Huh, I do recall a certain anti-corporate individual (with the initials MOC) that was fairly loud and prolific on both HN and Reddit around that time, including insisting that pg and other tech leaders were trying to get him canceled (well, before the term existed, I think). If this was him, perhaps he wasn't as much of a crackpot as many assumed he was.
The year was indeed 2015, and his political content would fit OP's description, but the reason for the ban was that he was repeatedly being a total asshole, not "YC is scared of anti-fascists".
You know... one of the charges leveled at Michael was creation of sockpuppet accounts in various media (Wikipedia, HN, Quora). I suppose it could be within the realm of possibility that this is another one of these, given the oddly specific example in the middle of general musings. The fact that all follow-on replies have to do with this particular incident and nothing else in the post, painting the victim in the most positive light, makes this especially questionable. If I'm wrong, I apologize and wish the OP well, but I gotta say, it looks pretty sus to this observer.
Capitalism is a scam against the working class. I dont know how people can read things like this and not want a huge reform. The OP "just following orders" is ridiculous.
Also, whenever the question "where are the tech unions at," comes up ,its because the system crushes anyone who is slightly left leaning in this regard.
Excerpt:
You’d be one of the best people they’ve seen in years, and unlike the people around them, you’re honest and ethical. The thing that’s holding you back is… a reputation problem. People Google you and think, “This guy’s going to start a union.”
This is going to make it hard to place you. Guys like [name] don’t like people they can’t buy. If I were you, I’d start blogging again and come out against unions. Do that for six months, and I can put you anywhere you want to go.
get born in the south side chicago and see how that works out for you to have a nice car and a fun job :) the main reason you have them is zipcode where you were born
My father was born in mexico, came here with his parents who worked in agriculture. He worked his ass off to make it to a comfortable, modest, middle class neighborhood. I didn't go to college, but found my way into the tech industry because it's about as close to meritocratic as anywhere else has been in human history.
Is it perfect? no. Is it better than everything else because of Capitalism? Yup...
I hope things get ever better and more prosperous for you and your family in the future!!
In some scenarios capitalism can work really, really well. but lose a job, have a health issue and you then see that it is just a house of cards that generally works for small fraction of the population. not that other systems don’t have their own issues (and more) but capitalism is always good in the eyes of the beholder and over time there are less and less happy stories (USA is perfect example, see graphs of income inequality/gaps over time…)
Yup, around 2008 is when I noticed that many of the Slashdot front page submissions were discussed on this new site called Hacker News 1-2 days prior, minus the trolling and the comedy threads. It was a pretty easy switch at that point.
The author talks about having a clear bias for action (a great thing!) but in the process throws the baby out with the bathwater. Without collaboration you'll end up with silos, overconfident decision-makers, and all sorts of preventable production issues, all in the name of avoiding the dirty C word. How about following the approach of pragmatism and finding a solid middle ground that achieves the best results longterm? I suppose that doesn't tell a great story in company all-hands and corporate blog posts.
On the bias for action front, one trick a previous company implemented that worked wonders was stating (in Slack, meeting, whatever): "I'm planning to do X, any strong objections?". The strong objection part generally dissuaded most lazy bike shedding, especially if paired with "do you really feel strongly about it". Of course if people do, then you have a discussion, but most of the time it's a thumbs up and off you go.
I'm torn on this, probably because either extreme isn't an end all solution. Companies stuck in beauracracy need this advice. Companies stuck in tech debt need to avoid this. But as of now in tech, one of these are clearly rewarded more often, so I get why the article is made as such.
For the other extreme, the largest issue I've seen is integration. You make two different systems with no plan on how they integrate. Neither team really takes the time to make them talk properly. That's where some agreed upon architecture helps.
The culture of feedback has the infected your brain. The "strong objections" framing is just collaboration cosplaying as decisiveness. You're still waiting for permission, just with extra steps and passive-aggressive phrasing designed to shame people into silence. It's corporate theater. You've invented a mechanism that still makes one person wait on others, fragments their attention, and creates the expectation that decisions are collaborative by default.
Why not just: ship it, get feedback from actual usage, iterate.
First of all, just because you (or the author) call collaboration a bad thing doesn't make it so. Secondly, you seem to have misunderstood the process. The steps are: I will be shipping shortly, here is the direction I decided on because XYZ, if you want to react there is some limited amount of time to do so but those objections better be nontrivial. There is no waiting for permission, the path is set - yes, barring strong objections. Apparently you think it's best to leave those for after the fact, well, good luck with that.
One interesting company in this space I've seen is CreativeMode - generating Minecraft mods based on a text description. Pretty brilliant use of LLM coding actually. Found out about it when my kid asked me to pay for it. Doesn't look like they ran a Show HN / Launch HN (not one I can find) despite being a YC company.
I loved IE6 as as user when it came out, and grew to hate it as a developer when the browser standards moved on, but a stubborn, large-enough user base percentage had not. I blame slow-moving IT departments that refused to touch their internal environments when all the Web 2.0 progress made things new and scary. A product my team was in charge of had to support IE6 and IE7 years after the rest of the world moved on because the IT admins at Walgreens straight out refused to update the machines that the pharmacists used at their stores.
The irony is that web standards didn’t move fast enough either, so the browser developers simply bypassed the standards body in favor of their own post-hoc ‘living standard’.
It wasn’t so much about the tempo of web standards; it was rather that W3C cared about the consensus of a far wider variety of entities, and browsers got fed up with being told what they should and shouldn’t do by people that were nothing to do with browsers—people that had interests in HTML, sure, but who were trying to pull it in directions that none of the browsers were interested in. And so, W3C having failed as a venue for browser HTML standardisation, they took it over.
To parody the situation: a consortium of bridge engineers is discussing building standards, but somehow they’ve been lumped together with every girl named Bridget and every young boy making toy bridges with blocks, and they all have voting rights, and the girls are insisting that bridges must sparkle, and the boys think every bridge should be able to support helicopters and diggers.
The risk of updating the machines to support IE9 might indeed be large, for not very obvious benefits. But what did they say about staying as is, and switching to Firefox or Chrome? Was it impossible due to use of some MS-only tech?
It's hard to remember the exact details all these years later... I doubt it was due to MS-only tech, but rather that IE6/7 were tested and approved and everything else was not. The incentives for IT teams are such that it's a lot easier to say no to something than yes, and create a ton of work and liability.
Funny enough, my wife and her parents all ended up with different variations of their last names in English when immigrating: ending in -ky, -kiy, and -kaya.
