“What happened” was just that some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through. This is not a new thing in any sense at all, from Rockefeller to Bill Gates – both “technology entrepreneurs”.
OPs timeline is somewhat off. They posit a golden era for the 1980s-2007 but that’s not right. Tech CEOs have often been hard-charging salespeople and businessmen. Look at early Wired magazines and there was much celebration of random rich guys in suits, as much as the nerdy tech creators. This was the “suit/hacker” dichotomy.
Google was the company that really exploded that paradigm, from their rise to prominence circa 2002 or so, to their IPO and post-IPO halo, around 2005-2007.
Now the nerds didn’t need the suits. They would run their own company.
They were shockingly wealthy and powerful but it was made to seem as a kind of distraction from their true nature. They marketed their own virtue and renunciation, both to the public, and to their own staff. Their business model rejected the previous search engine paradigm (backroom deals and paying for placement) in favor of a new one (complex math to produce the best results). They told the public and their staff the famous “don’t be evil”, and also “focus on the user and all else follows”. There was even a pronouncement that Google would never do such tawdriness as horoscopes.
The theme was that nerdiness was a kind of incorruptibility because a nerd was honest, unconcerned with social status, and unworldly. Let them into your life and they’ll make it all better. Larry Page and Sergey Brin cultivated that image, holding internal and external events where they made themselves look ever nerdier than they actually are, even wearing lab coats.
Now, this didn’t last and was never true. Soon after the IPO, Larry and Sergey bought themselves not just a corporate jet, but a commercial airliner. They justified it as something that was “good for the world” because they could use it to get entire teams of NGO workers on missions of mercy. It actually became a party plane, as far as I know.
There's also this age-old belief that if you do something out of passion, you're willing to pull more hours, and do whatever it takes to reach your goals.
I also believe that nerds, whatever thing they are obsessed with, make their nerdiness a personality defending trait. Their nerdiness is their personality. And if others aren't as willing to commit, they're simply frauds or wannabes.
Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.
In tech, however, it is too often assumed that you must be consumed by tech. Otherwise you're not really that passionate about it.
Whatever tenuous link there was between the two, only existed as long as computers were not really seen as a path to wealth and power. Because then a smart person with the capability to enter fields traditionally associated with wealth and power choosing computers reflected putting personal curiosity and interest over pursuing wealth and power as the sole objective.
People who spend their entire life in front of computers should not be the ones with the keys to society yet here we are.
Post-CEO, he had completely refurbished his image via philanthropy, only to throw it away with the Epstein stuff.
Because doing something you're genuinely interested is virtuous relative to doing something for personal/reputational gain or due to other social pressures.
> some people got rich and powerful and their real personalities showed through
This could not be more deluded - the negative equivalent of the hustle culture myth: anyone can become a selfish asshole if they work hard enough. The idea that every person who's ever taken an academic interest in tech is just another William Gates III waiting to happen is a very weird way of looking at nerd culture.
Generally I'm not sure you'd be considered a nerd if you weren't too honest for your own good. Not that this covers all types of virtuous behavior - there do exist nasty scientists. (And there is some level of fraud/dishonesty in academia, too).
Shouldn't you? Bakers and chefs aren't just "interested in nerdy stuff like chemical reactions," they make food for people. Writers have ethical obligations, both individually and as a group?
I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
The cultural perception of nerds being relentlessly bullied for the crime of having imaginations/GPAs/acne, I think, presented a culturally sympathetic view to the extent that the latent bro-ism caught some off guard, like we'd expect them to emerge from sweet gentle Stranger-Things style basement nerds to adulthoods as, say, Randall Munroe or something
Then the ideologues and political commissars showed up, giving zero shit about tech or logical reasoning, this pulled the discourse down to the lowest common denominator and the rest is history.
Why should I take the moral high ground and listen to an argument I dislike if I'm not offered the same courtesy.
Old man here, No this was never the case. Nerds were always hysterical and used the ban hammer frequently. the difference between then and now is that there were more distinct islands of nerdary you could escape to, and they wouldn't blend together.
also they generally had a "no outside opinions" rule that meant that forums were single subject. This allowed you to socialise with degenerates like emacs users in different contexts without descending into flame wars (mostly...)
Nerds were often seen as poorly social since "logic and reasoning" would go against socially accepted norms. This where the fedora tipping meme comes from: "everybody understands that religion is not literal, but we have to all accept the lie for social cohesion". But "nerds" would be the ones willing to take the ridicule and ostracism because truth would be more important than conformity.
Reddit was the place to be for nerds and spread like a pandemic. However, karma points turned this on its head since you have a mechanism to enforce conformity in non-conformity that was the basis for "nerd communities". Nerds hobbies that would be the gateway are gated behind such platforms that enforce a social credit system in a totalitarian way. The would have been nerds are thus mostly integrated into the redittor archetype that is so fundamentally opposed to the nerd archetype; a contorted version of itself trying to fit through distorting mirrors.
I'm not disagreeing with you; but why did the nerds not destroy the ideologues with logic and reasoning if not for the horizontal pressure of other "nerds" subverting the concept?
I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
I don't remember this internet. Ever since I got my first modem, I remember the kinds of vitriolic posts that led to the publication of IEN 137 (On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace).
Whether it was endianness or RISC vs CISC or ZModem vs Kermit or Microsoft or Kirk vs Picard or Kimagure Orange Road, flame wars erupted everywhere. The smaller the stakes, the bigger the war.
I think you're seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. In some FLOSS circles the discussions were dominated by ideologues, to the point some discussions seemed like Monty Python skits. I mean, your choice of window manager, let alone Linux distro, was something you'd be judged by.
I'm sure it has a different meaning, though
Shitposting, trolling, and harassment has been around since the very beginning of the public internet. If you didn't see it, it has to have been because you were (unconsciously or not) looking away.
The "ideologues and political commissars" didn't ruin your "friendly technical discussions", they merely pointed out how toxic a lot of those communities had always truly been.
If anything, if you really want to focus on the technical details, you should welcome their attempts to make it a friendlier and more professional space!
