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I don't think it "attracted" a certain kind of people, I think the people who were already in tech just became more wealthy and powerful, and that, predictably, brought out the worst in some. The worst qualities of "tech" people can be conflated but I think have a different flavor than the worst qualities of "finance" people. It's really just the same obnoxious behavior you can spot in young tech people. Some people grow out of it, and some people earn a ton of money and so have no reason to grow out of anything (not that you can't make money AND grow out of it, but there's less outside pressure to do so).

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No, the field grew tremendously and you can see a clear generational bias -- by years of experience, not age -- where the cohort from the last 10-15 years has a completely different understanding of what the craft is [software engineering vs business development] and how to approach it [optimal solution vs soonest deliverable].

You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the newer cohort coming from upper middle class backgrounds with families in careers like finance, consulting, medicine/dentistry whereas more in the older cohort came from more modest middle class backgrounds in engineering, academia, or even working class trades.

Of course, there were always some of all of these people in the industry, but the balance shifted dramatically during the last couple booms, tracking the atypically high compensation standards set by FAANG's since 2010 or so.

Speaking as an old school basement nerd (coding since middle school, 90’s): If I can do cool things with code _and_ get paid, I’m gonna go do that. Business constraints make it feel much more interesting than writing code in a vacuum.

Also money is nice.

> Business constraints make it feel much more interesting than writing code in a vacuum.

You never write code in a vacuum do you? You always have some kind of goal.

I should hope not. Even if your body could withstand the low pressure, you'd suffocate very quickly.

I don’t know dude, this one time I wrote a LOLCODE compiler into a Babel macro.

https://swizec.com/blog/lolcodetojavascript-compiler-babel-m...

It was pretty fun.

Also this other time I wrote a nodejs script to keep my computer at a specific temperature because our office fridge kept freezing my carrots.

https://swizec.com/blog/i-built-a-node-app-to-thaw-my-favori...

  > because our office fridge kept freezing my carrots.

That sounds like a goal to me

That's quite nice! You may wish to look into implementing a PID controller, so as to avoid overshoot (your carrots become too thawed initially) and unnecessary oscillation about the setpoint (meaning you are wasting energy on cooling and heating cycles that in the end cancel each other out, where you could have kept the temperature nearly constant during that time). I loved juicing carrots so much my face turned orange from the beta-carotene.

This post is so weird on so many levels. I'll focus on this part:

    > You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the newer cohort coming from upper middle class backgrounds with families in careers like finance, consulting, medicine/dentistry whereas more in the older cohort came from more modest middle class backgrounds in engineering, academia, or even working class trades.

So, you reach for class warfare? Sheesh. It is anyone's fault that they are born into an upper middle class family? Are people from lower economic circumstances somehow superior, as you imply? This is just bizarre.

As a reminder: Bill Gates, who is certainly old school tech, was born and raised in an objectively wealthy, well-connected family, then went to Harvard. This is nearly made-for-TV silver spoon stuff.

It is telling that you considered their post to be about class warfare rather than different values.

The original focus of this thread was on technical precision vs. market efficiency, and how quality was sacrificed for faster conversion to sales.

That shift compromises products for everyone by creating a race to the bottom toward the minimum viable product and safety standards. When the consequences eventually hit, the aggregate responsibility and emergent effects lose direct attribution...but they exist all the same.

As the sibling comment noted, I think you might be projecting value judgment onto value distinction.

The most salient values of the later cohort are different than those in the prior ones, and those values do track with the values we associate with those different class backgrounds.

But there's no ranking being made there. They're just different values.

The values of the new cohort have earned the industry a great deal of political, economic, and cultural influence on an international level.

The values of the old cohort didn't do that, except insofar as they built a stage for the new one. They made software differently. They designed products differently. They operated businesses on different scales. They hired differently.

Indeed some of us from the old cohort don't personally savor all the spotlight and influence and cultural drama that Silicon Valley collectively bears now, and miss the way thing were. And others love it. But that's just personal preference, not class warfare.

> So, you reach for class warfare? Sheesh. It is anyone's fault that they are born into an upper middle class family? Are people from lower economic circumstances somehow superior, as you imply?

