[shruubi]

As someone who is outside of SF looking in, to me the whole startup culture there seems utterly insane. To me, it seems as though there is some kind of reality distortion field that convinces us all that no matter what we is being worked on or created, it is in some way world changing or "disruptive", despite how stupid it is, or how viable a market there is for what is being made.

The funny thing is, organizations that are actually trying to make the world a better place by helping the homeless, poor, disadvantaged etc I've never even heard of.

The way I see it is that VC's are all about world changing and making the world a better place, so long as in this better world they can still milk a market for every last penny.

[M_Grey]

It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get, and want a piece of that. That's all there is to it. The rest is window dressing and empty words to facilitate an IPO, selling the company, or hitting that lucky lottery win in some other way.

When it inevitably, eventually implodes, nothing of lasting value will be lost.

[refurb]

It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get, and want a piece of that.

That about sums it up. If people suddenly became rich through farming, you'd see people flocking to the mid-west. A lot of people claim a higher calling or passion for tech, but it's mostly just dollar signs in their eyes.

[sp527]

I had a passion for tech. Then it was beaten out of me by large, successful tech companies. Some day, the majority of us who are relegated to inane, shitty work will wake up and acknowledge that.

So what do you do when you are a capable programmer who isn't rich enough to work on something challenging/interesting/meaningful like electric cars or rockets? Maximize expected value. That's not immoral. That's the shitty reality of being a person of average means.

[sangnoir]

> So what do you do when you are a capable programmer who isn't rich enough to work on something challenging/interesting/meaningful like electric cars or rockets?

The list of meaningful things a capable programmer is way longer than that! You dont have to quit yiur dayjob to work on them and get some fulfillment/validation.

I'll add: Rockets and electric cars are just at a certain point in their hype-cycles, and you're just drinking the koolaid. I'm 100% certain you'd have your passion for tech beaten out in those industries too, if you worked for the wrong company.

[noobermin]

>So what do you do when you are a capable programmer who isn't rich enough to work on something challenging/interesting/meaningful like electric cars or rockets?

Why do you have to be rich to work on electric cars or rockets? Many companies are hiring specifically for these technologies.

[eli_gottlieb]

Fuck passion. There are people who work passionlessly on revolutionary things. Accomplish something you care about, sure, but supporting yourself and a family is also worth caring about.

[noobermin]

You don't need to have to work on something revolutionary to support a family however, or even be a super rich guy. There is wallstreet after all.

[john_other_john]

Forgive me if this is without the applicable context, but sp527, I sincerely doubt you are a person of average means.

I mean neither to backhanded compliment the abilities of the HN crowd, nor to - as seems increasingly common when I find myself in the change - state interfaces of society, silently denigrate you by implicit reference to privilege I may not have. If you can take my statement literally, that would be superb!

I mean, I think the word average when it comes to ability or performance or self assessment is poorly used. Too frequently it is meant as self denigrating before a audience (which, as with above, I did not infer nor deliberately infer from your comment) and when it is used plainly, as in "I'm an average kinda guy" I find it too often misleads one into imagining one's interlocutor is saying they are a unremarkable character personally. It's a safety pitch in a chat up line, for one example of use subset my last classification of "average" use.

I take your statement literally in a socio - economic and intellectual sense, but with a skew that probably does put you quite a bit above the census bureau averages in most ways.

But what does frustrate me, when self description of "average" is used, is that perfectly "average" people perform quite wondrous feats or succeed with way above the deviation accomplishment, because one is able to trade in life.

I have just remembered this, prompted by your comment: when in my early twenties, despite I had received a privileged education, imagined what I could do by trading futures in myself. Take my thirties away and give that time to me now. Forget my personal growth (that was a biggie I left too late, beware!) because now I want to design things 24/7/365. And so on and so forth. I estimated not my ability or relative ability, but looked about at how long (by mere guesstimate) things I admired took to do, when I imagined most on that job were going home normal hours to wives and children, and having weekends and social lives, and the odd sick day or holiday, and maybe only reading two or three work related books a year, max, and certainly not consuming a subset of citeseer in unbroken mind-high caffeinated sessions which cared little to distinguish weeks, let alone days.

Quite apart form the fact you are either a engineer or have some capacity in that regard, the bounds of possible optimisation achievable from "a person of average means" I think must be very excellent indeed. How indeed, did mankind excel, when there was just a few of us in any social group hanging about with no tools or fire or built shelter and so on? Someone hit it right out the park, not merely once, but probably a while lot of times in a row, to get us through some earlier developing stages, just as we have some now, particularly in systematising and understanding what all this software lark is really about and how to make all of us good at it, instead of - one wonders - mere self defined _potential_ outlier points around some average.

