It really does feel like most tech leaders are having an internal struggle that they externalize and make all of our problems.
Have you seen Musks Twitter timeline? That guy is so chronically online and desperate to be liked that it's just sad. How can you be the richest man in the world and yet so deeply pathetic?
Same with Zuck's attempt at being "cool" now and don't even get me started on Benioff's whole weird "Aloha" thing.
Deeply insecure, unhappy people, despite having all the wealth in the world. And they're gonna make sure all of us are just as unhappy, because if they can't buy happiness, why should anyone else have it?
My theory is that it's the absurd wealth in the first place that makes these people completely unhinged.
Imagine you are in a situation where nobody you interact with will ever tell you something you don't want to hear. Everyone tries their best to only appease you and tell you that you are the best most brightest person. These people also all depend on your money for their own aspirations (that mysteriously never pan out).
It's basically the same thing that happens to dictators. They become unhinged. Their craziest ideas receive no pushback so they go ahead and implement every whim.
What they all need are good real friends, yet that's the one thing that's impossible for them to gain if they didn't already have it before they became rich.
And they are likely even aware of this dynamic which is why they view everyone in the world as being just in it for the money. So why not do everything in your power to horde more since that's what everyone else you interact with is doing?
What they all need are good real friends, yet that's the one thing that's impossible for them to gain if they didn't already have it before they became rich.
Even that isn’t a guarantee because friend dynamics often change with relative wealth disparities.
You probably need friends that are also very rich.
> Even that isn’t a guarantee because friend dynamics often change with relative wealth disparities.
> You probably need friends that are also very rich.
I don't disagree.
There's a Wendover youtube I recently watched that's tangentially about this [1]. Why do all the rich people have Yachts? His contention it's not because they like having big boats but rather because every other rich person does and that is your real social circle. If you don't fit in with them, you'll basically be friendless.
That also goes into why all rich people end up with private jets, because to interact with your social circle you basically have a packed calendar flying across the globe for rich people social events.
However, it's an insular group of people all subject to the same problem of generally being surrounded by yesmen. Further, it's not like these rich people aren't also trying to shmooze each other. Their businesses are still trying to make money and they often need to work with one another. So hard for these people to actually be friends.
> You probably need friends that are also very rich.
So they’re left to just chase whose partner they can snag or whose yacht is bigger? Sounds delightful. You’d think therapy would be more capital efficient. The hedonic arena is a trap for the emotionally unsound and perpetually unfulfilled.
> It really does feel like most tech leaders are having an internal struggle that they externalize and make all of our problems.
A lot of times people create problems and can't take responsibility for their own actions, so they blame externalities. That's what the author was saying about blaming DEI.
The realization that you achieved as much as one could hope to achieve and you still didn't find contentment.
That's honestly, to me, the saddest thing about the mega-rich. They don't know when, or how, to stop. There's no goal state where they can say "ok I made it, I can turn it off and enjoy life now, or at least stop fighting tooth and nail to hoard even more bigger numbers."
Point is that competition is fueled by insecurity. If you are happy, truly content, with yourself you will find competing extraordinarily tiresome and unnecessary. Not saying it’s good for society by the way. I think our civilization needs the pathologically insecure to be disruptive and create room for innovation. Related traits are narcissism and psychopathy. Painful, but useful, in small doses.
Musk, Altman, Bezos they are basically caricatures.
You're right about the individuals you're calling out, as well as some others, but I don't think it's fair to say "most" tech leaders.
It's just a few of the most troubled celebrity wealth-addicts making public the inherent ego-fragility that tends to drive addiction in the first place.
Meanwhile, there's still sooo many other tech leaders just trying to develop whatever vision they have for their business, industry, career, etc
Not all tech or business leaders are addicts, but some are, and as a society we tend to enable and even celebrate their addiction for whatever reason. Because of that, and because of power that comes with wealth, some of them wreak havoc as they use that power to manifest their very deep troubles in the public sphere.
And it's not a new phenemonom, nor particular to the tech industry. You can see it happen again and again and again throughout history.
I'll defend Benioff here, a little. The O'hana thing isn't a new, desperate COVID-fried-divorced-billionaire invention; it dates, I believe, from the establishment of Salesforce, decades ago. I think it was sincere at the time.
Government of Russian federation and significant part of Russian society that supports reconquering territories Russia used to control.
Soccer hooligan vandals.
Corrupt local politicians.
Some vandals obsessed with damaging community-run geodata collection project.
People who thing that overregulating everything in Europe is an exciting adventure and we should have more of it.
Climate change deniers, people misunderstanding vaccines and in effect trying to resurrect diseases that were extinct locally.
People with Saruman-like approach to trees.
Coal miners parasiting on billions from public funds to fund coal mining (as selling coal does not allow to pay for it, at least with how much they are paid for it).
