It would be awesome to listen to Prodigy or Megadeth while hackin' with the gang though. I'm still down for that if it exists somewhere in the now-corporatized tech industry.
I think a part of the hacker sub-culture that Hackers touches on lightly is that you have to make your own space. It's not going to exist for you in some prepackaged easy to consume way and certainly not in a corporation. Cyberdelia was for & by hackers, not a club run by some guy who has a bunch of cookie cutter clubs all over downtown. I don't think this is unique to the hacker sub culture, either.
I think The Plague was having fun.
> I think that if I had written the book in the past decade, perhaps Bateman would have been working in Silicon Valley, living in Cupertino with excursions into San Francisco or down to Big Sur to the Post Ranch Inn and palling around with Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder.
I think it comes down to the fact that our industry has become rigid and beholden to the university education system. John Carmack and John Romero were both college dropouts. Their stories would probably be impossible today. What we have now is a world of people coloring between the lines and going straight from one set of rules to another. There truly is no more punk rock left in tech.
I'm not saying people should not work in startups - they have their place in the industry. But there is nothing "punk rock" about them.
If you want to break rules and work outside the lines, we have come full circle to the 90s - bootstrapped small businesses are the way to go.
Unfortunately... because most of the world has taken their eyes off keeping markets competitive, it's less viable now than it once was, because the table stakes capital requirements are larger.
I've worked for a big pension fund and it was exactly like one imagines. Many meetings, a quiet office, slow and boring. I've also worked for small tech-focussed companies with technical nerds as founders; they were rather different, with music, dogs, vodka and late nights.
Oh and age matters too: after I had a kid, the late nights and vodka were not something I had the energy for.
If it's too high, you're not in a technology company in the sense we're idolizing here.
... And I'm also not sure "that" sort of tech company can exist above a certain size. No corporate silo firewall is strong enough to keep the business bullshit at bay.
See: the other posters comment about small profitable bootstrapped businesses being the only way to do this now. Successful indie devs are an anomaly. But my point was more that companies are far more risk averse these days than to let a group like Romero et. al. run loose on a new product idea without strict controls in place, and that the types of people selected for by these companies now ensures that.
Punk rock is small by definition. Once it becomes large it changes to mainstream.
You can also find people with that ethos in corporate places, but they get swarmed out by suits and people who went to coding school because it pays well.
Discovery that it exists -> Fumbling -> Golden Age -> Mechanization
Mechanization is where the bean counters and optimizers get into it and make it into something boring. I'm not a software engineer but I feel like my own field is in the "Mechanization" stage. My solution is I'm just about to leave and never look back because I stopped caring. I still like the original stuff I learned but I don't care about what's become of it.
Honestly, I think who you are as a person is often going to be misaligned with what capitalism and industry does with what looks like your passions, and it's healthy to recognize that and leave while you can. You may be doing software engineering but you're not a software engineer; you're a person and you can reinvent yourself any time you want.
https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Norton-Programmers-Guide-IBM/dp...
It might not be your exact thing, but you're likely to meet people who know about everything going on in the area.