Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I love the rag-tag optimism & grit in SF tech, but enough yokes have been slipped over its shoulders that there are very few directions it can still pull. It can grab talent incubated elsewhere, it can take advantage of special knowledge, but it (mostly) cannot experiment anymore https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1119342163026821120 …

While I agree with the overall sentiment (strongly!) I would posit: The effectiveness of a single hacker (better+cheaper tooling, open source) has scaled much faster than the price of SF rents. You can only afford 2 devs instead of 5 now, but they can get 10x more done

The cost to hire/keep the 10x dev was never constrained by low-end/median housing prices.

...ah, I think that was a misreading. I'm not sure I find the argument very compelling, though — I don't think creativity scales quite as well as productivity with better tools, and insofar as we've built taller ladders we've also grabbed more of the low-hanging fruit.

I think you also do see a qualitative difference in creativity with better tools. Think ipad+pencil vs MS paint. I hate to even go down this line of thinking because I completely agree housing is killing SF. Maybe I want to just inject some small dose of optimism :P

Agree 100% that "free" capacity has accumulated across the board for devs & that better tools can enable qualitatively different output (though I'm not sure drawing tools are a great example). I'm taking issue specifically with the "2 devs are as good as 5" claim

Ah, well from a “productivity” standpoint i think it’s fairly evident (eg see Mythical Man Month), but much less clear to me how to evaluate creativity. I’m ambivalent there. I certainly know of cases where the marginal 3 devs would add no (or negative!) further creativity.