Category: Technology Is Useless

One of the topics of this website is that “Technology Is Useless“. A lot of what is going on in technology (or what people consider technology) is useless to society at large. They think they are “solving problems”, but they are not even first world problems (like finding a cab). The companies people fawn over are not doing anything about climate change, or energy, or water. People in the startup cult are not as smart as they think they are. And I think a lot of them live in a bubble.

There is a guy living in Silicon Valley named Michael O. Church (henceforth MOC). Until recently, his site had a lot of posts that articulate this theme better than I have. But before I got around to writing this post, he took down most of his posts. You can find them archived here. [1]

From what I could gather before he removed his posts, he has been a software developer in SV for several years. He worked at Google, and was booted out due to politics. He started writing about the culture in Silicon Valley, and criticizing the startup fetish that has taken over our culture.

He has angered a lot of people in SV, which has hurt him when he has had to seek employment. One person that he angered is Paul Graham, programmer, author, founder of incubator Y Combinator. YC published the news aggregation site Hacker News.

PG has written a few books about a language called Common Lisp. He used that to make a company he sold to Yahoo in the late 1990s, which made him rich. He has written a few more books, and his essays on his website are pretty influential in “the Valley”. He started YC in 2005. Now, some VC firms will only invest in companies that are YC alums.

After the dot com bust, working at a startup had little appeal for a lot of people, especially outside the confines of SV. MOC credits PG with rehabilitating the image of startups via his essays and YC, and making them appealling places to work. MOC wrote this is good, but it has gone too far. Now startups have gone from being a stage a company goes through, to being an end in itself. It’s now a lifestyle. MOC wrote that PG is partly responsible for the “bro” culture we see in SV today.

MOC wrote that he has never met PG, but PG knows who he is and hates MOC. YC is an investor in Quora, and leaned on Quora to ban MOC from the site. Somewhere in the archives MOC lists a few more ways that PG has tried to make life more difficult for MOC, usually indirectly, and usually via YC leaning on companies to not hire MOC.

Why would PG hate MOC? Because MOC is living proof that PG is selling the world a bill of goods. PG tells people that if you work or found a startup, you will be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams. Apply to be in YC! Change your life and the world for the better! Or come to SV and work for a company that has been through YC. It’s the ticket to fame and fortune!

MOC is a smart guy. He worked at a few startups, and it did not work out. He has written posts explaining that the only people that win in SV are the VCs. They always win. Sometimes the founders get rich, but not always. And employees usually wind up wasting years chasing the dream. They get paid below market wages. They are promised “equity”, but either the company goes under, or the half a percent turns out to be not a whole lot when all is said and done. SV is the Wall Street of the West Coast.

MOC is living proof that PG is pretty much putting lipstick on a pig. PG does not need the money. It is probably ego. PG wants a nice legacy. It is hard for most people to admit they are wrong. When you have spent the past decade pushing something, it’s even harder.

MOC also points out that when firms say “We don’t care if you have worked with the language we use; we just want smart people”, they are usually lying. Have you ever noticed these firms rarely hire anyone over 30? It’s not because you get dumb when you are 30. They know it’s harder to sell the false dream to people past a certain age. When you get married, have kids, have to pay off your student loans, and/or realize you will need a LOT of money for retirement, an actual paycheck looks better than equity fairy dust.

Here are a couple of more quotes:

From “Silicon Valley Can Be Beaten“:
Increasingly, true technologists look at the culture of the VC-funded world and realize that it has to die, because marketing experiments using technology have won the decade while the larger goal of improving the human condition has been forgotten. To be a technologist used to mean that one wanted to invest in humanity’s total capital; now, the industry has been swarmed by champion value-capturers. Consequently, the short-term “next quarter” mentality, couched in juvenile lingo about “failing fast”, has won and to have vision is to make oneself a pariah.

From “Don’t Waste Your Time In Crappy Startup Jobs“:
Scientific research changes the world. Large-scale infrastructure projects change the world. Most businesses, on the other hand, are incremental projects, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Startups are not a good vehicle for “changing the world”.

One thing he wrote that I really like and caught my attention is that most of the companies in SV companies are not really technology companies. These companies are marketing experiments using technology.

