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Comment by tqi | Hacker News Reader

Journalists especially seem eager to have tech put back in its place.

These days it feels like they are straight up antagonistic towards the whole industry. A quick scan of The Verge homepage, I see mostly sarcastically negative stories (Netflix is finally taking a page from the rest of Hollywood) and neutral PR placements (Marvel’s Spider-Man: Remastered is coming to PC in August). As far as I can tell the only positive headlines are affiliate listicles (Here are the best tablet deals right now)...

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To be fair, anyone sitting on the sidelines watching tech companies spend 15-20 years without making a profit - or ever making a profit - is going to start thinking "what the hell is going on"

More than watching tech go down, I think there's just a general anxiety that all basic business fundamentals have been turned upside down, and much of it is led by tech.

The markets are rallying right now because macro data is poor (which means Fed rate hikes might slow down). It's a bizarro economy and anyone who thinks long-term is understandably queasy.

> To be fair, anyone sitting on the sidelines watching tech companies spend 15-20 years without making a profit - or ever making a profit - is going to start thinking "what the hell is going on"

Big tech companies have been absolute money making machines. What are you talking about?

The ones at the very top -- Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon -- are profitable. There's been a good number of big hyped names and decade+ "startups" that might have a lot of revenue but don't have much if anything left over in the net column. (Uber most famously.)

> Journalists especially seem eager to have tech put back in its place.

Journalists first turned on Craigslist when they stole classified revenue, then they turned on Facebook when they stole advertising revenue. They started turning on tech as a whole as collateral damage.

The whole time they shat on wall-street for stealing everyone else's money and being rich. When tech got rich, they turned on them. First in the dot-com era when SF started to get corporate-ified and not counter cultural, and then everywhere when Tech became the new upper-middle class and linked (by journalists) with society's problems.

Tech is never not going to be among the best paying profession until governments regulate the industry into less profitability. If Google can make $millions per-employee by having a global reach, then there is no way to stop the salary creep compared to companies that only have local-reach.

Its the job of journalists to bring a cynical/critical eye to important things in society. I'm glad that these folks exist and its their fulltime job to call out bullshit. Of course they will misfire at times.

People in tech also seem to forget that a lot of attention to tech is brought to them by the media. The first adopters are generally computer nerds and teenagers; people in media write about it, glamorize and make it mainstream (how many Tech CEOs have been on the cover of TIME magazine?). In fact, my personal perspective is that they haven’t been critical enough; when instagram and WhatsApp were gobbled up by Facebook the prevailing media sentiment was that of the unlimited possibilities in tech for wealth generation rather than concern about the anti competitiveness of the market that it caused.

Well, a lot of people did cattily tell unemployed journalists to “learn to code.”

Wasn't this started because before journalists started losing their jobs, they were telling blue collar unemployed workers to learn to code? So people turn that against them.

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