Most of the "creative nerds" I have encountered in this industry are arrogant, have grandiose beliefs about their own intelligence and have zero empathy for anybody who is not exactly like them. I don't think things would be much better if they ran the show.
Had a coworker say to a client, "I could explain it you but you're not smart enough to understand it."
Absolutly ridiculous and toxic individual.
I am too old to hang out with negative people, also too old for people who are only interested in making money. So I searching for a new tribe, I think outdoors people are the happiest bunch. I just don't know what can I do.
I recently saw a video about Boeing that concluded that the whole debacle was due to it straying aware from its commitment to good engineering and to trying to please the wall street. It traced back to the source of decline as the purchase of McDonnell Douglas which was mainly done due to Boeing management feeling that they needed better "business types", which was all that McDonnell Douglas.
Slowly, but I am seeing an acceptance and respect towards the nerds/engineering instead of hype men & impressive stock figures. Wall street types are seen as the hyenas/fox in a sheep's skin that need not be celebrated and looked upto.
Meanwhile Wall St. simply downgrades, the MBAs shrug their shoulders and speak about drive-thru ordering as an innovation, the Founders get ousted, and people become sick.
Short-terms gains at the expense of long-term losses is a fact that has to controlled by the board of directors and the ridiculous salaries of CEOs has to be stopped. A rule must be put in place that the shares they gain cannot be used during their tenure and only used 2-5 yrs after leaving the post.
Founders bring in an MBA to run the company is like parents bringing in a Consultant to raise the children. You can never expect anyone else to care of the kids as much as their own parents.
I think that Google lost its way due to Eric Schmidt. Considering that [Page was forced out in 2001](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Page#Changes_in_manageme...), he was away too long and Eric did his MBA-shit and screwed up the company. Page should have returned as CEO in 5 years instead of 10 yrs, it was too late by then. Now Google is Evil.
I feel that if someone like Page was leading Google and all the tech giants where lead by nerds like Satya Nadella & Sundar Pichai. PRISM & attack on encryption would not have been too strong. We need more founders like Elon Musk & Jack Dorsey. I hope someone like Sergey Brin advices the WhiteHouse on tech-business while Steve Woz or Richard Stallman advices on tech-ethics.
Mark Zuckerberg is a disaster, so is Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison & all Steve-Jobs-like creatures.
Video: "McDonnell Douglas had used Boeing's money to buy Boeing" - https://youtu.be/EESYomdoeCs?t=468
This is how I felt about myself, I spent my early twenty working a job living frugally saving and then quitting to work on my own projects. Failed entrepreneurship was a great lesson in how hard it is build things people want and how easy it is to build things you think people want. The difference is often very subtle small details, but asking the right questions to unearth those details in incredibly challenging.
The amount of things that someone will give their time or attention to our suprisingly small
So much this.
wars aren't started over human-rights, they are fought when you f%%k with someone's money.
True. Right now amidst the pandemic, it turned out the farmers, medical people, janitors, delivery guys are the most essential jobs.
* Meaninglessness. Most of the projects are simply not necessary, they do not help society in anyway, they just exist to make someone else wealthy.
* Tedium. The intellectual challenges aren't there after a while. There are countless intellectual challenges in the field of computing / computer science, but they are usually precisely the ones that industry has no interest on.
* Micromanagement. "Agile" and similar management practices (yes, I know, you're not doing it right, blah blah blah) are downright humiliating and infantilizing. Almost no other highly skilled professional has to tolerate such level of intrusion on their day-to-day activities. I love deep thinking and creative expression. The modern corporate setting prevents this by design.
* Open-spaces. See above.
* Idealism. I was so excited about the possibilities that the Internet opened for humanity. Now we have ad-tech and horrible exploitation of "gig-economy", warehouse workers and the like. This is definitely not what I have in mind when I started.
* Conformism. The tech industry is extremely conformist. Monetary consideration always wins. Deference to power always wins. "Hacker" used to mean something completely different. Almost opposite to the current definition.
I realized that what I always loved about computing was the endless creative and intellectual possibilities allowed by the medium. This is more or less the opposite of what the industry values, despite what they might advertise endlessly. There is nothing cool about it. It is stale and anti-intellectual.
I don't need a lot of money to be happy. You probably don't either. Time on this earth is the most valuable thing we have, and I would rather spend it waiting tables than enduring one more stand-up meeting.
I think creative nerds are the life-blood of the industry, but they tend to be shy and not assertive, so they have their life controlled by the "business types". I honestly believe that if the nerds told them to fuck off and started spending their time working on things they think are relevant, the world would become much better quickly. This won't happen, I know.