I'm also quite sure, that when you are in your metier, when you are at a fundamental level aware you are where you want to be, you will find relevant skills or muscles or abilities notably at a higher functional level than you ever imagined they could be. Because there is something reflexive, compounding, about the human existence at least I have known, just as equally there can be compounding, confounding negative spirals. I believe there must be a art I have not learned in my 40 some years, of neatly skipping sideways from the spirals and letting one's instincts guide us to where some factor or energy or whatever phenomenon it may be is compounding and positive. If we could so dance with our own entropy, what a dance it would be. But meanwhile, I think "average" is most definitely not always average.

[wutbrodo]

> A lot of people claim a higher calling or passion for tech, but it's mostly just dollar signs in their eyes.

AFAICT, tech was full of passionate people (at the very least about building something, if not changing the world), way back before it had the cultural cachet that it now does. As it became increasingly clear that there was a lot of money in tech, what I call (generically) "the finance crowd"[1] flooded in. By which I mean, the masses of more-or-less competent people across the country/world who really don't care too much what they study/work in, as long as it's profitable.

The beef I have with thinking like yours is that there are plenty of us still around who were here before working in tech went from being nerdy to (relatively) "cool", and we'll be here if and when it stops being the industry du jour. It kinda sucks when people like you make the leap from "most people these days are chasing dollars and paying lip service to passion" to "anyone who claims they love/believe in what they do is just chasing $$". To this day I know plenty of people who would be here even if it didn't happen to be the currently-booming industry.

To be fair, the oblivious author is far guiltier of this than you; he's a perfect example of what he's whining about hating, and if he bothered learning anything about the history of tech in the area, he wouldn't be so quick to assume that those who claim an affinity for it are completely hollow.

Though I have to say, getting here years before the rush provides the nice consolation of not having to compete in the ludicrous housing market that the boom + lack of construction has spawned.

[1] I may be guilty of making the same over-generalizing mistake about finance, but I know quite a few people who work in finance and have been legitimately passionate about finance as a concept and the technical challenges involved therein since they were pretty young. Every single one of them has had that passion beaten out of them by the industry itself and the people they're surrounded by. By contrast, I still know tons of people in tech turning down big paychecks to just work on stuff that they like working on (I quit my job last year and am taking about a 50% paycut for similar reasons).

[M_Grey]

They're smart enough to know that saying, "This is the new gold rush" would make them look bad, exactly.

[crdb]

> It's all about people who've seen how absurdly rich you can get

Yes and no. As is often bandied about, the expected value of a career in startups is lower than in many other fields, and yet people do stay after seeing through the myth.

A large part of it, at least that I've observed, is the energy, speed of execution, rapid change, the excitement and adventure of the startup world. You willingly give up expected value in exchange for a more interesting life. The stress is part of the fun, the person it moulds you into is something that becomes part of your identity. If the personal risk wasn't real, it wouldn't be fun. The man in the arena etc.

[M_Grey]

>Yes and no. As is often bandied about, the expected value of a career in startups is lower than in many other fields, and yet people do stay after seeing through the myth.

Hence, "Lottery".

[jxramos]

I can backup these claims via a third party testimony. I had a friend who worked at Microsoft Redmond for many years and grew tired of the operations a big Juggernaut company and how it can be wasteful and less daring and all the other undesirable behaviors that deep pockets can afford not being in a state of survival. He hopped ship over to LinkedIn to experience a more daring startup lifestyle. According to him it's added a great deal more meaning to his work life. I guess he'll see how things steer under Microsoft's sailing.

[radicsge]

It's not necessarily bad, but as "with great power comes great responsibility" is not followed here, is the real problem.

If you are lucky and became incredible reach you should give back to the world. And not just the 0.1% to have media coverage (like facebook did when their cheating got out)...

Apple once were the biggest company, yet i dont know anything that would shine any good light on that company... Their last notable act was that their blackmailed the EU..

Thats why i hope no company will overgrow the countries...

[tod222]

> like facebook did when their cheating got out

I have no idea what this refers to. Care to elaborate?

[jwatte]

Twitter, Facebook, Google, and a bunch of other previous startups do have value. Also more, like Electronic Arts, Oracle, Intel, Salesforce, Apple, ... It's just that the 1000:1 ratio between startup and final enterprise is brutal!

