They promptly put on a protest against The Man when asked to cut out the potheadery. Sun's engineers refused to stop smoking pot for the visit of the President (or Vice President, I don't remember which) of the United States. If you've read the "Life in the Boy's Dorm" series by Nancy Hauge, the power dynamic was very different then. Well, the sort of irreverent crackpottery that made up life in the first dot com boom doesn't really fly right now. Guys with pretty much zero technical skills used to be called geeks just for liking a tv show or play videogame. "We call girls with cute glasses "geeks"." Yeah, I find everybody is a geek culture annoying too. "The best way to defend this is that before the ipod existed, noone would ever say "I'm such a geek"." He was good in tech, but talking with him was a chore. However, admin I considered chore to talk with was condescending too often and it was hard to get what I needed from him. I dont doubt that there were groups of great admins that were not treated fairly despite acting all polite and all that. I have seen such behavior towards admin, but then again I did not liked talking with that particular admin either. "I can recall people dreading to call the sysadmin to deal with anything. In any case, if that workplace treated accountants badly too, the workplace was shitty for more then one group. In pretty much all workplaces I have been at, they have been treated with respect. There is nothing wrong with the accounting department. "And this snowballed into the workplace where the only people threated like the IT department was the accounting one." I mean, not being treated as something super special is not "considered less that nothing by society". The ok treatment is what majority of people have. Not being rock star is not an oppression. Nothing like the "rock star" attitude you get today." The constraints of tomorrow will be also different.ĭoing something that matters is ALWAYS HARD. The market was unproven (the 2000 bubble killed so much). Less libraries, less frameworks, no crazy powerful API (can you believe making uber before google map ?) and no proof whatsoever that what you wanted to do was achievable. Networks and computer where slow and expensive (we now got unmetered VPS for 3€/month, come on!). You couldn't google your way out of anything like today (now if you google, SO answer everything!). My father actually told me in 2003 that he was disappointed I choose to work in such a boring field. They were basically rejected, as something annoying you had to have somewhere in your closet. The working world didn't trust them, believe in them or value them. Geeks were considered less that nothing by society. I agree that time changes, but this is discarding the merits of those who did it then.īelieve it or not, at that time it was not easy either. "You wouldn't be able to publish the same story today." "You wouldn't be able to get away with the same jokes today." "Now you couldn't do it like they did it before". Brian Kennish quit Google and released Disconnect, a privacy plugin for browsers. When you do find them it's no coincidence that they're usually on the periphery of what SV touches. It's pretty hard today to find projects or communities that have similar levels of energy and disregard for rules. Not to mention whatever is/was happening between SV and the intelligence agencies. YouTube's ContentID system means thousands of legal satire and parody videos are removed every day. Founders in file sharing or media make a point in investment pitches that they'll be conformist. The tech companies have become the media companies. Today, startups that push the boundaries on bad laws and regulations are more likely to be roundly criticized than praised.ĭMCA notices are automatically complied with without question via automated systems. I find it hard to imagine a Google employee releasing an ad blocker, or Popcorn Time raising a Series A round, or startups shipping crypto that breaks the law, or a startup selling offensive security software (there's a reason that business has been pushed overseas) break the rules, etc." rhetoric, Silicon Valley couldn't be more different today.
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