Could you please stop posting political/ideological/national battle comments? You've done quite a bit of that in this thread. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I realize that many other users have been doing this as well, but each HN commenter needs to stick to the intended use of the site regardless of what others are doing.
Fortunately, it looks like your comment history is mostly fine (at least the parts of it that I skimmed back through) so this should be easy to fix.
Because there are conflicts of interest. Factory workers create the products which create profits. I am paid with these profits, if the profits go down engineers loose their jobs.
If Factory workers longer and more efficiently my job becomes more secure. So obviously I want a union which advocates that factory workers work longer hours, it is clearly in my interest. The same goes for strikes, if factory workers strike they endanger my job and reduce the size of the engineering department, reducing my chances to get promoted.
Their unions want my job to get outsourced and my working conditions to be made worse (RTO) why should I have the tiniest shred of solidarity with them?
>Get rid of them and there'll be plenty of money for both of you.
The unions? Sure, if they were gone things would become better.
Sometimes I worry that all the stories about unions helping to end the most extreme exploitation and fix deadly working conditions has made them unrelatable.
If you make a cushy salary and the biggest physical risk is carpal tunnel, you might think ”I dont have it THAT bad. It’d be greedy and disrespectful of the sacrifices that were made to use unions in my situation”
What made unions unrelatable for me was them obviously pushing the interest of factory workers over the interests of engineers. Thanks for trying to get my job outsourced I guess.
My class is the middle class and for generations we have profited from the extremely productive corporations here in Germany. Never in my life have I felt being "exploited" if anything these corporations have been excessively kind.
Quite interesting pattern. Insisting that everyone is a member of your imagined group, whether they like it or not. Then, when they reiterate why they don't want to be part of your group they never signed up for, you label them a traitor. No wonder communism has such a bloody history.
As a German I know that German corporations, like Bosch and Zeiss have always been at the forefront of making sure their workers were taken care of. Realizing that worker happiness and productivity aren't opposites but only come together.
As a German I know that the only attempt at an anti-communist uprising was met with swift brutality by the troops of the pro-capitalist social democratic government.
As a German I know how a country divided between anti-capitalism and capitalism looks like after many decades. I have seen the ruins of anti-communism with my own eyes, they are hard to hide and so are the crimes of the anti-communist government.
As a German I know that besides national socialism, anti-capitalism is also an illegal ideology in Germany.
You posted 19 comments since then, most of which are perpetuating this flamewar. No matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, this is abusive, and we ban accounts that do it.
Fortunately, it looks like your comment history is mostly fine (at least the parts of it that I skimmed back through) so this should be easy to fix.
I would call kicking out corrupt occupier oppressing workers and pretending to be socialist superpower as a great success.
Doing it with no bloodshed typically accompanying such events was even better.
Russia was not friend to workers, it was oppressive evil state and kicking it out (what started steps toward collapse of USSR) was one of greatest successes in the history of Poland.
It was no accident that largest strikes in the history of country taken place during PRL and capitalism is so well regarded in Poland.
More likely software developers are, for the most part, middle class – deriving their income from a combination of labor and land/capital.
While software developers just starting out are apt to be working class, when you receive a comparatively high income for your labor it soon becomes hard to find things to do with it if you don't start investing in land/capital, so one in that position doesn't stay working class for long.
The top-end of the working class shares more with the low-end of the working class, than the top-end of the working class shares with the low-end of the upper class.
I have never been to a politician's dinner. I have never changed a law. If I were fired, which can be done at any time for no reason, I would have no source of income. Money is the weakest form of power, and a well-paid job is the weakest form of money.
the labor movement really needs to get beyond this stereotype that it is to lift all these hunched poor little downtrodden suppliants out of poverty. workers who have successfully organized are not pitiful schlubs, and their affluence is a testament to the success of their organizing, not its triviality. political interests of the labor class just are not the same as those of capital, and therefore its methods and aims should be different as well.
one thing that i've been repeating for years now is that if you want tech to organize, unions need to sell themselves differently.
unions in the past are portrayed as remove physical dangers, limiting to reasonable hours and fair wages. but tech workers already have that stuff, so they don't see an upside.
codetermination (getting workers on the board), four day work weeks, full-time remote, sabbaticals, open source support, rethinking startup equity, ... there's all sorts of things we could be pushing for that would make our jobs better that we could to push for if we worked together.
It is still labor and we are still exploited - most the revenue we generate goes to capitalist interests, not us, the laborers, which are the creators of all revenue.
It's just that we have it comparatively good and so are less inclined to seek out systemic change - a less favorable reading would be that we are bought off to split us off from the rest of the proletariat.
There's a lot of regressives here actively abusing the flagging functionality for censorship - ironically the same kind of people that'll tell you how much they care about freedom of speech (the unspoken part: but only if its speech they agree with)
Same, I'd love if the EU sponsored the development of open source alternatives. I'm tired of the American tech industry and how it's towing the (anti-European) party line - just give me a way to make a living while building competitors!
