The title seems to insinuate there’s a correlation between a startup’s value and dev language. While I think our “inner geek“ all likes to think so - is that really the case?
There is an attitude some programmers have that business outcomes are not their department/problem and they should focus on the tech.
They will (for instance) avoid certain tech stacks, regardless of how useful the software being written is (eg “I wouldn't work for Wikipedia, they use PHP”).
I suspect any tech stack that they refuse to work with is at a systematic advantage when it comes to producing useful work, because engineers who don’t want to think about fiscal outcomes can readily lead you to ruin.
There is no correlation. Success is 100% business connections. Even if the CTO was terrible, it wouldn't matter because the most talented devs would be applying to work for this hot new startup and would be able to work around all of the CTO's silly constraints. I have seen this over and over in my career.
The CTO imposes pointless arbitrary rules, tools and languages and then talented developers figure out a way to deliver value within those arbitrary constraints. Developers will use whatever language their boss tells them, then later when the project succeeds, they will praise that language, those tools and their bosses.
People will always praise the leaders of a successful company, no matter how incompetent they are.
People who succeed always think that it was because of good decision making across the board. They don't admit to themselves that the only decisions that actually matter are who the CEO is and who their friends are. Our system is crony-capitalism, no doubt about it. Nothing to do with value creation; the evidence is everywhere.
Any good developer who analyzes cryptocurrency projects, for example, will realize that there is no correlation between quality (or scalability) of the technology and ranking/market cap of the project. The top, most valuable project is Bitcoin and consumes the same amount of electricity as the nation of Ireland to process a measly 4 transactions per second. Anyone who thinks that Bitcoin is the most valuable project due to technical merit is an idiot. It's 100% network effects.
I can say from experience across different tech industries that the current market selection process works the same way across the entire tech sector, not just cryptocurrency.
Every time a project succeeds, the people who built it will try to claim credit for that success. The people who are actually responsible for that success (through their personal connections) will happily let the technical people claim the credit because it diverts attention away from the much more cynical and unjust reality.
Any attempt to insinuate that success has anything to do with choice of tech is either misguided or deeply corrupt as the dogma harms real people (who will be forced to use tools they don't like) and causes real loss in productivity.
No correlation is a bold claim. It seems obvious that a web based startup built using Rails is far more likely to succeed than one using bash scripts, if all else is roughly equal.
yep absolutely and there is also the fact that its a list of VC backed (successful)startups we would need to see the failed ones at least. I would say sound development practices (code review, platform design, testing etc) is orders of magnitude more important.
Facebook started out using PHP and it was so bad they had to almost rewrite the language from scratch. PHP is now pretty decent and Facebook is doing pretty OK.
They will (for instance) avoid certain tech stacks, regardless of how useful the software being written is (eg “I wouldn't work for Wikipedia, they use PHP”).
I suspect any tech stack that they refuse to work with is at a systematic advantage when it comes to producing useful work, because engineers who don’t want to think about fiscal outcomes can readily lead you to ruin.