I mean not using the Dutch translation of the n-word as part of your username and thinking you're clever for hiding it in a plausibly deniable way would certainly help with me believing you're arguing in good faith.
Musk for me was never a nerd. Many "founders" aren't nerds for me. In the end, I wouldn't classify anyone who is "money" first as a nerd - to me they are businessmen (and businesswomen) in their core.
Want to see "the lost nerds"? Here, on HN there are many very high-profile nerds. People who built the internet and the most popular tools exchanging insight and jokes over posts. Many founders who aren't loud, who aren't about PR.
So - nothing happened. Author looks for them in wrong places.
A nerd, when I was growing up, had to have a "thing", and that thing had to be unfashionable. Being a nerd was not a good thing. You loved your subject despite the stigma. (although later on people loved a subject because of the stigma)
There was a difference between a $subject nerd, and an arsehole/weirdo. To be liked, you needed to hide the nerd streak and learn to interact with people using commonly accepted rules. This is partly why the internet flourished in the 90s because you could be surrounded by other nerds and talk nerd shit.
The downside is that a lot of people felt marginalised, but you were in touch with the "normies", so still had to act like a normal high functioning member of society.
Ruthless buisness types were seen as that (at least in the UK) out to make money, and fuck you if you got in the way.
The problem for us now is, ruthless business types now own all the media, and want to shape the world in their image.
Not anymore. I haven’t heard this for a while now, and I didn’t change regarding this. But people behave very differently when I say “software developer” recently. Now they think immediately, that I’m rich. Not that I’m a freak nerd. They are not surprised anymore at all.
I experienced this very obviously with something else too. I born in Hungary, but I moved to Austria. There is a huge difference between how people behave with me if I say that I’m from Hungary, than if I say that I’m from Austria when I travel. They immediately recommend me things which are more expensive. The beaches, restaurants, pubs for rich tourists. Not when I say Hungary. That’s the only time when they say to me that something is expensive.
I state openly, that if somebody says that the public perception didn’t change and also the people in this field didn’t change to be more money focused, then those people lying, probably even to themselves. The current discussions about AI make this obvious. Most developers, engineers, founders are fine to ship shit on every single level, if they get the same money for it. They became “developers” only for the money.
“IT crowd” is unimaginable today.
It's similar to the "old Internet" argument: it's still there, but buried in layers and layers of stuff that isn't the real thing.
I actually agree with the author's evaluation, but the irony is that their post is the first time I heard about this Founders Mafia thing. They're right that last thing we need is more people looking past the sins of the Thiels and Altmans of the world. Maybe this kind of thing works within 100 miles of the Pacific coast. But as a non-SV native still getting used to the culture around here, I see zero risk of this kind of content sowing any fondness for tech CEOs outside of the most tech-brainwormed regions of the world.
But it's easy to slide back into the fear mongering, engagement bait side if you don't pay really close attention to how you're feeding the algorithm.
And that's exactly the argument of the article IMO, that the famous nerds went from well-meaning eccentrics to evil greedy overlords.
People can fall into multiple categories at the same time. A lot of them aren't mutually exclusive.
IMHO Musk can be put into both the nerd/geek bucket and the asshole businessman bucket at the same time.
It's pretty hard to describe Elon Musk's ventures in space exploration, robots and human-like AI as anything other than prototypical, "core" nerd culture. Especially when it turns out that the very word 'Elon' shows up in obscure magazine excerpts from the 1950s as the leader of a science-fictional Martian government, and apparently this somehow plays a part into why Musk gets named Elon.
Finance, Law, VC guys were good too in the beginning but when the value/status change happens it attracts certain kind of guys who are average in talent but excel in demonstrating value and social management of the value/status.
Another change which has happened recently is that the economics of engagement farming have become common place wisdom as already proven effective for everything from selling books, personal brand, career skill/virtue signalling, staying relevant.
Due to this everyone is talking more without restraint and not keeping in their own lane of earned expertise.
Be nice, think about hard problems for a long period of time, only speak up when you have something positive to contribute -- be labelled an underperforming academic and managed into obscurity.
A great example of this is Peter Higgs, who famously said that he'd be unemployed pretty quickly in the academia of 2013. [0]
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
Finance was good people when? When Swiss banks captured all the war spoils of WW2? When they ran Penny Auctions during the Great Depression? When they financed slave ships? When the Medici financed endless war across Europe?
I’m not saying people are all awful, but I don’t think there’s any “before times” where people were better than they have been since then in any ageless profession. Perhaps there’s some degree of variance or even ebb-and-flow patterns.
I'll use the All-in podcast as a perfect example of the type of person described. They have some value in that they have palace intrigue + arguably asymetric access to information.
So, all of them?
aka techbros
Those career paths were always crooked. We see that going back to my great grandparents time with Black friday of 1929. They fucked around with unrestricted capitalism, and found out. Quite a few killed themselves by throwing themselves off of buildings.
It was only when FDR took office and worked with Congress to make tons of rules keeping the money hoarders from destroying the economy yet again. And it bloody worked. For those of you who say FDR was a communist, absolutely not. He was fighting against a large contingent of the population who were socialists and communists. He did appease some of their demands, bit not many.
FDR led us into our most glorious 20 years, the 1950's to 1960's. Cheap education, cheap homes, plentiful well paying jobs, only needed 1 worker per house. Thats what the boomers remember and want.
And it was systematically dismantled piece by piece.
'VC guys were good too'?!?! I take it you do t remember the 1980's Mergers and Acquisitions crisis? Thats when enough data was available for a company, that mergers, acquisitions, and liquidations coukd make a handful of people scads of money, and destroy the economy to boot.
And i also scarce remember a time when 'Finance' was good. Their slur was beancounters. Something costs $20 but saves $1000? Nope, its -20$. The loss is never analyzed. Every job Ive woeked in has had this perverse logic.
And especially with money, Goodharts Law comes to mind. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
"Men living in democratic ages have many passions but most of their passions either end in the love of riches or proceed from it." Alexis de Toqueville
Wherever there's big money to be made, will also attract ambitious people hungry for money and power - it's that simple.
