“The Gang has a Mid-Life Crisis”
2025 April 28
It's
understandable why the guys who had big tech startup successes in the 90s and
early aughts think that "DEI" is the cause of all their problems. Not
understandable in the "gotta hand it to em" sense, but in the sense
that it's not hard to follow the stupid mistake they all make.
I didn't
see any of this unfold, but I think I've pretty much seen it. 2005, old dorm
room with mold on the walls, the birds start to chirp their alarm to the fact
that you're up way too late. I can't argue with anyone who wants to say the
place exudes "a masculine energy," or at least a masculine smell. I'm
here because programming was the only career path for which, in the limited
vision of my youth, I could already see and understand exactly what I'd be
doing, and that there was very little I would need from anyone else to get
there. I'd be very suprised if Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, and James
Damore don't know, and to this day yearn to recreate, the sensations I'm
describing. They never find it again, because:
1.
These men are no longer
young. I'm not either. I still have Ideas, and I still think about what it
would be like to crush it for a few weeks straight, alternating between coffee
and beer, manifesting a vision. But... well, if you're still young, you'll find
out soon enough, and otherwise, you know already that there are too many other
things that need doing, because responsible people have responsibilities.
2.
The Internet is no longer
the world's great frontier, and the pool of unsatisfied wants that suddenly
welled up as the world first came online is not what it once was. There once
was no graphical operating system, no decent web browser, no search engine that
could find what you were looking for. The basic amenities are now there. Of
course there is still much room for innovation, but merely being able to write
a computer program and understand what computer networks are good for is no
longer the superpower it once was. If you're young enough to pound Red Bulls
all night, you're probably not old enough to have the breadth of knowledge
required to launch a great software product.
3.
For those who happened
upon great success, chance was a significant factor. First just being born into
a little seed cash and enough comfort to go a while without working a straight
job. As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage:
Ain't no garages in the trailer park. And as many said in the startup incubator
we lovingly called the Bitcoin Basement, it takes a dozen miracles to launch a
business successfully.
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.
Maybe,
like Dennis Hopper's character in Hoosiers, you need to give up on trying to
relive the glory days of being the high school basketball star, and start to
accept and settle into your new responsibilities as a coach, a respectable
father, and not being the town drunk.
