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Tell HN: These Are Tough Times

26 points by abadger9 ↗ HN
I was looking in my old email account and enjoyed seeing the liveliness of communication in old comms from companies like HortonWorks, Firebase, Whatsapp. Firstly, I feel communications with recruiters is so cold now (e.g, hello, yes the interview works, ok you've been rejected/move on to next round) and two I feel like silicon valley eight to tweleve years ago was a much friendlier place. I don't feel the same appeal from startup names now as companies like Klout, etc. carried back then - maybe each company is working on a little smaller niche of the industry, maybe I've gotten too old to appreciate crypto, but it was nice seeing how enthusiastic, hopeful, and happy silicon valley was a decade a go.

12 comments

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RjQoLCOSwiIKfpm
Money, through the arrival of the masses?, has really sucked the Internet and IT dry.

Back then it was "build cool shit".

Now it is "extract cool dollars".

jmathai
This was really evident the last time I drove up into San Francisco and noticed how bland all of the tech billboards were. Nothing interesting or novel…just a lot of enterprise SaaS products.

Looked a lot different 15 years ago.

nine_k
15 years ago? In 2008, the year of the Great Recession? Are you certain?..
jmathai
Yes. That's when I moved out to California. The tech industry looked and felt a lot different then than it does now. Recession or not.
nine_k
It had taken the colonel seventy-five years—the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute—to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied: “Cool shit.”

(I'll show myself out)

dudul
I've never bought into the "making the world a better place" meme. Even 10 years ago. However, I do certainly agree that back in the days recruiters were much better at communicating and some would even have add actual value to the job searching/interviewing process. Nowadays I might as well be speaking to a bot.
atonse
I don't know. When you look at the early days at companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Apple, Google, (even all these companies in the mid 2000s) they were absolutely about making money but by truly moving their industries forward by inventing new things at every level.

And they attracted truly world class talent in spades. But now most of these companies (save for maybe SpaceX) are so big that they must have tons of bozos that just want to move profits higher, keep the lights on, and get better performance reviews.

And many of those extremely talented people that moved things forward either retired, or do the revolving door of doing a startup, getting acquired, leaving, doing another startup, getting acquired, or became angel investors while they just chill.

Engineers like Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor, Joe Hewitt... the brothers that did Google Wave and Google Maps.

Nobody is blaming them for where they are now, they've earned it.

I am just saying that I don't know where the equivalents of today are. Please, please tell me they aren't all working on some crypto ponzi bullshit.

nodemaker
Keep calm and build your ai avatar app :)
j-rom
I think all the interpersonal connection eventually got removed since it started becoming more overtly about the money.
the_only_law
I don’t know what happened, but around mid-December I just stopped getting any contact from recruiters.
JSeymourATL
> communications with recruiters is so cold now…

True-

Worse still, Hiring Managers completely divorced from the recruiting process.

And C-Levels execs whine they can’t find the right “talent”… Hilarious!