Now that FAANG jobs aren't looking all that attractive, many such people have set their sights on AI research/dev and quant finance jobs. The latter one has exploded in popularity / virality the past years. Previously a niche profession within finance which, frankly, most had no clue existed, has become almost a mainstream ambition. Some of the people that never identified themselves as nerds, will wander from industry to industry, which one that pays the most.
But back to the nerds: Some nerds obviously changed. If you throw generational wealth at most people, they will change. Few people are so disinterested in money that it is simply not a thing they care about.
What's more, many nerds discovered that with enormous amounts of money, comes enormous amounts of power. You can now actually lobby for your sci-fi dream world, which is what some of the billionaire nerds are doing.
The money and power corrupted them.
Sadly, while I find AI effective, I also find it's removed the craft and personal reward I get from open source. So I will instead grow potatoes.
> The money and power corrupted them.
Actually accomplishing things in the world that constitute building a sci-fi dream world requires significant amounts of money and power, and any person or institution at all that could in principle have the capacity to do this would also have the capacity to become corrupt, at least by someone's judgement.
Personally, I'm pretty happy with many of the sci-fi things that tech billionaire nerds have made their money by bringing into existence. I rode across town in a self-driving Tesla the other day while giving orders to its AI system about how and where to go. That was a pretty sci-fi dream world experience. That's worth quite a bit of corruption.
One was framed and tortured, the other was given an empire.
The message was received.
We now only have the Zuckerberg type.
Oh how quickly we have forgotten:
> We plan to build this the way we've developed WhatsApp: focus on the most fundamental and private use case -- messaging -- make it as secure as possible, and then build more ways for people to interact on top of that, including calls, video chats, groups, stories, businesses, payments, commerce, and ultimately a platform for many other kinds of private services.
March 6 2019; https://web.archive.org/web/20190306191516/https://www.faceb...
Of course, none of that happened. But he did make a big fuss about it.
Hear me out: back in the day founding a company wasn't an identity, it was just an action, a verb. Stuff started going sideways when people started thinking of themselves as "founders". Suddenly the product wasn't the top priority anymore, instead it was second to defending their identity as a "founder". Seemingly stupid decisions followed, but seen from the perspective of a CEO who wants nothing more than to be a founder, they start to make sense.
We see something similar in politics, I think. Note that it doesn't apply to everyone, but it's interesting to compare people who are engaged in a social justice struggle, Vs people who identify as "activist". The latter will be very prone to doing things that are counter-productive to their started cause, because they don't really care about any cause, they're just defending their identity as activist.
I reckon the same idea holds elsewhere as well.
(Disclaimer: I'm not sure how common that last thing is in the US, but where I live, it definitely happens a fair bit. But even here it does not apply to everyone, it's just a very loud minority)
Second disclaimer: I use the word identity in a very specific way in this comment. It is not to be confused with other uses of the same word, for example in the phrase "gender identity". That is a completely different kind of identity and is completely orthogonal and irrelevant to what I'm trying to express in this comment
https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
> If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
Of course one can't not have any identity whatsoever, afterall ethics is a type of identity and no one should in their right frame of mind contest basic things like human rights.
You will see similar dynamics where a bunch of people are involved.
Playing off of it, the submission says something worth highlighting:
> One of them builds autonomous weapons for the Pentagon.
Luckey was perfectly happy doing VR at Facebook until he got shoved out over politics.
It's not just letting the non-nerds in--it's a decade-plus long campaign to push nerds out if they have the wrong ideology.
And then there were no 'safe spaces' for socially awkward/on-the-spectrum nerds. The spaces once created to escape the school bullies had let in new types of bully.
Capitalizing the work of others, Cannibalizing smaller entities, creating monopolies, controlling the government and the narrative.
The way of Jobs is how you "earn" a billion dollars.
All those C*Os and founders are good and successful politicians, not nerds. There was a colossal PR campaign to picture them as nerds for multiple reasons, but most of them never created like nerds would do (with a passion, going deep, enjoying the process & the result).
Politicians become successful due to skills incompatible with nerd mindset. Look at Linus, he could built an empire but he's a git.
Elizabeth Holmes persuaded for years that she was a groundbreaking innovator, even with non-existent product. Other manipulators are smart enough to have a real product that protects them via benefit of a doubt. Society is still not immune to people like that.
If it has active participation in the form of new comments, it makes sense to merge the comments and not penalize the post.
That post:
> 140 points by mrmarket 3 days ago | unvote | flag | hide | past | favorite | 110 comments
This post:
> 626 points by vrnvu 8 hours ago | flag | hide | past | favorite | 431 comments
IMHO, it's not a dup, because it's getting a lot more traction today.
because previously it was mostly the nerds who were at the forefront of the innovation (they still are), but they now have a playbook where they see all the other people (grifters) who are entering tech for money and the playbook of the attention economy and doing that because its a profitable strategy.
It's basically the fact that there are multiple companies where a grift culture is promoted within tech (ironically I am on YC website and YC had a company which you might've heard called delve :D)
As people realized that the technology has value and finance people realizing it to pour head over fist money into it.
With such eggregious trillions of dollars worth of money (basically the whole economy getting floated by tech), you are bound to see people within this do the grift playbook and talk about themselves and succeed and that has become the playbook.
So I think this is what has happened to nerd culture. It simply became profitable and then commoditized and used by people who could then grift.
BUT people are respecting the nerd culture (well the non grift version of it) a lot more
For some reason, I wish to recommend Weird Al video song about White & Nerdy[0] and how people within the comments are saying that Nerd culture has its own unique identity and many if not all appreciating the nerd culture
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw&list=RDN9qYF9DZP...
So TLDR: people like the previous nerd culture and it still exists, especially on HN but on platforms like twitter and others, as discussed within the article itself, with the attention economy. The grift culture is getting more attention than the nerd culture and because of the overlap in tech, the nerd culture is getting some bad rep but overall people appreciate the actual nerd culture (IMO) as interesting and unique (whereas previously, people wouldn't have appreciated it so much)
You don't hear about the actual nerd culture because it isn't algorithmic hungry but it still exists on platforms like Hackernews IMO!
