HACKER Q&A
📣 syndicatedjelly

Who are the "snake oil salesmen" of tech?


https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snake%20oil

snake oil (noun):

1: any of various substances or mixtures sold (as by a traveling medicine show) as medicine usually without regard to their medical worth or properties

2: poppycock, bunkum

Who are these people, companies, entities etc. in the tech world?


  👤 eimrine Accepted Answer ✓
So sorry to observe Blockchain tech/ppl as a perfect example of a snake oil / snake oil sellers. I can clearly see a big future on this field, kind of a Democracy 2.0, the "short script which is going to replace all the governments".

But the myriad of dudes who don't know even the very basics of cryptography but having some excellent sales skills make me feel sad sometimes.


👤 rl1987
Agile coaches who never wrote a single line of code. Blockchain people. Coding bootcamps and content/course creators promising unrealistic timelines to developer jobs. Pretty much anyone talking like they just made OVER-9000-DOLLARS(!!!) in a week with ChatGPT/Midjourney/Bitcoin/affiliate marketing/whatever the latest fad is. To lesser degree consumer grade VPN companies.

👤 gnz11
I suppose McKinsey could fit the bill and much of the tech consulting world for that matter. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ

👤 mawadev
Low code and no code tools claiming it's over for programmers

👤 cpach
If you look in blockchain, antivirus or AI, you’ll find heaps of snake oil salesmen.

👤 tacostakohashi
Vendors of elaborate, configurable, "enterprise" tools for software development and monitoring.

JIRA, SonarQube, VeraCode, Coverity - all these apps that seem like a good idea in principle, but end up being misconfigured with complicated workflows, and generally get in the way of ever making changes to software and get used to tick the security box instead of actually fixing anything.


👤 yevyevyev
Web3 aka distributed ledger aka blockchain

👤 joegahona
Most SEO tools or “experts” are snake oil.

👤 samstave
Social Media Influencers - and the platforms they ~~rode~~ wrote in on.

👤 8BitArmour
techlead,joma tech,99pc of Indian YouTubers,people who gaurantee you a job after buying a course,scaler academy

👤 lurn_mor
The ones we've already caught and convicted: FTX, Theranos, ...

👤 mharig
Microsoft

Selling a gaming OS as a tool for companies.


👤 mlhpdx
Basically all consumer security apps?

👤 Ekaros
Anyone selling anything at all...

👤 rasz
IBM Watson

👤 pg_1234
Crypto bros

👤 mikewarot
Anyone who pitches a "safer" computer language, or methodology. Rust, for example.

People who sell memory that they know is unreliable, otherwise RowHammer[1] wouldn't work

Most of the "CyberSecurity" industry... the Operating System should be doing their job, but isn't.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer