This article touches on an idea that I think many in the tech industry (myself included) continue to be myopic about: as disruptors we are held responsible for the negative social outcomes that we bestow upon society. I think many (not all) of us who work in software believe that the innovations we unleash, in-and-of themselves, make up for nearly any negative externality caused as consequence. We have brought services or experiences that have made life more convenient, faster, more accessible, etc.; that should be more than sufficient to legitimize our existence and effort.
Inside this framework, the driving factor is what Wired calls "techno-darwinism" the idea that software companies are "still standing post-disruption must have survived because they were the fittest". If you talk to people in SV, especially after the depression, the stereotype was that every startup was about to "change the world by becoming the [X] for [Y]" (Uber for cookies, AirBNB for laundry, etc.)
However, the outside world looks at us with disdain: they don't view our motivations as a desire for simple innovation or creativity, but outright greed and power. The folks that we have disrupted are often those who do not have the means to convert their labor to new industries; even when they do, those industries then get disrupted by some new actor.
Tech workers also have, stereotypically, been disdainful of government: it's too slow, too compromised/corrupt, too inefficient. However, engagement with the polity is the main vehicle by which the poor and disenfranchised are are able to find some kind of recourse for their lives, either by the ballot box or the ammo box.
I've been telling my non-tech friends recently that the great sin of our industry is not greed, its naivety and hubris.
> I've been telling my non-tech friends recently that the great sin of our industry is not greed, its naivety and hubris."
Close. But I would say it's ultimately a lack of empathy that is doing the most damage. It manifests itself in so many (negative) ways. It doesn't have to be this way. But that's the irony of lacking empathy.
> This article touches on an idea that I think many in the tech industry (myself included) continue to be myopic about: as disruptors we are held responsible for the negative social outcomes that we bestow upon society.
I think that's fair. I mean, since we get credit for the positive social outcomes, we should accept that we'll be blamed for the negative ones.
> However, the outside world looks at us with disdain
The only people that view the tech industry with disdain are journalists and old media.
Regular people happily use their iPhones, Facebook, Uber, AirBnB...
Just because a lot of ink is spilled trying to keep outdated media models alive, it doesn't mean the general population feels this way. The success of all of these services is proof enough that people are not bothered.
Yeah, they are too busy being addicted to candy crush without realizing that was precisely the intention. My wife, who is not an engineer (she works in applied science) is disgusted with how the technologies have been used to take advantage of the general public. She hates how airbnb has caused a town we wanted to live in to now lie around 24% of homes unoccupied outside of summer while housing prices continue to rise because Airbnb has made it a better value to keep houses away from long term rentals. You are being incredibly naive to even have a catogory called regular people. I am an engineer who builds infrastructure and manages projects each day. I can code but I am not a "software engineer". I am baffled how people at google, facebook, and the like who are funded by ad revene (from ads no one really clicks on or views) can sleep at night knowing how their products have caused so much harm.
There's absolutely nothing morally wrong with using heroin.
People want cheeseburgers, they're provided. People want marijuana, it's provied. People want alcohol, it's provided. People want sugar, it's provided. People want to gamble, it's provided. People want pornography, it's provided. People want violent movies and video games, it's provided.
You can outlaw so called sins, negatives, or you can properly regulate them and treat people that become addicts. Heroin is obviously an extreme example of that context. There is only one effective solution to heroin addiction: treat addiction, do not outlaw heroin use. It should be safely, legally provided to people that need it.
> Regular people happily use their iPhones, Facebook, Uber, AirBnB...
So when Uber circumvented the law to allow anybody to become a taxi driver, thereby hurting drivers who played by the rules, and the media reports on that, they can be safely ignored because they didn't interview a happy user of the app?
Regular people happily use non-biodegradable plastic bags. Maybe the old media should hold off on reporting on its consequences until the oceans have been completely liberated of marine life.
Taxi drivers played by the rules written by and for existing taxi drivers. It was a government protected racket badly in need of some free market forces and Uber/Lyft have provided just that.
When it comes to the services/products, I agree with you, the general population certainly thinks they are great. However, how often have you heard of tech workers as being a positive thing for a city? How many times in TV shows / movies are tech workers seen as a boon? (e.g. Silicon Valley, Black Mirror, Searching) I'm not saying that this _necessarily_ means that literally everyone feels disdain towards the tech industry across all slices of society, I am arguing that the banner of disruption of being a good thing by definition, is misguided.