To be fair, I don't see any value judgements in the post you're replying to. He doesn't say if it's a good or bad thing, it's just a thing. But what I think this means is that field became more popular, entry filters became more competitive, and families with less resources to invest in their offspring became filtered out.

There's nothing good or bad about it.

That’s why the bill gates story got so much public attention. It’s surprising. Their Harvard kid is doing what?

I suppose it may have been surprising to anyone completely out of touch with what was happening at the time.

I'm only a little younger than Gates, and it seemed like, what else would you do? PCs were revolutionizing the world.

A slight addition to this topic. A lot of jobs also became software, even if your intention in signing up for the jobs was different to begin with. PCs were revolutionizing the world.

For about a decade I worked as an engineer in a field where the expectation (at least starting) was that metal gets cut, stuff gets built, and there's physical hardware.

Those existed. May have actually had more hardware interaction than many in engineering. Yet much of the day to day rapidly became computer simulations of the metal that might get cut someday.

In many fields, the organizational choice decrement on anything involving capital expenditure or purchase was so severe that usually the obvious choice was to run a computer model, and simulate what might occur. What else would you do?

> decrement on anything involving capital expenditure

Boy is this true. I don’t think we ever recovered. Imagine trying to start a capital intensive business like mining in 2025.

Frankly a shame. Since there's a been a lot of development in mining technologies over the years.

Even for the folks that have an ecological focus, there's quite a few methods developed with limited degradation of the landscape, and reclamation of the mining sites into alternative uses (park, forestry, entertainment, tourism). The Wieliczka saltmine in Poland's an especially impressive example [1]

[1] https://www.wieliczka-saltmine.com/individual-tourist/touris...

And these days, there's also a huge number of resources in terms of mineral identification and site mapping. The EMIT Imaging Spectrometer from NASA's a cool example that does remote satelite mineral identification from orbit. [2]

[2] https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/instrument/overview/

> No, the field grew tremendously and you can see a clear generational bias -- by years of experience, not age -- where the cohort from the last 10-15 years has a completely different understanding of what the craft is

I bet a lot of people 10-15 years older than you would say the same thing - except they'd say it about you and your generation.

I'm not that old, but I've been around long enough to hear people of every age over about 30 claim that everything was better back in their day until the new generation came along and ruined it.

> I bet a lot of people 10-15 years older than you would say the same thing - except they'd say it about you and your generation.

And they’d probably be right!

I remember the grognards giving me shit about memory management and me giving it right back by explaining that what they considered a large chunk of memory would be worth pennys next year because of Moore’s law and I wasn’t going to waste time considering something that I literally couldn’t learn faster than it became obsolete knowledge.

Quantitative differences can create qualitative differences and I don’t think it’s surprising that we’re in a different age of software engineering than we were 10-15 years ago for any given X year

As a fun anecdote I think this same rationale - ”next years hardware is so much better” - is why so many desktop softwares 90’s->00’s became slow - ”meh you don’t have to care about performance, next year’s cpu is going to be so much faster anyway”.

Then suddenly single threaded speedups didn’t happen anymore (and people realized even though cpu speeds had grown, it was not directly related to Moore’s law).

Ofc your rationale used Moore’s law correctly while the ”cpu infinite speed growth rah rah rah” peoples didn’t.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill's_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

And more generally,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Seeing this multiple times in a day for multiple, articulable reasons in the mid 2010s if my memory doesnt fail me

>FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_LAST Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory > 1: node::Abort() [/usr/bin/node]

Is what made me decide it might finally be worth the time to actually learn how memory worked

>I remember the grognards giving me shit about memory management and me giving it right back by explaining that what they considered a large chunk of memory would be worth pennys next year because of Moore’s law and I wasn’t going to waste time considering something that I literally couldn’t learn faster than it became obsolete knowledge.

And that's why all applications are laggy as shit these days.

You both are right.