Reminds me of Pink Floyd’s "Have a Cigar":
> And did we tell you the name of the game, boy?
> We call it Riding the Gravy Train
Cleve Moler, the creator of MATLAB, died a few weeks ago. I've had the opportunity to meet him a few times, and despite him being a genuine mathematical genuis, the thing that impressed me so much was how humble he was, how anti-braggadocious. He was like this in person, privately, and also in public. Moler was an early post-WW2 engineer, his cohort is a shrinking class, and I'm worried about those who are taking their place, and then what happens when my generation and the younger replace them.
I'm not saying that to glorify anything. The sentiments in your comment could have been written at any point in human history. Part of that maturity is to lose the ego too. You're not a hero for doing what feels natural, and that is to share what you have been fortunate enough to gather so far.
If you haven’t met someone who is rude and inconsiderate and thinks that’s ok because they believe they are way smarter than they are, then you haven’t worked in tech.
This sort of archetype navel gazing is appealing because you can cast any story you want that way. Buy it doesn’t actually help to understand the complex problems we face, it just lets you blame some “other”.
A lot of society is actively fucked up by hyperoptimization, especially in business.
Anyway, I got some important coding to do now.
The author wants founders to stop projecting “an obsession with wealth and power” and instead “focus carefully on projecting an obsession with core nerd values”. And maybe it doesn't occur to them (as a fellow nerd) that _wealth and power were the whole point_. The author enjoyed being blind to the greed of it all, and now being unable to unsee they are begging the founders “please please just pretend a bit better”.
Now everyone plays, watches or at least knows games, but most games are lowest common denominator focus group tested commodity crap. Huge budgets and production value, almost zero innovation. Even indies are 80% slop to make a quick buck.
If you have a hobby no one cares about, hold it dear and close to your chest, and be happy that no one cares about it.
In fairness the exposed brick was already there when they rented the place.
When I worked in the Bay Area, I noticed the nerd-culture was still more or less predominant in South Bay. The arrogant, shallow types were always there (as witnessed by their fancy cars--"should we take the Jag or the Merc today?"), but I could still tolerate it. San Francisco was a different story. I started a new job at a startup once and remember thinking "I'm surrounded by Ivy Leaguers who look like models--this place is not for me". I think the crazy amounts of money just brought in everyone looking to make a buck, and the nerds no longer were the majority.
But then you have the company missions. It seems like most of the companies in the Bay Area are all about advertising or compiling info on individuals and selling it. It's mostly B2B and not so much "cool products".
We're on the downside of the tech bubble, and maybe that's a good thing.
I think it'll keep having waves, but I agree that a bit of cooling off could be a good thing.
The technologies are genuinely cool, interesting stuff, it's a super exciting time to be building stuff. But the business side of things seems quite vapid and desperate for many companies.
I wonder if more tangible industries like manufacturing have had similar peaks? Was there a time where the Wood Industry was going crazy, making everything out of wood, stuff that didn't need to exist?
Linus Torvalds on the other hand - that is a household name.
Some of it is the mask falling off and some of it is people genuinely getting warped by it. It’s a little of both.
In finance it’s covered over by a buttoned down ivy league veneer, but the coke snorting maniac is there.
Same in politics where there’s pomp and ceremony to cover it, but when it comes out in the open there it’s probably the most ugly. Governments have armies and police.
In nerd-dom it comes in a form that’s uniquely tone deaf to the point of coming off like a comic book or anime villain.
As someone who started to read this forum because it was y-combinator startup-friendly, business-friendly and investor-friendly, I never would have imagined the anger and ridicule on display here.
Obviously, the nerds have left the building--or at least this forum.
Did anyone read this article?
"There is no reason founders should disappear from public life. There are too many advantages to building in public to ignore it."
Someone has to say this: don't be a victim--get out there and build something valuable for yourself.
There are no overlords, except in your imagination. Go build great things.
A new thing will come along which the finance types won't recognise for its potential, nerdy types will start experimenting with it, make progress, gain some small successes but being nerds they're not really interested in creating large markets for their things. People with less eye for the detail but more for the market potential will pick it up, sometimes together with the nerds (Wozniak/Jobs), sometimes without them and create larger markets. If it really takes off like computers did there will be a wild-west period in which those who understand the technology - i.e. nerds - get to step out of the shadows for a bit until the technology is commoditised and the market is consolidated. Eventually there is less need to know the tech which has become 'boring' anyway so the nerds disappear into the shadows again to tinker with whatever scratches their itch.
The market is like society in that it needs both conservatives who recognise a good thing and do their best to keep it alive as well as progressives who are less interested in keeping things going than they are in changing things in search of some Platonic ideal. While the good thing is good the progressives are doing their things in their workshops without being seen much. When the good thing starts going bad the conservatives are mostly ignored because nearly everyone is looking at the progressives for a solution which is not "a faster horse" or "a lighter buggy whip".
Just create enough FOMO among the monied and you win. This is not nerd stuff... it's psychopath stuff.
I assume it is selected for.
I assume it benefits those at the tippy-top of the western corporate structure.
They make more money, taking advantage of situations that squish other people, in my view more quickly than those with fewer pathologies. In my personal experience they seem to be tacitly accepted by boards & investors. I understand "maximizing profits" is the job.
Not a new thing.
- https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/the-science-behind-why-so-ma...
Of course the ‘nerds’ you hear about and see online are extroverted self-promoters. Of course the most visible people in the internal culture of large organizations are the ones who do more talking than doing.
Those are the people who are doing all the talking.
It is a massive over sampling problem that leads you to think, by looking at eg LinkedIn, ‘why is everyone on here writing engagement-bait algorithm-maxing posts?’
Everyone is not; The content you see is by definition the content that maxed its algorithmic exposure.
I was believing I was working on something very important as one of the initial hires in a 10 person standup, with series B funding "on the way any minute now," knew it was a risk but believed strongly in the tech, maybe naively.
