Hacker News Reader

Comment by aleyan | Hacker News Reader

Issues raised in the article aside, I am here to argue semantics.

The article used the word start-up 3 times, plus one more in the title of his book. The company he worked for however, HubSpot is 10 years old and public and thus by definition is not a startup. Other two companies mentioned, Amazon and Netflix are both over a decade old and public and thus are not start-ups by any stretch of the imagination. Startups and tech companies are not synonymous and using them interchangeably is harmful to our discourse. If we can't agree on what words mean, how can we agree on deeper issues?

PS. I also have issue with author's use of the word "tech worker" to describe telemarketers. I maybe wrong, but a "tech worker" to me is not someone who works for a tech company but rather is one who creating the tech.

View on HN

I have a related quibble: a lot of companies are called 'tech companies' when, in fact, they're consumers of technology, not producers of them.

If your primary innovation is business model, and all the interesting tech you end up working on is purely a result of your scale, well, you're not a tech company. You're a company.

Those companies are probably great (or at least, so far as great == profitable/growing), but calling them 'tech' loses sight of what's interesting about tech to me. I'd argue that true 'tech' companies create technology as their primary or near-primary focus.

So... Uber? Not a tech company, I think. AirBnB? Not tech. Apple? Tech. Google? Tech.

(And yes, I'm aware these companies I call 'non-tech' are probably solving hard, tech-related problems; their developers contribute MLOC to open source projects, and they even release internal tools as open source. But to me, what you sell defines what you are as a company.)

I recently started reading A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel and one of the first chapter is about the past and how learning from it we can avoid the same mistakes. One of the stories that he mentions is how in the early 60s anything that sound "electronic" was valued 10 times more just because of that, even if it had nothing to do with electronics. We are probably in a similar situation with "tech" and "startup", they are cool buzzwords that get thrown around from people that don't really know the meaning to add some special attributes to a company.

I think it's even simpler: tech companies overwhelmingly create technology. So the majority of their employees should be developers or other people involved in actually creating technology. Uber and AirBnB are tech companies: they're primary innovation was creating technology and the majority of their business expenses are in creating technology.

I don't know how anyone gets away with calling call center employees "tech workers." It's a farcical trend and a way to make headlines ("Tech workers making only $30k a year"). They're not more tech workers than a developer at a news company is a journalist.

Indeed. I've also noticed that we (as engineers and designers) have a better lifestyle in terms of treatment, job security and pay at these startups/tech companies - compared to the marketing teams which consist of the people who typically write these negative articles.

Countless of these articles critiquing the tech work culture pop on HN and it's rarely ever written by devs/management. The tone always comes off as criticism from 'outsiders' who worked within the company, who treat the pride taken in creating eccentric workplaces as somewhat alien to them. Maybe because they aren't truly insiders to the culture... especially in the sense that they aren't ever the creators/leaders or long term members. Only temporarily working within the environment before going back to more typical corporate environments from where they write their analysis with a certain level of cynicism.

While I agree that the author and others in the same role clearly do not feel apart of the culture, could you really expect them to? They don't have any equity, they don't make very much, they are monitored and evaluated like telemarketers, yet the management expects them to buy into the "change the world" mantra. I think you have to admit that it's demeaning. Why would they feel anything besides anger or jealousy?

Is that not part of the problem then? Discounting a critique of a company because of the persons role is just as demeaning.

I'm a dev and I found the article to be spot on. HubSpot's impact on the world beyond is vanishingly small, to pretend otherwise is either naive or cynical. And anyone who calls being fired "graduating" is an ass.

I had the a similar reaction to the article ..and the same reaction to the interview on Fresh Air : http://www.npr.org/2016/04/05/473097951/laid-off-tech-journa...

The part in the fresh air interview that talks about jargon is especially interesting.

It's just supply and demand. There's more demand than supply for engineers, and more supply and than demand for sales, marketing, support, etc. That doesn't excuse no job security, unreasonable work/life balance demands, etc. The most optimum strategy is to treat all your employees well.

As an engineer and former Hubspotter, I think Lyons is pretty accurate, if filtered through a Main Street lens and embarrassingly self serving.

You can only revel in your "culture" from the comfy bubble you inhabit where everyone values your input, you come and go almost as you please, and you know you will have secure income for as long as you want it. Step out of that bubble and see if the world looks the same now.

> using them interchangeably is harmful to our discourse. If we can't agree on what words mean, how can we agree on deeper issues?

Well, I agree this sorts of equivocation can completely confuse important issues. But worth noting that you will always be able to ignore an opposing viewpoint if they have to agree with you on the definition of every term. Better to simply say in this case that the terminology confusion invalidates parts of his argument, and then when replying to bend over backwards to state your thesis unambiguously (in both languages if necessary).

You're confused on the definition of startup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company

Generally newly created, but not necessarily. In 'The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries one of the primary examples is based around Intuit, which is a large publicly traded company.

I sure hope a company has a scalable business model before going public. Then again, Twitter?

>I maybe wrong, but a "tech worker" to me is not someone who works for a tech company but rather is one who creating the tech.

You're wrong, if you work at a tech company you're a tech worker. Programmers like to think they're special, but you're the help just like the sales people, support people etc

Here, I read "start-up" as "company with a culture typically attributed to start-ups." And in that reading, the author is not necessarily incorrect.

That's a circular definition.

It's not, because it's being applied outside of its defining group. It's a circular definition if the term is only applied to "start-ups", because of course those have "start-up culture" by definition. But one can apply the term to companies that are not "start-ups" -- even if they once were -- but yet carry the same "start-up culture".

There's also the idea at this point of a stereotypical "start-up culture" that lives beyond the idea of whatever a "start-up" is. This also breaks the circular definition, because from that perspective "start-ups" no longer define "start-up culture".

If you want to nitpick about this then fine, but I think it would be really great if the top comment in the discussion did not begin by explicitly disclaiming that it's off-topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com