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Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

> quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”

This seems to be the real challenge that I haven’t seen any company founder overcome. How do you keep these types of people out? It’s like one gets in, then they let all their friends in, then they overtake the company.

The tech company offices I visited in 2010 were full of nerds—people who rode unicycles, juggled, and learned Haskell for fun. 14 years later, these same tech companies (some which I worked at) are full of investment banking types. They care nothing about the tech itself; it’s simply a means to an end.

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I think there is also another issue on top of that - once you establish yourself as a big money maker (a part of FAANG), a lot of tech people start treating a position there as a way to pad resume or make a ton of money. I am convinced it will shift the culture inside the company towards more corporate mindset.

I think this is really the issue. When I was in graduate school, I was in a group for some project. Before class had started, I was showing off another group member some little personal thing I had worked on over the weekend, some game or demo or something. The third group member, having seen this, was shocked that I was spending my spare time programming things for fun. I recall being perplexed by this, as it was pretty much the whole reason I was in the degree. She responded she was only interested in software engineering for the money.

It's not necessarily a bad thing to structure your career around financial success, but I met many people like her who were attempting to get jobs at Google or Amazon just to cash in as much as they could for a few years, then bounce. At some point your company is bound to become filled with people like this.

You bring up a good point, and it elicits the question:

Once a company is overwhelmingly infested with folks who are cashing-in-till-they-bounce, should you stick around anyway, even though that'll hurt your career?

The problem is that not just the company, but the whole software development world seems to me overwhelmed with such people.

I think it’s simpler than we may think: don’t hire anyone who hasn’t pushed a git commit in a management position.

Knowing code is the new knowing how to read and write, we should be less tolerant of “non-technical”, “in English, doc!” type people in positions of power in tech companies.

Are there enough people like this who want to deal with the unpleasantness of being managers? The only enticement we have is money.

> The only enticement we have is money.

Again, it may be more simple than we imagine :)

Having pushed a git commit says nothing about whether the person pushing it has enjoyed doing so intrinsically or as a means to an end.

Conversely, I’ve worked with very passionate technical people that seemingly couldn’t care less about their share value or even core business metrics (which is ok as long as there’s somebody around that can reel them in if they go off on a tangent and they let them), but just don’t like writing code.

I don’t think there’s a simple, non-gameable heuristic for determining whether somebody is intrinsically or extrinsically interested in the tech part of a tech company, or even the company’s core product.

There are people in technical leadership making decisions who are not capable of performing the most rudimentary of programming tasks like committing code.

This is a problem when the decision-maker doesn't act on advice from staff or is incapable of understanding the advice. Now give that leader an ego and abandon all hope.

There are many rungs to fall below "competent, but not passionate". In fact, I think I prefer my leaders to be dispassionate and competent.

it's not nearly that clear cut.

I've seen PM's and PO's that claim 1-5 years experience as developers who are shite because they're not very technical.

The underlying issue is that these positions should be filled by senior developers but instead they became their own career track.

> Having pushed a git commit says nothing about whether the person pushing it has enjoyed doing so intrinsically or as a means to an end.

Case in point: the Hacktoberfest fiasco.

Financially motivated types can figure out how to use git if that lets them gain a lucrative job. There as entire undergrad CS major to Associate Product Manager pipeline which proves this.

The Bozo Explosion: https://kevinpaulscott.com/the-bozo-explosion/

I’ll use this article as an argument for the next time I’m forced to choose the lesser of two idiots in a round of interviews.

Thanks for sharing, really insightful.

This problem existed way before 2010.. it might not have been a problem in companies like Google but it had already been a problem in previous waves of big tech companies. For example in lots of the Telecommunications giants that were building the hardware in the 1990s that made the growth of today's BigTech possible.

Maybe the same people got older.

Having been around at that time, I suspect a lot of that behavior was period specific — “quirky” as a character trait was big then — or a put on to fit in socially. Lifted trucks that never see so much as gravel in one place, unicycles and learning functional programming language from comic books in another.

Where do we think the unicycle riders work now?

Whichever company has pickleball courts

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