[1] I have wanted to finish this post for a while, so I am kind of going by memory here. Also, I have never contacted anyone mentioned in this post, including MOC. All opinions/interpretations are my own. Paul Graham does not endorse this post.

Image from Stargate Wiki, assumed allowed under Fair Use.

The “Technology Is Useless” theme has a couple of major sub-points: Most of what is going on in the technology space is not as innovative as many people think (especially the people doing it) and it is not being directed towards serious problems our society is facing.

Part of the cause of these is that a lot of people in the technology/startup world are not as smart as they think they are, and many of them live in a bubble. Maybe it is impossible to be a human and not live in a bubble. But if you are really so smart, you should at least be aware of it. I do not mean living in an economic bubble, but more in the sense of living in an echo chamber, and associating with people who think the same way you do.

Technology is pretty male-dominated. It may be impossible to declare a King of Useless Technology. But I may have found the Queen: Danielle Morrill. At this time, her blog has a picture of San Francisco at the top of every page.

Her tagline is “I can see the future, because I live in it today.”  What sort of future do you live in? Do you get electricity from a fusion reactor? Do you have an electric car with a range of 500 miles? Are your goods shipped in a cargo vessel that is powered by a nuclear reactor instead of diesel? That is the sort of future we need to working towards. Not going on and on about startups over and over again.

She also says “I’ve received most of my education in business working for my father’s finance consulting company, Reliant Consulting & Research, from the time I was 12 years old.” Finance consulting is another example of uselessness. How many people do you need to hire to refer people to Vanguard?

Now she runs some company called Mattermark. It  “Provides Powerful Tools for Researching Startups”.

So it’s a startup about startups. Is it a bubble within a bubble, or a bubble around the bubble?

She closed a prior startup she ran because she did not want to become a “zombie startup“, which she defines as “startups out there who are still ‘operating’ but might as well not be”.

More startups fit that definition than you think.

Image from Wikipedia, assumed allowed under Fair Use

This is sort of another “Technology is useless” post. Recently I sent it as an email to a few people I know after I said I was becoming disillsioned about the software industry. I think the software industry is getting better at looking at how it makes software, but nobody seems to be thinking about what the software or the company they are at actually does.

I am kind of frustrated with the software industry. I am trying to transition to another language (Ruby) that companies say they are clamoring for. Yet they all want someone with a few years of experience. I could probably get a Java job, but then the next time I look for a job, people will look at my resume, and say, “Hey, he’s done Java. Let’s give him another Java job.” I would like to get out of that trap. I don’t hate Java, like some developers do, but I would like to have some choice in the matter. I went into software to have more control over my life, but that does not seem to be happening.

Plus a lot of what goes on in software seems pretty stupid. Everybody keeps talking about startups, and counting on that to save the economy, yet a lot of them do stuff that is pretty stupid. Like finding bars that are not crowded. Or they are replicating some particular vertical from Craigslist (selling furniture, finding a babysitter). Or they have something to do with Facebook or Twitter.

Meanwhile peak oil and climate change are still bearing down on us. Shale oil may not be the savior that people hoped. We are still using hydrocarbons for transportation, while using more of it for plastic would be better (since plastics can be reused and recycled) and we are not doing enough to push electricity for transportation. Norway is going to try using thorium as a nuclear fuel. I am not sure why nobody tried this sooner. (If thorium is even half as good as its boosters say, it would still be worth it in my opinion.) I would like to be involved in finding and using energy, but I don’t have a degree in engineering, and I am not a grad student willing to work for half-price.

Startups and a lot of consulting firms do have a better process for making software than large corporations. It is more iterative and more responsive to users’ needs. It is easier to test, tested more often and in more ways, and generally easier to change. Larger firms, on the other hand, use what is called the “waterfall process”: make all the decisions up front, have a Bataan Death March to implement it, and hope that the users’ requirements have not changed in the meantime. So the people with the best process are making the least relevant software.

The last place I was at managed the electrical grid for a few states. (So far they have not asked me to come back, and for a variety of reasons I may or may not apply for another job there.) People complain about brownouts, but if the grid were to be overloaded and shut down, it would take three days for it to be turned on again. So the lives of 20 million people would be on hold for three days. They were pretty bureaucratic and slow, but what they do is pretty important. Go ahead, tell me how important your startup is. Tell me how important Facebook is.

