Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cryptica 2128 days ago
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.

1 comments

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.