The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis

The biggest thing is about "Amazon was started in a garage" is that Jeff Bezos had worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw (founded in 1989) from 1990-1994 (that's where he met MacKenzie, she was an admin staff, he was a finance guy). So he had hedge fund money already before he founded Amazon.

I just learned this quote now and I love it. Very true. Much of tech mythology, where we are told "started from nothing" actually started from a place of at least some capital and privilege.

This is a sort of perplexing subject for me. I grew up pretty poor. We had a well, but not running water. We flushed with a bucket, bathed out of a trash can-cum-water barrel. We subsistence hunted. We had vehicles that mostly ran, most of the time.

Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege.

Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk.

My parents prioritized one single thing above all others. Land. They bought land. Remote land, useless land, land wherever it was cheap.

They could have fixed the car, but instead bought an acre of land. We would go 100 miles from the nearest town to eke out a parcel of land in some Godforsaken place I haven’t been to since.

Because of that, and the skills I learned because I had to do everything myself, I have never had to pay rent. Because I knew how to live without luxury, I built a cabin when I was 16 on my parent’s land with salvaged lumber and fixtures and wire and things I got from demolishing houses. I raised three children in various iterations of that eventually 600 square foot house.

By that time I was successful in infotech, so we bought and rebuilt (ourselves) a 63 foot steel schooner and finished raising our children at many ports in the world, so that they would grow up with the same privilege of mind, but with broader horizons.

But I never forgot land. Land, not a house, land . Land is the key. Just a couple hundred square meters is fine.

You can still do exactly what I did today. You can buy land cheaply in many places in the world, including the USA. I just bought a half acre in Montana for $1200, with road access. (I sometimes buy cheap land sight unseen halfway across the world when drunk and bored at 3am, the results are kinda hit and miss, but it makes for a good excuse to travel to see what happens) On eBay there are many deals owner financed with nominal or zero down, with payments from 50 to a few hundred dollars a month.

You can still tear down old structures for people and get building supplies. You can get furniture and appliances curbside or on Craigslist, etc. I don’t need to, but I sometimes still do.

Every opportunity I took advantage of is still practical today. You can still buy land on fast food wages, you just won’t be able to live near a big city while you do it. That also was impossible in my youth. The sacrifices were substantial, the discomfort at times severe.

Nothing has changed except the expectations that people have about life and what they can or cannot do.

I was born into privilege for sure, but it was a privilege of a culture of independence and a deep understanding of the value of owning outright a place to stand.

Except those born into poverty in a truly hopeless place in the world, we suffer mostly from our attitudes and lack of knowledge, and belief in our ability to do reasonable things that other people don’t believe we can do, because they are not willing to.

would you mind giving a greater explanation of what they mean by this? I couldn't grok the meaning from context, other than the obvious its not really possible to simply startup half baked out of your house or something along those lines

What are you trying to imply - sounds like your trying to make a broad but vague statement.

Ain’t no trailer parks without engineers and mechanics designing trailers.

Everyone is connected; the growth of the world economy has brought nearly 90% of people out of global poverty in under a century.

Good points, but what happened to 5 and 6?

> 2. Distractions galore - Social media and trillions poured into the distraction economy ensures the ADHD-prone builders have less hours and are less productive in that precious 5PM-10PM.

Not enough is said about this. It's almost comical when you think about it. As technologists we are both complicit and victims. I've spent half a decade in one of these 'attention economy' companies and let me tell you the amount of money, talent and resources that our industry deploys to forcefully grab and monetize users' attention is staggering.

Recently I've shifted to using single-use, fit-for-purpose devices (Kobo ereader hacked with KOReader, KingJim Pomera DM250 digital memo) for my day-to-day and it was like a weight that I never knew was there was magically lifted away. If capitalism could find a way to produce such devices at scale, not only would it be a public health win, it would be a massive boost to the economy long-term.

But with most corporation's incessant focus on short term metrics I'm not holding my breath that this will ever be a reality.

I mean yeah, but Uber promised us self-driving taxis, but only found profit by delivering takeaways. Meta and Twitter - adverts, and all on the foundation of a zirp economy.

> the fact that their empires are now all they'll ever be

Eh, Mark Zuckerberg is 40. Facebook is planting seeds in some pretty ambitious places (VR/AR + AI). To put that into perspective, Elon Musk is 53 now, but he was ~40 when the Falcon 9 first launched for SpaceX and the Model S was released at Tesla. In June 2012, when the S was released, Tesla was worth about 0.7% of what it is now. Elon Musk was certainly rich, but no where close to the wealthiest folks at the time. Similarly, at 40 years old (21 years ago) Jeff Bezos was worth about 100th of what he is now. Rich, but it wasn't clear that Amazon would ever come close to, say, Walmart, in terms of market cap.

Mark Zuckerberg's empire still has plenty of time to grow.

The author is pretty upfront that the conclusion was meant as a reference to a character in the movie "Hoosiers", not that any of the personalities named were literally drunks or bad fathers.

The Free Press recently did an interview with him.

https://www.thefp.com/p/google-memo-james-damore-vindication...

Basically he has kept a very low profile.

Yeah that was weird. Has Damore ever contributed anything to the industry? Never heard of them in the open source world. The way I read their arc, they went directly from cosseted upbringing to finding out that they weren't anywhere near as gifted as they'd been told their entire life and shifting from trying to actually compete in the industry to being a paid podcast guest in the grievance-sphere.

> Those are serious accusations - being a bad father and a drunk. The author doesn't give any evidence for either.

Are you a robot?

There is an infinitely long list of things that were part of the environment when that kind of passionate creative problem solving in software was thriving.

What the author is saying is that not all of those properties were causative to make software great again.

