I'm a coder in my 30s now. But when I was a coder in my 20s, FWIW almost all the wealthy (male) investors I interacted with were not degrading towards myself and my peers FWIW. And the ones that were tended to be in their 20s or early 30s.

And Gordon Gecko type characters are already pretty rare to begin with, especially in the Bay Area.

The entire Bay Area is built around Gordon Gekko types. VC is Gordon Gekko. "Disruption" is the Schumpeterian hypercapitalist "creative destruction" that underlies Gekko's "greed is good" maxim.

In the Bay it’s about “Making the World a Better Place”, which is the all-important fig leaf to cover up the uncouth sin of hypercapitalist greed.

Wish I had the power to upvote more than once.

Gordon Gekko type behavior is pretty rare around the Bay Area in public. You'd be shocked to see how some top financiers and executives act in private among peers who can (supposedly) be trusted. The mask really comes off, especially after a few drinks and some recreational pharmaceuticals.

It's a big club, and you ain't in it.

Some degree of greediness, and other unattractive characteristics, displayed in private is to be expected in even the most virtuous figures.

What is unusual however are those who are consistently sleazy.

Nobody intelligent spends their time hanging out or working with likely backstabbers, if they have any other choice.

Which is why I feel confident in my assertion, even though I haven't personally inspected every private club and office in the region.

To be fair, OP said degrading yourself, not that they degrade you.

+1, the most insulting people I've met were the young "entrepreneur" types, not older/accomplished/actually wealthy people.

The older and accomplished ones have nothing to prove and have been that way long enough that they've had a chance to grow out of old habits.

i am in my 30s now and in my 20s they were super nice to me. its just that in retrospect i see how that was a tactic to exploit me. and to be very clear i benefited from my relationships with them quite a bit! but a spade is a spade and luck had a lot to do with my exits. if i hadn't been so lucky they would have just exploited me without there being ends to justify the means

> they were super nice to me. its just that in retrospect i see how that was a tactic to exploit me

Omg. Then what isn’t exploitative?! There’s always a bit of a selfish motive in developing partnerships or friendships even.

This is next level victimization.

In this thread: HN fails to understand flattery, a behavior that features heavily in popular culture with a clear record in literature dating back 3,000+ years, and a heavily-covered topic in early childhood education since time immemorial.

What part of flattery did they fail to understand?

Thanks for your reflections, certainly it's important to have in mind that VC's are innit for the money, which makes the world spin

Also, it's survivorship bias, to a degree. Being nice is just as much tool as being smart, and you can wield it with intent that is just as malicious. Truly successful people have to wield many tools successfully, it's only natural that one of the easiest to master is commonly used.

You never know what people's intent is, and you should assume the best until proven otherwise, but like you say, a spade is a spade, and being nice is useful to the people being nice.

I wasn't trying to imply that Musk would do any degrading. He does however expect the employees to do it themselves, given the working hour expectations and minimal consideration for stability he's given Twitter's employees.

I say this as someone who sees nothing wrong for cranking out 60+ hour weeks of that's your thing.

hmmm you seem like the exact sort of chap i'd love to hire! plz send resume as well as a signed consent for the doors to be locked from the outside while you are inside the (mandatory) office!

Please don't cross into personal attack on HN.

You may not owe wealthy men better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. The issue is what this sort of bile does to us, in our own community.

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

I recognize this as reactionary and low value, and will refrain from similar in the future. I fail to see how it is a personal attack, though. If you have the time (I know you're busy around here), the connection would be elucidating. I don't see lampooning a statement another has made as a personal attack on that person, especially when I'm attacking the content of the statement with no regard for its maker.

Asserting what a person "doesn't care about" in order to make them look bad strikes me as unduly pejorative and therefore an attack.

Ahh, so an attack on Musk as opposed to Marc. Makes sense. I wasn't intending to make Musk look bad with that statement, just pointing out what I believe to be the fallacy in Marc's viewpoint, but I get how your interpretation would be the common one. Thanks!