"Cool technology" here means things like dishwashers, or MRI machines, which pretty much strictly improve people's lives, not slightly better advertisement algorithms.

I don't think you need to be an asshole to invent a dishwasher or an MRI machine. The usefulness alone lets you sell these. AI on the other hand...

There is more than usefulness to it. Take what became social media later but what at the beginning was just a means for friends to have many-to-many async conversations instead of only 1:1 in an easy way. This was useful, I have no doubt about this. Yet the final product sold is something quite different, and in some cases can hurt people instead of benefiting them.

Invention is one thing, a product to sell is almost an entirely different thing. The more I see the more I realise that being technical is almost all the time the least important part.

You need to get people around you to succeed. In practice that means investors so that you can hire and people with the right connections so you can get sweet deals.

You need people skills not inventions. And a bit more fake it until you make it rather than correct/technical information.

I think that this is true, and I hate it. In a previous job, I had to work with the worst (shop)-framework I have ever seen. It is very expensive, over-engineered in the worst ways, very slow and awful to use. The blatant misunderstanding of software architecture principles in that software is hard to put into words. For example: It took an experienced developer two weeks and more than 2000 LoC in more than 40 files to add a new label to a product. But the company creating this mess is good at marketing, and their events are great.

A few weeks ago one of the guys (a freelancer) who stayed in that project was on an event of a competitor to this shop framework. After that event, he said that their software was way better, but it wasn't interesting enough for him to invest in learning that system. In his opinion, their marketing is not good enough, and they won't be able to sell it to important companies.

So we are stuck with bad products because they apparently sell better than the good ones.

The developers in the company I mentioned first even knew beforehand that the software was bad. They were "included" in the decision process, and they all voted against the bad software and preferred another solution (it was before my time, and I don't remember if they told me what they actually wanted to use). But the manager who made the ultimate decision had such a good time with the guys from the bad product that he decided to go with it.

I know a lot of good developers and people who can sell themselves really well. Sadly, these two groups hardly overlap.

> I know a lot of good developers and people who can sell themselves really well. Sadly, these two groups hardly overlap.

Because the best marketers and salespeople are plainly people who lie. People who lie about the capability of the product they are selling to get their customer to buy more of it. Good marketers and salespeople cripple their financial gain by being truthful. So liars get more money, so they get more customers, so they get more power. So it goes.

Software development, being somewhere between a craft, an art, and a science, is fundamentally grounded in truth. You can't bullshit your way to quality software. You can't lie to the computer like you can to a human (maybe with AI you can). So "success" in these two fields is diametrically different.

Though I bet you'll get the opposite answer on a sales/marketing forum.

that's not a manager, that's an internal client from hell.

and yes, the world is full of these dysfunctional groups flush with money. (you might euphemistically call it this or that VC/startup scene)

on one hand it's great that there's plenty of room for technical improvement, on the other it needs the right socioeconomic circumstances. sometimes FOSS helps with this. (developers who spend their career working on products based on FOSS stuff at least have some chance of knowing that their efforts can might be valuable for a wider audience.)

That's only the VC angle. Plenty of revolutionary products will find adoption without playing the SV startup playbook. I think it's time to reevaluate the startup business "wisdom" of these past 15 years in the light of the companies and founders "role models" it has produced over that time frame. Good at making money, obviously. Holding the promise of making society better? I'll let you judge. As for me since I've read from Zero to One I have a sense I have been duped. I was once grateful for HN for opening my eyes on marketing. Now I'm hangover at how it perverted everything.

For sure. I think I expressed myself poorly; I very much do not think being an asshole is a necessity for cool technology.

I do think that "cool technology" such as dishwashers and MRI machines is a virtue and we're better of with those than without.

Plenty of people are finding AI to be useful. I don't know what you're hinting at.

You don't need to be an asshole, but if you win big enough to end up in the spotlight, you might eventually get painted as an asshole.

UNIX is pretty cool but Ken Thompson isn't an asshole (as far as I know).

I agree.

My point (which I communicated poorly) wasn't that assholes are necessary, but rather that there are reasonable definitions of "cool technology" which are an inherent virtue.

Pretty sure Paul Lauterbur was no douchebag and good products and inventions can come from good people.

Has Sam actually caused any cool technology? It seems Loopt was kind of meh, he's just an investor in Helion. OpenAI was largely funded by Musk and would have happened without Sam and it may have actually lived up to the Open bit if he hadn't been there which would have been cooler. Now it's just another corporate.