> For instance, the same year the government loaned $535 million to solar-power company Solyndra, it also loaned Tesla $465 million. “Taxpayers footed the bill for Solyndra’s losses—yet got hardly any of Tesla’s” gains, she says. Solyndra has become “a byword for the government’s sorry track record when it came to picking winners,” a story that has helped keep regulators at bay, she says.
I'm no Tesla fan, but that's sort of how loans work. You get your money back plus interest. It's not a lottery ticket. And Tesla paid back their loan early. I don't think the program lost very much money overall.
That is how loans work. But in a free-market economy, loans also come from professional lenders, who price loans according to risk. Government loans made to further industrial policy are necessarily subsidies, which is not how loans work.
From the view of the economy as a whole, it can work out fine, in that we tax the profits of the successful companies. (Although a great deal less than we used to.) But it does rather put a hole in the myth of self-made men and the companies they built from nothing.
I'll also note that Silicon Valley has a university at the heart of it. We fund a great deal of research, and we should. We also subsidize education in a variety of ways. But the first version of Google was developed by grad students as part of their student work, and Google today hoovers up quite a number of recent graduates from schools are either publicly run or receive a great deal of government assistance. It's a highly interdependent system. I think that's great, but don't think our myths acknowledge that.
Loans are often structured with a penalty if they are paid back early. The provider of the capital wants the scheduled payments more than they want access to the capital.
Perhaps big fat government loans should really be purchases of special restricted securities (that do things like limit the control the government has over the company and prevent dilution).
Any additional evidence (either for or against) the claim that government pays for tech advances, while the private sector is who sees a return from that?
This is a super grey area. As I'm sure most people are aware, most technology innovation is evolution, not revolution. The smartphone doesn't exist today without the desktop computer and failed attempts by Palm.
The reality is as follows:
- ARPANET is considered the earliest form of the internet, which was developed by DARPA (paid by taxpayers)
- Many patents for internet based technologies are held (or were held) by universities which were paid for by taxpayers
- The first proposal of hypertext by Tim Berners-Lee was done in his capacity as a contractor to CERN, which is a multi-government-backed entity
The question, that will be debated for centuries, is who has profited from all of this? Just think of your laptop for a second. There are probably a million different functions, services, applications, etc. all playing together harmoniously. It's the purest form of amalgamated advances in both government backed projects, FOSS, and for-profit entities all dancing together harmoniously. Many people would argue the ones who sell the final good are creating the most value, because they are essentially responsible for bringing all of those disparate parts together, and hence why they would argue they deserve most of economic profit.
In both the government and private industry, both which are needed, the overlooked ones are the individuals and teams that make these innovations.
The big fish are the government and private industry that helps drive forward, but when you break it down to the particles that make up the system, you'll find individuals, inventors, entrepreneurs, good managers, smart financial navigation and encouraging of the open creative state.
Anything that allows the smallest of nodes in that system to flourish, the individuals, should be noticed and rewarded.
Generally, the pattern has been that government and university funded researchers make the early discoveries, and then corporations do the research towards applying them. Universities benefit from patents, but the federal government doesn't.
One of the things that makes research "basic research" is that there isn't an obvious financial incentive for it. IBM, AT&T and Xerox at the height if their monopolies could afford to do some, but in general it's a financial loss on the timescale of a human or a corporation.
But what we see sometimes (alternative energy, drug research, e.g.) is government funding of applied research, and that isn't good for the market or the science, and should be called out.
Locking up applied research at companies often creates a lot waste as several companies do the same research and don’t share their results outside of patents/products.
What's the alternative exactly? What would a government do besides hand it over to corporations to use?
Even if they wanted to use it purely internally, they'd have to hire a company to manufacture what they want. I suppose a country like China could use a state run company instead of a private one?
How can someone write a whole article about disruption but not actually use the correct, well understood meaning of the term? They literally just made up their own strawman definition of what "disruption" means (tech people getting rich I guess?).
Disruption has always been used to mean disrupting established market leaders via innovation. Guess what? That's exactly what has happened with Uber, AirBnB, Amazon...
