Seriously, there are so many great points in there hidden between the expletives. Here is one that really touched me:
> And what the fuck all those parties after raising money. Don’t you get it? You just dug your grave a little bit deeper. You should celebrate any day that you don’t have to sell off another part of your company.
I think that I last had to shift bits in a C program back when WordPerfect (4.2 and 5.1) used an XOR cipher for encryption, and used bit-shifting and (I think) XOR-ing to give you a 16-bit key for quick rejection of bad passwords. (At least, I think that's what the key was for.)
On the other hand, I last read a book in a week last week. It was a novel, not very long or very complex; but it was a book and it took less than a week.
You should look into getting an embedded systems job, those programs are full of shift / AND / OR / bit twiddle galore. You'll feel awesome for awhile, but trust me, all that low level bit stuff is sometimes a huge pain.
The irony of the fact that I read this during my morning 30 minute read through of tech news—at Hacker News, the über site, no less—is not lost on me.
Although a funny essay, there's a great deal of truth here, and should make us ask some hard questions about how, why, and when the technology world and its culture should infiltrate the everyday.
Now that the 30-minute routine of tech news is done, we shall reflect on this essay during the 30-minute meditation session and add appropriate actionable items to our quarterly and yearly goals.
> Fuck your eating disorders, why the fuck does everything has to be so extreme with you? On one end of the scale you’ve got the pizza-guzzling, office-snack hoarding monster, and on the other end you have the ‘I-must-optimize-every-living-second’ douche that only drinks fucking Soylent. Seriously, what the fuck?
And from me: also fuck your third extreme, of eating fucking hipster fruit salads all day every day, because everything has to be healthy and natural and organic and stuff. And fuck the way you force it on the industry events, so that I can't get a goddamn pizza on a programming conference because everything now has a catering company providing various kinds of weird-ass vegetarian food. I can eat healthy at home; I come to industry events for the fucking pizza.
There, I said it. I feel a little bit better.
--
As for the rest of the essay, it's a little heavy on the expletive side, but pretty much spot-on if you look at the media side of things. I'd say things aren't so bad in individual startups, but the overall culture - the blogosphere, the professional publications, etc. all feel like encouraging and glorifying this kind of nonsense.
> I can eat healthy at home; I come to industry events for the fucking pizza.
Really? In most realms outside IT, that's the food you buy when you consider the people eating it not worthy of actual catering. I can understand wanting pizza if the alternative is salad and water, but still.
>I never had to shift a bit in a C array in my life! And I never got a compilation error on a white board, when I need an 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.
No, fuck you for making everything run so slow on our pocket and desktop supercomputers.
...I said, as I shared this article in a JavaScript-powered desktop team collaboration application, and went back to writing a JavaScript-powered server-side application in a JavaScript-powered text editor.
This feels like a bizarre mixture of sensible criticism and sour grapes.
Standing desks? Actually pretty great for those who want them! If your back hurts after a day of sitting, go find some option you like better - why should the rest of us be upset by it? Yeah, they're not an option at a lot of jobs, but demanding that everyone standardize on a bad experience because "you're not special" is a great way to make every job awful.
A book a week? Not so bad, especially if it's something light! There are plenty of books you can read in <10 hours, even content-rich ones.
Understanding complexity? Interviewing is a mess, that's a standard belief, but constant time versus exponential time isn't meaningless yet. Start by getting rid of tree reversal questions, not declaring Big-O a useless concept.
And yet there's something pretty good buried under all the impractical complaints. Putting together a "user story" shouldn't be necessary when the task is "our login page is broke, let's fix it". Adding layers of media references and cultural touchstones to every possible concept just creates useless barriers to entry. A/B testing a hundred different features in isolation isn't a viable way to build a product.
So yes: there are a lot of things to criticize, and I know this is hyperbole. It's still a weird mix of justified and left-field attacks.
This article is trying to point out the absurdity of the current culture of the area, which I don't think makes him a curmudgeon. Also, reading HN (which I doubt is a terribly accurate characterization) makes Silicon Valley seem like an absurdly pretentious and expensive bubble.
