I miss when this place was full of wide-eyed CS undergrads, now it's just "Exploits in Venture Capitalism". Everyone has grown up and gotten themselves high paying, boring adtech jobs so now they feel the need to defend surveillance capitalism and "intellectual property" at every turn. We used to make fun of illegal numbers and censorship efforts, now we support them. I guess you either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.
HN has always had lots of startup content; in fact it started life as "Startup News". If anything, there is less such content here than there used to be.
Well, this site was started and is still run by YCombinator, so that tension has always been there, and is in fact part of what makes it so great. (I sympathize mostly with the wide-eyed undergrads though.)
I think the difference is that our goals with startups has changed. Money has always been important, but other things matter too. They still do, but I believe money has weighting that money has to the equation has significantly increased.
I think Apple is a good example. There's plenty of critiques to Jobs (neither saint nor villain, but man) but he at least understood something: functionality and aesthetics go hand in hand. It always sucked to pay a premium for Apple hardware (and I even long protested it, fearing we'd get what we now have). But at least the hardware was higher quality (I'm aware of arm, that's not what I'm talking about), the aesthetics were great, in both the physical machine and the software. But now, what is the innovation? Smaller? Thinner?
I feel like Pantheon captured this very well when they have Pope saying he doesn't know what he's doing so he's really just trying to get Steve back to tell him what to do. I feel like this has happened all over Silicon Valley (and the rest of the world). The metrics became the targets. The hacker mentality of make products that make a better world and get rich while doing it are not as valued, even if it was always a facade. We still had deep respect and revered the hackers that rejected the money. The reason to learn to program was not to get rich, but to control computers. And whatever that meant to you, is true (even with silly bitter "vim vs emacs" rivalries. But even that illustrates a difference of today). The days people wrote the hacker manifesto, the deep ties to anti-authority, the liberation that the net could provide, all that and more. Now, I see two very different classes of students when I teach. There are the kids who love computers. Sometimes they skip class, sometimes they come in for a sense of duty, but when you provide an environment to let them be free they will give you the best projects even if they fail the tests. But most students just want an A and a good paying job.
I could never blame anyone for that! Life sucks, and we all gotta live. But the passion is different. Less finding problems to solve and more finding problems that allows them to use a specific tool (whatever is most popular at the time: currently ML). I don't blame anyone, but yeah, it is different. These things still exist, and probably even in higher quantities than ever before, but I'm willing to bet that it is not true for percentage. It's like we won, but forgot why we did all this in the first place.
Perhaps, but also the new generation didn't know anything else. There's plenty of fresh grads where I work, here, and elsewhere, who just don't value that fight as much or see it as the winnable-struggle-against-the-empire like we did.
I'm sure having a few kids takes the wind out of the middle-aged pirate ship's sails, but there are plenty of younger folks here who just value the startup culture, technology for its own sake, hustle, and have other values we can admire.
I adore the level of professionalism, diligence, and expertise I'm seeing in new grads who grew up knowing what a giant software company is (unlike us when they were kind of emerging as we were kids).
We've banned this account—first because you can't attack another user like that here, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are; and also because your account has repeatedly been posting flamewar comments and breaking the site guidelines in other places too.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I actually see a lot of comments, frequently, on this site pretending to hate surveillance capitalism and sticking up their noses at adtech, at every turn, particularly when used by some tiny little niche website that's just barely scraping by. This despite, presumably, many of these same people working for some of the biggest adsludge-pumping companies on the planet.
I'm willing to bet that there are a bunch of users here that don't work for those companies. Even more that might, but not in those departments. The latter might be more in line with what you're getting at, but we need to be careful casting too wide of a net. I want to convert those people, not push them away.
>Even more that might, but not in those departments.
So by some odd alchemy, if you take your salary from a company that creates it from things you morally detest, but you don't work in those specific departments, you're not at all a hypocrite?
It's like a libertarian working for the Stasi but saying it's alright because he's only doing microphone maintenance for them.
> I want to convert those people, not push them away.
On this I sympathize, though it has its limits too.
I'm not looking for a fight. I'm not sure why you decided to ignore the following sentence. If you want to cut comments apart with a scalpel you'll be able to find whatever you're looking for.
And they were a leadgen/SEO expert a few years ago. These technogrifters just move from one hot topic to the next trying to make whatever buck they can smooth talk people into giving them.
What do you mean by co-signing? We currently do attribute the work using "Co-authored-by:" in the commit message. I'm not sure if there's any other/better way to do it.
On top of that, we are thinking about developer profile you can share as a part of your resume. I'd love to hear some suggestions on what you think we should include in it.
I retract my previous statement! If you're already doing the Co-authored-by, that is fantastic, then their names are clickable on GitHub, and the developers themselves will be able to directly interact through their own GitHub accounts if they are @'ed by the customer. This is great. Definitely advertise that aspect.
In general my advice is this is one of those gray area markets where it is extremely easy to exploit workers, so you should do everything humanly possible to make sure that:
a) workers in this program are progressing with the goal being they can eventually "graduate" to the point where a middle-man is not required. This won't be possible across the board but an evil version of this startup would be designed to keep workers in this situation as long as possible, so just don't be that.
b) Allow customers who want to direct hire specific workers to do so seamlessly and don't do hefty referral fees that are enough to stop a lean startup from being able to pull the trigger. I've personally witnessed startups unable to pull the trigger in such situations because they can't afford to "buy the person out" of whatever referral company owns them. Don't be like that. If you absolutely must do a referral fee, structure it so they at least get back the money in credits with your program or something.
c) Treat workers like the assets they are -- each worker that eventually gets a job through your program becomes a marketing asset that will drive referrals from their home country when they eventually find success and tell their friends how they succeeded. Make sure you have created a positive enough experience for them that they will actually recommend you and dear god give them referral fees when they send you someone.
Your advice is spot on, and why we wanted to build a better than the current status quo!
a) we already have a sizeable alumni who have gone through GitStart over time, with many still in touch. We are in works to bring them all together in discord
b) there is no current restriction or even referral feel for both devs and companies to work with each other. The only thing we ask is for devs to either be full time on the platform or work with them directly and pause GitStart
c) good people recommend more good people! And we have a program where as alumni they get free credits for their own companies (over 5 have launched their company and used those free credits)
We currently do not have a referral program for alumni to recommend devs (it is there for currently active devs) but that’s a great idea to roll out!
I won't comment on the pragmatic side of this. But it is flawed even on the idea level, as it completely disregards time.
And as we all know it "You could not step twice into the same river".
