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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

>Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be.

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.

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I think it's because most tech jobs are not in tech. If you work for a bank, you work for bank. If you work for a fashion retailer, you work for a fashion retailer.

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.

I used to think that, too, but be warned: SaaS companies quickly become beholden to the sales org, and all of a sudden, working for a "tech" company becomes working for all the industries you serve. Very few tech companies are pure tech anymore. Basically only the private ones like Valve.

The meeting:work ratio is a decent proxy.

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.

Considering Valve's game output I'd say they too have become drunk on easy money being a storefront. (Which isn't all bad, though I'd rather have HL3.)

HL3 = IRL

What part of their story are you referring to? There are lots of indie devs that appear to be having great fun making games and doing well to boot. Valheim, Black Rock Galactic, Celeste, Dead Cells, Papers Please, Stardew Valley, Enter the Gungeon, Don't Starve, Undertale, etc. were all pretty bit hits, certainly made their developers millions of dollars, and AFAIK the developers were having fun making them.

> There are lots of indie devs that appear to be having great fun making games and doing well to boot.

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.

I guess I'm not aware of their history. I thought they (Carmack and Romero) were indie bootstrapped business. Their success is being repeated today by 10x to 20x the indie teams, or so it seems to me.

John Carmack was also constantly working on the cutting edge. I think that makes a big difference. IIRC from reading MoD, he was the first person to get true side-scrolling working on an x86 chip, before it was thought to not be powerful enough vs the chips used in consoles at the time. Problem is that most of us just don't get to work on the cutting edge usually. A lot of the software that needs building often doesn't need much in the way of creativity.

Is John Carmack also a genius? Sometimes I can’t tell, but I suspect so.

If you’re going by IQ I’d bet he’s at least in the 145-159 highly gifted range.

I'd comfortably add 30 points to that, at least.

There are all kinds of people in tech who are self taught without CS degrees though. I don't think it's that beholden to the universities...at least not like other professions. I think it's simply that people took notice that all the money was being funneled into tech. The MBAs all followed.

Industry, for the most part, needs predictability and scale for it to function well. It's very difficult to accomplish that without at least some rigidity.

Punk rock is small by definition. Once it becomes large it changes to mainstream.

Are startups the closest you can still get to "punk rock in tech"? I would love for the dream of the 90s to still be alive somewhere...

Startups are the least punk rock thing in tech. Follow patterns and rules to match the expectations of VCs so they give you money... and then they drive what you do.

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.

The more expensive the Bay Area is to live in, the more the VC approach becomes the only game in town

Angel / friends / family was always more punk than VC, because VCs literally distill the funding transaction down to a business science.

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.

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