Comment by rmoriz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmoriz | Hacker News Reader

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It's not only about the "Long Beards" in backend programming.

Let's look 10 years back: To become a popular "web company" you've probably had to invest a lot of cash in advertisements. Today strong social networking (blogging, twitter, HN, fb, linkedin) in theory allows the developers/builders/creators/"marketers" direct access to the market without having a middle men and for a few bucks.

So it's all about "full stack self promotion": You've to sell AND deliver awesome quality on a daily basis.

Some good and hard-working will be able to make bigger profits themselves if they learn self marketing skills (=> 37signals, peldi/balsamiq, amyhoy … ) and actually WANT to sell. Many of the old school OSS developers don't want to sell themselves as an "ego brand" on a daily basis. They just want to do cool technical things and get enough money for a living. They are awesome brains but often have autistic-like social/selling skills and a completely different motivation.

Bullshit. They may promote some illusion of quality, but having seen both internet startups and massive banks I can tell you they're huge liars. They're all about the illusion of quality and selling it, and not any actual quality.

Banks collapsed because they had crap IT. This is why Bear Stearns has a 20000% increase (yes, percent) in failed trades in the last two days of their life and didn't know about it. Bad IT also let them create these derivatives and have no idea how much risk was actually in them, hell, how much money was in them.

Startups are going to go through the same thing. They're lack of attention to detail of the total product quality while promoting their "full stack" as if it were high quality is already starting to bite them. I know a lot of these exits you're seeing would have been higher if they had better operations than they do.

So this myopic view that it's all about sales at any cost and "user experience" only does nothing for the industry.

I've seen a lot of IT crap in the last 10 years (retailers, insurances, media companies) but I guess unless you're lifting heavy things (as maybe in millisecond-daytrading, nuclear power plants, defense) it takes a really long time to "let them pay for the crap they do/did" except for high burn or poor fail-startups. IT became more and more a commodity. Quality is nice but doesn't matter unless it's exploding. There are many ways of doing it "good enough" even if it's rubbish from our point of view.

regarding the "ego promoters":

For me it looks like currently the trend is to "migrate" from IT to "Life Coach" and selling your "make money fast" show to the community, which already suffers from the described decline of appreciation. It's like the sales, psychology and stock trading gurus we all know: They have their time and in the end their star is usually waning fast BUT the next one is already preparing to enter the stage…

"Banks collapsed because they had crap IT. This is why Bear Stearns has a 20000% increase (yes, percent) in failed trades in the last two days of their life and didn't know about it. Bad IT also let them create these derivatives and have no idea how much risk was actually in them, hell, how much money was in them."

I think you have a good point, but you're stretching it a bit here. Bear Sterns was dead before the last 2 days of their life.

I read those two sentences as independent assertions, but you seem to be conflating them.

Bad IT also let them create these derivatives and have no idea how much risk was actually in them, hell, how much money was in them.

You sound like you think the bullshit derivatives etc were an accident? As if the people slicing & dicing bad mortgages into CDOs etc didn't know what they were doing?

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