Ask HN: Why is everyone in tech so performative/two faced
I am not technical I just like building and making friends and having fun inventing
It feels 70% of people I meet, are trying to determine what you can get them, if u r important enough or trying to butter you up in a coffee chat
What happened to building cool stuff, not having a ego and being real. Sorry if this isnt allowed. I dont know where else to post. Am i hanging out in the wrong crowds?
> What happened to building cool stuff, not having an ego and being real.
There are certainly developers building stuff just for the passion of solving problems and producing high quality products. You have to know where to find these people, because they aren’t common and typically are not self promoting.
The people more interested in marketing and promoting themselves tend to devote more time and attention to that noise than the energy required to solving challenging problems.
It’s because Tech is too broad a word, encompassing curious engineers with pure motives all the way to hucksters shilling their offerings for ad revenue.
do you have any hacker spaces nearby. You should meet the good people there
pick your clique: nerds & hustlers
the two tribes of tech
im not smart enough to be around the nerds, but im not douchey enough to hang with the hustlers. I pick nerds. Hopefully they accept me.
not a great basis of discrimination tbh, there are people with dignity in spirit and there are those without, there's no other quirks etcetra for you or anyone else to have to identify yourselves/others with as very essential.
what kinds of things have you built?
nothing that interesting or has made lots of money. Ive been making little projects and i like new ideas and inventing
made a couple social networks in high school + sold counterfeit hall passes i tried making a snowball gun toy lots of random businesses like 10+ and dropshipping right now working on a startup related to odor in healthcare/crime scene settings
Im not the coolest SaaS person on the block.. but just my take on what ive observed
Find a local space for the first thing or focus on something like the startup in particular and real spaces for that. Otherwise don’t succumb to the anecdotal bias
How does one find local spaces like that?
I love the idea of accelerators and those spaces to meet others i just worry i wont fit in because i am not the most experienced or deep in tech. Thank you for the advice
Try hanging out with people who have paying jobs doing the thing. (Not trying to break in, not founding a startup, not selling an idea). I worked at a FAANG company. People were honestly smart, capable, humble. (There was a strong correlation between the most effective tech people and their humility)
Maybe I got lucky. In retrospect I probably got super lucky.
That sounds so awesome
because theres so much money in it...try the arts, social services, religion, primary and secondary sectors, and people are way nicer
You're suggesting mixing with the right-brainers, who can drive the left-brainers crazy, and vice versa.
Ugh.. all those things are lame to me.
Haha!!
Lol.