Lived Fast, Died Young, Left a Tired Corpse | Hacker News Reader

Lived Fast, Died Young, Left a Tired Corpse

codinghorror.com

126 pointsmattyb45 comments

That was over ten years ago. For context, Mark Zuckerberg was all of sixteen when the original web bubble popped.

Yes, you will have incredibly lucrative job offers in this bubble. That's the easy part. As Startup.com and Code Rush illustrate, the hard part is figuring out why you are working all those long hours.

If this is supposed to some kind of reminder as to what we're doing with our lives, it's not going to work to stop a bubble. Those who will work those long hours this time aren't old enough to have lived through it the first time. The people who were the foot soldiers of the bubble ten years ago are not the ones who are going to be the foot soldiers in the next bubble: I seriously doubt anyone who worked the long hours ten years ago is going to consciously make a choice to do so again. It's not just that our collective memory is short, it's that there are so many new, young, impressionable, minds with no memory to influence their decisions.

This is just how I read it and I might be reading a lot of my own experience into things but I was a very young foot soldier the last time (still in my teens) and I think there's an important point here. The thing about the last bubble is most of the foot soldiers that I knew weren't working to cash out. They were working to change the world.

Don't get me wrong. Money was a nice consolation prize but still.

The problem today is most of the people I meet in startups seem to have the same goals. For all the talk I can't recall meeting a founder who openly admitted to building a company just to flip it. Yet they're repeating the mistakes of the late 90s because our industry has very little institutional memory

(perhaps all that looking forward makes us forget to look back)

I think his point here is that those of us who were there need to remember what happened and make a point of imparting those lessons to those who weren't there. Because they were too young to really see what was going on.

I started my post-collegiate career in 1997, joining a startup. You know why? I love technology and it was a great job. In 2000, I joined another startup. You know why? I love technology and it was a great job too. In 2009, I joined yet another startup. You know why? I love technology and it's still a great job.

Will this startup crash and burn? Maybe. If it does, I'll roll the dice and try again.

Over fifteen years, I've worked with lots of great people, on mostly exciting work, solving new problems, often with technology that didn't exist last year. Sometimes it takes long hours, and sometimes I can scale back a bit.

Some of us do what we do because we have fun doing it.

In the mean time, my work has enabled me to support a family and contribute meaningfully to society, even if I'm not changing the world 100% of the time.

$0.02.

So what you're saying, is that it's good to be king? If you lived through the first dotcom as a foot-solder you now have some experience and wisdom behind you and access to lots of cheap, unsophisticated labour willing to work long hours.

Sort of like Mark Zuckerburg now.... Maybe he is smart after all.

Perhaps I'm being cynical, but I suspect that part of the reason Facebook's recent investors have accepted such a ridiculous valuation is that they expect the everday ubiquity of Facebook to drive a flood of dumb money into Facebook after the inevitable IPO.

Someone is definitely taking that attitude. I bet on Goldman Sachs when this came up a while ago, describing their actions as 'Pump and Dump', but there's no reason their customers couldn't be doing the same. The problem is that we've then very clearly got the first two layers of a bubble pyramid, and the roadmap for the next crash becoming all the more clear.

Honestly, some days I do wonder if we wouldn't be better off as a society radically restricting the operation of the various investment markets. The current system seems almost designed to create financial instability through irrational exuberance, deliberate bubble creation and wild crashes while they work out how to build the next house of cards...

No shit. My take on boom and bust is:

- Boom is the process by which the money of the middle classes is transferred to the top few %

- Bust is when they announce that the transfer is complete

In the dot.com bubble, it felt to me like the opposite was taking place: a lot of very rich people pumped a lot of money into startups, some of it in turn transferred to engineers and other employees and from that into, say, restaurant tips.

I was living in Tel Aviv at the time and you could almost taste the sudden influx of wealth into the city's economy.

A bubble isn't bad, if you're careful not to buy into it. It's a great time to launch or upgrade a career, and acquire skills, contacts and even savings that will last you a long time, especially through the inevitable bust.

Sure, it feels great when it's in bubble phase, which is kind of the whole point.

I was in Ireland just before the last bust and all my cousins and aunts would be dispensing pearls of wisdom such as "you never lose on the housing market in Ireland", and "My house is worth 700K. I'm RICH!".

Bubbles are by definition Ponzi schemes, and when they bust someone is going to be left carrying the can. That's usually people who a) Had some money beforehand (or are now massively in debt) and b) aren't the most astute investors.

I'm not, by any means, suggesting bubbles are a good thing. I'm saying they're a fact of life in this field, so people working in startups should know how to deal with them.

If you can maintain a level head in a bubble (ie, the opposite of the approach you heard in Ireland - and I often heard in Tel Aviv) you can survive it, and even gain from it. I'm talking about the startup engineer case, I don't know anything about the investor's case.

Where is this conspiracy-theory shite coming from, and why is it getting upvoted all of a sudden?

It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a caricature.

So don't participate in the financial markets. At the moment there is a lot of money chasing very few good bets. Figure out a way to be a good bet, and rake it in.

Isn't there a direct contradiction between not participating and "finding a good bet and raking it in"?

EDIT: Also, I'm not sure "not participating" works anymore. The last bust was not paid for by people gullible enough to buy into it, but by government debt. In the long run that means it will be paid for at least in part by inflation (which again hits people with savings).

I just re-read your comment and realised I read "find a good bet" where you wrote "be a good bet". That's actually great advice and my previous answer makes no sense now.

If the financial companies actually went bankrupt, instead of getting bailed out, when their schemes unraveled, they might be a bit more careful about what they do. And the same goes for their investors.

