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Comment by proc0 | Hacker News Reader

I'm so tired. From the 2008 recession, into a short break in mid 2010s, into a pandemic, into an AI revolution, my career is a series of managing catastrophic changes. I was a sold a lie by society and universities that studying some field, i.e. CS, meant some kind of meaningful progression. In reality it is all about profit, and selling products. I guess I was too naive to be that cynical, but I'm realizing now, it's literally all about selling product and making money and nobody gives a shit about expertise, craft, or specializations.

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> In reality it is all about profit, and selling products.

All business endeavours are about profit and sales.

I don’t know why people in tech keep thinking they are special in this sense.

There is the widespread meme about getting out of IT and going farming or sone variation of that. Do you think farmers actually live free of the thoughts of profits and sales?

It’s not even about cynicism… it’s just reality.

> Do you think farmers actually live free of the thoughts of profits and sales?

You can escape the market by becoming a subsistence farmer or trying to join the hunter-gatherers living on Sentinel Island. Might involve a reduction in standard of living though.

This may surprise you, but there is actually a whole realm of possibilities between late-stage social-darwinist capitalism and subsistence farming.

You don't even have the freedom to choose that unless you're both already wealthy and crazy.

How will you afford to pay your property taxes on a subsistence farming? Or do you plan on squatting on someone else's land? Public land? I think it's possible to camp longterm on the latter, but the government probably won't appreciate your farming operation.

> or trying to join the hunter-gatherers living on Sentinel Island

Good luck, I think they're known for instakilling outsiders over there.

It isn't about being special. It's about what exactly I'm supposed to optimize and maximize as a skill in order to be successful. It turns out the only right answer is business and marketing skills. So then what's the point of learning anything beyond surface level? Especially now with AI, but this was true before as well going back probably many decades.

> It turns out the only right answer is business and marketing skills.

< astronuat meme>

Always has been.

Look, I feel really bad for you, and I hope things get better for you (and the others in this thread).

But it's worth calling out that the post-GFC software world was entirely insane. The low interest rates caused a lot of madness to be funded, and software engineers and other "technical" people got treated with kid gloves because their skills were perceived as rare, and the moonshots only needed to pay off 1 of 100 times for the funders to be happy.

That's not the world we are in today, money is much more expensive, and the mainstreaming of remote work made a lot of businesses think about offshoring even more than they were already. Also with that, there's AI where lots of people believe they don't need tech people any more (they're probably wrong, but it'll take a while to come out in the wash).

> So then what's the point of learning anything beyond surface level?

Because if you learn some useful skills (computers etc), AND you learn how to talk about business & sales, then you can get a better job. The days of just being able to sit in a corner and code are gone for now, but people with enough skills to talk to other humans about their actual problems can definitely do well.

But again, mostly I'm sorry that things haven't worked out for you and that things improve soon.

> All business endeavors are about profit and sales.

This is the kind of simplistic thinking that has destroyed the modern world. Businesses are just groups of people, and most people don't care about the endless optimization of profit and sales -- they care about having purpose and they want their work to contribute back to society in a way that benefits their community.

The problem is we've empowered "entrepreneurs" (mostly narcissists) who espouse this form of one-dimensional thinking because they're the best at consolidating money for their own benefit (and the benefit of others who directly help them).

> All business endeavors are about profit and sales.

You say this because to you business is a game about winners and losers, and in your interpretation you believe all players should simply work to maximize their "points" at the expense of everyone and everything around them. This form of thinking only comes from "entrepreneur" types who are actively destroying the world and the very fabric of our society for their own personal gain.

> It’s not even about cynicism… it’s just reality.

It's only reality because we've allowed a small group of selfish cynics to take control of our society.

Well said.

I don't think business should be about just profit and sales, but your point is that it isn't about it right now, which I disagree with. It's not about us choosing to socially support or allow the narcissists to exist. The whole system that's set up here is self-reinforcing. The most greedy, selfish and cruel are empowered to rule over everyone else, because the only things that are rewarded with power and influence are gaining more money. Some people who run businesses with purpose and integrity still exist, but year after year they're getting slowly pushed out, until they will eventually occupy only the most fringe margins of economics and all the air is taken up by the narcissistic giants. In that sense, in 2026 business ventures are all about making as much money as possible and nothing else. Game theory-wise, anyone caving to their morals is playing business wrong and will lose, because that's how the game was constructed. As far as I can see, there is nothing you and I can do.

