Live in Chicago. Once a quant, worked in many startups, machine learning and Haskell. Want to go back to quant path.

[NeroTulip]

What's Google's union risk list?

[october]

Silicon Valley is terrified of unions. Most of the large tech companies have lists of people they consider at risk of starting unions. As you might imagine, they get the worst tasks and are usually fired "for performance" in the next cycle. (I left before that could happen to me, but I'm sure it would have.) Years later, they admitted that putting me on the URL was a mistake and they may have abolished it.



Union phobia is also the reason for the age discrimination. They want to throw people out before they realize they've been screwed. The typical 22-year-old who got his dream job at Hooli is neither interested in starting a union, nor organizationally capable of it. Young, clueless, and talented but unskilled and fundamentally interchangeable workers are the Silicon Valley wet dream.



Banks handle this problem with huge bonuses, allowing the worker to be a mini-capitalist. Tech companies handle it with a college-like halfway-house work environment, an "Agile" management discipline designed around unskilled people, and aggressive age discrimination.

[rod]

If Hooli hired the Pinkertons and shot at striking unionized Hooligans, the Burning Man that would follow would be... awkward.

[october]

They don't use Pinkertons these days. They destroy reputations. Because tech has a lot of useful idiots who don't question what they're told, it often works. It's really easy to get tech people to turn on each other.



I could write a book about how these fascist horsec*nts operate. And maybe I will.

[katastrofa]

Hey man, you nuked your blog? Why?

[rod]

I wonder the same. Was one of the best blogs out there until some hours ago.

[jslade]

Blogs and having opinions are definitely bad for business. It's a pity: there are not enough critical voices of VC and the hype around it. I have a bunch of horror stories myself. In particular, I have learned that about 90% of the words that Paul Graham puts together are the sheerest self-serving gorp.

[october]

(Now that I'm "outed") I just yanked most of my posts. I'll probably reinstate the best 20 or so, but I'm trying to cut down the amount of stuff that can be used against me. This is about reducing the attackable surface area.



For one thing, I can deal with the death threats and harassment. I know who they're coming from, and these guys (Silicon Valley elites) have too much to lose. They're mad because they blame me [1] for their inability to be *loved* in addition to rich and powerful, when they should blame themselves and their conduct. They want to be seen as visionary statesmen and public intellectuals, rather than just another generation of new-money robber barons. They didn't get the reputation they want (Steve Jobs got the "visionary" image and died before he could lose most of it) and somehow I became a scapegoat because I... said things on the Internet. Economically, I did no measurable damage to any of these people, but they blame me for breaking a certain cultural momentum that would have petered out regardless of me.



I'm fine with how things have played out. It's pretty hilarious that a relative nobody has got their panties in a bunch. What I can't deal with is all the time that it wastes to deal with their nonsense, like when they try to bribe employers to fire me (hence, my sparse LinkedIn profile; it hasn't worked yet, but why take the chance?) I'm going to streamline the blog aggressively. If it improves my professional credibility or gets an important message out there, I can write it. If all it does is get people pissed off but nothing changes, it's not worth it. Not at this stage in my life.



Besides, the "unicorn" bubble is going to collapse regardless of what I do. This has me a lot more interested in figuring out what to build in its wake. There are going to be a lot of talented people looking for useful things to do; might as well find a way to come out ahead of that.



I used to optimize for footprint: getting ideas out there, building up a reputation, becoming "well known". Now I have more projects and work and desires than can fit into each day and I have to be a lot more efficient with my time.



As for Paul Graham, I think he was better in the mid-2000s. In 2002-5, the "conventional wisdom" was that startups were a one-time '90s thing and that we'd never see technical people have that kind of leverage again. After the '90s bubble collapsed, the world overreacted in the other direction and the mainstream was bashing everything startup. Paul Graham built up a reputation by defending it, being right on a few key things (including, which matters from a talent/recruiting perspective, the importance of programming languages). I don't like the guy very much these days, and he's become insipid of late, but he was right about a few key things in a time when almost no one else was.



So, he used Y Combinator to monetize that reputation. And, good for him. Now he's become absorbed in his own image, like Narcissus, and everything he says is (as you perfectly put it, @jslade) self-serving gorp. Some of his essays are great but most are unreadable.



In fact, my main reason for not wanting to be known as "a blogger" is that I don't want to spend clock cycles obsessing about reputation. That leads to a certain self-absorption that is passable if you're rich (see: Silicon Valley) but makes it harder to actually work with people. I've noticed myself being drawn down this path, just because reputation is such a big deal in that world, and I'd like to stop.



[1] This sounds self-serving, but I know what's said about me in those circles and it's not to be believed. Unless Marc Bodnick is a liar, Paul Buchheit himself (Mr. Don't Be Evil, haha) demanded that Quora ban my account under false pretenses. (They made the ridiculous claim that I was running a voting ring. The evidence: a password match between my account and a 3-year-old lurker account-- apparently, storing passwords in plain text is in again, in Silicon Valley-- and the fact that I did stupid things with sock puppets on Wikipedia back in 2003.) These people defend their reputations militantly, and they haven't the slightest respect for the "old-fashioned" way to build up a positive reputation: by actually being ethical. In a world full of founders who believe they'll be billionaires or ruined in 5 years, you get aggressive management of short-term reputation but a neglect for long-term considerations like, you know, actually being ethical.