More interesting is to see what aspects of it can fit the HN milieu. How does the bureaucrat and the corporate genre fit the startup scene and the tech industry?
like a glove. Tech today is dominated by basically two forms of business. The Googles and Facebooks and so on, which fit the Weberian bureaucracy that the author addresses, arguably even more than actual bureaucracy because they're rabidly trying to codify everything in software, which is in a sense more technocratic than Weber himself could have ever dreamed of, and the startup culture which is basically performative entrepreneurship, consuming a certain lifestyle to signal being part of a certain class, with the products being created performing essentially no meaningful social function and don't constitute any sort of technical progress.
OK, maybe - but only because you say tech today is "dominated" by these two tropes, not "consists only".
There are exceptions. Obviously I have one self-serving example in mind, but let's skip that. As I brainstorm, the first one that comes to mind is NextDNS which is such a fantastic and simple idea (and one I wish I had thought of).
github, too, was a very substantive and progressive model that has really changed the tech world.
The Veblenian Entrepreneur, as they say
I think the Gervais Principle answers this question nicely. There was a series of essays based on GP that was written by someone formerly active on HN that can only be found on the way back machine that ties GP into modern Silicon Valley. I’m intentionally leaving out this former HNer’s name because he took down his blog for reasons of professional discretion. I don’t think it’s that hard to find, though.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5574429
I think that’s a sufficient hint while not piercing the blogger’s veil of anonymity
Please respect his/her desire for a modicum of professional privacy if you figure out who I am referring to.
>A Harvard Business Review study of common traits among CEOs found that the leaders who rose to that position fastest were those who had a “catapult experience”—a bold and potentially risky career move. Perhaps the same traits that lead to this type of bold action might also lead to very poor outcomes on a college campus. Perhaps hyper-permissiveness actually ends up promoting a form of timidity. We’re left with Silicon Valley dorks who microdose LSD in order to create hookup apps where users exchange sex puns on the toilet.
That last dig pointing out the absurd mix of hyper-permissiveness (hookup culture) and timidity (texting) just highlights how contemporary innovation is the often twisted nexus of these two extremes, and it is the continuation of this pattern being described that makes up the neo-bureaucrat culture's cognitive dissonance.
Do they start to become constrained by marketing? i.e. their actual innovation won't earn them many more sales, and only by marketing more they can increase sales? Do all companies that get big enough (in revenue) do this?
Now, in order to make that money for shareholders, they're going to need customers that are satisfied with their product. They might need to innovate to stay competitive. They might need to actually make the world a bit better in order to stay solvent. But at the end of the day, they aren't going to sacrifice shareholder rewards for their customers, innovation, the betterment of the world at large, or for anything else. It's simply not their modus operandi.