Which is why we need a return to separation between retail and investment operations; a retail bank with a significant proportion of the market going bankrupt causes enormous problems for everyday customers who really aren't well placed to hedge angainst and cope with that risk.

Nothing cynical about it. I'd say you are 100% correct.

All classic stock hype relies on the greater fool theory. People who are 'in' now know there are probably 1,000,000 fools lining up waiting. Apart from disaster their investment is locked in and waiting for maturity.

Like a lot of Coding Horror articles, there's less here than meets the eye. Unless I am missing some subtle subtext, the content is basically "Netscape did some cool things, back in the day", to which those of us over a certain age can only reply "No duh."

A deeper analysis of the Netscape case would be a fascinating read. This, however, isn't it.

I think the snippet about "Code Rush" being available online was useful, and perhaps there's a deeper analysis of Netscape available there.

I think he's going for "Netscape, unlike (my example) webvan.com, did some cool things, back in the day". It's not that it's any less bankrupt; it's not that the Netscape coders didn't work long hours (indeed, see jwz's well-known ramblings); the point is that Netscape left an impressive legacy (in Navigator/Firefox, in a host of highly succesful people, ...). Netscape is dead, but all the hard work was not (entirely) for nothing.

Also see TomOfTTB's comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2162290.

This onion article is now more relevant than ever:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/recessionplagued-nation-dem...

It seems to me there is a fundamental difference between today's market and the dotcom bubble. Right now, sites with ridiculous valuations actually provide a great deal of value. Facebook has >500,000,000 people using it and makes a great deal of money. Groupon also makes a great deal of money. Google too.

Sure, it seems like we might be in a bubble, but at the same time things seem different.

But you have to remember that out of that bubble came a lot of companies that also provided value. Google came out of it (Google was from the last era, not this one). Akamai came out of it. VMWare came out of it.

The more things seem different, the more they're the same.

The big diff between now and then was that the first era was all about IPOs. Now its all about acquisition. I personally think the acquisition route is more ethical, since presumably the companies buying understand that your company may never be worth $X on its own, but strategically may be valuable. Whereas the IPO route seem like more of a Ponzi scheme.

The same people that buy IPO stock own stock in the companies that make bad acquisitions.

What are they eating unhealthy in that movie! Boxes full of sugary donuts, cream cakes, piles of empty Coke bottles. I hope that nowadays they serve better food at those kind of companies.

I can't help but wonder if there was a method to their madness. The brain requires vast amounts of caloric energy to do anything interesting, and maybe all that corn syrup went to good use: solving problems and writing code.

Anecdotally, one of the best programmers I've ever met was bean-pole skinny and fueled himself with a big glass of OJ in the morning, cheeseburgers and fries at every lunch, and eating candy all day while writing code. (Of course, he also got lots of physical exercise).

Just a thought.

Fructose is actually poison (not in the sense of "you die now", but in the long term alcohol sense) with almost no energy benefit. The high fructose corn syrup and sucrose (50% fructose, 50% glucose) used in most candy are remarkably inefficient sources of energy. The fructose provides practically zero and although the glucose in sucrose is good, there are better sources for it.

For source, watch "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM) and/or look up the research it references.

What Lustig doesn't mention is that sugar is what your brain runs on. Eating too much sugar is not good for actual marathons but it works great for coding marathons.

Do you have a source for this? As far as I am aware your brain mostly burns glucose like the rest of your body. Admittedly glucose is also a sugar, but in the context of this talk sugar refers to sucrose (i.e. the white stuff you put in tea) which is 50% fructose, 50% glucose. Which would imply that sugar is still inefficient "brain fuel" compared to other carbohydrates like pure glucose. If you have any sources/references showing me wrong about the brain metabolizing fructose I'd be very interested and grateful if you could point me to it.

The problem is that a sugary diet will lead to insulin resistance, which will lead to the need for more sugar ...

With all of the printing of money going on and no other sound investments around to absorb it, its no wonder another bubble is developing. You literally cannot even safely buy municipal bonds these days. So anything that has been growing will get bubbled. Until, of course, it cannot be bubbled no more and an extreme lack of people willing to overpay arrives.

Are tech bubbles all that bad? They are periods of economic optimism where money flows into tech companies furthering R&D and technological growth in a society. In the long run this is a very good thing. Where would we be now if it weren't for the last bubble, or the one before that?

The tick lines on the graph shown are drawn in an exponentially decreasing fashion. Makes it look like we are moving really close to pre-1999 days when in fact we have a bit more room to "bubble".

Personally I look forward to the day when there is a bubble because then and only then will the bubble speculation stop, if only for a brief while.

but what about the dreaded double-dip bubble?!

you mean the dubble bubble.

I'm not seeing any signs of bubblenomics going on around here. Where's the beef?

Perhaps we're jaded with visions of the previous one, with its excesses and unrelenting and misplaced hubris. Maybe the next one will be muted, but it doesn't mean it can't or won't happen.

On the other hand not all bubbles are bad.

Y'know, I think the "bubble" is primarily in the price of one asset, which isn't even publicly traded: Facebook shares. And I could be wrong about that one too if they ever develop a better revenue model.

e-Dreams?

Amazing how we go from; Stock market bubble to Netscape to Facebook to Stock market bubble.

Jeff Atwood should write for CNN or USA today.

Well, Coding Horror's the CNN/USA Today of blogs (and TechCrunch is the National Enquirer).

And Valleywag is the US Weekly.

The contention is that Netscape was part of the last bubble and Facebook could be part of a new bubble, but that the constant focus for developers should be on achieving their goals and not getting sidetracked by the power of these trends. Seems pretty coherent to me.

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