News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Silicon Valley Software Engineer Salaries by Experience L... by DonHopkins on Wednesday November 29, 2017 @03:17PM (#15810451)
You hit the nail on the head, but it's not limited to (but is concentrated in) Silicon Valley:

>I would go out on a limb and say that there are more smooth talkers with silver tongues in Silicon Valley, who will talk their way through an interview and only provide the perception of talent.

And smooth bloggers with silver cursors, who will type their way through a posting only to provide the perception of talent. People famous for being famous, cheerleaders who fancy themselves the authority on this or that because they have a lot of followers, but have no technical skills whatsoever, and have never done any of the difficult tedious shit work and midnight oil combustion required to ship a real product, like Scoble and his emulators.

I think a big wave of incompetent developers started with the "Ruby on Rails in 10 minutes" screencast that anyone could watch and easily duplicate the exact same CRUD web site with lots of pretty frosting and absolutely no cake. So many "dot com" startup web sites since then have the same level of out-of-the-box polish and spray-on tan, yet absolutely nothing tangible behind them, in terms of skilled thorough execution or original tractable ideas.

The shoddy buggy thrown-together quality, carelessly flagrant and criminal privacy violations in the naked pursuit of virality, and total lack of maintenance and customer support of sites like AngelList.com, where the lights are on but nobody's home, exemplify what I mean. It's got about as much depth and execution as "Hot or Not", and explicitly caters and appeals to the Silicon Valley charlatan crowd.

Tell HN: AngelList told my employer that I'd updated my profile: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326011

diskcat: "This is damage control. You clearly want to make people update their profiles or whatever by pretending to be somebody else they know. You went with an immoral strategy to grow your business and that now it has finally hit you in the face on a very visible website you are here to be all apologetics. It's the "easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission" strategy and it is deliberate thus I must conclude that your apology is insincere and is only an attempt at limiting the backlash against you."

AngelList acquires Product Hunt (techcrunch.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13080283

exogeny: "Why are we applauding Ryan again? This is a saving face bailout from one of their own investors and a particularly embarrassing one at that given his statements of "I wouldn't consider anything under $100mm" and the pedigree of his investors. They raised a shit ton of money and built nothing. No real technology, no significant additions to their platform, no development of community. And now the result is an all-stock acquihire from AL, which will amount of a purchase of their users and a one year rental of the same engineers and team that failed to build anything worthwhile. Raising money at a $22m val from A16Z and selling for less than that - all stock no less - is a failure, and we need to stop lauding it as if it's somehow notable or impressive to take money and waste it."

There are no comments on this comment yet.