But ignore memory at your peril. I have one proj that has a 256GB instance. For a fairly boring CRUD app. I am asking a lot of questions as apparently we are having the yearly 'we need more memory' questions. Things that are leading to speedups. Just by using less memory. At the bottom of that stack is a L1 cache with less than a hundred KB. It doesnt matter right up until it does. I have seen huge 300+ item string classes that needed maybe 10 of the fields. They threw it in 'just because there is enough'. Yet something has to fill in those fields. Something has to generate all the code for those fields. The memory mangers have to keep track of all of that junk. Oh and all of that is in a pipeline of a cascade of applications so that 300+ class is copied 10 times. Plus the cost to keep it on disk and shove it thru the network.

On the other hand, I've seen developers who don't know about things like that start up a project on a small instance and wonder why everything is running at turtle speed.

People that stopped running tests because they were configured to make 10,000 API calls in one minutes and it crippled the app until everything was restarted.

"Add some more memory to your database instance....poof"

I definitely agree with the greybeards and I think we see the results of not listening to them. We have these processors, buses, networks, and all sorts that are magnitudes faster and more powerful than what they began on but many things are quite slow today. Worse, it seems to but getting slower. There is a lot of value in learning about things like caching and memory management. A lot of monetary value. It's amazing to me that these days your average undergraduate isn't coming out of a computer science degree being well versed and comfortable writing parallelized code, given that is how the hardware has moved. It is amazing to me we don't normalize caching considering a big change that was driven from the mobile computing side and adopted into our desktop and laptop environments is to fill ram because you might as well. It is crazy to me that we have these games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop that are buggy as shit, hog all the resources of your machine, and can barely run at 4k60. Where you can hit a bug and go "yep, I know what's causing that memory error"

Honestly, I think so much of this comes from the belief of needing to move fast because. Because why? That would require direction. I think the money motivation is motivating speed but we've lost a lot of vision. Moving fast is great for learning but when you break things you got to clean it up. The problem is that once these tech giants formed they continued to act like a scrappy developer. To not go back and fix all the mess because we gotta go fast, we gotta go forward. But with no real vision forward. And you can't have that vision unless you understand the failures. We have so many low hanging fruits that I can't figure out why they aren't being solved. From deduplicating calendar entries, automatically turning off captioning on videos when a video has embedded captioning so you don't just overlay text on top of text, searching email, or even setting defaults to entry fields based on the browser data (e.g. if you ask for user's country, put the one the browser is telling you at the top of the fucking list!). These are all things I think you would think about if you were working in a space where you needed to consider optimization, if you were resource constrained. But we don't and so we let it slide. But the issue is a death by a thousand cuts. It isn't so bad in a few cases but these things add up. And the great irony of it all is that scale is what has made tech so powerful and wealthy in the first place. But no one stops to ask if we're also scaling up shit. If you printing gold but 1% of your gold is shit, you're still making a ton of shit. The little things matter because the little things add up. You're forced to deal with that when you think about memory management but now we just don't

As the base reality of computers and the inflated reality of software have diverged more and more, education and culture has tracked the software story and led to runaway irresponsibility. Forget not optimizing for performance; I think a lot of software today straight up fails to actually serve users some way or another. And those are paying users at that!

I agree. There are just too many obvious low hanging fruits. So I'm just trying to inspire people to take action and fix stuff. Ask not for permission, just fix it. Ask for forgiveness later.

This is what happens anytime a field gets large in terms of job applications. Replace software engineer with anything else to that measure and you see the same things with wealthy families being overrepresented in the cohort because they always have an edge in getting the best credentials due to not having to work any part time jobs and having mom and dad (or even a paid advisor) actively working on your behalf to vet potential internships or other opportunities for you. You are essentially out numbered 3:1 or even 4:1 or more, and you can't work a full 1 part anyhow due to the aforementioned other obligations life has saddled on you.

I completely agree. Software engineering is just the most recent field I can think of(unless you consider data science a distinct enough portion of software to carve off as a separate field) that has had this pattern occur.

Well that and this is a forum for a lot of tech people which means a good number of software engineers here.

I doubt that has anything to do with getting "large in terms of job applications" alone. It's a correlation, alright, because wealthy families have it easier to get high-status and high-paying jobs for their kids, and if such a field grows, wealthy people flock to it like everyone else. But I sincerely doubt you'll find the wealthy over-represented in physical labor / blue collar jobs, regardless of how the ups and downs in the labor market for those occupations.

