[mmaunder]

I wonder how many HN readers don’t realize this is satire.

It’s unfortunate that they used the word customer once in the post. Total omission would have been so perfect. The point of the satire is devs navel gazing rather than focusing obsessively on who their customer is and their customers needs and solving that customers problems.

There is a failure mode that has a dev team obsessing over building abstraction layers, tooling, automation etc and not writing a line of code that solves customer problems.

[tomhoward]

But which startups does this describe, that actually get any media/public attention, or raise any funding, or succeed in recruiting any serious talent? I feel like this is trying to satirise something that exists in the author's imagination but doesn't exist in the real world beyond adolescent first-time founders' early misfires, from which important lessons are quickly learned.

It doesn't seem to be satirising something that actually needs to be satirised, as there is not a significant number of startups in the real world actually operating like this. A startup that operates like this wouldn't (barring a major mistake) get funding from YC or any other competent investor.

The Silicon Valley sitcom is funny and successful because it satirises stuff that really does happen in the startup/tech/VC world (I know, I lived through much of it myself), but it noticeably doesn't stereotype founders as utterly clueless and hapless the way this piece does.

With the sitcom, anyone who knows the startup world can point to real-world people/events on which the people/events in the sitcom are based. I don't think you can say that about this post. It's hard for me to believe the writer of this really knows any significant number of real-world startups.

[MarbleEmperor]

Well this seems like much more of an internal thing that would really never make it to any sort of media publication. You never read about the internal shit-flinging that happens when a team of engineers has to decide on a stack, but it does certainly happen. At the very least I have personal anecdotal experience of this happening from a couple of companies I worked at.

I can't think of a specific example, but when BLOCKCHAIN was the new kid on the block, every startup and it's mother just threw that word into their company somewhere somehow. How many of them got very far?

[ericjang]

This happens all the time at Google, though the mundane details of internal tech churn are not often publicized. Source: am Google employee.