Ah, good old TPOT, and the teenage-wisdom “you just don’t like hearing the truth” takes. Such elevation, blessed be the fucking clowns.
(Extreme double-lol at paulie coming in hot there)
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1812 readers
27 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Anyway if any of you actually do hate techbros for being nerds and wanna give a fuck you to computer geeks in general and tech enterpreneurs in particular, I have an evil plan for you.
Found the Uber for software development. Create an app to connect customers with freelance developers (particularly in lower income countries) and crucially, make sure the developers are responsible for their own infrastructure. Have the devs shoulder the ever-growing burden of cloud bills and server maintenance, minimize your own role except as a middleman and encourage a race to the bottom between the people doing the actual work. Use your VC money on lawyers, manipulative user interface development, marketing and sabotaging your competition.
Congratulations, you will have accelerated the inevitable devaluation of the computer programming profession and stripped it of its perceived prestige. You will have fucked over the majority of software developers and IT operations people. You might even break the pretension that finance bros owe their wealth to their skill with computing technology. You will hoist some "disruptors" by their own petard, hit a bunch of people for collateral damage and probably make a lot of money for bigger fish capitalists.
Do not actually do this, or I hope one day you will be treated like the pestilent leech you are. Consider becoming a communist instead.
So are techbros just software devs? I'm unsure what it means now. I thought it referred to the bitcoin/venture capitalist types
load more comments
(3 replies)
Unfortunately, this already exists
Upwork (previously e-Lance) has a massive systemic lowest-bid-wins downpressure dynamic already, favouring labour from extremely low-cost markets and rushthrough result output. It is occasionally possible to find a good/decent bit of work on there, but largely I t’s a shitshow across multiple dimensions. (There’s more I could say here but it probably deserves its own post somewhere)
And then there’s fucking Turing, a newer entrant to the market labour arbitrage space (because, really, that’s what these are). Turing is a Startup. They explicitly search out developers from developing/third-world nations, mail them (e.g. I got on mail they could only have gotten from scraped commits), and then pitch them on a number that is “better than what they may get locally” but still far below whatever it is that Turing itself bills to end customer. And they called it fucking Turing.
Yes, I know gig economy for programmers already exists, but to really make it the UberBnB for Upwork, the idea is to push the CAPEX to the workers themselves.
Uber became the world's biggest taxi company while owning no cars. Airbnb became the world's biggest hotel chain while owning no hotels. Imagine being the world's biggest cloud while owning no servers.
ah right, soz, I meant to address that too but was typing from phone and fucked that bit up
more than a few of the projects/things on these sites tend to be in a shape of "programmer provides all facilities", be it dev tooling or "before launch" site hosting etc. but in favour of your point, it's still definitely incidental instead of structural/built into the system foundations
might not swing that way either, because it places a lot of leverage on the dev's side (and in an exploitative economy, the money doesn't like going for that)
load more comments
(3 replies)
You think I hate nerds? Ha ha, fuck you. If I did hate nerds, I could never do the kind of damage to the reputation of the geek subculture that Paul Graham and his like-minded cohorts have.
Come on out and nerd fight me, posers. I will outnerd you. I will eat you for breakfast. You ain't got shit on me. Give me six lines written by the hand of the most pedantic bluecheck and I will pedantically point out seven fallacies in them, write a filk song about it and arrange it to chiptune.
Yet somehow people don't seem to hate me for being a nerd. I think I'm fairly popular and most people react to my nerdy interests positively, or at worst indifferently. If it sounds like I'm bragging, I'm not saying I'm some super cool gigachad, but that anyone is compared to these losers.
People don't hate techbros for being nerds, or men for that matter. If I (a nerdy man) am the one who supposedly hates nerds and men, why are you the one implying that the faults I criticise techbros for are innate to nerds and men?
Oh well, we all know the real reason techbros hate leftists is that we make so much better art, have better sex, do better science and are oh so resentably attractive.
load more comments
(1 replies)
The term techbro specifically refers to someone with a business/finance background who acts like they have tech knowledge without actually having any tech knowledge.
'nerds taking over the world' no it was finance with techbros taking over the world. If nerds had taken over there would be a lot more open source and we wouldn't all be familiar with the word 'enshitiffication'.
One of the most famous techbros wants people to print out code and has trouble running a python script.
It's almost like they're missing the point that techbros are misogynists and it describes a sexist mindset.
Its almost as if a guy in STEM and a techbro are not synonymous
"What would the reaction be?" It would be different. It would be far more negative. Do you know why it would be more negative? Because women in tech do not hold power in tech. They do not hold power in the world. A misogynistic name for that category of people would be punching down.
By contrast, "techbro" is acceptable because we know who's in power right now, and it's punching up.
HTH
As one insider told me (who is not me): ‘imagine an equally sexist name was given to, say, female pundits and journalists’ … what would the reaction be?’
With the amount of misandry omnipresent in mainstream media. I'm starting to question which way is up and which is down.
no u
load more comments
(1 replies)
Imagine being richer than god and still being mad about how nerds were treated in 80s teen movies.
Paul never evolved beyond that blog post he wrote about the poor nerds sadly. And the the whole nerd/jock thing has not really been relevant for ages anyway, superman plays warhammer ffs.
I at least appreciate that he points out that he's describing American schools; my experiences of British schools doesn't tally with his, but I assume from all the media's portrayals that his memories match the common US experience.
Techbro was originally used to describe the type of men who made it difficult for women in tech, then somewhere along the line the general public realized the same dudes were also making it difficult for lots if people in lots of places.
If tech folks never actually acted like frat bros, the bro appellation never would have happened. I've worked in offices with Kegs cor crissakes.
I’ve worked in offices with booze, ping pong, and arcade games!
but not for us. it’s used as a hiring incentive and plonked into the middle of the office, but any use of those things at work will quickly result in a PIP. the booze, ping pong, and arcade games are for techbros only — the founders and their nepotism hires, specifically. any engineer caught using any of those things clearly isn’t working hard enough, because they haven’t converted their entire body and mind into a machine for writing shit code for shit capitalists.
@self @Evinceo I worked in an office where there was a beer fridge, & ping-pong-and-beer o'clock started at 4, directly next to my desk. When I told my manager that I felt uncomfortable around drunk male coworkers, and I was going to call it a day anytime the ping pong by my desk started, guess who was the problem?
Oddly enough, one of the tech offices I worked in with hot and cold running booze also had a sexual assault problem. But yeah, "tech bro" is just a way to hate on nerds.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
so you can at once insult nerds, men, and fascists, what's not to love
What if we used different words in a different context? Wouldn't the meaning change? Checkmate atheists
TPOT word chess, with the rules directly stolen from ^W^W cribbed from ^W^W^W inspired by LW
Image description: a series of three tweets by blue-checks.
Tweet from suzuha:
"techbro" is just the reemergence of thinking it's cool to hate nerds, mixed in with a bunch of resentment from watching the last 20 years of nerds taking over the world
Reply by Paul Graham:
It's more a way to hate men.
Reply by jason:
As one insider told me (who is not me): 'imagine an equally sexist name was given to, say, female pundits and journalists' ... what would the reaction be?'
Haha “as one insider told me (who is not me)”
Jason is isn’t even a tech bro, he’s just a weird rich dork
I didn't have much respect for him before, but seeing him absolutely lose his shit and scream for the feds to save Silicon Valley Bank instead of manning up like Rockefeller and getting his rich friends together to bail them out without government help shredded whatever little respect I did have.