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New hire cannon fodder

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6 pointsraju8 comments

My lord. How can anything manage to be this incoherent, ignorant, dysfunctional, and personally ugly all at the same time? It's almost like a genuine design achievement.

This meme of "Paul Graham the cult leader, the exploiter, the bloodsucker" is fascinating. It's really something to watch it evolve as people divorce further and further from reality. But one has the luxury of fascination only because it's inocuous. I don't think it's too hard to see in this the seed of something nasty... imagine, say, people starting a mass movement to take action against this harmful exploiter of our youth!

Edit: just to be clear, I'm not saying anybody's going to actually do that; the thought is ludicrous, which is the point. What I am saying is that the same psychological dynamics (of demonization and outrage) seem to be at work, only in a trivial way... which is a difference in scale rather than kind.

I think it's an interesting perspective (plus, I like his style of writing).

We all get that the 'lifestyle business' runs with different assumptions than the 'VC-funded business'. It really is two different worlds. Why not just accept, then, that the 'lifestyle business' crowd has their own assumptions (just like HN has its own), instead of casting it as the new enemy?

On another (but related) line of thought, since the 'lifestyle business' crowd is in general older (compared to the HN crowd) and not a marginal group (it's quite a movement), don't you think it deserves some attention, instead of combating it?

On the contrary, I have zero interest in the oppositions you set up. I said nothing about "lifestyle" vs. "VC-funded" businesses, and neither did the OP (other than gratuitously name-dropping 37 Signals at one point). Approximately, you're telling me that I'm involved in a war between pandas and oranges because I commented on a post about dinner plates.

I spoke so harshly of this post, not because I have any opinion about whether startups ought to seek venture capital, but because it says things like this: YC "hire as many gullible young naive programmers as possible and work them to death", and "Who will end up really getting the spoils out of any of YCombinator’s work? Paul Graham." These statements are demonstrably false. Worse, they are falsehoods which anybody could easily learn are false with just a little research.

Then there's this whole other level of nastiness. Paul Graham thinks that "designing and building is for chumps". He wants to "make the big bucks and sit on [his] ass". He (by implication) "can't wait to screw over the next guy". Are you telling me that I am wrong to call this "personally ugly"?

Clearly, you and I have very different tastes in writing style. More importantly, I object to your reasoning that if I criticize someone who is doing X (combating and casting enemies), I must also be doing X.

Point well taken for the unjustified personal attacks in the OP. Although exaggeration clearly is a figure of speech in this case, just like the 'cannon fodder'.

Although indeed there is no mention of 'lifestyle business' and 'VC-funded business', I read the OP as a voice for the former, in the context of the current (and interesting) debate between the two. Linking to and siding with Daniel Haran (the author of 'YC is cult', a pro lifestyle business) tend to support this.

I object to your reasoning that if I criticize someone who is doing X (combating and casting enemies), I must also be doing X.

I understand what you mean, and I'm sorry if you meant to criticize as opposed to 'combat'. However, your How can anything manage to be this incoherent, ignorant, dysfunctional did not sound right to me, hence my first reply to your comment.

However, your How can anything manage to be this incoherent, ignorant, dysfunctional did not sound right to me

You forgot "personally ugly" :)

Actually that phrase doesn't sound right to me now, either. I was focusing on whether the words were individually accurate, and I still think they are. But put together, they come across as heavy-handed. I see why you got the impression you did.

Usually I edit to the point where you might call it pathological, but not enough that time!

The personal attacks are obviously pretty off-base, given that companies like YCombinator actually help young hackers to actually retain more of what they create by taking a smaller initial percentage than traditional VCs would. I really don't see how you could possibly argue the founders are being taken advantage of.

But . . . I think there's a point worth noting here, which is that the whole "work hard and cash out" mentality really only benefits people with a lot of equity, yet many of those companies need to eventually rely on non-founder employees in order to get to the point that they cash out, and those employees are often expected to work just as hard (or close to it) as the founders or the first few employees that have 10 or 100 times more equity than them, all while generally accepting below-market wages and benefits.

That, to me, is what bothers me about the flip-it mentality: it's fine if it's you and your co-founders and that's it, but as soon as you grow past 10-15 people and have to start hiring on people who really have no chance of hitting it big, it becomes a little less noble to me to basically abandon those people once you're able to cash out, rewarding their years of hard work and low pay with a chance to go work with a bunch of people and in an organization that they didn't originally sign up for. I, at least, wouldn't want to work as an employee with startup founders that had that mentality.

  Kids will work for pennies.

That's not true. The difference in pay based on experience is negligible, even ignoring the tremendous difference in expected productivity.

This guy seems incredibly bitter, and his animosity toward Paul Graham makes no sense.

I'm one of those "exploited" young people, and here's the contract I follow. I'm willing to work long hours and be paid less than a 1/N share of the company's income, while the "elders" are paid more than 1/N. They have more experience than I do, and the differential in pay is my paying a mentorship fee in order to learn from them at work. If I were ever used as a garbage disposal for bottom-rung work, as happens to young people in places like investment banks, I'd be mighty pissed about not getting my half of the deal; but if I'm getting a top-quality education from the job, it doesn't matter that the boss makes more money than I do. I mean, in college, I paid the bosses.

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