Glamorous tech startups can be brutal places for workers | Hacker News Reader

Glamorous tech startups can be brutal places for workers

economist.com

15 pointsTurukawa10 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10912945

> Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram, mainly to hire its 13 employees.

I don't usually like to nitpick, but this just seems totally incorrect.

Right there with you, given the network effect of the underlying business, it seems crazy that this wouldn't be most or all of the value of the company.

Moreover, it is not a stunning realization that not everyone likes their job ...even in tech. Or that employers with a lot of technical drudgery would have to offer higher wages, perks, and more job security to recruit.

Yes and no. Facebook had tried mobile and failed, and there was clear fear it could not cross the chasm from desktop web to mobile web/app.

Instagram was 'born' mobile, and Facebook was very motivated to ingest their thinking/culture/skills.

The whole reason why all the perks and high salaries have to be offered is because there aren't that many people who want to do the work. Otherwise, people would be willing to work for peanuts in order to get a foothold in the industry, like in entertainment, journalism, or art.

Not necessarily, that maybe part of the explanation.

The majority of the population is simply not capable of doing the work because it requires a high IQ.

If that were the case, then theoretical physicists and mathematicians would be getting paid high salaries to do what they love, rather than decamping to Wall Street and wasting their lives performing financial gymnastics.

Both supply and demand matter, and the vast majority of coding is something the average person could be trained to do, especially given how accessible the resources required to learn are. The problem is that the majority of people are not interested in spending their lives sitting in front of a computer for 8+ hours/day editing text files essentially reinventing the wheel.

Physics and Math aren't in demand the same way high programming ability is.

"Both supply and demand matter, and the vast majority of coding is something the average person could be trained to do, especially given how accessible the resources required to learn are."

This is wrong. Passing an interview like Microsoft's or Google's requires a very high IQ. They are designed that way for a reason. http://infoproc.blogspot.ca/2007/02/its-all-about-brainpower...

The average person isn't nearly as smart as you think, probably because you mostly interact with people in a restricted range. For example, have you taken the SAT and do you remember how easy it was? Training, on average, fails to significantly improve SAT scores. http://infoproc.blogspot.ca/2012/02/test-preparation-and-sat...

If you think the average person can solve highly g-loaded algorithmic problems by practicing you are delusional. Most people could practice 16 hours a day for years on end and they would still do awful. Even for the more basic programming stuff, the performance of a higher IQ person is usually far, far better.

I should've been more careful when I said that the "average person" would be able to learn how to code. You're right that I wasn't even thinking of those who had difficulty with the SAT, but rather those who went to good colleges and then went into a variety of non-tech fields, such as finance, law, medicine, or science.

I was formally trained as a scientist, and many of my friends who didn't go into tech went into one of those 4 aforementioned fields. It's those groups of people (which is quite large) that I was referring to when I said that coding is something that can be self-taught with freely available online reference materials - myself and a couple of my friends have successfully done exactly that.

More likely, IME, they could do the job fine, but have been led to believe that they need a higher IQ, so why bother to try?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com