Both used technology to get there (there were no apps to hail taxis anywhere near feature parity with Uber for instance). They also leveraged the distribution mechanisms of the app store to reach scale.
> Wasn't their "innovation" flaunting the law to gain a temporary advantage before regulation leveled the field again?
Whether you view it that way or not (I don't) it doesn't change the fact that these companies successfully disrupted established players. It doesn't matter if it was "innovative" (again I think it was), the end result was textbook disruption.
Airbnb in particular benefited from the existence of other technology they didn't directly employ, mostly related to smartphones: ubiquitous cameras for hosts to take pictures, reliable taxi service from Uber and its rivals making more areas viable for tourists, high quality mapping apps to let people see what neighborhoods are fun and convenient.
Cellphones in general mean hosts don't have to provide TVs, landline phones, alarm clocks, paper maps, newspapers, etc. that were traditionally in hotel rooms.
Uber and airbnb outcompeted them by offering lower prices and disregarded obviously outdated laws. The phone was what actually disrupted the industry not the actual services.
> If you have to break the rules to succeed against competition that is playing by the rules
I read this three times before I understood what you were saying. At first I read it as "If you have to break the rules to succeed against competition, that is playing by the rules" as if to justify breaking the rules. English is a lovingly ambiguous language sometimes.
Or just that the rules are stupid, and/or bought and paid for by the incumbent businesses. I have no sympathy for taxi medallion owners or the entire system of graft that caused it to arise. Basically everybody wants to pull the ladder up after them once they get to the top.
>Before regulation locked out any possibility of long term successful competition
from companies willing to exploit loopholes in hard won labour laws whilst putting the health of the general public in danger by exploiting the slow moving mechanism of governance for profit
I think the "disruption" thesis presented in the wired article is perfectly reasonable. Clayton Christensen has his own theory of disruption too as you point out in reference to his book. The wired article is reviewing books that analyze disruption in terms of the broader social/legal context vs Christensen who focuses on disruption in terms of a company and the market. Both are valid.
The author cycled through several ways it gets used, and it IS used differently in different contexts by different people, and that matters. Your appeal to a platonic usage is unconvincing.
Anyway this isn't a "whole article about disruption", it's an article about three books that reframe Silicon Valley's history.
"An Alternative History" would suggest that the actual history would be mentioned somewhere in the article. The Innovator's Dilemma book doesn't even get a mention.
It's totally fine to have a contrarian point of view but you have to accurately represent the opposing view point. That wasn't done here.
> (One of the future Trump adviser’s least favorite words? “Politics.”)
What's with this unrelated off topic dig?
Secondly, what's the point they're trying to make? That Thiel is a hypocrite? If so, you can both hate politics/government and work to try to improve it. One strategy is to do so from within. Musk was trying to do the same for a while.
Can confirm, was a contractor in Silicon Valley. The "narrative" these executives sell is little more than an opiate for their fleets of highly-paid engineers to feel like they're justified in having a salary several times higher than the contractors they work with on a daily basis.
The w2 outsourced contractors are a long standing issue in silicon valley and tech, as such even the IRS has weighed in and basically only allows tech companies to have someone on contract for 2 years. There's some additional issues with it in that you really are a w2 employee because you don't get to chose when and where you do the work (or what hours you work).. So in a sense it is worse than uber because you can't choose your hours. Companies like it because it is low risk and you typically can get someone in for a lower wage than you would have to pay otherwise. Netflix is using contractors now btw..
I imagine things have evolved since the good old days:
AFAICT, there's two kinds of contractors. The first kind are experts that companies don't have enough ultraspecialized knowledge work to keep on a salaried basis. These people are like the Wolf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWmRTjLRMfU), brought in for problems nobody on staff was able to solve and charge accordingly. All the contractors of this type I know are self-represented, no middlemen. 3x is a norm, but often much higher due to their niche experience.
The other kind of contractor is ordered from an agency. The agency might charge a shit ton, but the IC sees a fraction of that. These agencies only profit from the markup, so they position themselves accordingly; they find as much cheap labor as they can. If you look at the top H1-B sponsors, it's typically dominated by these places. Nominally places like Infosys file Labor Condition Assessments at 10x the rate of Google, but in a sense most big tech firms are outsourcing the H1-B process to the body shops. As you can imagine, this puts downward pressure on contractor wages.
