Americans’ confidence in technology firms has dropped
brookings.edu
brookings.edu
SV doesn't build software for people anymore, and this is one of the greatest tragedies in history. We built a huge industry, based on the most efficiency-increasing technology ever, and what came of it? Every human interaction has been captured and monetized, to the extent that younger generations can't even conceive of a mode of interaction that isn't mediated by apps.
I really hope that app adoption falls off drastically, in general, so maybe our industry can refocus on actually being helpful to people's rational objectives, instead of being enslaved to people's base desires.
Depends on your definition of "big technology" I guess, but I would put Valve in this lonely bucket
Once we had some established businesses in the valley, the next generation that brought its own quaintness entered with the rockstar, ninja, 10x programmer who spends all their free time coding. Open source software started to converge within businesses and their interest, with the face of tech becoming a new type of humble, scrappy programmer who also is altruistic. Tech benefited greatly. The dark side here is that with large salaries for IC roles came strict performance requirements and constant churn of folks looking for new hotness. Many burnt out as many more were entering the new gold rush.
Nowadays, most SE’s don’t carry a hacker mindset and those with curiosity are stamped out to make way for strict worker bees. Companies are hiring people straight out of college and they just don’t have the drive to do anything besides the bare minimum so companies are just raising the bar for the minimum and paying less because they’re not bringing the same value as new hires from 10-15 years ago did who had curiosity built into their work styles.
SEs are now being given minimal context and big issues are finding their way to production for many companies. These SEs don’t seem to care to get a bigger picture. Users blame larger companies for spying because all data is being sent to a random server instead of being processed locally, claiming it’s a just a big cabal conspiring to steal data, when it’s often just horrific incompetence at all stages and the fact that nobody has a clear picture on what exactly this is doing - a reality I find even more terrifying.
While this is not the complete cause of tech distrust, the companies I’ve been at who lack a systemic hacker-culture mindset have been miserable to work out, distrusted by its users, and sometimes outright despised (yet begrudgingly used). I have turned down jobs when I cannot find the curious itch that I’ve come to expect from all teams in a company.
Where have all the hackers gone? Are we just stuck with this enshitified version of the tech industry?
They are still around, I'm in a community with a few of them. They are just quietly working on small relatively unknown hobby projects in their spare time, while simply putting in their hours to get their paycheck.
The big companies have so much capital that they can very easily capture a market and get mind share, which the small hacker types building actually good and useful software have zero chance at getting anywhere.
Software companies are controlled by MBA types, and as such the hacker types get very little input into the development and direction of software. Having to build software for the sole purpose of making the shareholders more money is demoralizing. Hacker types want to make cool useful software that benefits users, which unfortunately isn't very profitable.
Modern programming culture is cult-like in its fad chasing and full of "Best Practices" grifters. There is a ton of useless cruft and friction in software development, however if you're not chasing the latest fads and not building software according to the latest religious writings, you'll get excommunicated.
They're still around, they've just been pushed out in the name of shareholder value and "Best Practices".
Yes, this. I am a classical hacker and most of my computery friends are as well.
The larger computer space has basically ejected hackers (often while trying to maintain the hacker aesthetic) because it turned into a money-printer rather than a space for creative disruption and curiosity.
There is no company that I'm aware of that retains the hacker philosophy at all anymore. It's All About the Benjanims, Baby.
Hackers haven't gone away at all, they're just less visible than they used to be.
Is Brookings living in an alternate reality? Google was the little mouthpiece of the WHO during the pandemic, censuring and putting warnings on anything that went against the WHO Propaganda. I'm surprised the trust in Google did not plunge into negative values.