You actually just kind of gave an example of what I meant! Developers are the consumers in this case, and they'll almost always opt to use AWS and Azure versus hosting their own infra. It's easier, faster, usually cheaper, and it makes you yourself are more marketable.
There's a reason software-as-a-service has beat out software-as-a-product. While people might think they want full ownership/control over what they're buying, they want it to be as safe or secure as possible, they want it to be self-hosting and not communicating information back to the distributor... that's just not what plays out for the most part.
OpenAI vs Mistral, Coinbase vs Metamask. I'm not that old, but I'm beginning to notice a trend where the fast, easy, cheap business model wins the most market share, and then slowly works towards providing more values-aligned features as it grows. The company aligned to consumer values from the get-go usually has a tough time keeping up (although they can usually still carve out a good niche from people who are particularly values-focused - Mistral and Metamask aren't doing poorly by any stretch of the imagination).
I personally think this will be one of the biggest "what the hell were we thinking" ideas to come out of the still-developing hangover of the 2013-2023 startup space. From my perspective, the once-startups that are now big companies are the ones who focused ONLY on solving a real and immediate problem with happy, motivated employees. Every industry has inefficiencies to improve upon. Most employees want normal hours, a 401K, some benefits, and clear performance reviews. There's still a ton of work to do at cool-but-not-the-absolute-cutting-edge startups.
Even if AI should be home-run, it probably won't be for most people. In a more technical community, it's natural to think that most people care about "values" when it comes to tech. However, the reality is that people just want what's easiest / cheapest / most fun. It's great when what's easiest/cheapest/most fun aligns with what's best for the individual or society, but those cases are outliers. After spending a few years building a crypto startup, I left with more conviction around this theory.
I did a similar thing to you. However, I do feel like cutting your teeth as a "founding engineer" at an early startup has 2 major benefits:
1. You get to see what it's like under the covers, as you said. It's not nearly as glamorous as it looks from the outside. And yes, as an early engineer, you share in a lot of the downside without nearly an equal share of the upside.
2. You get to leave. Unfortunately, the startup I joined entered a tailspin. But, my name wasn't attached to the company, and I didn't have a fiduciary obligation to our investors. I had a lot of "stake" myself after putting in years of 12-hour days, nights and weekends, but at a certain point I saw that my career was actively being harmed by staying. That "founding engineer" role on my resume got me the job I'm at now, at a level that skews higher than my YOE.
Do those two points mean you should get a fraction of the equity (or rather, a fraction of the options) as the founder? Honestly... maybe. I've now seen a few founders fail. It can really be a career-killer.
Maybe it won't go back down to 8, but I do consider it very likely it'll drop back down to at least 12-15. Humans simply don't work in a way that allows something to nearly triple (in value, land, whatever) overnight and stay there.
I bought at 8, I bought below 8, I bought above 8... but there's no way in hell I'm buying above ~20 for the next 2-3 years.
This viewpoint doesn't hold true far outside of forums like this one and certain subreddits. People just don't care about any of the things you noted, and if they see everyone wearing Airpods Maxes, they'll want Airpods Maxes. They'll see AKG as inferior, even though that's objectively untrue.
Super cool, I've never thought about it this way before. Having read about this stuff somewhat intensively, it just goes to show how many blind spots I have.
This is an interesting take. As someone who is relatively interested in this stuff but by no means an expert (i.e. I've read a few pop-psych books), do you have any further reading I could do to see where you're coming from with this claim?
Because, by my very limited understanding, I always thought something like electromagnetism was always thought to be "concrete," for lack of a better word - whereas I always thought that sociology and psychology were much more subjective fields (and this is why it's impossible to, for example, predict whether a stock will go up or down). Is there any reading to suggest the latter?
This is one of the main reasons I love using Go for backend work, and the lack of this functionality is just one of the reasons I dislike JavaScript.
Anything to make JS feel less haphazard and more elegant (i.e. using TypeScript) is awesome in my books. Looking forward to hopefully using this pattern in my personal work going forward, and maybe trying to introduce it to my team ta work.
I thought it was just me that can never get the right god damn angle to see those signs! I swear the ones at Union Square I feel like a gymnast trying to just see how far away the next train is. Knowing the MTA, I'd guess your conspiracy is definitely at least partially true.
I'd be curious to hear what someone who is just visiting NYC would think of something like this. From my experience, once tourists enter a subway station, all bets are off in terms of orienting yourself. I feel like the little LED indicators in most stations at least in Manhattan with the line and time-to-arrival is really all you need.
Or, instead of investing in a virtual map, invest in better speakers in the actual trains themselves so that people can actually hear "now arriving at 14th St Union Square next stop Astor" instead of "now arcshcshcshcsh Uniocshcsh next cshop cshcshcsh"
A lot of people do this - just like I've seen a lot of people put "Arctic Code Vault Contributor" on their LinkedIn pages, or list that they're a student at MIT because they're taking a Coursera course taught by an MIT professor. Typically, the folks who do this do not really consider the quality of work put on a resume/LinkedIn. Having contributed to some open-source projects over the past couple, I've come across this a lot.
Ugh, I hate stuff like that. Number of GitHub contributions, lines of code, number of commits - these don't actually tell people anything. I know to a recruiter doing a cursory glance, these things may be important, but it's just frustrating. I'd so much rather see one high-quality, ideally squashed PR/commit per week.
Definitely a valid point, I'll clarify because I definitely don't want people to shy away from open-source as I think it's some of the more altruistic work developers can do. Even typo fixes may not be a bad thing. I more mean things like a PR that removes a contraction (i.e. I've gotten a PR changing "won't" to "will not" in one place).
I know Hacktoberfest is certainly exacerbating the problem, but as an open-source contributor for ~2 years myself, but someone who has been working on side projects using GitHub for like 7 years now I've noticed a significant uptick in bullshit PRs in the past year or so.
I have a hunch it's because a lot of bootcamps / tutorials / etc are encouraging students to just "contribute to open source." People may either not know exactly what that entails, or may just be just as lazy in their bootcamp as they were in school.
I've gotten PRs on my school projects from 5 years ago fixing typos in comments. I'm not sure how people even find those repos, and I'm even more confused why they'd feel the need to "contribute" unless someone is telling them to without any additional context.
I have to disagree - I feel like most successful investors explicitly look for ideas that can grow in the exponential fashion you describe. YC particularly doesn't seem to show any interest towards linearly-scalable businesses AFAIK.
EDIT: Or, rather, I agree with the point you're making, but I think it's pretty commonly-held belief.
This, to me, is just furthering a new channel through which people try to get famous, like acting or being a professional athlete. Past the surface-level veil of "online presence," this article more or less just tells me "if you get famous, you can quit your job."
You could replace "online presence" with "acting," or "baseball skills" and get largely the same outcome. Growing my acting presence isn't optional anymore, because if I get famous I can quit my day job. Growing my baseball skills isn't optional anymore, because if I can throw a crazy 12-6 curveball I can get drafted and quit my day job. Growing my online presence isn't optional, because if I become an influencer I can quit my day job.
I'm sure I'm biased because I try to keep a very minimal online presence and it has, if anything, positively affected my day-to-day life, but this article just rubbed me the wrong way.