Although I genuinely miss Valleywag and all the absurdity that it covered (e.g. Clinkle), I'm not sure if this is a fair critique of startup culture outside of having the excuse to say the F word a lot. As someone living in San Francisco, I can say that there are more to startups and startup culture than the stereotypes seen in Medium thought pieces and the Hacker News front page, although given the end of this particular Medium thought piece, that may be the point.
Toxic SV culture is ripe for parody, but words won't stop it. What will stop it is when the money stops flowing so easily and the wider economy improves so that it's no longer the place to be for the greedy. Not sure I see both those things happening any time soon, in the meantime Tech is sadly the new Finance.
Or, we (engineers) could all take a cue from workers of the past and organize to demand an end to abusive labor practices.
Seriously guys, just because we're making 10x the salary of a miner doesn't mean we're not also generating 100x the money for our employers without being allowed to take part in decisions that effect our lives.
You probably aren't making 10x what a miner makes. Mine foremen make around 95K[1]. A regular miner makes somewhere in the range of 40k-55k. Do you make 400k as a software developer? I'm making a broader point here, in that you aren't as seperated from blue collar workers in terms of your economic interests as you may think.
Yeah, but you get to make it without hugely-out-of-your-control health complications. Developers can get fat eating a lot of pizza, but they can run it off. Harder for a miner to avoid all the hazards with the job. As much as I hate the open workspace, I also would prefer being at a computer than doing manual labor in a claustrophobic mine.
Yeah, of course. I meant you income -> social position relative to the people who own the capital. There are interesting parallels. Mining companies operate on leased land with leased equipment backed by institutional investors... they keep it lean. The contemporary mine operator isn't totally dissimilar to the CEO/founder of a largish startup in how they approach their business. Yeah, of course writing code won't give you black lung, but you're still working for the man. The coal mine machine operator is a lot more like me than I am like Jack Dorsey.
He either completely misses the point, or completely gets it.
Every single one of these "benefits" are very well thought out and calculated shams meant to deceive and manipulate impressionable kids into working insane hours for less than a realistic living wage. That's the whole point.
It's just like that circus in the Pinocchio movie.
Not quite as exploitative as the music industry prefers to behave in pursuit of profits, but I concur the general top-down structuring of environments like that is not particularly an accident. Like hard seats in a fast food restaurant - they're not supposed to make you want to stay for an extended period of time, in theory.
Sometimes anger is justified. And sometimes it calls for a good venting. Sometimes it even calls for a little activism. And sometimes all of these are just futile, because richer people are in control of what you see and hear, who have interest in keeping their pockets full using the hard work of young impressionable kids who don't know the real value of their own time. It's sickening, and the anger is justified. The rant is probably going to be forgotten tomorrow though, and unfortunately won't save a single soul from the startup world.
> Fuck the transparency trend, the post mortem and the 5 whys.
Yea---wait, what? Those other things are reasonable complaints, but wondering why things go wrong and trying to stop them from going wrong for the same reason tomorrow is, you know, good.
I guess the complain about it is because to founders this is easy to do and gain some juice after failure while employees still get nothing. If it is só I agree with him. Glamourization of failure (privillege of few).
I concur. Incidents have many causes and different levels of failures, and "5 Why" documents make it too easy to target an easy or politically convenient solution without needing to mention the other failings.
Postmortems in general are fantastic, though. "Here is what (not who, what) went wrong, here is the list of things that made it go wrong, and here are the steps we're taking to make sure that this can't happen again or will not be as bad when it happens again."
Meh. I could write this same post about the corporate world stereotypes, but that would be dumb. This person has a problem with healthy people, fat people, people who have an interest in their field, people who work hard and overachieve, just an absurd breadth of random adjectives and interests that make people unique.
It just seems like they wish everyone was the same so they wouldn't be compared to the tons of people who've found success in the 'startup world'.
Fuck you HN, and your overly critical and serious comments complaining about how the article isn't new, isn't cool, isn't specific enough.
Fuck you HN for feeling the need to comment just to get your voice out there, just to put something down, just so you can add your snide remark at the end to prove your own intelligence to your peers.
And fuck me, for doing all of the above in pointing that out.
113 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] thread> And what the fuck all those parties after raising money. Don’t you get it? You just dug your grave a little bit deeper. You should celebrate any day that you don’t have to sell off another part of your company.