[lucaspiller]

Twitter and Facebook may have value in dollar signs (OK maybe not Twitter right now), but I'd really question how much value they have provided to society as a whole. It seems like all Facebook wants to do is built an ecosystem, lock you in it, and milk you for data they can sell to advertisers.

[ec109685]

Seriously? A billion+ people use Facebook products, many hundreds of millions very happily.

[collyw]

I am sure I have seen research claiming that excessive facebook use makes people less happy.

[wutbrodo]

Excessive _damn-near-anything_ makes you unhappy or is otherwise bad for you. That's....pretty much what the word excessive means! The idea that it's possible to use something excessively means it's of little value is just beyond ludicrous.

[radicsge]

Yet if facebook would disappear, nothing would be lost. Somebody would overtake the position in no time. This is not true for real value added companies.

[noobermin]

By that logic, Ford produces no "[added] real value." It seems like only monopolies can add real value in your criteria.

[john_other_john]

I can only ever see this as a kind of broken transference of emotions that normally attach to the pleasures (and trials) of proximity to one's friends.

Most simplistically, we have traversed a social arc between almost hard - wired numerical limits to groups, by tribe or family or township, or travelling together, through dissociation of conurbations and suburbia and the popularism of the "atomic family" which mae feel-good about a life within a picket fence and a statutory numberof offspring, all separated from relations, co-workers and even neighbors by white-picket and loosely connecting these nodes via tin chariot (well, steel, but tin chariot scans more to my liking), through synchronous but limited (by cost of area code) node to node networks (POTS) until today one only has to sign up for Facebook and one is inundated not only with "friends" * but the immediacy of multifaceted interaction in many time-division multiplexes of attention, which is in comparison with our earlier means to communicate, infinitely closer to the real thing of mingling among people we know or vaguely know.

Meanwhile, for a litany of reasons, from specialisation in study to the economic drive that demands ever greater input from students to adjuncts and in similar fashion in business demand for narrow "verticals", silos of expertise, the straining naturally not automatically robust interdisciplinary lines of correspondence, even to the distraction of once innocently the snake game, but our phones themselves...

It feels to me as if we have been corralled, and I do not say this has been to any grand plan, but it feels to me as if our lives are inverted. Or at least I felt that I experienced a inversion: My work was a primary social interaction, and home a "refuge" or rather a seclusion at best, a isolation at worst, and it could feel so even when not alone, if I was in my wife's bad books. But now instantaneously I can obtain the adrenaline, serotonin, the chemistry caused by high value, high consequence socialising, whilst individually I cannot communicate silently my mood with a gesture or sigh, whilst individually I can be picked off for especial treatment to pump my brain chemistry in the right way to receive a advertisement, without someone guffawing what a load of tripe the product is or telling me I won't like a violent scene in a movie or..

I may not be doing so well at this, but I am trying to describe how I believe Facebook and imitators can co-opt the physical self that is keyed to complex social interaction, [edit to add next few words] and in a larger social context high value things such a reputation and acceptance carry heavy processing burdens as well, which potentially may impair other critical thought. [end edit]

Along with the chemical and thence psychological rewards, comes very possibly "being happy" or "a happy user", yet because we are alone, a sole observer, I see risks. Even in company we have created our unique context. I recently described the difficulty of discussing code between two on even the same part of a project, to being able to tell from what they say how, by reading what articles or using what sites, your love on the sofa with you has arrived at a particular remark, without them explaining it. I said just keep adding bells on that one." Because social interaction at a wider mark is high value and high risk, and because we process so much of this intuitively or subconsciously, any extension of the framework that omits balances and checks, which are provided in face to face society where communication is necessarily open, I believe there is significant potential for undesirable system wide side effects on a individual.

So I do not think that users are in of themselves happy _because of a product like Facebook, but Facebook has created for them a simulacrum. I believe like any simulation which is necessarily crude, inherently non - deterministic, and isolating whilst increasing sensory or other input, such a system is not inherently not dangerous.

*That experience was made even fresher to me, not very long ago, when I first time ever registered on FB, and before anything else, entered a pre-pay cell number. I was quite confused a while how many people seemed to know me, even invite me to be friends, who seemed to stretch my recollection a bit much, before I twigged the number had been allocated not long before I bought the phone. Invites to be friends were surprising - I checked and I don't share a name with anyone in this other social group...