The way I see it, it's like 'swatcoder and 'lovich said upthread: the field became a money printer, and attracted - not revealed, attracted - a different kind of people, with a different mindset. I too saw this change happening. Applicant pool size? That's a spurious correlation - it's just driven by the same factors that make software industry a money printer.

> It's a correlation, alright, because wealthy families have it easier to get high-status and high-paying jobs for their kids

You have just written down a partial solution to this dilemma: make these high-paying jobs less attractive in terms of status for these wealthy families. :-)

You're not wrong but this is overly reductive. In other words this is more of a sliding scale and not a step function centered on 10-15 years ago.

For instance I was a CS undergrad in the mid/late-90s. There was an enormous difference demographically between my incoming freshman class and the incoming freshman class by the time I graduated. And the talking points were exactly the same ones we see in this thread.

It's a "yes and" situation. You're completely correct that people who were already in tech just became more wealthy, but there's no question that in the mid to late teens (in particular), tech fundamentally became, for many, about $$$. There was a huge migration of people who couldn't write code from NY to SF in a "there's gold in them thar hills" kind of way.

Now the people entering the industry by and large see it as a game of wealth acquisition similar to finance or big law, and big tech is adapting in a similar way -- high salaries, insanely bad wlb, politics far exceeding any other skill as a determiner of career progression.

Same kind of thing happened in the early 2000's, when the Web suddenly took off.

For a while, if you knew how to type into a text editor, you were hired as a "webmaster." Lots of people made a lot of money, writing awful stuff.

If there's money to be made, people will pour in. They aren't necessarily bad folks, and many of them are skilled, and willing to work hard, so the trope of "thousands of terrible engineers" is maybe not that accurate.

However, I kind of despair at the management skills of the folks that run the teams, and the decision-makers that set the bar.

But the story is correct. Teams need cohesion, a lot more than rockstars. We can do together, what I can't do alone.

It absolutely attracted different people. The inflows are much larger and not the same.

For example EE used to be prestige and CS was the backup. And that would never compare to finance or law.

Yes but imo this change happened no later than late 90s. I distinctly remember how suddenly it became cool to be a programmer and the 'new type' was already making changes by early '00s. And yes, the $s attracted smart people who did not embody the old hacker ethos.

These are the new bloods that gifted us with surveillance tech, btw.

“Call 1-800 beageek”. Remember that commercial? That was around the time software dev went mainstream, late 90s iirc.

Mainstream is different than upper middle class and ambitious.

Back in the 90s, they were the “suits”.

Andreessen, Scott McNealy, & Ellison were, to me, the ones that left a particularly bad taste.

The behavior you're describing definitely happened but what I'm describing did as well.

At some point the wheeling and dealing, snake oil, corporate backstabby like people that many associate with finance were actually high schoolers at some point who had to pick where they went in life. The ones who only care about wealth and power, only care about wealth and power, so if software was a good route to that theyll put on their software face and do that job. Before software made a lot of money for people, finance was the default

Yeah - this is a bit like "competition brings out the best in people" when the reality is that it also brings out the worst in people

People in the trades relatively speaking in the midwest are easily far more wealthy than engineers in the bay area, and they have no such delusions of grandeur seemingly. They seem to understand that an electrician is an electrician and an engineer is fungible. That is why many of these engineers are unionized as well because they understand labor is replaceable and needs to advocate for itself. The coasts have much to learn from the corn lands it seems despite the prevailing narrative being the opposite.

1. The data absolutely does not show that midwestern tradesmen are wealthier than Bay Area engineers.

2. I agree that unions are useful, and you’re starting to see them (eg Alphabet Workers Union). There is definitely opportunity here.

3. I think your visions of non-grandeur are blinding you to the possibilities that others live life and advocate for themselves differently, without it being wrong. Sometimes change is ok and sometimes people being different from you and your beliefs is ok.

