The topic is advertising rather than something with a heavy technical component, but the description of caring about creative work rings true.
The topic is advertising rather than something with a heavy technical component, but the description of caring about creative work rings true.
I agree with everything he’s written, because I feel the same way. As technologists, we have such a strong desire to make that we’d be in this game even if the billion-dollar IPOs and “unicorns”– who came up with that childish fucking term, anyway?– weren’t a possibility. We hate mediocrity in our work, but most of us are fine enough with upper-middle-class financial mediocrity because (surprise?) that’s what most of us are going to get, now as then.
That “passion” is exploited. Businessmen view us as children, and treat us that way, because we’re seen as “follow your dreams” idealists for happening to remain invested in the belief that understanding Haskell or deep neural networks or robotics is more important than getting a parasitic sinecure at some private equity firm. What’s unfair about it is that, yes, a lot of us enjoy what we do. So do the businessmen. We’re following our “passion”– which is more a mix of many things, also including competitive drive, and a need for approval– as much as they are. The only reason why we get dinged for it (a “passion tax”) and businessmen don’t is that they’re better negotiators.
I admire Redding’s courage. It’s not easy, when you’re dying of cancer at 52, to admit that your career was mostly a waste of time. (It’s the truth for most people, but it’s hard to admit to the fact.) It’s even harder to come out and say it. Oddly, I think that his essay was probably more meaningful, as a beneficial accomplishment, than anything he’d done in advertising; just as I’ve done more good for the world in writing about tech than in producing software (and not for a lack of trying or ability).
Personally, I find it increasingly difficult to “believe in” technology when I observe its evolution: more short-term thinking, worse and more sexist/ageist/exclusionary cultures, horrible ideas like open-plan offices and “Agile” (both backdoor age-discrimination, if it wasn’t obvious) getting traction. The good guys are losing this fight; Silicon Valley has already fallen. It can be really hard to convince myself that there’s value in understanding the mathematics behind a new machine learning algorithm when the dismal fact is that we’ve been hacked and pwned, through and through, by the status quo business-culture colonizers. It seems like Linds Redding’s experience was similar. Even as his career progressed, the career of advertising devolved into a shit-pit. They failed to fight for themselves, and the results were all-around dreadful. If businessmen had the foresight to realize that there’s a performance/control tradeoff and that their demands for control ruin everything (including, in the long run, their own economic fortunes) we might not see that pattern of devolution.
Unfortunately, the people he calls “bean counters” are (to use a metaphor that, I hope, wouldn’t offend the writer) the cancer cells of the human organism. They externalize costs to others and claim savings to their managers. They play politics against the organizations in which they work. Whatever performance measurement systems (social immune system?) are in place, they exploit for their own benefit. Like cancer cells, sociopaths are toxic (and, sometimes, fatal) to the organism but individually most fit, and no industry has managed to evolve a defense mechanism against them.
What good is that, exactly? Your comment here—which is absolutely representative of much of your other writing—is dripping with broad generalizations and bombastic claims. Allow me to put it into perspective: your writing is far more acidic and divisive than any “businessman” I’ve personally come in contact with.
Why do you think it is bad to be divisive?
Some people have interests that are opposed to other people’s interests. Being “divisive” in such cases is the only way to be intellectually honest.
Great! No problem there.
If “divisive” is an uninteresting synonym of “oppose,” then I have certainly used the wrong word. I used “divisive” to describe a writing style that encourages division based on some amorphous goop of generalizations. If there is some well defined opposition to a specific group of people in @michaelochurch’s writing, then I’ve missed it. Instead, all I see are The Good Guys, the Software Engineers, or “us” versus The Bad Guys, the Businessmen, or “them.” What exactly are the interests and motivations of these two groups of people? Nobody knows, unless, of course, you’re @michaelochurch.
It’s division for the sake of division. I’m drawing a line in the sand. You’re either over here, with us, or you’re over there, with them. That’s the subtext of @michaelochurch’s writing, and personally, I find it cringe worthy.
