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?
Ok I will give you a simple method to separate the 2 groups of nerds and hustlers. Now this is not fool proof, but is good for about 80% of the time.
If they approach you - Hustler.
If you HAVE to start the conversation - Nerd - you might have to restart it too.
Most nerds are so involved in tech that they do not spend time working on social skills.
Most hustlers skip the tech and refine their social skills.
So find some techie forums / meetup / events and start interacting.
Myself I can fake social for about 15 to 30 minutes, but then I am exhausted. And I could not hustle my way out of a paper bag.
This is good advice
I never understood the point of coffee chats There is no way we will develop a relationship naturally within these 30 minutes, and now its awkward if you ask me for something. Too transactional I assume they are all hustlers.. Lol!
Ehh I am the nerd and I’ll start the convo. I actually think this gets me in trouble. People judge the book by the cover.
This question ignores that this problem exists with people as a whole.
People after all are full of emotions and are ego driven. I think that most of people’s negative responses intimately boil down to fear…
This new hire makes me look bad I am worried that so and so is better than me What if their implementation is better and their company does better than mine
Instead of being happy and comfortable with the uncomfortable people react poorly
> 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.
Welcome to the human species!
You may be hanging with the wrong crowds in the sense that your people are out there somewhere and you just haven't found them yet, but your people are still a minority. One would hope that tech would have more genuine and curious people, but I swear most of us are hustlers who bought a shovel for a particular gold rush.
In my experience, you'll have the best luck finding likeminded people at hacker spaces and conferences.
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
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
How does one find local spaces like that?
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.