What they already contribute is amazing, honestly. My concern is that, in order to build a genuine competitor to Windows, investment needs to increase substantially.
As it stands, getting into kernel development or working on something like a desktop environment (or adjacent software like Firefox or Chromium) is quite difficult in a way that supports you financially.
I mean, as individuals, we still invest personal time into public domain projects because we love to tinker and build stuff - but sadly we can't afford to do that full time.
The way Linux kernel stuff works, is you do a Linux internship with GSoC or Outreachy or LKMP , and then core Linux contributing companies like Intel, AMD etc gobble you up. Or you join FOSS consultancies Like Igalia, Bootlin, Collabora etc. Or you go the rockstar Patreon way like Asahi folks, trading off money for independence.
This is where governments need to step in. We need grants to open source contributors as a national security priority. If you're helping build alternatives to American Big Tech, the state should sponsor that.
First order of business should be to detach the governments from Microsoft. Probably the hardest part of this whole tangle is that the governing bodies are so bound to MS that any move can hit back twice as hard. It's easier to legislate the consumer side, since it's not directly affecting the efficiency and budgets of the organizations making the legislation.
Thankfully, it seems that a movement from inside governments is really starting, with more and more project funding demanding e.g. avoiding vendor lock-in. This helped push one of my projects from MSSQL to Postgres. One step at a time...
That's a tricky one. From my bubble, the first thing I would to is to stop digging the hole any deeper - stopping any ongoing Azure (and other US cloud migrations), not buying into new products such as MS Fabric etc.
But what really would rock the boat would be a MS 365 competitor, since that's currently suffocating everything, because everything is included: email, files, office suite, chat... None of these have to be the Same Product (and I'd prefer specialization), but the integration between different apps should be painless. So, protocols.
If nation states could onshore that package, it would even out the playing field for the other, more optional applications
I think what makes Microsoft so hard to challenge is not one product but the fact they have a tightly integrated ecosystem. Everything is coupled with the Active Directory, Azure and Office365. By themselves these components aren't irreplaceable but no company has ever been able to offer as wide a range of products.
From a public interest point of view I would say AWS, GCP and Azure
From the likelihood of a business being successful probably less well entrenched services, and ones politicians understand - so probably things directly used by consumers and very visible. Probably SaaS of some kind.
Also, its not just the EU (which is what the article is about). Non EU European countries, and the rest of the world too also have a problem with this dependence. I think the best approach would be broad collaborations on development, with deployment at a national level so every country could have sovereign data centres.
My hope was that this would allow us to move away from SaaS, get a fast native software ecosystem where you store the data on your own machines.
Going back to the old ways, where software was shrink wrapped, fast and local. So if that's where we end up I think we failed to make use of the potential in this forced decoupling event.
> My hope was that this would allow us to move away from SaaS, get a fast native software ecosystem where you store the data on your own machines.
I would prefer that, but the GP was asking what a startup should try to do, and I think trying to get people to go back to using their own machines would be an additional barrier.
This could be the ultimate push to open source, pushed by most if not all non-US governments globally.
As for services/products - cloud and MS. From MS - Active directory, Exchange, Outlook, Word, Excel and probably Powerpoint in no particular order. The key is not to have something basic cca working, we have those for decades and they are pretty fringe. Walking the last mile, the hardest part of smoothing integration, ironing UI, responsiveness. This would be a massive task, but worth it.
You have this, you don't need to look back at questionable US products anymore, at least not until they ship as bunch of code that you build and review locally. Goodbye NSA, back to cutting fiber optic cables on the bottom of the sea.
The integration might be the best real reason, but IMO the real reason is branding and good marketing.
A lot of FOSS and other non-US software has at least as good UI and often better responsiveness.
However for many people particular apps they need are Windows only. Lots of industry vertical stuff.
With regard to marketing and branding, a lot of people use AWS because of the brand. Its not a particularly good provider of VPSs but I have lost count of how many people use AWS as a VPS provider (not using other services) and even worse most of them buy and instance plus storage rather than saving money by using Lightsail. I have had people argue that potential acquirers might be put off by using smaller providers.
Enforce separation of layers through interoperability. Each layer of the tech stack should be easy for someone to swap out (or even choose at first use). The mainboard, the processor, the RAM, the disk, the firmware, the bootloader, the OS, the apps, the each layer of the network services etc.
Because if the EU steps in to stop this you couldn't scale because the EU isn't one big market like the USA it is a bunch of smaller markets that add up to a big markert that all have their version of how things should go. If the EU wants to have hyperscalers like the USA they will at some point need to force EU members to do things like relax language requirements, have more overlapping business law, etc.
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