am building something in Unity or GodotSharp,
there are far more opportunities where bit-shifting is useful.

I generally agree with your statement when referring to code bootcamp
graduates, but anyone with a CS degree should have learned bitshifting by
their second programming course; YMMV.

------
UweSchmidt
Some "Fuck Everyone" vibes from Ed Norton in 25th Hour. Could use a little
more than one line of self-reflection though at the end though.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgL_5QcZCMo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgL_5QcZCMo)

------
dgellow
There is a follow-up post where he explains what happened after publication:
[https://medium.com/@shemag8/when-your-story-go-
viral-8a1c84a...](https://medium.com/@shemag8/when-your-story-go-
viral-8a1c84ad0fdb)

------
mkarliner
I lived like this for decades. I think I'm beginning to recover now.

------
peteretep
This is amusing. However, there’s rejection of the baby with the bath water
here:

> reviewed your quarterly and yearly “goals” for another 30 minutes ... noise
> cancelling headphones and Pomodoro timers, your fucking to-do lists, apps

You can have these when you pry these from my cold, dead hands. I vividly
remember my life before I got organised, productive, and before noise
cancelling headphones, and there’s absolutely no going back.

------
master_yoda_1
It get me off on this line " when I need a hash set in Java I just use
HashSet- I don’t fucking care about the complexity of this code block because
I can afford another EC2 instance! So fuck you." I have to deal with these
incompetent idiots everyday. Software Engineering is not mindless copy paste.

------
haywirez
In September 2020, somehow this all feels so dated and irrelevant, including
talking about it here on Hacker News. The whole culture is past its zenith,
ready to be processed and filed away.

~~~
mercer
To some extent the 'culture' just moves on to different fields and/or
subfields.

For example, my experience has been that the cryptocurrency/blockchain
'culture' reached its zenith at a point later than the more general
'startup/app culture'.

I suppose ML/AI stuff is still sort of on the way up, if not for the
coronavirus putting everything on pause.

I know a bunch of people in their early-to-mid-twenties who are perfect
'canaries' for whatever is the next 'startup culture' and it's both
interesting and slightly annoying to talk to them about it.

I feel to old to get caught up in all of it, but I admit that knowing what's
hot can be helpful to find the type of work that I don't like but that pays
the bills.

~~~
blaser-waffle
> For example, my experience has been that the cryptocurrency/blockchain
> 'culture' reached its zenith at a point later than the more general
> 'startup/app culture'.

I'd argue that it was the same thing; startup culture was running out of gas
and then a new, spicy tech showed up that revived the field and spawned a
whole new galaxy of statups.

------
bradhe
Interesting that in 2020 I’m not really sure how much of this applies? Trying
to think of the major trends today, I don’t feel like they’re very well
represented here. Or maybe I’m just a bit more disconnected from the modern
startup world.

------
gridlockd
_" I don’t fucking care about the complexity of this code block because I can
afford another EC2 instance! So fuck you."_

You mean, you can afford another N^2 instances?

------
02020202
"I’ll come work for you because you have the Glenlivet 17 and not the 15" ...
obviously not a whisky drinker :D ... nothing against Glenlivet but come on :D

------
bcoughlan
The Hustle:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U)

------
pacomerh
This felt good. I feel like I also wanted to say this

------
Dansvidania
quite the collection of first world problems...

I only skimmed the article, but I am guessing "Fuck you for my 6 figures
salary" is not there.

------
lvturner
This just came across as "I am 14 and this is deep" or perhaps a LiveJournal
post. I know how to swear too!

------
sgt101
>design sprints

Oh my goodness; let's take everything that anyone has learned about software
development and gut it. I hate these people.

------
cryptica
Let's not ignore the 'minor' detail that the entire space is a ponzi scheme to
begin with (coming from Chamath Palihapitiya; a billionaire who was one of the
first Facebook employees):
[https://youtu.be/NVVsdlHslfI?t=2](https://youtu.be/NVVsdlHslfI?t=2)

And let's not ignore that the entire financial system within which this ponzi
scheme operates is also a giant ponzi scheme:
[https://youtu.be/iFDe5kUUyT0?t=79](https://youtu.be/iFDe5kUUyT0?t=79)

So the startup world is literally a ponzi scheme within a ponzi scheme.

