Article URL: https://www.sevarg.net/2023/03/25/why-people-hate-tech/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48919242 Points: 17 # Comments: 27

I’ve been watching the shifting sentiments towards the tech industry for some while now, and it’s funny - they’ve shifted so much, and so quickly, that even people in the startup ends of the tech industry seem to have worked out that, you know, not everyone likes them anymore! What’s funny, though, is watching them try to figure out why. A recent article doing the rounds attempts to sort this out in typical “Wow, you’re high on your own supply…” fashion, so I thought I’d be helpful and offer a bit more of an outside opinion on why, exactly, nobody likes the tech industry anymore. The article I’m responding to directly, and then expanding out from, is titled Tech Entrepreneurship and Shifting Sentiment. Go read it, and if you can make it to the end without at least one giggle, snort, or eyeroll, you’re doing better than I did. The author correctly identifies that the sentiment has shifted against the tech industry, but then proceeds to hypothesize about some reasons, and… well, I think it’s safe to say that they’ve not made it outside their little social bubble of “tech startup” workers in a long, long while. Upton Sinclair’s quote about “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” is relevant here. If you’re in the tech bubble (and I use that term broadly to include “Most tech companies and surrounding companies/cities”), and don’t regularly interact with people outside it, or pull back out of it and analyze it from the outside, you miss what’s going on - to your own detriment. So, from the perspective of “someone who works in the deep weeds of tech, really dislikes what we’ve done with it in the last decade, and still talks to a lot of people who aren’t sky high on whatever shows up in the punch at VC parties,” here’s my response to their possible reasons about why sentiment has changed. I’ll follow that up with my views on why sentiment has changed. Startup fraud genre. Consumers delighted in the startup disaster stories retold in Inventing Anna, WeCrashed, Super Pumped, etc. The media frenzied around Elizabeth Holmes’ trial and sentencing. Nope. Most people outside the tech industry don’t care, and I very much doubt anyone outside the “very tech bubbles” has even heard of those publications. I try to pay attention to what’s going on, and I haven’t heard of them. If most people know anything about Holmes, it’s probably that the company she founded outright lied about it was doing, repeatedly, over and over, across the board, and are pleasantly surprised to see that someone is facing real consequences (maybe…) for outright fraud, because the normal industry path is that you lie to everyone, defraud investors, and still come away clean with your golden parachute of tens of millions of dollars in exchange for having “failed completely and blown up the company.” This is utterly unlike the rest of the world, in which there tend to be consequences for criminal actions like “theft” and “fraud”. You can only hear about how some new startup is going to “disrupt” some industry, based on what are pretty clearly absurdities to every normal person, before you expect the next one to go down in flames too. Most people have the good sense to recognize that “I’m going to sell you $10 of services for $5, but I’ll make it up in volume!” either means you’re going to try to drive everyone else out of business so you can achieve monopoly and then raise prices, or you’re full of crap. Milking VC funded companies for actual products is fun (I’ve done it, the church EV charger is a direct result of that), but most people who’ve had to deal with reality also tend to recognize it for the scam it is. But the scam has been evident for well north of a decade now if you’re grounded in reality, and I don’t think this has really changed. It probably means you’ve got more of an uphill battle, but I guarantee people thought your startup was full of shit long before these recent trainwrecks.