But most startups think that what they are doing is a big deal, either due to the specific product they are pushing or because they are a Startup, and as we all know, STARTUPS ARE MAGIC. (Why? Because it’s a startup, silly. The reasoning always seemed kind of circular to me.) They go through incubators that cycle wave after wave of Zuckerberg wannabes, not seeing any irony that they are all depending on electricity from the same boring utility they all probably think they are too good to work for.

I think a lot of people are too enamored of their processes and technologies to ask themselves if what they are doing is useful to society, or even to themselves. I know someone who left Groupon who is now dedicated to helping software developers improve their skills. On one level, that is a good thing and should be encouraged. But once again, I wonder how much thought he has put into it. On his twitter profile, he says that “Latent human potential pisses me off.” Wonderful. But does he think about that human potential is doing? If all of the mental energy that people expend on sports and their iPhones was devoted to evolution and particle physics, we could probably cure cancer and have fusion in a decade. Nobody is predicting the oil will last beyond a century. What happens then?

I was at a tech meetup recently. The guy running it said he would start letting recruiter emails through to the list. He will still filter out the ones for people who are just cloning Groupon and Pinterest. Everybody else laughed when they heard that. But I wonder how many of them laughed at Groupon or Pinterest. Nobody would laugh if they heard about someone building another power plant, or building another desalination plant, or converting more land to farmland. Nobody would ask why anyone would want more electricity, water or food. Nobody would say, “Don’t bother, it’s been done.” If you think the clone of something is a dumb idea, then the original is a dumb idea too.

(When Groupon started, I needed people to explain it to me more than once. It’s like curling: It’s so stupid, my brain kept rejecting it.)

In the past couple of years I have seen some interesting changes in the industry. People are now talking about the process of learning and productivity. The Pomodoro Technique and sites like LifeHacker are improvements. I don’t remember software developers ten years ago approaching the process of making software from that angle. There is also more attention paid to process, testing and workflow.

But sometimes I think that the infatuation with learning goes too far. I think for a lot of developers, the ideal is to be a trainer or an educator, to bring new people into the fold or help veteran developers do their jobs better. Another highly esteemed goal is to make software that other developers use in their toolchain: A library, a framework, an editor. Then there is all the obsessing about toolchains and workflows that developers do, and chasing trends. Should I use vim or Sublime? Moving the industry forward is necessary. But what about the users? When do we stop obsessing about how we make software, and start thinking about the people who use it but know nothing about how it is made? What about all the real problems our world is facing? I don’t mean the fact that many IT shops are on old versions of their software, or using bad processes or languages that you don’t like. Things like the fact that the world’s population is increasing, while crop yields are flat. The fact that the processes of producing and procuring energy are taking more energy. Perhaps software can do nothing for any of these issues. But let’s not confuse making your life easier with helping humanity. I just think that people with college degrees should do more to help the world than people who are less educated.

Some agile developers write books, make videos and put on conferences about their processes. Then they go back to writing software for startups that clone other startups. If the only people who take your advice are irrelevant, doesn’t that make you irrelevant too?

There is an article out there called “Facebook the Devourer” with a good line: “The best and brightest have been lured into the beast with giant paychecks, childish perks and the idea that somehow a new blue square button on Facebook is the best possible way they can change the world.” But what does changing the world mean? For me, it means find new sources of energy as well as more ways of utilizing current ones and designing and building the infrastructures to use them.

So anyway, I don’t have a degree in engineering. Should I just go to some startup or corporate job and suck it up while the world’s fuel tank goes to “E”? Maybe one person can’t change the world, but I am not too thrilled with where I see things going. I have had jobs that I have hated. Even though it can be good money, having a job you hate can be more stressful than having no job at all. I have this hope that if I learned some more math that maybe I could make software that is actually useful. I am involved with a library to implement math functionality in a language usually associated with web apps (Ruby). Perhaps I could be some roaming math/energy consultant before the seas rise and there really is no money to do things we should have done 30 years ago.