this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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TechTakes
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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.
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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.
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.
I’m glad Alan Turing never met the modern techbros
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)
Sounds like they called it "Turing" in the midcentury law enforcement sense.
So are techbros just software devs? I'm unsure what it means now. I thought it referred to the bitcoin/venture capitalist types
No, that is not what I meant. Not all software devs are techbros at all. Techbros are people characterized by their romanticization of computing history viewed through a corporatist lens; an obsession with IT and Fintech megacorps and trend-du-jour bandwagons like blockchains or AI; a façade of laid back trendiness; business ideas based on rent-seeking and value extraction; or attempts to minimize, excuse and deny the deep-seated misogyny and racism within startup and tech corporate culture.
What I'm saying is that there is a certain prestige (albeit a steadily diminishing one) associated with the technical professions, paricularly software development, and the venture capital types are taking advantage of that fact by acting as if their wealth is built on their technical talents (e.g. Paul Graham appointing himself and his news site as champions of hacker culture or Elon Musk attempting his out-of-touch idea of code review).
The idea was that if you hated both techbros and actual computer nerds, you could help ruin that prestige by taking a page from the VCs themselves (Airbnb in particular being an Y Combinator startup). Make everyone an "independent contractor", shift the ever-accumulating capital expenditure on them, make the crabs drag each other back into the bucket and position yourself as the purely extractive middle man. See how the techbros like it when you do it to their little sacred cow industry.
And as @froztbyte points out, some of this has already happened. I'm just trying to imagine the cognitive dissonance of pretending you're a genius programmer while also believing (even celebrating) that LLMs will replace software developers.
Thank you this is also a great answer, I still disagree, but I think it's just on an emotional level and you've given me a lot to think about.
Apologies if I've come across as combative or rude, I've come from my "all" feed and I'm not as familiar with your arguments and terminology as I should be.
Thank you again for your post
The term includes those devs who carry water for the Silicon Valley vulture capitalist crowd as well.
Thank you, I feel that's blurring the lines in a way I'm not happy with. But I appreciate your answer and the time you took to write it