YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The issue is, executives believe we have to push features first or else some mysterious competition runs us into the ground. Or sometimes even that saving on security will give them money.

And since these people have the power, it's hard to avoid them.

The norm is vast business where tech is ean enabler, not the actual thing itself.

It's just the get rich quick story of VC path that pulled a certain type of introverted high iq personality to it.

AI is now showing that emperor has no clothes.

> If you happen to hit the startup jackpot, Paul gets even richer and you might become wealthy too. If you don’t, you’re left with nothing while Paul, already rich, gets to write an essay about your failure.

What exactly are we chasing?

The chance to become rich? Recognition? Status? Or, ultimately, the chance to be admired, perhaps even adored?

Startup hustle culture feels like the American Dream distilled into its purest form. The nerd, once at the bottom of the traditional social pecking order, suddenly has a chance to become the hero. Intelligence becomes power. The outsider becomes the billionaire. The kid nobody wanted to sit with at school gets to buy the whole school, town, state or even the country. Ah heck, if you’re really rich enough you can pointlessly put a car in space and everyone will just think it’s cool.

But are we really escaping that old social hierarchy, or simply finding a different way to climb it?

And perhaps that’s what bugs me most. We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that building something useful, earning a comfortable living and having enough time to enjoy life isn’t really success. Success has to be extraordinary. It has to be visible. It has to make other people envious. It is envy culture.

Meanwhile, the people selling us that dream are often the ones best positioned to profit from our pursuit of it like parasites living off their host and moving on to the next once the host dies.

Maybe we should spend less time asking how to become the next billionaire and more time asking why we think we need to.

As I grow older (I'm not that old), the more I think I'm an idiot by not playing "the game", but I just can't make myself do it. Maybe because deep down I believe in at least karma, if not some afterlife.

I found a fake quote from Dostoyevsky yesterday which said (I'm paraphrasing):

"Don't let the corruption of others be an excuse for your own."

I know it is a fake quote, but still I think that is a worldview to try to strive to. Seeing people like the author of the article supporting a similar point makes me a bit happier and hopeful that the big AI "revolution" won't make my life miserable.

It's fine if you want to check out of your job and make it a hobby, you'll be happier. But (I hate to say it) if you take on this mentality you won't have a job or a career for long in this space.

The money goes to people who move fast and do not care about anything in the way, especially moving slow and fixing things. That's why everything sucks. Every day this becomes more true when a competitor or peer with a louder mouthpiece can slop together something that slurps up the money from whatever you're offering. If you don't want this to happen, you are back to playing the game.

Would love to live in a world with more counterexamples, but this post is mostly advocating for quitting your job or exiting the space. Not everyone can afford to do that.