alt Hacker NewsI don't have some kind of beef with you. I react personally too in these long discussions, don't begrudge you the impression.
Just saw what I thought was youth, but it was a fellow older fellow*, so chased the interlocution more than I usually would because I was curious and wanted to make sure there wasn't insight I had missed and you were speaking loosely (as is normal, we are not robots)
re: motivation, I took a lot of pride in not taking money back in prime ZIRP, early-mid 2010s and felt it was vindicated by what I saw happen to competitors.
What I saw was proto-"Bending Spoons" behavior. Frankly, Bending Spoons seems ethical and right-headed at its face. i.e. after 30 seconds with their website. but what do I know.
What I saw was private equity rollup iPad-based point of sale software who couldn't justify another round, and let the business owners using their point of sale systems flounder until they got the energy to switch. Explicitly. the rug pull wasn't just on engineering or further development of the system, it was support too. That might sound stupid (who needs support w/software?), but its necessary for point of sale due to credit card processing. Multiple companies, same playbook.
Cheers & apologies, I went too far, I left you feeling like it was a grudge.
FWIW it's also important to me because I want a fellow wide-eyed college-dropout-waiter soaking in HN from a small town to know VCs involved in these messes will continue acting as they have post ZIRP, as you've established.
* via your HN profile, not stalking off site or based on username
No worries, all good! It's difficult to convey emotions and tone online.
> it was a fellow older fellow
~11 years professional experience only - still got plenty to learn, but unfortunately seen enough shit to be cynical. Started out starry-eyed in the middle of the ZIRP era ~2015 and made some salary off it but no exit money, though something felt off and I never understood the over-engineering at the time.
Then as I gained experience, switched to consulting to boost my earnings and looking back at it my (admittedly very jaded) opinion is that a lot of that "engineering" was performative bullshit enabled by cheap money, which continues to be the case in some verticals (blockchain; now AI).
Senior engineers of the time would've likely known it was bullshit and were just happy to play with new tech while subsidized by VCs, but unfortunately this "quiet part" was never said out loud to those who started their careers during this period and for whom their only experience of technology was through this distorted lens of cheap money and no financial/business pressures.
The result is a lot of very senior people tech-wise but with little exposure to the business side of their craft, who the readjustment hit like a brick wall. The fact my statement about maintaining a (well-built) product requiring much less manpower than building it is apparently controversial suggests many people have yet to experience this brick wall.
But for those who looked into the financials, the selling out and subsequent layoffs should've come at no surprise - it was never sustainable to keep paying those tech salaries perpetually. The same thing happened to blockchain/web3/crypto, and the same will eventually happen to AI.
There is still and will always be money to be made in technology, but it will be made by applying technology to business problems and approaching every problem as "how much money does this make/save and how big of a cut I can negotiate". Permanent employment is just letting someone else do said negotiation on your behalf in exchange for a promise of stability - well, turns out when the times are tough they don't have to keep that promise: plan accordingly.
(btw, this ZIRP-era distortion was not limited to technical roles - there were plenty of "startup founders" and executive roles too who got there because of the cheap money rather than earning said position through demonstrated skill - unsurprisingly, a lot of those people have since quietly transitioned back to the rank & file once the money fueling their little startup escapade ran out)