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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

>>narccisistic hubris

That's funny, because as member of the tech community myself, I can unequivocally state that if there is one group that can be defined by the narcissistic hubris of its most prominent and influential members, it's techies.

I mean, we're talking about people whose idea of "disruption" is bending and breaking all kinds of rules and laws. AirBnB, Uber, Theranos, Facebook, Google, you name it... they're all led by people who think they are better than others, know more than others.

THAT is the real reason there's a backlash against us.

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That's exactly what I'm talking about. You can cherry pick good and bad actors in any industry. This ignores all of the dedication poured into open source and support in frequently thankless roles - have you ever noticed how dry and professional OSS support forums like github and stackoverflow tend to be? To the point where people feel the environment is offensive (though I disagree). All of the positive contributions to control systems that link the globe and drive our factories and machines. Brilliant, completely free GPU based mathematics libraries in multiple languages - do you have any idea how far these technologies are driving the future? Tech is the foundation of the future. Maybe not now but it is inevitable, if we don't destroy ourselves, the live of the average person will undoubtedly become more and more computerized.

Also, what technology do you think is enabling clean tech? We simulate everything on the back of a subset of the tech industry.

>> That's exactly what I'm talking about. You can cherry pick good and bad actors in any industry.

It's not cherry-picking at all. Look around you. The most powerful and influential actors in our industry are also the worst.

>> This ignores all of the dedication poured into open source

Please don't strawman. I am very clearly not saying that the entire industry is bad.

> do you have any idea how far these technologies are driving the future?

I think unlike you I know the past. I can see both it and the future. I don't like this future. All I see is you guys are building machines to exploit people.

But “techies” mostly aren’t the CEO-types who try to do all this disruption. They’re mostly developers who like to get paid to do semi-interesting work. The messianic stuff is largely confined to a small, loud group, I think.

This is exactly it. There's a lot of apex fallacy going on in the discussion of tech.

Most of us in tech don't have any say in the direction of the industry. Many of the rank and file workers would actually prefer to live someplace cheaper like Seattle, but it's the leadership of the tech industry (VCs, execs, etc) that have been slow to geographically diversify the industry.

There's too much blaming of all techies for the actions of the people at the top of the tech hierarchy.

>> Most of us in tech don't have any say in the direction of the industry.

We would have a say in it if we, you know, unionized.

But last time I checked, most techies viewed unions with disdain.

That’s not “techies” those are VCs and some founders.

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