HN Explorer

Ask HN: Who are the "snake oil salesmen" of tech?

11 points by syndicatedjelly ↗ HN
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snake%20oil

snake oil (noun):

1: any of various substances or mixtures sold (as by a traveling medicine show) as medicine usually without regard to their medical worth or properties

2: poppycock, bunkum

Who are these people, companies, entities etc. in the tech world?

48 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] thread
joegahona
Most SEO tools or “experts” are snake oil.
8BitArmour
techlead,joma tech,99pc of Indian YouTubers,people who gaurantee you a job after buying a course,scaler academy
coldtrait
Most of tech and Indian tech space these days seems like it
petabyt
Oh yeah the Ex google ex Facebook ex Amazon tech lead
mlhpdx
Basically all consumer security apps?
yevyevyev
Web3 aka distributed ledger aka blockchain
coldtrait
People are still grifting in this space and I hear these guys on twitter talking about how they made six figures working in web3/dao/whateve buzzword
mikewarot
Anyone who pitches a "safer" computer language, or methodology. Rust, for example.

People who sell memory that they know is unreliable, otherwise RowHammer[1] wouldn't work

Most of the "CyberSecurity" industry... the Operating System should be doing their job, but isn't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer

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NukedOne
It's wildly insulting, defamatory, and detached from all reality on several levels, to classify Rust as snake oil.
an-account
Not a memory development guy, but I am a rust programmer and have managed cybersecurity teams. Rust is amazing for memory safety and good programing practice. And cyber… is a lot more than the OS.
trealira
I would be more worried about the opposite: future software and devices will use memory-safe programming languages like Rust, with C and assembly limited as much as possible, so things like the iPhone and the successors to the Nintendo Switch won't be able to be hacked or jailbroken to run software that wasn't approved by the hardware vendor, because there will be no buffer overflow exploits or dangling pointer vulnerabilities in them.
syndicatedjelly
Is that supposed to be a bad thing?
trealira
It's a mixed thing. Good for reducing piracy and increasing revenue, probably. It does mean that people who want to be able to install whatever they want on their devices, or write software for themselves to use on their own devices, will have to start buying ones explicitly marketed with those features, because you won't be able to just jailbreak it anymore.
syndicatedjelly
Why can’t a manufacturer just decide that they don’t want people jailbreaking their devices? It’s a black hole of a use case to support, especially when there are plenty of open Linux-based platforms for power-users to hack away on
trealira
Why are you arguing? I don't have any control over what manufacturers do. I'm glad there are open platform equivalents, like the PinePhone and Steam Deck. I just hope businesses like that keep existing, or else there'll be no way for you to control your devices without building them yourself. It empowers manufacturers and disempowers the individual user, even though the law hasn't changed. That's why I said it's mixed, not unilaterally good or bad. Maybe it'll be good in the long run by making people buy from platforms like that if they want control, promoting legitimate business.
Exuma
Imagine an idea more detached from reality than yours. Wow.
rl1987
Agile coaches who never wrote a single line of code. Blockchain people. Coding bootcamps and content/course creators promising unrealistic timelines to developer jobs. Pretty much anyone talking like they just made OVER-9000-DOLLARS(!!!) in a week with ChatGPT/Midjourney/Bitcoin/affiliate marketing/whatever the latest fad is. To lesser degree consumer grade VPN companies.
dcminter
"Agile coaches who never wrote a single line of code."

Hard disagree here. Of the agile coaches I've bumped into over the last decade or so the most excellent one I worked with was entirely non-techy and made a dramatic difference to the quality of the team.

samstave
Social Media Influencers - and the platforms they ~~rode~~ wrote in on.
eimrine
So sorry to observe Blockchain tech/ppl as a perfect example of a snake oil / snake oil sellers. I can clearly see a big future on this field, kind of a Democracy 2.0, the "short script which is going to replace all the governments".

But the myriad of dudes who don't know even the very basics of cryptography but having some excellent sales skills make me feel sad sometimes.

PM_me_your_math
Democracy is hell on earth. Whether it is a system of government, or a means by which groups make decisions or peddles their wares. The majority tends to encumber, enslave, and/or murder the minority. The eventual outcome of any purely democratic state or process is tyranny. This is why the founding fathers choose a republican form of government that uses democratic processes. Recall that Socrates was sentenced to die by a majority vote. With that in mind, then yes, the faux value assigned to "tech influencers" is a form of democracy that's just as poisonous as people who seek to "save democracy."
eimrine
You are right my man. I can not say I understand democracy as well as Bitcoin, all I can say that cryptography field is among the least trivial things in the Universe.
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cpach
If you look in blockchain, antivirus or AI, you’ll find heaps of snake oil salesmen.
pawelduda
Why antivirus?
mikewarot
In order to have a 100% effective AntiVirus program, you'd effectively have to be able to solve the halting problem, and predict the behavior of every program before you ran it.

If, instead, the Operating System did its job, and enforced the choices of the user, we wouldn't be in this pickle.

quickthrower2
It is still defense in depth though? Having email attachments run though AV is going to save someones ass even if said person should be cognisant of phishing attacks.
pawelduda
Maybe nowadays it's not required. Back when I used Windows XP connected to the Internet, it was mandatory. Ofc it wasn't better than common sense but it saved me a lot of times.
cpach
Many of those companies don’t know what they’re doing. They make the computer less secure instead of more secure.
gnz11
I suppose McKinsey could fit the bill and much of the tech consulting world for that matter. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ
Vaslo
Underrated comment. McKinseys delivery to price ratio is very poor. We get a slick talking salesman and then smart but underprepared analysts, at least for we should be getting for that price!
twright
A fun search I do is “McKinsey estimates” and see some bonkers numbers about hyped things that never really took off, at least nowhere to the degree they estimate.
lurn_mor
The ones we've already caught and convicted: FTX, Theranos, ...
tacostakohashi
Vendors of elaborate, configurable, "enterprise" tools for software development and monitoring.

JIRA, SonarQube, VeraCode, Coverity - all these apps that seem like a good idea in principle, but end up being misconfigured with complicated workflows, and generally get in the way of ever making changes to software and get used to tick the security box instead of actually fixing anything.

mharig
Microsoft

Selling a gaming OS as a tool for companies.

mawadev
Low code and no code tools claiming it's over for programmers