Quite right. My contracting agency was making as much as I was for every hour I worked. Doesn't seem right when all they did was handle complaints and payroll issues. On the bright side, they were throwing money at us anyway and my student loans are paid off.
Left a sour taste in my mouth, though. Haven't worked in tech since.
Depends. If you're a talented engineer you stand to make a lot more money as a contractor if you stay busy and set your rates appropriately. The average salary in my area is $140k for a senior software engineer. As a contractor I could make $110-150/hr which could be $170k at the low end once the extra taxes paid by contractors are taken into account. None of those numbers include normal state and federal income taxes which would apply equally to both. Also being a corp entitles you to play a few tax games which let you reduce your tax burden slightly.
I was contractor for a while and never saw those $100-150/hr contracts. In my current company the contracting agency gets within that range but the contractors themselves see much less.
It helps to form your own corp and go direct. If your company can charge $150 for you, then you have a chance at charging $150 for you. Your company might provide some added value, so you might need to drop your rate a bit, but if you develop customer relationships and consistently meet expectations then you can get away with jacking up your rate a bit. There are times when you still might have to take a lower paying job but it varies.
This article deeply disappoints me as Hacker news is the last place that I would expect to find Luddites.
> They promised the open web, we got walled gardens
Google doesn't give out its users data in the same way that a bank doesn't give out it's users balances.
> ...many of the dystopian business practices we associate with fast-growing tech platforms [like] operating with a small group of well-paid engineers, surrounded by contractors
The implication here is that before Amazon, no company applied aggressive and unethical cost saving measures. When was Nestle founded again?
> Uber did not cause this precarious economy. It is the waste product of the service economy
This is the kind of thing that makes you sound smart but means nothing. There is not an explanation of the "waste product of the service economy" that follows this quote. In fact this implies it is not Uber's fault at all for disrupting the taxi industry.
> In the case of venture capitalists, [...] their real genius appears to lie in their timing: their ability to enter a sector late, after the highest development risks had already been taken, but at an optimum moment to make a killing
The implication being that nobody made a competitor company before the internet was around. The other claim is that being n+1 to the market gives you a guaranteed and significant advantage. If this was the case it would be trivial to overtake Google.
> The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the future, but rather a future where they are kings
This line tells me that the author has gotten used to modern day conveniences that tech has brought us and thinks its unpredictable that people who made companies that span the globe are rich and powerful.
I’m not sure what this articles point is. Disruption as called by Christensen, Andreeson, Thiel, etc all talks about displaced jobs and industries. I don’t think this is unknown. It’s just that the benefits outweigh the costs (to some).
So this isn’t an alternative history more than it is just a weird anecdote or two without follow-up.
I’m not sure what Wired is as a magazine any more. It really needs knowledgeable editors to plan and shape stories along some theme. I feel like these stories about rich and bad Silicon Valley is are pretty common and all boil down to the same reality that Silicon Valley has high margins and makes a lot of money for in demand employees and stockholders. This isn’t relevatory though and I’m not sure what Wired’s angle is.
> I’m not sure what this articles point is.
...
> So this isn’t an alternative history more than it is just a weird anecdote or two without follow-up.
It's weird. The article seems to be a book review somehow cast as a news article or thought piece. Read as a book review it's a perfectly reasonable and informative.
Inside this framework, the driving factor is what Wired calls "techno-darwinism" the idea that software companies are "still standing post-disruption must have survived because they were the fittest". If you talk to people in SV, especially after the depression, the stereotype was that every startup was about to "change the world by becoming the [X] for [Y]" (Uber for cookies, AirBNB for laundry, etc.)
However, the outside world looks at us with disdain: they don't view our motivations as a desire for simple innovation or creativity, but outright greed and power. The folks that we have disrupted are often those who do not have the means to convert their labor to new industries; even when they do, those industries then get disrupted by some new actor.
Tech workers also have, stereotypically, been disdainful of government: it's too slow, too compromised/corrupt, too inefficient. However, engagement with the polity is the main vehicle by which the poor and disenfranchised are are able to find some kind of recourse for their lives, either by the ballot box or the ammo box.
I've been telling my non-tech friends recently that the great sin of our industry is not greed, its naivety and hubris.