Found out later, the CEO had been given a generous buyout offer by a competitor, in the 8 figures, a modest amount but far exceeding our level of debt/investment to that point, would have made several of us including him a decent chunk of change. This guy got it in his head at that point that the offer was insulting, and we should be worth billions, not this 'paltry' sum. I could barely believe it when I heard it way after the fact (I would have quit earlier if I had known). What I understand is the board of investors was not very happy with this and there would be no more funding to come in after that point. Within 6 months of that, I went from this bright eyed person to a person not receiving a paycheck for several months, wiping out my early-grad finances in record time, and a significant amount of debt, all the while they shopped our team around the country desperately looking for a buyer. (they did not find one and had to borrow more money to pay our wages).
Needless to say after that I resolved never ever ever to work at any kind of 'startup' ever again, and my career many years later has finally recovered (though my cynicism has not).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48504361
Anyway, the answer to the question: 'Nerds', like any cultural grouping, are a product of their environment. The United States of today has developed much higher inequality, debt burdens, rent demands, maintenance cost demands and trade deficits than the same environment had in the past, largely due to the Fed policies of the 21st century, with some help in worsening things by all administrations.
It’s a scam: people like Musk take credit for the work of thousands of people and even states. It’s ridiculous that a few people capture the value commonly generated.
We can go back to decades of public funding of research and development through taxes at universities and other public institutions, that’s a separate post.
If you're a visionary, by definition you see what others do not. Which means that there's a lag between being right and being seen as right. That lag looks like arrogance.
Of course, the trick is how do you tell the difference from the outside? I used to think "be right about everything all the time" would be enough, but I've seen it fail constantly for myself and for others.
Now I think it boils down to "some people will decide to love you and some will decide to hate you, based mostly on tribal affiliation[0] -- how much will liking him cost me socially? -- and how often you've been proven right actually has very little bearing on the situation."
[0] Also apparently your spinal posture matters a lot more than what you're saying. Crucially both are social-emotional, not logic-based.
This used to be only one of many paths available to a nerd, but now: (a) academia is dead thanks to overly competitive publish-or-perish set-up (probably the biggest loss of the three), (b) corporate jobs do not pay enough to safely survive downturns that leave you jobless for extended periods, (c) government jobs have been made even more onerous and even less paying in real terms.
So everyone has to become a self-promoting, trend-chasing startup-founder type. Even if you don't found a startup, you have to be always ready for a new "business opportunity".
I guess in a roundabout way, what I'm trying to say is that I wonder how much of this is a change in PR rather than a change in the people themselves.
Better to have a bland guy running McDonalds who can't stomach eating the "product" than some passionate chef doing his best to improve mass market food but rubbing people up the wrong way.
It's failure of capitalism if the money goes to the guy in the shiny suit instead of the person, or team, who can actually innovate. I don't want to be too melodramatic, but maybe this is all part of the fall of the empire.
The whole problem with opening Pandora's box is that you don't get to close it if you don't like what came out.
Why would things eventually get better? Especially on a time scale that matters to anyone who is currently alive?
Now we have to figure out a new way forward. We need a way to put what needs chaining up back in its chains without harming the innocent weirdos. I don't have an answer. There might not be one. But it is the challenge.
People whose whole career always was to manipulate and impress people, to talk well, to convince investors to give them money, to lead companies just are not nerds. Regardless of whether they are narcistic assholes or not.
i’d say it’s worse for founders. i barely see any nerdy founders anymore in sf.
it is all striver types whose parents are execs or other wealthy types, and all these people want to do is rent seek or attention seek instead of making something interesting.
so many of their ai products don’t even work. the entire goal is to get suckers to pay for a few months or sign a contract to lock down “$insaneAmount arr in six months” and then blow the VC money on yacht parties and other lame stuff.
Steve Jobs was brilliant and complicated with many down sides, but he also seemed to have good taste and to care about user experience as well as good design, and his era at Apple produced exceptional products that redefined their categories: Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc. Even Jobs' failures were interesting: NeXT, Mac G4 Cube, iPod Hi-Fi. Well, except for the hockey puck mouse which seems like an obviously bad idea.
Since then, the only thing that's mattered in tech is "how will you monetize", and monetization doesn't mean a modestly successful software company, no, it's a billion dollar unicorn or bust. Or getting your company to a high valuation and then sell and gtfo, rinse and repeat.
So why do you get? The people who care very much about making a billion dollars. And for the most part, people who care very much about that are assholes.
It doesn't matter if you write fantastic library, nobody is gonna use it because they won't know about it, the one with a gif of the terminal (ffs) will win that has a good page describing what it does (and being the most popular one can even become better than your library because of the following but that's not the point here).
It's everywhere, products, hiring, services. We have no network of trust (sigh), we need to trust some heuristics based on a shallow information. If somebody focuses on the shallow he wins, because nobody can ever dive into everything.
Consider this: present-day historians say Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn was a writer in the time of Leonid Brezhnev. 100 years from now they'll say Brezhnev was a politician in the time of Solzhenitsyn.
Then the world digitalized, and people who do not have any interest in computing and computers in general became "experts". That's when the ball begin to roll. This created people who can't give a french fry about the work they are doing? Quality? Efficiency? What do they matter, it was a job you did for 9-5 and you got your salary. If money was in say, haystacking, they'd be doing haystacking.
Now whenever someone utters "crypto" I do a doubleback and realize they mean cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. I do not expect any of my new hires to know the word "grok" (other than the AI of course), enjoy science fiction or any nerdy things we did. IT was a community where like minded people were working, now it is not.
Links to the first two episodes:
did this guy ever hear of Larry Ellison? He also claims Gates wasn't a terrifying overlord
We won. I used to stay up all night watching Nasa launches and landings as a kid. I felt like an outcast. Now everyone’s wearing Nasa shirts like it’s cool and they don’t really have any good launches.
We used to be outcasts and now I look at youngsters and they’re doing the same things and it’s cool…? It’s like suddnely the jocks are the outcasts.