This is a perception that I’m in danger of creating, but I don’t see it as so. The business people aren’t the bad guys (not all of them, anyway). They have a skill set, and “we” have a skill set, and when we all do our jobs well and respect each other, things work really well.
The bad guys are the ones who decided to make software engineering strictly subordinate to The Business. They’re the people who turned Silicon Valley into a shitty colonial outpost for the existing establishment.
Part of the problem is that the Silicon Valley tech world gets the worst people from the colonizing culture (Damaso Effect) which is the mainstream business culture. It’d be great if we got the capable business people. Instead, the ones went West to boss nerds around are the ones who weren’t good enough for the hedge funds, so they become VPs of HR at places like Google and implement stack-ranking systems. The high-quality business people actually have vision; the low-quality ones are just mindless cost-cutters who count on being promoted fast enough to escape the damage (externalized costs) that they’ve done. The low-quality, vision-less business people are the ones whom I can’t stand because they ruin companies.
So, no, I’m not saying that you’re an asshole if you’re “a business guy”. On the other hand, if you look at the current climate of the software industry where engineering is entirely subordinate to non-technical decision-makers and you’re OK with that, then I question your judgment.
Well, I can’t be sure of this, but I like to believe that I’ve given the world’s software talent some additional resistance against “reality distortion fields” of charming, overpromising businessmen. If engineers are made aware of the game that’s being played against them, they won’t trade their 20s and their health in, at a 90-hour-per-week clip, for 0.05% slices of someone else’s company.
If I wake people up, and help steer the young away from mistakes that I’ve made, then how is that not good for the world?
Read it again. I’m pretty moderate. I strike a nerve, because I’m thorough in my search and can articulate what I find, but my actual political stance is moderate. I’m not saying that capitalism is evil or that business people are all bad and I’m certainly not going to say that engineers are all good. I will say that Silicon Valley software engineers are a colonized people with someone else’s culture imposed on them, because it' true.
I upset people not because I’m an extremist but because I’m an extremely effective moderate.
I didn’t say you were an extremist or a moderate. I frankly don’t really care what your political philosophy is—I respect plenty of positions across the political spectrum (extremist and moderate alike).
I stand by my initial assessment. Allow me to clarify once more: your writing is divisive, acidic and full of generalizations. It is divisive because you are intent on continuing a narrative that pits one group of people against another. It is acidic because every sentence is dripping with negativity. It is full of bombastic generalizations because you speak of groups of people without reservation or qualification as if you know better.
I’ve never met a successful educator that laced their lessons in insults and rhetoric.
I had a snarky reply (which I deleted).
I’ll give you acidic. As for divisive, I can’t control how people choose to divide themselves. I discuss painful truths. Some people choose to accept them, and some wish to deny them. I’m fine with that, and I expect it, but it’s not on my watch.
People put themselves against each other. I’m just documenting it. And no, it’s not that “business men” are bad and software engineers are all good. That’s clearly untrue. There are some terrible (morally, as well as in competence) programmers and there are some great business people.
Still, I think it’s obvious that a small, well-connected group of parasites has settled in and is robbing people blind. They’ve made a system that doesn’t value makers or real technology anymore. It’s the old, failed corporate elite that should have been discarded by history, remade using technology to market itself as somehow inventive and progressive, without anything really changing. Fuck that and fuck them.
Well, that’s because the kind of behavior that this position (of someone trying to save technology and the maker culture from cultural genocide at the hands of an overreaching corporate elite) requires of me is unnecessary if not unacceptable in peace time. We’re not in peace time. People (a few overfed, greedy, and actively parasitic people) have to get hurt for progress to occur, because they’re standing in the way of it. If I have to blunt and brutal to point that out, I will. The job is what the job is and I can choose to do it or not to do it, and I’ve been going with the former.
Yes, this is the “bombastic” part of your writing. It’s that subtext that is just so grating. I’m right and there’s no way I could possibly be wrong. I don’t know how to reconcile that sort of attitude with someone who really does try to seek out the truth.