[Edits for punctuation, minor clarity]

[drakonandor]

Twitter had over $2B in revenue last year.

[pascalxus]

Entrepreneurs and companies that get started are utterly desparate for solvable problems to solve. The ideas may seem "stupid" to you, but that's only because biggest problems have way too many barriers to entry and are typically guarded by rent seeking government lobbying legislation.

Take homelessness. I'm sure there's a technical way to build housing for cheap enough to get people back into houses. But, the government legislation makes it a complete non-starter. There are so many rules and regulations, a potential entrepreneur or existing Company couldn't even begin to dream of creating a solution. It's all Locked up. Homelessness is a problem that is illegal to solve, as so many things are.

Trust me, if it were legally possible to create housing that was profitable (low enough cost to cover expenses), I'm sure there would be dozens of builders lining up around the block to do it.

[forgetsusername]

The building of cheap houses isn't the problem. Who maintains them? Who enforces the code? Who insures them? Who is liable for them? These are things that "SV" sometimes ignores. That's why these are bigger problems.

[toomuchtodo]

Google "Tiny homes homelessness". The project I'm fond of "A Tiny Home For Good" in upstate NY purchases cheap city lots (or takes land donations), has volunteers build the tiny homes, and then provides them to the homeless to get them back on their feet.

The regulations aren't hard. Simply put down your JavaScript framework of the week and go out to do real work that effects change. Prepare to work long days and not get rich, but make people's lives better.

But people won't, and that's SVs problem.

[mifreewil]

Homelessness has a multitude of problems, not all are because of government regulation.

But yes, in many places (SF and SV), homelessness is at least caused in part by local zoning that mostly comes from entrenched interests (existing homeowners) and blocks most new building of housing. Local zoning in the US seems to be where democracy is at it's strongest, and capitalism at it's weakest, often to detriment of most people (renters).

[collyw]

Regulations didn't stop Uber or Airbnb.

[wutbrodo]

It's simply intellectually lazy to assume that that must apply universally. It's usually useful to think through how that happened and what that might imply about when the political will doesn't exist to push back against loopholes.

In the case of Uber, the class of people that benefited economically were the kind that wield a fair amount of money and political influence. This means that 1) Uber had enough revenue (and promise of future revenue) that they had the resources to fight legal battles and 2) a reasonably politically influential class of people was likely to be on their side in any potential regulatory battle. As an aside, the perceived minimum reasonable amount of regulation required for housing is a good deal higher than that of transport. This makes forward movement without the co-operation of the regulatory regime much more difficult, since working outside of the regulatory framework exposes you to real problems involving sanitation, fire safety, infrastructure, etc[1].

The homeless unfortunately _don't_ wield these kind of resources or political influence, so efforts to route around housing regulation in a way that benefits the homeless has no economic incentive backing it (and much of the time and money currently dedicated to fighting homelessness generally doesn't think of housing regulation as a problem). This isn't even entirely hypothetical; the article I linked in this comment is about a guy in LA building mini-houses for the homeless that the city keeps tearing down. I'm not even saying that they're necessarily wrong to do so, just that "derp other companies in unrelated contexts weren't stopped by regulation" doesn't even close to approach a sensible response to "regulation might impede improvement of the housing problem".

[1] http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-tiny-houses-seiz...

[otempomores]

That very same goverment invented resource scarcity to stop people from having houses even if they could afford them..

[smogcutter]

In what specific ways is homelessness a problem which is illegal to solve?

[wutbrodo]

I'm not the parent commenter, but I've heard this complaint before, and it usually boils down to zoning and some types of development limits drastically reducing the efficiency of the housing market (in terms of provision of housing to the most people). AFAICT, it's not really controversial that land use regulation is a big chunk of what's responsible for the craziest housing markets in the country[1].

An illustrative example is the shocking cost-effectiveness of trailer parks. The fact that the land beneath the trailer generally isn't owned means that they're technically free of a lot of the weird distortions of the regular property market, and thus people who would otherwise be homeless are able to avoid the impossible choice of a house they can't afford or living on the sidewalk.

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21647614-poor-land-use...

[throwaway2016a]

New England is depressingly the opposite. I've seen actual world changing ideas (think curing major disease or advanced robotics) get less attention and funding than a photo sharing app would in SV.

[WalterBright]

> milk a market for every last penny.

The reason they are able to make money is because they created value that people are voluntarily willing to hand over money for. It is not stealing.

If you don't think what they created has value, don't buy it.