Is the technical/design community broken?
I come from a business background and I've spent about a year in startup world, working with programmers and designers on multiple projects.

At first, I embraced the anti-corporate, anti-traditional management ethic that this community constantly espouses. You all seemed to be driven to be productive and make useful things. It seemed positive. I liked the emphasis on getting things done, rather than following certain accepted routines. You all love to talk about how hard you work and how productive you are - especially when you're unshackled by evil corporate interests.

But once I dug below the surface of all this talk, I was deeply disappointed with what I found. Actions speak louder than words, and I've found that this community is nearly all talk and little action. I'm sure there's a top 10% of your community that is highly productive and operates on your core principles, but this is the case in any community/society. Indeed, the traditional business community has a top 10% of honest, productive talent as well.

Unfortunately, I've found the technical and design areas of the startup community to be filled with lazy, unfocused, dishonorable and irresponsible people who simply use the principles espoused by this community to bitch and complain without doing much actual work. For example, working from home is supposed to be a good idea because you get more done in an environment where you're comfortable, not so that you can blow off work for a week without anybody knowing.

I spent some time in the evil corporate world that you all hate so much. It was boring and the people weren't incredibly interesting, but they worked so hard and they seldom bail on their team midstream. In the corporate world, when you make a commitment to a project or a client, you bust your butt to follow through. That was my experience there.

In contrast, the tech and design community certainly has more interesting work (in those rare instances where anything actually gets done) and more colorful characters to work with, but it's filled with people who essentially operate like infants.

Unfortunately, after much interaction with designers and developers in the startup community, it's become clear that this "community" is largely made up of immature, irresponsible individuals. These people have learned relatively low level technical skills that are currently in demand, and they use this technical knowledge to avoid any sort of hard work or responsibility.

Here's my point: I think this reality is a major contributing factor to why there's no real innovation in this community anymore. Why there's no Apple or Microsoft (or even Google) emerging from this community in the last 10 years. It's partially driven by the broken venture capital system which has encouraged these negative elements in your community. But, ultimately, it's you. Your community is broken: it's bloated and overweight. And you have freeloaders who are hijacking your principles to basically live like little children without any responsibilities or sense of reality. Given this environment, it's really no wonder that we're mostly seeing clones of existing concepts coming out of this community and even our most popular sites like youtube and facebook cannot figure out any way to add any actual value to our economy or to our world.

What do you think? Is it time to reevaluate what's happening in this community?