> I don't think business should be about just profit and sales, but your point is that it isn't about it right now

It both is about it and isn't about it right now, depending on who you ask.

> anyone caving to their morals is playing business wrong and will lose

You are one of the individuals who thinks it is about profit and sales. I'm recommending that you change your mindset.

If we change the culture, we might be able to change who's in control.

Anyone who thinks business is primarily about P&L should be considered mentally ill.

> You are one of the individuals who thinks it is about profit and sales. I'm recommending that you change your mindset.

I think you're severely misreading what I'm saying. I would never do or condone any of the abusive acts that modern businesses have largely sunk to. I'm just saying that the fact that our system has rewarded the biggest profit-chasers is completely obvious and will not change regardless of what my mindset is. Said profit-chasers are now integrated so deep into everything that it will take far more than regular people like us changing the culture. They don't care about culture, they already own everything and can do whatever they want.

I understand what you're saying, this is the part I disagree with:

> I'm just saying that the fact that our system has rewarded the biggest profit-chasers is completely obvious and will not change regardless of what my mindset is.

Specifically the "will not change" part.

It's our system, and we do have the power to change it. First we have to change the way we talk about it. Stop calling them "winners" and stop calling those who follow a moral compass "losers." Call the entrepreneur-types what they are: sad, selfish individuals who deserve no power in our society. They're not winning at anything -- they're dragging our entire society down with them and making all of us losers.

I'm not assigning moral value to them when talking about 'winners' - objectively, in a game where money equals absolute power, it would be kind of absurd to say that the tiny minority that together holds far more power than the remaining majority didn't 'win' at that game, right?

As long as people like you keep recognizing them as "winners," they will continue to have power over you.

If we all decided to view them as criminals instead of winners, this problem would resolve itself in a matter of weeks.

I'm not sure why you're so stuck on this. Perhaps you still want to emulate them on some level.

Take a look at observable reality. Not how you wish things worked. Being optimistic won't change anything. Won't change the balance of power. Won't make anything more fair. Just make you a more pleasant serf. It literally doesn't matter what you call Elon Musk. He still has tremendous power. He has hordes of defenders. No amount matter how much power you pretend people have with their vote you're still ignoring observed reality. In your world, someone like Trump could never be elected much less twice. Yet here we are. There seems to be a fundamental disconnect between your beliefs and reality.

> Just make you a more pleasant serf. It literally doesn't matter what you call Elon Musk.

Actions speak louder than words.

> No amount matter how much power you pretend people have with their vote you're still ignoring observed reality.

Voting likely won't get us out of this mess. You'll need to be a bit more creative and... persuasive.

> In your world, someone like Trump could never be elected much less twice.

In my world, Trump was elected twice. Helped by people like you who submit to their power and tremble with awe at their accomplishments.

> You say this because to you business is a game about winners and losers

i never mentioned winners and losers, so please do not put words in my mouth.

any business MUST be profitable to stay in business (in a healthy way).

He said 'all about profit', not 'about profit'. There's a difference between building a great, innovative, useful product and making a profit from that vs literally enshittifying/worsening an existing product (or just building total crap that came out of some illiterate MBA's ass in general) and aggressively leaning into marketing, dark patterns narrative control, etc.

These days it seems like most of SV and US tech industry in general is mostly the latter. This is a big reason why US tech companies can't compete with China anymore - VCs and big tech have captured the US market 10 years ago, and have been just squeezing it for profit ever since.

I worked a general public facing job that I will not describe in detail lest I doxx myself, but you can imagine it as basically tourist facing retail. I did this for 10+ years. I was already deeply cynical by the time I went to school for CS, and yes, it was for money, and I still prefer it to the alternatives.

The world of menial jobs is absolutely miserable, depressing, and will grind you to a pulp - it's nearly impossible to get out of, by design.

It's perfectly ok to study CS for money. My point is that the job market in general doesn't really care about all this technical specialization, despite them signaling this over and over with CS degrees and technical interviews. At the end of the day all careers have to do with making more profit for the business, not specializing in some skill.

Your knowledge and experience is super valuable. Your bosses and the typical parasites running the typical SV tech company do not have the knowledge and experience you do .

You shouldn't be discouraged just because they don't understand or value your skills and expertise - you can build a product and/or company from the ground up by leveraging your skills and using AI to fill in the rest. They cannot do the same thing.