On the other hand, I last read a book in a week last week. It was a novel, not very long or very complex; but it was a book and it took less than a week.
Now UI stuff, that's where the real fun is!! ;-)
:(
I JUST WANTED TO GO INTO SPAACE!
Cookie for anybody who gets that semi-obscure reference.
Although a funny essay, there's a great deal of truth here, and should make us ask some hard questions about how, why, and when the technology world and its culture should infiltrate the everyday.
;).
And from me: also fuck your third extreme, of eating fucking hipster fruit salads all day every day, because everything has to be healthy and natural and organic and stuff. And fuck the way you force it on the industry events, so that I can't get a goddamn pizza on a programming conference because everything now has a catering company providing various kinds of weird-ass vegetarian food. I can eat healthy at home; I come to industry events for the fucking pizza.
There, I said it. I feel a little bit better.
--
As for the rest of the essay, it's a little heavy on the expletive side, but pretty much spot-on if you look at the media side of things. I'd say things aren't so bad in individual startups, but the overall culture - the blogosphere, the professional publications, etc. all feel like encouraging and glorifying this kind of nonsense.
That's an odd reason to attend an event/conference.
Really? In most realms outside IT, that's the food you buy when you consider the people eating it not worthy of actual catering. I can understand wanting pizza if the alternative is salad and water, but still.
No, fuck you for making everything run so slow on our pocket and desktop supercomputers.
Standing desks? Actually pretty great for those who want them! If your back hurts after a day of sitting, go find some option you like better - why should the rest of us be upset by it? Yeah, they're not an option at a lot of jobs, but demanding that everyone standardize on a bad experience because "you're not special" is a great way to make every job awful.
A book a week? Not so bad, especially if it's something light! There are plenty of books you can read in <10 hours, even content-rich ones.
Understanding complexity? Interviewing is a mess, that's a standard belief, but constant time versus exponential time isn't meaningless yet. Start by getting rid of tree reversal questions, not declaring Big-O a useless concept.
And yet there's something pretty good buried under all the impractical complaints. Putting together a "user story" shouldn't be necessary when the task is "our login page is broke, let's fix it". Adding layers of media references and cultural touchstones to every possible concept just creates useless barriers to entry. A/B testing a hundred different features in isolation isn't a viable way to build a product.
So yes: there are a lot of things to criticize, and I know this is hyperbole. It's still a weird mix of justified and left-field attacks.
I'm on your lawn, aren't I?
I should get off, shouldn't I...
Doesn't say anything for people against things that legitimately suck though.
Yes, but not much.
Seriously guys, just because we're making 10x the salary of a miner doesn't mean we're not also generating 100x the money for our employers without being allowed to take part in decisions that effect our lives.
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=mine+sallaries&oq=mine+salla...
Living in the bay area and working for a startup it's easy to relate and it's funny, i'll five the author that.
After the second paragraph it starts getting pretty old though...
Every single one of these "benefits" are very well thought out and calculated shams meant to deceive and manipulate impressionable kids into working insane hours for less than a realistic living wage. That's the whole point.
It's just like that circus in the Pinocchio movie.
Yeah!
> Fuck you drinking culture too.
Yeah!
> Fuck your open space floor plans
Yeah!
> Fuck the transparency trend, the post mortem and the 5 whys.
Yea---wait, what? Those other things are reasonable complaints, but wondering why things go wrong and trying to stop them from going wrong for the same reason tomorrow is, you know, good.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys#Criticism
Postmortems in general are fantastic, though. "Here is what (not who, what) went wrong, here is the list of things that made it go wrong, and here are the steps we're taking to make sure that this can't happen again or will not be as bad when it happens again."
It just seems like they wish everyone was the same so they wouldn't be compared to the tons of people who've found success in the 'startup world'.
2/10, barely entertaining.
Fuck you HN, and your overly critical and serious comments complaining about how the article isn't new, isn't cool, isn't specific enough.
Fuck you HN for feeling the need to comment just to get your voice out there, just to put something down, just so you can add your snide remark at the end to prove your own intelligence to your peers.
And fuck me, for doing all of the above in pointing that out.