You’re not documenting anything. You’re casting sweeping generalizations over large and diverse groups of people.
If you are actively seeking war, then you are also actively seeking collateral damage. Therefore, it is dishonest to pretend as if only the “evil fatcats” will get hurt on your Quest.
It’s not at all clear what you “have” to do. Why do you think your writing needs to be crass, full of dichotomies and acidic to be effective? Certainly, you seem to be interested in educating people. I don’t know how you hope to accomplish that with rhetoric. What data have you collected that suggests your writing style is conducive to instruction?
That’s not what I’m doing. I’m trying to explain, at a 30,000-foot level, the moral failure of Silicon Valley: how it happened, why it happened, and whether it is preventable in whatever takes its place. Makers have lost the Valley to takers, but why? Could things have happened differently? What were and are the motivations of the major players? What sociological dynamics determine who gets sent where? I don’t claim to have all the answers– I’m just getting started– but I’m far enough along (and probably farther along than almost anyone else who’s willing to write on the topic) that what I’ve learned is useful to other people.
I’m not “actively seeking war”. The conflict already exists. I wouldn’t start it if it didn’t. Makers have had their industry taken from them by takers. It used to be that shots were called by intelligent, hard-working people who understood technology and had the vision to build for the long term. Now, the makers are “just a programmer” engineers on 0.05% while the well-connected legacy idiots who run the rest of the world also run that corner of the world (Silicon Valley), make almost all of the profits, and have inflicted the whole industry with this disastrous short-term mentality that threatens the future of the country.
Take “Agile” or Scrum. To most, it’s just annoying and stupid. I, however, have seen a billion dollar company die (as in, 90+ percent valuation drop) because of that garbage. Now imagine what happens if the arrogant assholes who like Scrum and open-plan offices (back-door age discrimination) and all the sexism and ageism in tech get to run the country. They destroy everything they touch and they’re power-hungry. I highly doubt that they’ll get far enough to represent a credible national threat– I’d give it less than a 1 percent chance– but something or someone has to stop their advance.
This is an iterative, evolving process. So no, I don’t know that my approach is the optimal one. Do you have evidence that anything but indignation has the “punch” necessary to wake people up and get them to move in the right direction?
The cannon fodder for the current system are 22-year-old clueless/eager programmer types who accept the unacceptable because they think they’re going to be CEOs in 3 years. I was one of those socially inept idiots, once. They aren’t exactly a group that’s good at subtlety. It takes a splash of cold water or two to get through to them.
If I can divert some fraction (probably a tiny fraction) of them away from selling their careers and lives in exchange for nothing, then I can erode the power of an evil system– a system that has been co-opted to sell control of technical progress over to the people’s enemies– just slightly. Am I doing the right thing? (I think so.) Have I pushed us from losing to winning? (I doubt it. How much can one person do?) But I’m doing something. Technology is important and this fight is worth it.
Pretending that any technology industry ever was other than a servile creature of the “taker” class is illogical, and, more trenchantly, ahistorical. An appeal to a prelapsarian hacker state of grace does nobody any favors and makes you sound naïve.
Things were never perfect, but the culture was more engineer-driven and there was more of a long-term mentality. Sure, governments and corporations funded the research because someone had to pay for it and, sure, sometimes the profit motive caused moral compromise. The difference, I think, is that the old culture abhorred that moral compromise (it certainly happened, because people have always been people, but it was frowned-upon and, one hopes, more rare) and the current one celebrates it. In the old culture, people wanted to make great things and getting rich was incidental. The new culture is about flipping a piece of crap on someone who’s stupid enough to buy it for three orders of magnitude more than it’s actually worth.
For example, if you grew up in the 1950s and said you wanted to run a “billion-dollar company”, it wasn’t socially acceptable. You had to have an actual vision, not just dollar signs in your eyes. These days, we use the childish term “unicorn” to make naked greed (inflate your short-term price tag at all costs!) seem cute instead of pathological. Look at Mad Men. Those people were considered corporate psychopaths back in the 1960s. By the standards of Silicon Valley today, they’re playing softball. I can’t imagine Don Draper making a personal project out of ruining someone’s life three years after that person leaves his company (something I’ve seen in technology).
