Thought Shrapnel

This is the best takedown of Zuckerberg, et al. I’ve seen in a while. The whole thing is not much longer than my excerpt, so I suggest reading the whole thing. It’s spot-on.

That you got lucky at a singular moment in history and now you’re an old man is not an easy set of facts to accept. So I understand — that is, I see how — one can end up associating one’s best years with superficial aspects of their circumstance. You had no responsibilities, no serious consequences for failure, and the freedom to be reckless and inconsiderate. You launched small new products that didn’t require building a team. If you attended school, the vast majority of your fellow students were men, and they were more or less all the same person as you.

If these are the conditions under which passionate creative problem solving thrives, then of course we must recover them to make software great again. But they are not. We need look no further than the “hackathon,” that sad facsimile of the days when we were all learning the basics so fast that the world could be ours with just a day or two of focused effort. Hype up an exciting atmosphere, assemble some folks with so few attachments in life that they have time to spend all weekend at a hackathon, and this ritual will summon up the old gods. The hackathon is the proof that people believe this can work, and it is the proof that it doesn’t.

Maybe most of the critical things that can be created by one guy typing furiously are gone, and the opportunities that remain require expertise and wisdom from a bunch of different people. This is harder than spending all day every day doing your favorite thing and insisting that everyone else leave you alone. Often it’s boring. Sometimes there’s paperwork. You will have to have conversations with people you don’t always understand right away. Your job evolves, and it turns out not to be exactly what you thought it would be like when you were a teenager.

Source: Chris Martin

Image: Snowscat