Hacker News Reader

Comment by eob | Hacker News Reader

A lot of us here are VC minded hackers *because* we spent years of our lives working minimum wage jobs in academia and then eventually realized we preferred to build!

View on HN

Or preferred to eat. I love teaching, and I'm good at it. If it were more valued by society then I'd do more of it. As it stands, I'm in adtech, and I teach a little piano and math on the weekends.

I am one of those. I'll also say I never felt the kind of emotion in software building that I did when working on PhD problems.

> A lot of us here are VC minded hackers because we spent years of our lives working minimum wage jobs in academia and then eventually realized we preferred to build!

This is a disingenuous framing. I've "built" more in academia than in some jobs I had, and some VC-backed startups are renowned not for building but for their lack of ethics.

"Building" is not the discriminating factor.

Building things which you couldn't convince people to pay you for could be might as well building dubious crap

Man, majority of Sillicon Valley production is dubious crap with not much other utility or even actively harmful. And someone pays that.

Earning money is not curelated with usefullness these days. It is somewhat correlated with lack of ethics.

I think it's a very skewed form of ethics to make people pay without convincing them.And fwiw Making money is correlated with productivity which is negatively correlated with a lot of bad things so I think on pure technical point you are wrong, there are subtleties.

Reward alignment is the differentiator. Obviously it's very far from clear-cut what is worth funding in research. But i've seen a lot of crap research, that would have died off far sooner if it had some VC/free market equivelant.

Or maybe to earn proper money?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com