Doesn’t seem like you’ve been keeping up with DHH’s reputation. He’s at best controversial. He has publicly expressed fervent views about subjects outside tech that were definitely not fun/curiosity-driven/charming and has gotten plenty of backlash. I also see no reason to believe he’d decline to be on that Mafia game, he feels as much a “personality” as the others.
does anyone else get the feeling this comments section is being subtly astroturfed to sabotage the spirit of good-willed idealism and innovation? Look closely, there's reasons the powers that have insane capital would do this.
They've done it to every other space already.
I don’t give a damn about any company’s goals now.
It's not particularly difficult to understand. "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the results." - Charlie Munger.
Most CEOs are completely private.
Most people don’t post their thoughts on Facebook on random topics either.
Because when most people post all their private thoughts on matters publicly, it’s kind of embarrassing.
Nah, that's been dead since 2010 or earlier. It was probably dead during DotCom too. Anytime tech is hot again, it attracts the kind of money/status chasers that move to whatever is hottest.
I mean Zuck was a Harvard grad and Bezos was a hedge fund guy first. Thiel was in law and derivates trading before tech.
The founders in garage era was more 70s/80s vibe.
1) Incredibly large amounts of money
2) GamergateInstantly thought of the big short: “they’re not confessing. They’re bragging”
Some subset of these big companies will be run by people who appreciate that they're having an impact on society and feel that it's important for them to be more public so people can better appreciate who they are. Jeff Bezos was a bit awkward in the 1990s, Bill Gates was way more awkward back then, oh man, it was physically uncomfortable to watch him in interviews. Mark Zuckerberg was absolutely out of touch and forcing himself into the spotlight of his company was a disaster, he rolled -1000 charisma. They had to get Elon Musk to make dice just for that to be possible.
Most of them get better over time. These are not people that generally started hugely confident in public or with lots of people, but when you run these companies you gain both confidence and money which make public appearance less painful. You could argue they might sometimes veer into overconfidence to make up for confidence slipping, which can also be seen as ego.
There are plenty of nerds out there. Statistically based on population growth and also increases in autism spectrum diagnoses, there are more than ever.
This sort of behavior is authoritarian. During Covid, this was was very apparent. I saw tech leaders supporting forced vaccinations, suppressing opinions online, and getting people fired from their job for simply stating their opinion.
Magazines like 2600, who always championed freedom of speech and expression during multiple administrations, showed their true colors. They supported suppression of people they disagreed with politically.
Twitter/Facebook were found to be colluding with the government to target individuals that made the government look bad or had contrarian views.
The worst part? It was swept under the rug. Nobody in the tech industry cared.
This is why I support the suppression of rights of people I disagree with politically. This tit for tat will need to continue, until lessons are learned, and it stops for everyone.
> Jobs was flawed and everyone knew it, but it was all par for the course. He was aggressive in his ambition, uncompromising about even the most minute details of his company, and occasionally arrogant
> Then there was Woz, the patron saint of computer science: bashful, generous, humble, averse to the spotlight, and content with having a reasonable amount of wealth but not an absurd, evil-seeming amount of wealth
I think broader problem is HN’s laser focus on few managers that are 1) doing [subjectively] immoral things 2) doing things not in a way busines and tech industry were doing it 15-20 years ago.
Down to a point where people start painting an “us vs them” picture with white knights of old and scary liars of new.
> Phase two (2007 to 2015): the founder as parable.
> Phase three (2015 to now): the tech industry as grift-adjacent.
This pops out at me for a few reasons.
1. The grift era started long before 2015.
2. The dotcom era (which falls in the absurdly large 1970s-2007 range) was pretty grifty.
3. Come to think of it, maybe the parable we were sold in the 2007 era was ... Wait for it... A grift?
What kept things sane for a long time was the focus on products. Someone made something and sold it to end users. The end users had to be kept happy. That leads to a sane industry.
Now, most of the big names in computing are ad-supported. That's a completely different dynamic. The hype is the product. The user is the enemy.
On August 9, 2006, Eric Schmidt, head of Google, spoke at the Search Engine Strategies conference.[1] Before that, "search engine optimization" was considered a scumbag business, and it was the job of search engine companies to fight it. On that day, Google made it legitimate and turned evil.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-ceos-new-paradigm-cloud...
I am not so sure I agree with this take. The "nerds" are building incredibly powerful technologies (Amazon, Starlink/SpaceX, search, algorithmic social media, AI, etc.) that literally control our lives now. It isn't any great mystery that the tech titans realized they had this power, and hence are questioning whether democracy is some outdated concept. They all want to be Plato's philosopher (or in this case, technologist) kings. At the risk of sounding like an AI, it isn't just grifting (or a con game) - these guys really do think of themselves as the new feudal lords. So I don't think this author is thinking big enough...
(There were a lot of negatives due to this AT&T monopoly but we are talking about nerds here and having to socialize your own worth/value. It's a shitty game that real nerds aren't necessary interested in playing)
I'm gonna disagree on the timeline and maybe get some flak for it: phase 3 was 1995-2000ish. When the first advertisement script and web analytics were born and disseminated. That's where all the tech grifts originate.
I've been thinking about this a fair amount over the past 5-10 years, and I think a lot of the issues that we have can be traced to our demography and specifically 'the zeal of the convert' along with existing cultural dysfunction that would have been addressed if we'd grown more slowly as a group.
There's a lot of discussion about tech as an industry, but much less about tech as a culture, encompassing people's lives outside of their work/career.
Most people who are into tech in their 40s-60s came into it via a strong interest as an adolescent or young adult, and a fair number of them felt misunderstood and/or were abused/taunted/bullied/etc by mainstream culture. Then they discover this part of the world where people think like them and things make sense. They make friends who see things in systems! They can argue with facts! They agree what is important to argue about! They agree that consistency in thinking principles matters! Etc. This means a lot of people in tech, particularly the ones who hold the most power (even outside of founders) are decently likely to have either a disdain of or fear of non-tech cultures due to bad experiences, feel that tech culture needs to be defended from outside influences who don't understand and would crush it, and are well... zealots about it.
