Why do you perceive it as bitter rather than simply factual observations about employment? It is a whole discipline of social science research, eg “Moral Mazes.”

My personal goal is for my beliefs and my participation in a community to above all be accurate. If the fact-based conclusions aren’t very pleasant, that is a function of the state of the world, not the state of participation.

Thank you for this comment.

You seem to be reading a bitterness into the comment that is not there. Apart from that your comment is also very true. The op will go very far! Big picture, networking, and management are far more valued than someone with raw technical ability who misses the above.

Indeed. If your goal is to become a VP at a successful startup, you're better off working on your networking/blogging/social/managerial skills than studying anything technical.

It is needed to offset the disgustingly fawning, sugary, overly-optimistic, back-slapping responses like yours.

Overall it results in a fairly balanced forum.

That breaks the site guidelines. Please follow them when posting here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Tech startup as a phenomenon of the last 25-ish years is maturing and has become sufficiently mainstream that it has attracted a very wide spectrum of people, so much so that the majority of them are - as you would expect - quite average. It turns out that being average is not enough to beat the odds, and those are quite stacked against early-stage startups. So you end up with fairly low chances of success and the resulting bitterness. As this industry continues to mature, the next step will be calls for regulation, unions, etc.

None of this is new - it's happened to all industries after they became sufficiently mainstream. Take a look at aviation - at first it was the wild west at the beginning of the century, then WW1 and WW2 brought some rapid advances, and in the last 70 years things have been relatively stale. Anyone dreaming of designing the next airliner today is a very different person from those who designed them at the beginning of that cycle.

I am not even saying there's anything wrong with all of this. As an industry matures and becomes more mainstream (aka, affects more people), we have to put some safety mechanisms in place. That means discussions become more about safety and less about achievement, and this attracts a fundamentally different group of people - more average, more bitter.

Kudos to the OP: just like syndacks, I am rooting for him and hope he'll use his enthusiasm to continue to shoot for the stars!

That's a nice theory but tech people have been bitter since the invention of Usenet.

> this attracts a fundamentally different group of people - more average, more bitter.

I'd put it another way : it makes room for many people to participate in the social life by mean of work in the civil aviation.

So, from being a domain ruled by elite (of gifted or lucky or rich persons), it ends up a to be a domain of emancipation for big parts of society...