Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
8 hours ago
That doesn’t really sound like “being ripped off,” as opposed to “betting on a lame horse.”
The people behind this were irresponsible, childish, and exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They weren’t really hardline crooks. Crooks are probably a lot more organized.
I have gotten myself invested with similar crowds. There’s usually a charismatic spokesperson, leading the chaos.
They likely didn’t plan to rip him off, but paying him wasn’t really something they thought about. Real crooks put lots of planning into taking money.
> Multiple very junior developers were touching (binary, TouchDesigner) code and deploying straight to production via thumb drive, with zero version control. In fact, they didn’t know what version control was.
I suspect many startups fit that description. If they survive, then they usually pull themselves up by the bootstraps, eventually. Many of them collapse, taking everything with them.
I think you’re right and it’s fair to reframe this that way, in that in a certain sense, despite my naivety, I was the adult in the room and should have seen what they couldn’t.
But then given what I’ve learned since I think I can say with some certainty that this particular group saw the writing on the wall and were willing to use the skilled labor and time of an endless army of cannon fodder to try to staunch the bleeding or take one more long shot at getting final payment, and doing so without the agreement or awareness of the people they enlisted to the risk they were participating in.
I've seen similar, at a bigger scale.
When the wheels start coming off, morals are first over the side.
In some cases (think Theranos), it can go all the way into straight criminality. Most times, it just reaches the point where everything collapses, when the supports rust away.