The problem is zealots are really bad at accepting and pinpointing issues within a culture. They want to defend it beyond all reason because to them, that culture/group is their safe place. If someone is bad in the culture, it can't be a sign of something wrong with the culture (because the culture is a safe place). Instead, that person 'isn't a true X'. Or that person is just a bad apple. The other influence is that converts absolutely don't want to lose their place. In the case of tech culture, because we've intertwined the culture with a career, that means people being afraid of losing their career/network/etc.
This is a different than being born into something. The perspectives are different. People born into tech culture/grey tribe/however you want to label it get to see more of how the culture expresses itself in different relationships (including its problems). They see disagreements between nerd adults that aren't mediated with corporate or monetary power/status structures, they have a choice about how much of the culture they participate in or not (like how someone born Catholic who goes to Mass once a year at Xmas is still considered Catholic regardless). There's more wiggle room, and more a sense of how those virtues play out over an entire lifetime instead of being limited to how they're expressed in a workplace between the ages of 20 and 45. Depending on the particular situation, it's also possible to have someone in tech culture who doesn't hold any personal grudges against the other cultures they share space with.
Right now, since we're dominated by converts between the ages of 20 and 50 and we've grown so quickly, we haven't had the time to create the cultural guardrails that would allow us to do things like 'agree on what constitutes an abuse of power' or 'agree on what we should teach our kids about morals', etc.
And because of the lopsided age pyramid, we have next to no elders, which doesn't help either.
This is shifting slightly as the first generation of explosive growth is starting to reproduce, and soon they'll start aging out of the workplace and we'll start to see more contemplative behavior. It's already somewhat starting: there's hints of people reaching that stage in their lives.
(NB: Yes, I'm aware that the tech industry pre-dates the 80s, but demographically those numbers are minuscule in comparison to the people who joined during and after the dot com boom. My grandmother used punchcards and knew C and was born in 1934, but there just aren't enough people with that experience for them to exert a cultural pull. Almost all of the elders we do have are regarded individually: we know (or know of) those people, but that's different from 'I'm struggling with this moral question, I'm going to go ask John because he's both wise and will understand what I'm talking about enough to give decent advice'.)
They were compelled to do this, because nerds ate Hollywoods' lunch.
Just look at the show, Big Bang Theory. A heinous exposition of nerd culture which derides and degrades nerd'ism and aligns it with the neo-fascist Ayn Rand'ian ideology being propagated by Hollywoods' culture class in order to promulgate division and derision.
The Wests' copycat culture, not really able to develop culture of its own, simply picked up the baton and ran with it.
Now, gullible impressionable generations assume - courtesy of incessant mass-media groupthink - that its necessary to be a misanthropic asshole if you want to sound clever.
I feel like every founder is now some kind of grifter. Bouncing from new idea to new idea on how to make more money even if the whole thing is just smoke and mirrors.
They may have shared a love for technology, what they also shared is a deep immaturity.
The immaturity of a person not wanting to acknowledge and cary any responsibility for other people, for the consequences of their work, for any kind of accountability. Just play with their toys without any concern for the external world.
'I'm just here playing with tech and code'. Sure! but that stuff you're building is being weaponised by other (the venn diagram unfortunately overlaps) tech bro's so men can film women with their glasses in public like the little sick creeps they are. Or steal all their data. You can't pretend you are not responsible and complicit.
They want "what's theirs" and anything in their way - including people - have to comply or be destroyed.
People bought Apple because they were subscribed to Steve Job's personality cult. Heck, they might've even bought a "not-a-flamethrower" if he tried to sell one.
There's a new trend to call everyone you don't like a "grifter". How is Elon a grifter? The dude has been getting shit done on and on for years. This is the opposite of grifter.
> One of them builds autonomous weapons for the Pentagon
Also what is this? Wasn't the whole point to have an agreement to not build AI weapons? I think the author is on some emotional screed.
come on man, what are you doing. must admit that i haven't followed this guy closely, but i thought with him being a part of Signal he would know better.
that actually makes me even more suspicious about Signal...
Elon? Grift? Give me a break. He's the greatest true technologist of all time.
I couldn't fine even one other defender in either discussion. Maybe its true that HN has been BlueSky'd and Twitter is the new HN
ps. Great post aside from this
I can only speak for my institution, but eagerness to lock down ip and keep ownership of everything tightly controlled and out of the hands of said nerds/inventors doesnt really incentivise me to do beyond what I'm paid for.
The one time I tried, I was hit by the full force of my institutions commercialization goons and lawyers, to a degree that it killed my drive to do anything novel for them. Despite being promised partial ownership, in the end, after federal grant funds were secured and product developed, they took everything using "loopholes" that go against the law and the institutions own rules, but to fight it I need resources I don't have, which the institution no doubt knows. All that despite me initially being fully aligned with my institution, and happy to only take a very minor share of actual profit, in-line with what i'd get anway, only stipulation was veto rights in application (as the tech has very real applications in offline autonomous drones, which I consider an X-treat).
If my own institution is a hostile actor, and willing to fuck me over nothing, simply because they can, why do anything?
So, current state of Copyright law favours institutions over the very individuals it was meant to protect, and there are no options to protect one self if anything interesting is developed without serious capital and legal might. So, fuck it, im not doing anything except hobby related, GPL licensed stuff. If I can do anything to make it hard to commercialize, I will. If it can be kept in house, it is kept there.
Capital interest has become a rather ugly and hostile egregore with interest aligned against that of humanity. All those building cool and novel shit I know hold similar opinions, so it is no surprise to me. I was strongly advised against working with the institution by older folks i look up to, people who have built really powerful tools of their own. Their warnings ended up being proven valid with deafening clarifty. I've always found the statement that capitalism breeds innovation to be a joke, and while it works in the chinese model, the "western" model is sick and suffers a sort of cultural psychosis that makes it rather unttractive to engage with.
Elon probably most of all, he was the one who took fringe edge lord behavior and elevated to something to be admired.
