Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If who you know and how well you can politic overshadows what you did and the results you got, then you're in trouble.

For me its just another sign that 'tech' is growing up. Pretty much any industry creates an economic flow, and the flow is a source of power (some would argue the only real source in peace time), and one can harness that power by having influence over the flow.

Back when the Homebrew Computer Club was meeting and Steve and Steve were there and nerds gathered at the ByteShop to see the latest S-100 board that Geoge Morrow had dreamed up, the total flow was measured in less than a million dollars a year. Few 'professional' power brokers even noticed. Today the total economic impact of 'tech' is approaching a trillion dollars by some estimates, with that kind of flow comes real power. You also get a different class of players in the game.

We joke about people who would sell out their families for a million dollars, however that number gets uncomfortably large as you go up in decimal orders of magnitude. 10 million, 100 million, a billion ?

The stakes are higher today, some people are the barrier to entry you have to get past. It hasn't been a "gentleman's game" for some time now. Kinda sad really.

"You also get a different class of players in the game."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

I'm not sure. Sleaze tends to correlate with easy money. Before 1997 or so most of the people I knew that were in tech were in it primarily for love but when all the easy capital started flowing in suddenly the quick buck hucksters started coming out of the woodwork. Very few of the latter stuck around after the first dotcom crash.

Right now a lot of dumb money is pouring into tech because there's nowhere else for it to go. I'm seeing a lot of the same kinds of low class opportunists popping up as a result.

I believe you are thinking about the rent-seekers. About that time when someone in business school realized 'hey, these guys are defining new fundamental concepts, if we could patent those we could just sit back and roll in the cash!' There was a tremendous shift from open disclosure of all the technology to 'just the necessary bits to operate' around that time. Comparing the PC/AT technical manual (with BIOS listings!) to the PS/2 manual? DEC went from publishing system schematics to just 'diagnostic notes'.

I had hoped that the open source wave that hit after the dot com crash would have reminded people about why openness leads to growth not stagnation but I don't think it has.

I think one of the challenges with growing up is that you have to work increasingly hard at preserving that which made you special.

As others have argued, "Don't be Evil" is Google trying to inoculate itself against growing up too much and always having a nagging reminder to strive to be the company they were in their youth. Perhaps the valley was never a gentleman's game, but it was (and still is) much more so than other industries.

Really? I remember reading about all the crap between Apple/Microsoft/Xerox (in the late 80s/90s) none of it could be described as even close a 'gentlemen's game".

Are we that different to any other industry?

Or all the recent nonsense about non-compete hiring practices between top tech firms.

I wasn't aware of this issue. Do you have a link to a recent article/HN discussion concerning it?

Sure:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3521817

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3516314

Interesting definition of "tech" that seems to exclude companies like HP, IBM, Atari, Xerox and more that would have had just a little bit more that 1MM/year in flow.

It's important to realize that this is how many industries work because it's practically human nature. The article basically boils down to "influential people in tech can be greedy/power-hungry." I often get the impression that those involved in tech are viewed as more advanced or more noble than in other industries. This is false, and a dangerous assumption. Tech is not full of angels - it's full of people. SV people are just as capable as politicians of being greedy or underhanded or even selfless.

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary." -James Madison

I think it is more serious than you make it sound. This article describes a racket that resembles mafia behavior.

“Pay seven figures a year to buy a corporate subscription to my newsletter and I’ll say nice things about your company, and when the press needs a quote, I’ll be there to puff you up. Or, don’t buy a subscription and I will bash you relentlessly.”

This is not a new game. "No one gets fired for buying IBM" was born, then later became "No one gets fired for buying Microsoft" on the back of "industry journals" that were more or less the dead-tree version of the rackets Fake Steve is describing. None of this is new. This, more or less, is the history of subscription trade journals in every industry for the last 100 years.

Model is thus: Subscribe to our journal, we'll ply you for survey responses/advertising. Fail to pay? You won't get reviewed or if so, it won't be flattering. Advertise? You'll be reviewed, and positively so. Oh, and we'll charge you for the report born of the analysis of the survey data you gave us. Repeat for all major players in a niche field. Welcome to industry publishing.

Yes, mafias are not new. The interesting thing is when someone publicly take a public position against (not many people do).

A game can be a gentleman's game, but only if we all agree to play it like gentlemen.

There are days we can't even disagree like gentlemen here. :-(

> For me its just another sign that 'tech' is growing up.

For me it's another sign that 'tech' has some serious growing up to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com