Cory Doctorow

And I'm an ex-ops guy.

I'm a recovering sysadmin.

So I'm not going to say that that's nothing.

It is a skill unto itself, the careful work to make things work and make them resilient and scale them.

But the idea that that has to happen under one roof

I think is a false binary.

I mean, one of the things Google did, arguably far more efficiently than they hired innovators, is they hired operations people.

And those are the people who really do the yeoman service at Google because the innovators, the product managers, never get to launch.

They only get to buy other people's products and refine them.

And meanwhile, I think you mentioned acquihires for people who aren't unfortunate enough to be steeped in the business of Silicon Valley.

An acquihire is when a company is purchased not for the product it makes, but because the team who made it have proved they can make a product.

And then they shut down the product and they hire the team.

And acquihires are, I think, a leading indicator of pathology in tech and investment.

An acquihire is basically a post-grad project where venture capitalists sink some money into you pretending that you're going to make a product.

It's a science fair demo.

in the hopes that the company will buy you and in lieu of a hiring bonus will give you stock and in lieu of a finder's fee will give them stock.

But no one's trying to actually capitalize a product or a business.

I think anytime you see a preponderance of acquihires in your economy, that should tell you that you need to sit down and figure out how to rejigger the incentives because your economy is sick.

Yeah, I mean, we could talk about the other tech workers, right?

The majority of tech workers drive for Uber or for Amazon or work in a warehouse.