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Comment by Bjorkbat | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, but this reminds me of something someone said on Twitter that has resonated with me ever since. Startups targeting developers / building developer tooling are arguably one of the worst startups to build, because no matter how much of a steal the price is relative to the value you get, developers insist they can build their own or get by with an open-source competitor. We're as misguided on value as we are on efficiency and automation (more specifically, the old trope of a dev spending hours to automate something that takes minutes to do).

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This is also why devs are not in charge of purchase decisions at tech companies. I don't mean FAANG but the usual tech shops. Someone buys a tool and you have to use it. I think the startups selling dev tools are not selling to developers at all, but to the IT folks of these big tech firms.

Should they pull it off, it's not at all a bad startup to build. However, you need to now invest in a sales force that can sell to the Fortune 500. As a tech founder with no sales trope, this will be incredibly hard to pull off.

I digress, but yeah selling to devs is almost always a terrible idea since we all want to build our own stuff. That spirit may also be waning with the advent of Replit agent, Claude code and other tools.

> I think the startups selling dev tools are not selling to developers at all, but to the IT folks of these big tech firms.

They are often selling to IT managers against the advice of the developers and IT folks, and then they mostly don't get used because they don't actually add any value to the process.

I've noticed this tendency in myself and thought about the 'why' a lot, and I think it comes down to subconsciously factoring in the cost of lock-in, or worse, lack of access to fix/improve a tool I've come to rely on

For me, a larger part than "cost of lock-in" is the "hacker spirit", the curiosity to understand how it works.

Sure, I can pay google or fastmail to host a mailserver for me, but that deprives me of the joy of configuring and updating dovecot/postfix/etc, writing custom backup scripts, writing my own anti-spam tooling, etc. I want to know how all those pieces work.

Sure, I can pay kagi to search its index of webpages for me, but that deprives me of the joy of creating and running a botnet to index webpages, storing 100s of terrabytes of scraped data, and writing my own search code.

Targeting hackers is indeed a sucker's game.

I think this spirit is totally lost on most people in this field. It’s tempting to say younger generations but it’s everyone. It always amazes me when I meet someone who has spent 10+ years in this field and doesn’t even care how anything but their shitty Kafka-Flink pipelines work.

If that; I’ve met plenty who only care that they work, not how they work.

As someone who works in infra and dabbles in coding, this is a continual bugbear, because often I’ll find an optimization while troubleshooting “my” problem, and the dev team is disinterested in implementing it. Their endpoints are meeting their SLO, so who cares?

I've honestly thought of hacker spirit as embodying a kind of homesteader ethos in a way. There's this homesteading book I bought a long time ago when I was in college, rich with illustrations on how to do everything from raise animals and grow food to building a house, processing lumber, drilling a well, everything. The same fascination I have with homesteading and DIY culture extends into my interest in technology, and I suspect this is the same with a lot of developers as well.

> but that deprives me of the joy of configuring and updating dovecot/postfix/etc, writing custom backup scripts, writing my own anti-spam tooling

I'm 90% sure you're serious, but that didn't stop me having the best belly laugh for a solid few minutes at this. Thank you.

>We're as misguided on value as we are on efficiency and automation (more specifically, the old trope of a dev spending hours to automate something that takes minutes to do).

but automating something that takes minutes to do is Larry Wall's example of programmer laziness, and is a virtue.

of course - this needs obligatory conflicting XKCD comics

automation makes you do more work: https://xkcd.com/1319/

is it worth the time to automate https://xkcd.com/1205/

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