Objectivism is a stupid, angry idea borne out of the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. It exists in a vacuum. Eddie Lampert named his yacht the Fountainhead which is amusing since, while I don’t question he has talent, he got millions in seed money to start his own fund from Richard Rainwater. Elon Musk is not some scrappy kid; the vast majority of founders are from comfortable and increasingly upper middle class families where they can tolerate the risk of failing with a reasonable safety margin and then delude themselves that they bootstrapped everything themselves.
Curtis Yarvin does not exist in a vacuum. These are awful people and the fact that we’ve allowed them to be taken seriously and control the conversation is…obscene.
Tim Apple [sic], Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos all went to the inauguration to bend the knee. They all paid 7 figures plus to be there.
Being a billionaire is fundamentally incompatible with being a countercultural nerd. If anything, this was Silicon Valley returning to its roots. The first companies were founded before WWI (eg Federal Telegraph Co) but the true origins of the name "Silicon Valley" came from semiconductors and the likes of HP and Lockheed Martin as a Cold War defense offshoot.
I think a far more important question is why we no longer have more reasonable public figures. Who are the modern equivalents of Isaac Asimov or Richard Feynman?
So, in Civ6 terms: Nerds didn’t have an existing industry pantheon that could stand up to religious pressure by non-religious entities. This is part of what made Jobs and Apple so successful: arrogance is a stellar defense against religious pressure, and Jobs was implemented a rigorous culture that resists religious pressure very strongly. It’s not invulnerable to sects from within, but it’s nearly impenetrable to sects from without.
There’s also a subtler reason why Jobs and Woz could coexist at all: Jobs wasn’t arrogant and cruel to people because he looked down upon them; he was arrogant and cruel to ideas, and so to work with him, that detachment of idea from self-worth and ego and etc. was mandatory.
To use Woz and Jobs as a constructed spectrum analogy: Everyone perceives me as being more like Woz than Jobs interpersonally, though never fully Woz (I’m a little too distant for the tastes of the needy), until they invite me to critique their ideas or listen to my describe my own, at which point they (permanently thereafter) perceive me as being much more towards the Jobs end of the scale. It can be somewhat isolating and uncomfortable to ride alongside someone like that long-term, but that’s compensated for somewhat by having a work culture that prioritizes hallway chats over cubicle farms. (No coincidence the UFO, then!)
Most nerds lacked both the arrogance and unconcern for other people’s feelings that insulated Jobs against the belief grifters and the innate confidence that insulated Woz, and instead have what we see in Elon Musk: a deep and desperate craving for other people to like them, to value them, to adore them. (Praise him.) So of course most successful nerds fell prey to the basic grift that hooks people on religious and secular cults every day: “we’ll sell you a feeling of belonging, of being valued, in exchange for your adoption and propagation of our beliefs”. Jobs didn’t give a fuck if you propagated his beliefs or not, so long as you adhered to them at work; and Woz clearly doesn’t need to belong to be confident in his value to others.
Zuckerberg is a good example of someone who has the arrogance/asocial of Jobs down pat, but in contrast is fully decoupled from prosocial outcomes. Investigating what the guiding forces in Jobs’ life were that directed him towards prosocial outcomes, rather than asocial outcomes like Zuckerberg, would perhaps be quite revealing; Jobs built a company that tends to minimize harm to its customers, while Zuckerberg built a company that tends to maximize harm to its customers, but both succeeded at building institutions that resist external religious pressures. That’s a distinction missed by this post, and separates the outcomes neatly into a simple 2x2 matrix: asocial/prosocial (Jobs), asocial/apathetic (Zuckerberg), social/confident (Woz), social/needy (Musk).
Are we on the same planet? Trust and motives? Is this some kind of secret that we’re not supposed to talk about? Tech, from its very beginnings, has been about libertarianism, subversion, counter culture, trying to be cooler than the people, wanting to wield power over them, misogyny, abusing free speech, racism, gatekeeping. The list keeps going of so many bad characteristics.
“core nerd values: a love of learning, curiosity, an obsessive interest in your domain, and an admirable humility”
Again what planet is this? Most nerds are some of the most self important condescending better than you social weirdos.
Ohhhh yes. Here it comes
“occasionally arrogant (not always, IMO. Sometimes you're just right.”
Ah yes applauding arrogance as correctness.
Phase One. Holy. The delusion here thinking that 1970-2007 was some golden CEO age. Do you live your life never understanding the incredible pain and exclusion and mistreatment that people experienced and continue to everyday? Is that by choice (willfully ignorant) or are you just this privileged that you thought the world was fantastic?
Here’s the fact: These CEOs, SVPs, Directors, Managers, Engineers didn’t just magically become shitty people in recent years. They’ve always been terrible people right down to the no-social-skills neckbeard who manages IT. This has always been the case. Might I remind you that computing was full of women? That’s how it started. What did boys do? They came in, kicked all the women out. Took over and then invited their buddies. It gets worse because then it also became racist. This was never a surprise. The root cause was that terrible people came in and ….. SURPRISE …. behave terribly.
This is some of the most delusional and downright offensive stuff I’ve ever read and I don’t even want to begin to read some of the HN comments. And HN has had far worse discussions and articles on the front page. Most of us have never experienced the depressingly (yes actual clinical depression) horrible treatment that people have been experiencing either as potential employees or full time employees ever since those ENIAC days. Go look at your team. And then look at your other teams. And then your line of management. You’ll see the pattern. Now go back and look at history for the same things. You’ll once again see the same thing. It’s the same people. Young terrible hateful xenophobic racist homophobic freaks grew up and continued their ways. Nerds being the good guy is as cringe as the incel nice guy. Yuck.
Our industry is rotten because it has rotten people all through the ranks. It’s not just CEOs or founders. It’s everyday working people who are terrible to each other. And sorry to say but nerds geeks whatever you want to call them are at the top of the most terrible. That’s what make this industry suck. We never actually sat down and told most of these people (and us) to goto a therapist and deal with our trauma, demons, etc. and stop propagating that hurt to others. Start there.
Oh and this is the same blog with a different URL from 2 days ago and commenter pointed out. Yikes.
Patrick Boyle seems to cover the SPCX trajectory fairly well...
So now instead of programming it makes more sense to go to the gym.