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by aerosmile 2305 days ago
Tech startup as a phenomenon of the last 25-ish years is maturing and has become sufficiently mainstream that it has attracted a very wide spectrum of people, so much so that the majority of them are - as you would expect - quite average. It turns out that being average is not enough to beat the odds, and those are quite stacked against early-stage startups. So you end up with fairly low chances of success and the resulting bitterness. As this industry continues to mature, the next step will be calls for regulation, unions, etc.

None of this is new - it's happened to all industries after they became sufficiently mainstream. Take a look at aviation - at first it was the wild west at the beginning of the century, then WW1 and WW2 brought some rapid advances, and in the last 70 years things have been relatively stale. Anyone dreaming of designing the next airliner today is a very different person from those who designed them at the beginning of that cycle.

I am not even saying there's anything wrong with all of this. As an industry matures and becomes more mainstream (aka, affects more people), we have to put some safety mechanisms in place. That means discussions become more about safety and less about achievement, and this attracts a fundamentally different group of people - more average, more bitter.

Kudos to the OP: just like syndacks, I am rooting for him and hope he'll use his enthusiasm to continue to shoot for the stars!

2 comments

That's a nice theory but tech people have been bitter since the invention of Usenet.
> this attracts a fundamentally different group of people - more average, more bitter.

I'd put it another way : it makes room for many people to participate in the social life by mean of work in the civil aviation.

So, from being a domain ruled by elite (of gifted or lucky or rich persons), it ends up a to be a domain of emancipation for big parts of society...