Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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I enjoyed the article; I find the description entirely plausible and totally depressing. It definitely reminds me of Dan Lyons' book "Disrupted", which was also perfectly believable.

I've been around since Bubble 1.0; I started working in San Francisco in 1997. The thing I find horrifying about this article is the way Vision Critical apparently takes the worst aspects of startups and amplifies them, while taking the best aspects and perverting them.

As example, I was an early Agile person; I went to the main US Agile conferences 2001 to 2008 or so. The whole point of things like sprints and standups was to control schedule pressure and keep our work lives sane. The point of agility was not to increase risk and fear, but to make it safe to take risks so that we could be both bold and serene. If you had focused on "maximizing productivity", you would have received stern talkings-to about "outcome, not output." The point was not to put on a show of working hard; it was to radically increase effectiveness.

The sales-bro culture of competition and aggression is also nightmarish to me. It's inevitably short-sighted. I'm sure it works to generate rapid growth, but at what cost to the people and the long-term prospects of the company? It's a sign to me that they definitely aren't changing the world, but instead are likely pushing a mediocre-or-worse product on the world. As if that's new.

For what it's worth, I have the impression that this sort of awfulness is is more common in tech startups that aren't in SF/SV. I take it as classic cargo culting: instead of adopting the important parts, they adopt the visible parts. So maybe some of the saltiness here is just where people are working.

> classic cargo culting: instead of adopting the important parts, they adopt the visible parts.

This is the most succinct description of cargo cutting I have come across. Thanks, will use it :)

I will think of this every time I see a getter/setter pair on a class. The illusion of modularity and encapsulation with net negative in code quality.

Let's not forget about one Interface for one Class, because that adds flexibility in the future :)

I never understood this objection. The interface adds flexibility in the present - it allows other classes to depend on an abstraction instead of a concrete class. The future is absolutely irrelevant here, since YAGNI.

> it allows other classes to depend on an abstraction instead of a concrete class.

... which has exactly zero concrete advantages if there's only one implementation of the class.

A good programmer plans ahead.

Edit: of course it is up to individual judgement on a case by case basis, and there are instances were it is obvious that no other concrete implementation of an interface will be required. But otherwise, writing an interface is good practice because it helps safeguard against time consuming future refactoring.

This is exactly what YAGNI is meant to counter: the constant tendency of programmers to add speculative extension capabilities that are never used. These add complexity and cognitive overhead. It's a net loss.

Also, people pretend like refactoring is hard. My experience is that refactoring is only hard on the ends of the spectrum, where someone has added all the wrong abstractions, or no abstractions at all. Of the two, I'd prefer the latter, but obviously anything in the middle is usually better.

> A good programmer plans ahead

The comment above said the opposite, that the future was irrelevant.

These days there are tools that can help in a lot of languages; it's not a time consuming operation to press the Resharper "extract into abstract interface" button.

No. I get why you think this way, as I also used to. Good programmers may think ahead, but they don't build ahead.

Show me a guy who says YAGNI and I’ll show you a guy who has coded their way into a corner that the only way out is a total rewrite. Why do you think webdevs throw everything away every couple of years?

>Why do you think webdevs throw everything away every couple of years?

Because their bosses tell them to and because it looks better on their resume, not because the code they have suddenly stops working.

Chances are you're not gonna need it. Chances are you don't even need most what you do have.

From what I've seen, web devs throw everything away every couple of years due to high technology volatility, high requirements volatility, management idiocy, and outright business failure. As well at lack of automated testing that is exacerbated by the many technologies that make that hard.

And in environments like that, YAGNI makes even more sense. Overbuilding now in hopes it will pay off later is never a great idea. But it can only ever pay off if you correctly predict your business and technological future accurately. When you guess wrong, it's just waste.

I can understand one or the other, and I can understand a setter that does some logic first, but to me, you might as well just make those members public if you're going to do both.

I think the sales-bro culture is much more prevalent outside of SF. I can only speak for Chicago, but having interacted with a number of 'startup' companies here, there is an obvious lack of engineering talent and an abundance of sales people ready to hit the phones. The sales guys all come from massive companies and want to work at a startup, and are sold on a pseudo startup culture; for them, its a dream come true.

I agree. Interestingly as a sales recruiter, I've noticed that while the sales bro culture is well and alive in NYC / SF etc, a lot of the major aspects of it are especially magnified when you talk to candidates outside of the major tech markets.

From outside San Francisco, it looks like SV is a giant circle jerk of these exact problems you're talking about. I'm actually much more likely to believe that a startup elsewhere in the US is focusing on the important things because they're less likely to be influenced by that culture.

From the outside, sure. From the inside, that's not my impression. And given that so many places are trying to follow their perception of what SV/SF is doing, it seems very plausible to me that they will pick up and amplify those visible traits.

The sales-bro culture is tightly coupled with the standard sales compensation model. You generally have to give salespeople large commissions, both because they expect it and because the best salespeople are too expensive to justify as a fixed cost. And it's only natural that people want a bell to ring and drinks to chug when they're regularly earning five-figure bonuses.

I doubt it's actually "natural". And if it is, that something is natural doesn't mean it's right. Tuberculosis comes to mind, for example.

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