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Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

I can't leave any comments on the actual blog so I'll just leave it here:

This is some bullshit written by a very entitled young man that is apparently aimed at very entitled young people. To wit:

"You didn’t even need to be a finance major to get aggressively courted by the bulge bracket firms. Goldman Sachs, in particular, seemed to have an obsession with taking the most liberal-arty kid"

Maybe if you are one of those kids that went to an Ivy, but this is so not true for the vast majority of college graduates in the US as to make the rest of this post really ridiculously meaningless.

It's not a backlash against "startups," it's a backlash against the same sort of douchebags that brought us CDOs now flocking to the tech industry cause it's a "hot scene."

I know I'll get voted down for this but everything about this guy and what he's writing about is exactly what's wrong with this country.

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Startups are just small companies trying to grow fast.

Some are good, some are bad; but there are systemic reasons why there are a lot of douchebags becoming founders (hint: they have the social contacts to raise money on ideas alone and tap into the private welfare system called "acq-hires") and we need to address the problem, have the conversation in a no-holds-barred format where no solution is off the table, and drive the fuckers back where they came from.

The problem isn't "startups". There are great startups out there. It's this horrible ecosystem that has become a devastating talent graveyard and the latest mechanism through which an entrenched elite can mine the brains of their intellectual superiors for extreme profit.

I agree with most of what you've written, though I don't agree with the part about "intellectual superiors." Certainly it seems like a flashy rich kid can walk into a room and have a lot of success selling a pretty silly idea built with some hard work by some smart folks just because of his connections and advantages and that really bites, but I think sometimes engineers and scientists can fall into an ego trap as well when we get bitter about the weirdness of that same situation.

My main issue is when I talk to people and they tell me they're "in tech," and they're a marketer or sales person or biz dev and they could be doing the same thing in some other vertical for all they care. (the "for all they care" is the important part too)

I would rather they just go back to Hollywood or the Media/PR world or wherever they generally come from and leave the tech industry to focus on creating cool tech in a more sensible fashion than the way it seems now.

I don't want to sound jealous either, because I've been fortunate to learn a lot from incredibly smart people, work on some challenging and fun projects, and pay my bills.

My only caveat is what does "in tech" mean nowadays? > Enterprise software/SaaS Companies have very often been started by sales oriented founders (Siebel, Benioff come to mind). > Ecommerce/marketplaces have very rarely been started by CS majors/engineers.

So sure, you can have very engineering focused Companies like New Relic, Heroku or Dropbox, and that's great, but if you send all business people to Hollywood, I am not sure how you could actually have a tech industry in Silicon Valley.

Ecommerce/marketplaces have very rarely been started by CS majors/engineers.

Except for, you know, the biggest and most successful ones: Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist.

Who were you thinking of?

You are partially true. Omidyar had a business co-founder. Airbnb founders were front end/design folks, Vente-privee in Europe was started by people who came from the liquidation industry. If you look at the last 10 years, many successful eCommerce sites (Fab, Modcloth, One Kings Lane, Gilt) or marketplaces have not been started by CS majors.

Sure, some e-commerce sites have been started by people who didn't major in CS--particularly the ones that have started recently. No one is arguing that all e-commerce sites have been started by CS majors.

But it was inaccurate to say that e-commerce sites are rarely started by CS majors, when three of the largest and most well-known ones were all started by CS majors.

Also, three of the companies he mentioned have CS majors as co-founders.

Fair enough.

My main point was not that one though, as I am sure you have understood. My main point was to say that the tech industry is an industry and such, it requires people with different backgrounds to grow and thrive.

And don't worry, I hate as much as the other guy the "wantpreneurs" and gold diggers/acquihire-seekers that one can find by the boatloads between San Francisco and San Jose.

My sentiments run towards agreeing with the first comment in this thread. I'm not going to begrudge anyone for using their talent in any way they see fit, but the article on Medium seems to not only be written for approval of HN, but glosses over the fact that there are a lot of pointless startups. There are some amazing startups out there that are changing the world, working on problems that the world outside of the tech bubble needs solving - clean water, higher education, transportation that doesn't chew up fossil fuels - but for every one of those, there are indeed 50 startups that focus on trivial things (to-do apps, mail apps, photo apps, weather apps, really? Really?). I know everyone can't work on curing cancer or world peace, but if there is a backlash from within, it stems from founders who act as apologists for the more banal of startup ideas.

I want to add an addendum that I shouldn't have necessarily included the author when I said "what's wrong with this country." He may be a thoughtful guy after I considered the ending to the article. I also think anyone who really loves technology should have a seat at the table. It just seemed tone-deaf in many ways to the reality that most people in this world face, let alone most Americans his age.

Thanks for this addendum.

Yes, the premise was built on some generalization. Not "everyone" was courted by Wall Street 10 years ago, just as not "everyone" is trying to get into tech these days (though I would argue that from certain points of view both feel that way).

I am aware that these narratives don't represent the typical American experience and should have made that clearer.

Thanks for reading and responding.

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