While I do think unions are important, Silicon Valley engineers are responding in-kind to their fungibility. It’s pretty common to see people jump around every few years, chasing opportunities instead of loyalty. Usually collecting a pay bump. It’s generally not looked down upon in hiring, because it’s increasingly normal, and the extra pay and corresponding savings protects against periods of unemployment. Regardless of people’s thoughts on the practice, “resume driven development” grew as a reaction to the fungibility - forcing their own self-growth upon a disloyal employer.

Big urban areas with lots of job opportunities are difference employment environments, and employee’s actions of self protection evolved differently. Is there room for learning? Always. But this entire comment seems to pass judgement upon a world that frankly doesn’t exist.

As a Bay Area resident who once lived in the Midwest, I can confidently say that people on the coast don’t have such a negative view of “corn lands” - this narrative is very much self imposed.

The data does show that if you look at what cost of living is buying you in the midwest versus the bay. New construction large homes on large lots are in reach. Multiple vehicles are in reach. Everything is in reach after that. I'm sorry but the housing stock in the bay is just poor quality for what it is. The lots are tiny barely larger than the home. The home is small. The bedrooms are small. Most you can do is tear out the old chicken wire and plaster building and build a big ugly modern glass/cement box to the edges of the property line and even then you are slumming it in terms of space to what you'd have in the midwest. You want actual property, with some setbacking from your neigbors, and still convenient to things, its just not really available even if you had the money. Like those homes on pinehill or robin road in san mateo would be the caliber i'm talking about you can buy as a tradie in the midwest, in terms of setback and square footage, even finishes too for that matter. and that land in the midwest will actually be relatively flat and probably cleared out for you vs it being a home tucked in high slope chaparral you might technically own but can't really do anything with like build outlaying buildings.

You could have an indoor pool in a detached building. You could keep horses. You could have a 6 car garage. All the upgrades from the builder too. All for a song in comparison to a home a fraction of all that in the bay. I mean just start looking on zillow between these sorts of homes in say indiana or ohio and it is absurd the difference in cost of living. How much you'd have to pay to rent a tiny old boat on lake tahoe for the day vs buying a boat outright and even paying to winterize and store it in a yacht club on a great lake. SF country club fees vs midwest, literally exclusive fuck you old money rates vs only a couple thousand initiation fee for the same sort of course conditions and probably a nicer appointed newer constructed clubhouse in the midwest. Same is true for the private schools too, the nicest ones nationally recognized in the area can only charge so much because there's just so many people with kids and wealth in the private school market so they aren't absolutely stupid like in the bay. Even the public schools go up to bat with those in some districts.

I don't think "the data" you might cite are considering all of these factors of the lived experience. Maybe one or two economic indicators but not how life actually plays out with even the half dozen or so things I've laid out above.

> The data does show that if you look at what cost of living is buying you in the midwest versus the bay

But that is blatantly not wealth? For a topic so humorously numerical, this entire comment is decided not.

> You want actual property, with some setbacking from your neigbors

First, not everyone wants these things, and even quality-of-life is not one size fits all. Second, this is also not what wealth is.

> You could have an indoor pool in a detached building. You could keep horses. You could have a 6 car garage. All the upgrades from the builder too. All for a song in comparison to a home a fraction of all that in the bay.

Uh, duh the midwest is cheaper than the most economically productive region in human history. Thanks for explaining.

As an ex-Cleveland resident who now lives in San Francisco, I can confidently say that these trappings are not available to most midwesterners nor Californians; neither tradesmen not high skill workers; and its also still not wealth, although it is certainly more closely correlated.

Anecdotally, you couldn't pay me to own a horse, nor do I even have use for my single car - owning 6 seems like a waste when on-demand self-driving vehicles will shuttle me effortlessly around San Francisco.

> I don't think "the data" you might cite are considering all of these factors of the lived experience

Because that's not what the words in this conversation mean.

> Maybe one or two economic indicators

That's what these it means. And they're not in the favor of a tradesman in the midwest.

> not how life actually plays out with even the half dozen or so things I've laid out above.

But what you laid out (quite condescendingly btw) is farcically not the meaning of wealth, and not the indicators of a good quality of life. I can name a long list of things that the midwest can't provide to the wealthy that are readily available to working class people in California (eg. an extra 100 days of sunlight a year). But I won't because it's obvious and not the definition of wealth.

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