We now have a culture that celebrates pathology. Evan Spiegel got funded because he was a member of a notorious rape frat at Stanford– one so bad that the school eventually banned it. (I’m not claiming that Mr. Spiegel himself ever committed rape– I have no idea if he did; how would I?– but the VCs' logic of, “He belongs to a privileged, horrible, and unaccountable social organization, which means that he’s probably well-connected and so we should fund him”, is fucking revolting.)
Programming used to be an R&D job, which is what it should be, and the people who think otherwise must be driven out of this industry at any cost before they tank the entire country if not the global economy. Anyone who thinks that it’s OK for Lucas Duplan and Evan Spiegel to be made founders and billionaires, when others who are much smarter and worked their asses off for 25 years get booted due to ageism, must fucking go.
Sure, the machines were less powerful in the old days, and there was a lot of annoying stuff like carrying around punch cards, but programmers didn’t have “Scrum masters” browbeating them whenever they didn’t get enough “story points” (or whatever that fucking bullshit is called this year; I can’t keep up with that nonsense) done that “sprint” (by the way, “sprint” means unsustainable, so these people need to call it the fuck something else if they want even an outside chance of not sounding like fucking syphilitic idiots) and they didn’t work in fucking humiliating bullpen layouts where one could start office betting pools on which programmer has the most open-plan-induced panic attacks that week.
You’ve continued to speak in sweeping generalizations without directly responding to any of my criticisms. You refuse to acknowledge collateral damage in your Quest.
My criticism does not seem to be sticking. So I’ll have to demonstrate it.
What “moral failure”? How is this anything other than rhetoric?
Lost what? To whom exactly? Can you actually demonstrate it?
But you claim to have lots of answers confidently.
You called this a war (“it’s not peace time”) and went on to say that if the fatcats need to get hurt, then so be it. But war harms everyone. So you are dishonestly representing your Quest by pretending that your quest will only harm the fatcats.
When? By whom? Which people exactly? What did the makers have?
Nebulous generalities. You avoid precision to avoid ever having to confront that you may be wrong. Who can possibly prove or disprove “makers have had their industry taken from them by takers”? What kind of bullshit is that?
When was this exactly? Which intelligent people? By what metric? What time frame was this? Which firms?
Where did you get that number? How do you know that it only applies to “makers”? Does it always apply? Where’s your evidence?
How do they run it exactly? Who is part of this group of “well-connected legacy idiots”? Can you demonstrate a plot by them to destroy all those you label “makers”?
What short term mentality is that? Who? Can you articulate exactly what the threat is?
Who says? You?
Which company? Where’s your evidence that Agile caused it? Does anyone else support this view? Or is it just you using it as a convenient talking point because it is impossible for anyone else to verify?
How will they do that? Who exactly?
How did you come up with 1%? And what exactly are you doing to stop this “advance” that you cannot articulate? If you cannot articulate it, how are you forming a strategy to stop it?
I’m not the one using such tactics while pretending to be an educator, so I have no need to satisfy that burden. But you do.
I’ll just stop beating around the bush: you cannot be both an educator and someone who employs tactics to persuade your audience at any means necessary. Educators don’t berate people with indignation. Educators don’t carry their ideas with certainty.
Who exactly? Where did you get this data?
By who?
How are you measuring the progress you purport to make?
You’ve clearly convinced yourself that you are right not only ethically but in your analysis of the world. I don’t see any part of you that is conflicted over whether your analysis is right or not, and I see no effort put forth by you to subject your views to peer review and critical analysis. This is not the mark of an educator. It is the mark of a crusader.
You’ve opened up some good questions. Unfortunately, this thread is at the point where it’s ceased to be interesting to anyone but you or me. Also, I’m never going to convince you of my position.
