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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

/me throws one blogpost in the making in the trashcan for fear of being labeled a plagiarist and checks the room for webcams.

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Same here. I'll probably get slammed for saying this here, of all places, but if you manage to push out a product in six months then either you're brilliant or what you're doing just wasn't that hard. The thing is, every single person in this position assumes that they're in the first group, but it's not even possible for more than a few of them to be right. Even accounting for the nine out of ten startups that fail, there just aren't that many brilliant people. It's like Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. If everybody's brilliant, nobody is.

That means the vast majority of these people are deluding themselves and others. Not only does their expertise not carry over into other fields, but it wasn't expertise to begin with. Their swagger is unwarranted, and intensely annoying to those who'd rather build something new than swirl around in an infinite disrupt/reinvent loop.

There's just too much hype and churn in the industry today, not enough true innovation. Of course the old-timers who got us here get frustrated to see such opportunity wasted.

I've met a couple of the relatively recent "tech luminaries" often waxed poetic about in terms of their technical genius and found their understanding of actual technology (as it relates to overall software development) to range from very superficial to non-existent.

OTOH they are wildly rich and I am a wage slave, so I guess the joke's on people who think the actual quality of the technology matters rather than the way it is marketed.

You're absolutely correct that the actual quality of the technology is not the main determinant of success. Neither is how it's marketed. The biggest factor is the time and place in which both are done, and therefore how their product matches up against buyers or competitors. That's almost entirely beyond the "brilliant" entrepreneur's control. I don't begrudge them their success, but I also don't take it as proof of anything above base-level competence.

Define true innovation. There's been amazing advances in many industries. I think your perspective may be one that is looking a little too hard at the startup hype cycle and not enough at the whole of technology.

As someone who've always liked your writing, please do write the blog post even if it's similar to this one. While it has some merits in term of ideas, the writing is quite horrible, if not confusing ...

For example, while he's bashing on the younger generations, his one anecdote is about an "entrepreneur" with 20 years of experience: that's neither Gen Y or millennial ...

I'll think about it. My reputation as a cranky old guy doesn't need any further boosting either.

What struck me from this essay is the point that if you do something because you love it (rather than just that you get paid for it) you tend to dive deeper and your degree of understanding will over time increase. If money is what motivates you all you will care about is shortcuts to the point where you can invoice, or in the case of the so called 'entrepreneurs' how you can screw your customers/co-founders/investors best.

So we get this collision of two worlds: one group wants to make cool stuff and learn, one group sees dollar bills in large quantities. And somehow the one group is able to co-opt the other and as a side effect pulls in vast numbers of people that have no idea what this is all about but that start to crank out stuff in unprecedented quantity. It's like landing in an ikea when you come from a carpentry shop, only the furniture is made of bits instead of wood.

I didn't have a blog post about this in the works and my gripes aren't 100% the same (though there is a lot of overlap), but this blog post resonates with me as well.

I'm 41 and have been doing software development professionally since the mid-90s (as a hobby since 1983) and I find the vast majority of the tech industry just so disappointing these days in that it is basically just another "widget factory" industry and I thought/hoped for something better.

If you start a cranky old tech man club, send me an invite.

Odd that: me too.

I was hitting my now regular frustration with things which actually seem to get harder with time instead of simpler. It feels like we are no longer standing on the shoulders of giants, but attempting to stand on a billion ants and then struggling to see daylight as they swarm all over us.

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