@Elucidating In some ways I’ve thought that not getting into grad school was one of the better things that ever happened to me, and perhaps similarly, having the first startup acquisition I was a part of crash and burn really was more of a blessing than it would have been if it had been marginally more successful
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Matthew Lyon (mattly@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 18-Jul-2024 00:31:40 JST Matthew Lyon -
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⛈️ Information ⛈️ (elucidating@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 18-Jul-2024 00:31:41 JST ⛈️ Information ⛈️ Lots of people go into tech, they get a positive signal from being the technological equivalent of an agreeable party person, and never gaining any technical depth, leadership skill, or experience actually shipping a project.
And then they're in their late 30s or whatever, realizing that they're lying to people about their finances while waving around an expired founders card. They're living out of an illegal pod complex in SF's Mission district and they have no prospects, no real career.
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⛈️ Information ⛈️ (elucidating@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 18-Jul-2024 00:31:41 JST ⛈️ Information ⛈️ This is *especially* obvious when you meet a lot of "AI engineers" and realize that if their underlying API doesn't support it, they can't do it and you realize, "Oh... you're a python programmer who's read the docs. You're... you're not actually an AI specialist. You know this Python API."
There are obviously enormously smart, respectable people in the field. But they are not needed or even wanted to make a customer support chatbot or copyright ripping sextbot or whatever. That's for the marks
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⛈️ Information ⛈️ (elucidating@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 18-Jul-2024 00:31:41 JST ⛈️ Information ⛈️ And I think this is where a lot of people in tech who marched through the world of startups (especially those like myself with any degree of success) need to recognize: the 2005-2020 era was basically a lot of people participating in ponzi schemes, in which the bagholders were novel: tech workers accepting private equity with dubious terms in exchange for the privilege of executing the "mission," namely their incredibly time consuming labor to make these products on the off chance they blow up.
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⛈️ Information ⛈️ (elucidating@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 18-Jul-2024 00:31:42 JST ⛈️ Information ⛈️ Recently an old acquaintance came to me expecting that I'd be sympathetic to their extremely awful AI grift, because they saw me saying "the technology has potential."
I confess, I hesitated before telling them it was not good (I used stronger words). I feel bad about all this, but I really mean the best for folks when I tell them:
You cannot build a career in tech superficially chasing fads and the latest hype cycle. There is no substance there. You will end up a hollow grifter, as well.
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