Do we need people to have enough of a safety net to take risks with entrepreneurship? Yes. Do we need enough regulation to prevent entrenched companies from using regulatory capture to stifle competition while having little enough regulation that small companies can spin up and be nimble? Yes.

Do we need to be listening to N'Sync, wearing JNCOs, watching Beavis and Butthead, and drinking Crystal Pepsi? Probably not. Those were in the air, but not causative.

And, certainly, I see little evidence to support the implicit claim in "anti-woke" that somehow sexism, homophobia, and racism were causative factors that enabled entrepreneurialism to thrive a few decades ago.

There are, however, such things as breakthrough eras and consolidation / comprehension eras.

Physics hasn't been the same since Einstein's era. While breakthroughs have happened, the fundamental reframing of the way we comprehend the world that happened with the one-two punch of the theories of relativity and the experimental evidence for the quantum model have patterned the world in which we now live, but understanding that pattern is the new work.

Similarly, I think a good case can be made that the one-two punch of the implementation of the Internet as a fabric and the web as a killer app is now finished work. While the remaining work is real, valid, and valuable, it is of different kind to the creation of the new pattern; consolidation and comprehension of the pattern is the work of the day, and that's not nearly as glamorous, sexy, or profitable (to reputation or pocketbook).

It's fine for there to be eras of great opportunity and eras of not, so long as we respect which we're in.

(Google is great as a case-study for this concept. The circumstances that birthed Google are now actively suppressed in the ecosystem... Mostly by Google. The positive feedback loop of great-search-breeds-great-search-data that birthed Google doesn't leave room for multiple Googles because human attention and time is finite; this is evidenced by Bing being unable to draw users despite huge monetary investment and just as much technical competence. But they can't draw the users because they aren't already better than Google.

As consequence, two guys in their garage can make something but it won't be a Google-scale search engine. Meanwhile, the small, scrappy search engine is now a huge behemoth with 8.5 billion daily searches, and that amount of real human contact implies real human responsibility... if Google goes offline, people will literally die from lack of access to information, so they can't take the kind of risks they used to be able to.

Young systems have different features than old systems. Young ten-person companies have different behavior than old 100,000-person Fortune 500s. Young people have different wants and capabilities than older people. Making the transition is key. Failure to make the transition causes pain not only to the one failing but to the ones interacting with them).

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>The link between DEI and the rest of the content of the article is not well-articulated at all.

It felt like a lazy generic swipe at 'tech bros'.

I think the OP’s idea is that DEI is a scapegoat for diminishing growth, and the real cause is just that the low hanging fruit is gone

While I think the TFA makes some interesting points, I too felt the DEI reference was tangential. The point that I felt TFA missed is that none of this was fundamentally unique to the dotcom era. Random factors like "right place/time" have always applied at the birth of new industries whether dotcom era, 1970s microcomputers or 19th century punch card tabulating devices. Historically, new industries that quickly emerged from not existing to being consequential, had early players who achieved outsized gains and pole position during a limited window of time when a couple of reasonably clever outliers could choose to speculatively pour unreasonable amounts of time, energy and whatever environmental resources were at their disposal into delivering early value.

Usually the choice to pour too much into an unproven, nascent prospect was objectively a bad idea, poor investment or, at least, not prudent. We know this because other smarter, more sober people looked at the opportunity during those early moments and made wiser choices, which only seem unwise in hindsight. It's also usually the case that those early zealots taxed their available environmental resources (whether spousal support, parental savings, current employer latitude, etc) to the point of unfair burden, if not abusive burden. Sometimes those unwilling 'resource investors' were repaid and sometimes not. And, of course, even having environmental resources to tap (and unfairly burden) in the first place has always been a matter of luck.

There's an historical record bias here because if we double-click as deeply into the circumstances around other early market entrants, such as a Herman Hollerith and punch card tabulating, we often find similar patterns of abdicating current responsibilities to make unwise leaps into months of furious work to realize some speculative vision, enabled by unfairly (or abusively) burdened family, friends or employers whose existence was random luck. On top of that, there's selection bias at work. Because whether we're talking about Zuckerberg, Gates/Allen, Jobs/Woz, Hollerith or Gutenberg - we're only talking about them because they are the black swan exceptional outliers. The vast majority of the time this pattern ends in unrecorded ignominy or tragedy, existing only as cautionary tales about the distant relative who squandered whatever job or prospects they had, along with their money, family's money and finally the patience of all around them in the pursuit of some crazy dream which never panned out.

The more interesting question is whether this repeating pattern of irrationally abdicating responsibilities to chase speculative dreams in unhealthily unbalanced ways enabled by unfairly burdening environmental resources is, on the whole, net bad or good. And I think that depends on the scope by which we measure. On an individual, family or community level its almost certainly net bad. However, on a societal level it could be net positive. The thorny issue is that the pattern involves abuse of unwilling others to whom rewards may not flow, even in the unlikely event it doesn't end in tragedy. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to eliminate the possibility of unfairness toward others or the overall ambient unfairness of 'winning' by leveraging environmental luck.

This dynamic has been explored extensively in the creative fields. Most namely with the music industry and the "sophomore album curse".

My cynical answer: I think they reframe their history to see it as a series of ever-larger successes -- with some setbacks maybe. They avoid introspection that might lead to the unpleasant conclusion that they have actually gone off the rails and caused societal harm since their initial success. By and large their net worth has continued to increase, and that's the measure that they're comfortable with associating with success, and they see that as validation. Plus, they are surrounded by people who have the same incentives to lie to themselves and to each other.

Both of the women mentioned have been accused of creating the type of environment mentioned in this blog post.

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/former-spacex-engineer-essay...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg#Allegations

I agree with you in spirit but naming women who were appointed positions inside of companies famously founded by men is not helping