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Comment by overton | Hacker News Reader

Here's another way to look at it.

Is there any way to be really successful without being some kind of disingenuous sociopath or at least blithely unaware of the broader context of your success and the suffering it's built on?

No, not really. And if that makes somebody bitter, then I think that makes them sane.

This is story is the perfect example of the above. PG is selling us same old story that these two made it through hard work and attitude, while they really made it by opening up residential housing to rent-seeking speculators to use as hotels.

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Get your gist but the indiehacker and bootstrapping community are absolutely full of counter examples, and plenty of YC companies have not made the world a worse place: Stripe, Dropbox, Gitlab, Twitch, etc.

I agree that all of those have much fewer obvious negative externalities, and do provide very useful services. But I can't help but think that work in general is a hostage situation for most workers: "sell your labour for less than it's worth or die. Also you will have to simply accept a host of petty tyrannies (in the best case) or abusive behaviour (in the worst)." You have to accept because most people don't have enough capital to make it on their own, and are prevented from accumulating that capital because they are exploited in the first place. Then the CEO's/founders/funders will turn around and say "Look at this amazing thing that I personally built." The value extracted from workers (and the real suffering that entails) is ideologically erased in the narrative about why the company was successful.

I think this dynamic is generally less recognized by software developers because we're frequently comparatively well paid and well treated at work, and can occasionally accumulate enough capital to break out of this vicious cycle (though we're still paid less than the value of our labour and still deal with much of the BS noted above). However the same can't be said for the people making our computers.

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