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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

> Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield might be a household name today, but in 2001

'Kay. Maybe in your household.

Is this really a tech downturn? Yes, some companies are laying people off, with gig-economy things particularly hard hit, but the entire economy is a mess right now. It doesn't seem like tech is relatively more affected than other industries.

I do agree with the general premise that a bubble bursting is like a forest fire clearing away all the bullshit (along with many people's livlihood), and the current tech industry has a lot of BS ripe for being cleared away.

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> Is this really a tech downturn? Yes, some companies are laying people off, with gig-economy things particularly hard hit, but the entire economy is a mess right now. It doesn't seem like tech is relatively more affected than other industries.

If anything, tech seems more insulated. Where I am (Calgary), software engineering job postings seem to have grown. Granted, many of them are not that great jobs for companies that are mostly desperate to get back up and running, but work is there which is more than can be said for other fields.

http://blog.indeed.com/2020/04/30/labor-market-spotlight-job... software is doing better than average.

>'Kay. Maybe in your household.

I've used slack everyday for years and I have no idea who the founders are. I'll probably forget Stewart's name by tomorrow morning.

Would be better worded as "Slack, co-founded by Stewart Butterfield, might be a household name today, but in 2001[...]"

Slack is certainly more well known than its founder, but neither are household names unless you live in silicon valley.

As an example, have you ever watched a movie where someone uses slack? I haven't. Have you ever seen a movie where someone uses google (or some rebranded website that's obviously a google stand-in)? Of course you have. That's what a household name is.

Edit: also if it was rephrased that way the rest of the paragraph wouldn't make sense because they're discussing slack's founder well known-ness, not slack.

you are being very pedantic

Not really.

why

I think, for the sake of this article, you could consider Slack a household name. It doesn't mean everyone has heard of it, it just means "well-known". It's a publicly traded company, and I'd say the average person (especially in America) likely knows what it is.

I guess I don't really watch many movies that delve into 21st-century office communication, but I imagine if I did their chat app would be modeled after Slack.

Overall, though, this is a minor point compared to the rest of the article.

I think the average white collar worker at a company with a trendy software stack knows what slack is, but that’s like 5% of the population. The average American definitely does not know what Slack is.

I think more of the population might know what Church of the Subgenius Slack is than Slack the application.

The average person definitely doesn't know. I've met wealthy people in their 20s in LA who don't know who Elon Musk is. Attention is hyper fractionalized.

People know who Jeff Bezos is, people don't know Tim Cook.

No one around me knows who Bezos is, but everyone knows Musk - the guy with the Teslas and rockets is kinda hard to forget, but Amazon doesn't even have a localized website here...

Lol, the average person most definitely doesn’t know Slack - that’s pretty funny that you’d even think that. That’s like saying the average person knows C++ or react.js or Tensorflow. Slack ain’t no Excel...

I worked on the Danish government electronic invoicing project, and lots of people at the time I hung out with, being government people, knew what it was.

About a decade later I worked on the JavaScript implementation of NemID, NemID being a security thing in Denmark that basically every citizen has to use.

A coworker said to me (paraphrasing): "It's great to work on NemID, because everyone knows what it is, so it's easy to explain at family dinners" which is true. very true, everyone knows in Denmark what it is.

To which I thoughtlessly replied "Oh yes, it was the same when I worked on eFaktura", his face got the momentarily shocked and dismayed expression people get when they realize they are talking to a crazy person or an idiot.

About 5 minutes later I thought to myself "what the hell are you thinking, nobody knows what eFaktura is, fool"

I think the household name status of Slack or the guy who co-founded it is sort of like the household name status of eFaktura in Denmark.

All this tells us is that no executive producer has a significant stake in slack.

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