If there's no problem with Brilliant Assholes in technology then why are there such a clear pattern of them?
Paul Graham has got a no-asshole rule for a reason- and it's not because he finds it difficult to find assholes to fund.
People with enormous power and wealth are frequently terrible across all industries. I'm still fairly convinced Kalanick has more in common with Weinstein and Miki Agrawal than your average trenches-level programmer, simply because power corrupts. (If tech has a singular problem, it's that startup culture means some people are in power for their whole careers.)
And at the trenches level: yeah, brilliant assholes are a thing in software. And classical music, and physics, and law, and... They're all specialized fields with noninterchangeable work, power-law payouts, and room to minimize human interaction in daily work.
I don't disagree with you that this happens in the field, and I definitely appreciate hearing from people in the field who might agree with this article. But it still feels like there's a pattern of comparing Silicon Valley to Wallstreet, while ignoring the myriad other fields with similar dynamics. That, not the existence of assholes, is the part that feels agenda-driven to me.
1. The median household income in the US is something like 1/3 to 1/2 of what I understand the starting salaries are in SV. For most outside the tech bubble, economically, there is little visible difference between "techies" and "billionaire CEOs".
2. Much of Kalanick's behavior is mirrored by lesser techies, albeit on a smaller scale.
3. Anyone have any hard numbers on the size of the "techies and billionaire CEOs" class versus the total professional classical musicians and physicists in the world? Certainly, the former seems to have more actual impact.
4. Do you really want to live on the pointy end of lawyer and wall street banker jokes?
("What's the difference between a lawyer and a catfish?" "One is a bottom feeding scum-sucker; the other is a fish.")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1633171
"pg 2632 days ago [-]
"Incidentally, we don't call it a "no asshole rule." I think what I originally said to Robert was that we try not to accept jerks, and since he'd heard the phrase "no asshole rule" he used that to describe it.
"Our criteria aren't the ones listed in this article, either. We're not trying to avoid people who make other people feel bad so much as those who are bogus, or dishonest. That's what we mean by a jerk: someone you can't trust."