It also looks like you’re a graduate student, which means you know nothing about the evil that’s going on in Silicon Valley. You’re not there, you’re not a part of it. On the other hand, you’re probably more of an authority than I would be on the catastrophe of the academic job market– another grievous moral failure of our society.
What leaves me disinterested in continuing the conversation is that you failed to see that Agile/Scrum was prima facie negative. Look, you can question with the goal of getting to the bottom, but sometimes things are obvious. Let’s say that someone breaks into my apartment and takes a shit on my living room floor. One could argue that, to truly prove harm, I’d have to take a sample, send it to the lab, get a count of the pathogenic bacteria, and compare those numbers against the ambient numbers (since any surface on Earth is crawling in bacteria, most harmless). On the other hand, most wouldn’t require me to go so far. They’d say, “That guy was an asshole and a criminal” and that would be that. The bacterial content of his feces doesn’t matter. What matters is that he doesn’t have the right to enter my living space and defecate on the floor.
You’re asking me to send the feces to the lab and prove that it has increased the number of pathogenic bacteria in my living space. I’m trying (as you see it) to get away with a more holistic argument that appeals to what most people find obvious: feces on my living room floor is bad. That’s a lot of effort to prove things that are already evident to anyone with a clear mind, like that Agile/Scrum (as practiced, if not in theory) devolves into toxic micromanagement almost everywhere that stuff is deployed, and that often toxic micromanagement is the reason for introducing those practices.
No, I’m not. My profile is very out of date. And being a graduate student does not mean you don’t have any industry experience. But yeah, nice attempt at trying to turn this on me. This is about you and your writing.
So, you’re refusing to subject your views to critical analysis. You should probably just state that up front, and maybe you’ll save everyone a lot of time. Otherwise, you’re just being dishonest. If everything were obvious, then you wouldn’t need to write or say anything. But clearly not everything is obvious, and yet, you still choose not to substantiate your claims for reasons only known to you.
By refusing to elaborate on specific details and demonstrate your claims, you make it impossible for anyone to critically analyze the foundation on which you’ve mounted your Quest. This makes sense if you’re a crusader, but you’ve lobbied under the name of educator.
What if the most important thing to educate people on is how to deal with, and oppose, evil? What if that is the actual #1 issue, that few are addressing because it is so unpleasant?
I mean, look, it’s good to know how to code. On the other hand, if you don’t know what “multiple liquidation preferences” are, then you’re not equipped to defend yourself against evil and everything you build will be taken from you, so does it really matter if you know how to write a cache-friendly Fourier transform? Probably not.
If you’re a relative nobody like me who is trying to wake up hundreds of thousands of people, you have a hard job. A really fucking hard job. A you-have-no-fucking-idea-how-hard job. I wish someone else would take it over. I’d love to see a younger, more impassioned, more articulate version of myself with the power to take down Sand Hill Road’s manchild oligarchy for good. I’d love to see that person come up in this world. Knowing that I could hand the work of rhetoric and indignation off to someone more competent than I am at it, that would make for one of the happiest days of my life. I’d let her do the work for 10 years (at which point, she’d be burning out and need to find her replacement, if the job weren’t finished) and maybe she’d finally tear this manchild oligarchy down.
Then I could focus solely on things that are intrinsically interesting, like computer science itself, literature, history, mathematics, and the sciences… and not have to mix the jobs (which you’ve differentiated) of educator/thinker and crusader/polemicist. (I do actually worry sometimes about the conflict of interest. But, unlike you, I don’t let it stop me from saying and doing what needs to be done.) What, do you think I want to be discussing “Agile”/Scrum with my finite time on this earth? Do you think I want, “Contributed slightly to the death of the open-plan office” to be my headline accomplishment, when I am dying and looking back on my life? Of course not! I’d rather spend my time with good literature, develop a Zen meditation practice, write some neat games in Haskell, debate the nature of the soul, learn quantum physics and some more math… all of those things beat writing about fucking software politics. However, I’m a man who does the job in front of me, even if it’s ugly, and even if it’s the opposite of what I would want to be doing in an ideal life.