Time to stop worrying about the fact that you can't serve these clowns and time to start building.

> you can build a product and/or company from the ground up

The MBAs can. Engineers can write a program, spend 5 years polishing it and convert maybe 2 paying users. The "just start a business" is the "learn to code" advice of the 21st century. It's not a panacea, or a viable path for most engineers to return to the career they had before.

No they can't. Their only skill is in squeezing profits out of existing products and corporate politics. These people are mostly technically illiterate, and they don't understand the tech market/business well either. Even AI will not enable these people to deliver working, quality code.

Writing code is a very specific and highly technical skill, you cannot just will yourself to do it without many hours of study and practice. Doing business strategy + machiavellianism 101, which is realistically what 99% of these people do, is not a very complicated or technical skill at all, the average high schooler understands these things for the most part, and AI can do it better already.

There are thousands of products and companies out there that were once okay, and did pretty well, after which they got taken over by the MBA/marketing people, and now their products are enshittified, stagnated dogshit, they only exist because of existing customers and connections, and they can be easily outcompeted.

To the contrary - good products and businesses die all the time, because they have no executive leadership or marketing plan. Highly intelligent programmers end up starving themselves trying to sell a video game or an innovative algorithm.

Yes, these MBAs will be releasing products and starting businesses that were once relegated to only developers. They'll overpay for cloud hosting, completely fail to innovate, abuse their customer relationship, and make much more money than solo devs ever did. The programming mindset is restrained by unprofitable concepts like "taste" and "respect" and other nonsense principles that the industry long since forfeit to FOSS. The victor will be the contractor, the business grad and the tradespeople. The library maintainers, indie devs and SaaS addicts are going extinct.

The programmer will begin their final phase-out, the one that started when Oracle and Microsoft subcontracted their war crime software to third-world workers.

That's true, you do need marketing, sales, etc. But is there any secret sauce to that beyond having existing connections? Not really. AI does that job better than the 99% at this point.

> Yes, these MBAs will be releasing products and starting businesses that were once relegated to only developers.

Show me a single, actually working, profitable tech company built by a non-technical MBA without the need for developers. Until then it's fantasy. I've watched numerous seemingly high-ranking, very successful MBA/marketing people try - it's a complete joke - they need nerds to babysit them 24/7.

> They'll overpay for cloud hosting, completely fail to innovate, abuse their customer relationship, and make much more money than solo devs ever did.

Cool fantasy I guess

AI/LLMs are an amazing tool and a multiplier, but they are far from perfect - it requires technical understanding to use effectively. An experienced software engineer can leverage it 1000x more effectively than a typical corporate MBA NPC. That's all there really is to it.

Where's the disruption? If experienced engineers can leverage AI "1000x more effectively" than their peers, we should be seeing the consequences. The only thing that's happening is that software is getting cheaper. The high waterline of quality that used to differentiate software products has boiled away. Many professionally-designed programs are being functionally replaced by vibe-coded alternatives. FAANG is barely shipping software any more dignified or advanced than vibe-coded crapware.

Ask yourself this; do you think Apple would rather give up their engineers, or their brand image? Only one of them is replaceable.

The disruption is definitely happening. The main roadblock is that the US tech industry is completely captured by big tech and VCs, who openly collude with each other. But that is temporary and the cracks are starting to show - the aggressive push towards AI regulatory capture is just one obvious sign. Explain to me how DeepSeek, a company with far less access to compute and capital, and starting from behind, is now able to offer LLM inference at roughly 10x the value per dollar of the frontier US AI labs.

> Ask yourself this; do you think Apple would rather give up their engineers, or their brand image? Only one of them is replaceable.

What do you think the 'brand image' is? Is it a pretty design/image, or a cute ad campaign, is it just whatever the marketing/propaganda says? Or is it actual product quality, reliability, efficiency, etc. ? If apple gives up their engineers they have no more brand image at all, and no more products either.

Wait, are you asking "Where's the disruption" when we have a couple folks vibe coding replacements for Adobe's whole stack, as well as things like Autodesk Fusion 360? Are you serious? Then you say things are being "vibe coded" away ... well, what is it? Sounds to be like the moats of the large corps are being dissolved, and that those who can ship working software - will.

"software is getting cheaper" - and easier to make, but it hasn't lifted all of the other constraints. Guess who's well positioned to understand what those constraints are and to work well in this new landscape? Answer: they didn't go to business school.

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