Comment by grandempire
2 months ago
> a straight-up script kiddie
Why is the age such a talking point? An insight in startup culture is that the public underestimates young people, especially when it comes to business skills with objective results and tight feedback cycles.
It just seems like now that HN is skewed older we no longer believe that?
Script kiddie isn't about age, it's just a derogatory term for someone who never learned to write their own code, instead only slightly modifying and/or straight up running someone else's code that they don't actually understand very much.
It doesn’t seem entirely separate from age - as several other reply’s to this comment are about age.
I also think your description applies well to many startup founders.
It's not really about age. More about a specific level of impatience, maliciousness, inflated sense of skill and importance, and a general lack of integrity.
One could be a 60 year old skid.
> when it comes to business skills with objective results and tight feedback cycles
Is the federal government a business or startup? Does chainsawing it have a tight-enough feedback cycle to get good results? I'm going to say No to both, but I don't have the time or expertise to try to prove it. It can be true, both that young people are great at startups and bad at the federal govt.
Financial auditing does.
DoGE exists to dismantle branches of government that Republicans disapprove of, enrich the Republican elite, and use the federal government's data for their personal benefit.
Musk has openly reassigned some contracts to SpaceX for personal gain and fired people investigating his companies, so it's a given that they're also privately lining their pockets.
The federal data will be used to harass and disenfranchise their opponents. Musk, for example, can use the NLRB data to identify complainants about his companies, so that he can pay them off or have them sent to El Salvador. The data can also be used for the Safeguard Voting Eligibility Act (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...), which is intended to prevent women, blacks, and other groups from voting.
Financial auditing doesn't really enter into it.
There's ample evidence of incompetence from DoGE, including obvious coding security holes, firing people who ensure the safety of our nuclear arsenal, and other mistakes that you would expect from an unmotivated intern.
This is supporting evidence that they were picked for ideological reasons - namely, being young white supremacists who wouldn't ask any questions. That's why Marko Elez was rehired. Musk, Trump, and Vance all share his views, he was just dumb enough to express them in public.
> Why is the age such a talking point?
Young people get convinced to do stupid things that their older selves would regret.