Right now, the fact (and yes, it is a fact, but I don’t expect to convince you) that technology is run by the wrong people poses an existential threat not just to our nation but to the world. I don’t know what to do about this problem, but I see that it is a problem and that it deserves higher priority than the things I wish I could do with my time instead. Only through technological and economic growth can this species avoid impending ruin. If we don’t slay the serpent of economic scarcity (something that can only be achieved through technical means) then we are headed for war and collapse and possibly extinction. Technology can end scarcity and slavery and war, but it can also be used (and has, historically, been used) to promote those evils. Right now, the tech industry is run by creators of artificial scarcity rather than people who wish to annihilate it. If this doesn’t scare you, you’re not paying attention.
You’re just repeating yourself. You can’t even articulate the specifics of the evil you oppose or substantiate its existence. Your only evidence is “because I said so.” You haven’t actually said anything substantive and have not responded to my criticisms. Instead, you’ve invented a litany excuses to rationalize your choice to be a martyr for a cause only known to you because you refuse to elaborate.
Technology is humanity’s only tool for sustainably and permanently eliminating scarcity. The mainstream “Establishment” business culture is based on hoarding– of connections, wealth, and the means of production– and creating scarcity in order to increase one’s own power; it’s a zero-sum game.
These two forces are at odds. On one side, we have the people who want (in the long run; the very long run, to be realistic) to make everyone rich, and to deliver a world where economic scarcity is no longer the dominating feature of human existence. On the other side, we have those who wish to perpetuate, enforce, and even retrench existing scarcities for personal or class benefit.
The old culture (“MBA culture”) isn’t necessarily all that evil. In fact, what’s alarming about the SIlicon Valley culture is that amplifies the worst traits (ageism, sexism, obsession with monetary growth at the expense of everything else including morality) of its colonial overseers, trading in the casual sexism of investment banking with the overt, aggressive sexism of a typical VC-funded tech company. The part that is evil is the invasion. Zero-sum players have taken over Silicon Valley, and the technology industry with it. Is that “evil” in the cosmic sense of Sauron or Kefka or Darth Vader? Probably not. It’s more of a matter of a certain militant, ignorant selfishness that must be opposed because of the sheer momentum behind it.
There are zero specifics in this comment. All you can do is talk about “culture” as some big amorphous blob. You can’t answer elementary questions about your crusade. Who? Where? When? Why? How? All you do is point a finger at some arbitrarily/conveniently delineated group of people and say, “Them! They did it! Fuck them!”
VCs who use extortion to shove multiple liquidation preferences down founders' throats. Influential financiers who think it’s OK to fund people like Lucas Duplan while more qualified people get ignored. Founders who think it’s OK to typecast software engineers to business subordinates. Founders who think ageist and sexist and classist cultures are somehow necessary to get shit done. Investors who don’t give a shit about founder quality or ethics because they can always throw a company to the side, burn it, and start a competitor. VCs who share notes and collude instead of competing with each other and allowing founders to get a fair shake. Uncle Tom software engineers who are OK with an arrangement in which engineer autonomy is crushed with the micromanagement in the name of “Agile” that ruins the job. VCs who use “we’ll fund your competitors” for extortive purposes. People who use “back channel” references to make employment and funding decisions.
Have I still failed to convince you that there are some shitty people in the tech game who need to be taken down? Are you that dense?
While not disagreeing with the overall thrust of your posts, isn’t it all just a bit, I don’t know, presumptuous to think that posting on Hacker News about the undoubted duplicity of VC culture is going to do anything? I think you’d probably be much better off writing to Janet Yellen to advocate for an increase in interest rates, if you’re looking to combat the culture of cheap dumb money.
Who? Name them. What specifically have they done? What do you mean by “taken down”? Where is your evidence that more qualified people are being ignored? Which founders are ageist, sexist and classist? What is your measure of founder quality? Whose ethics are right? What is an “Uncle Tom” engineer? Can you name any?
Demanding that a crusader answer some simple, basic, fundamental questions about their warring ideology is hardly “dense.”