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Comment by JustExAWS | Hacker News Reader

It always makes me groan when I see this sentiment like back in the olden times, people got into development for “passion”.

Sure I was a hobbyist in the 80s programming in assembly language on four separate architectures by the time I graduated college in 1996 in CS. But absolutely no one in my graduating class did it for the “passion” we all did it because we needed to exchange money for food and shelter.

The people jumping into tech during the first tech boom were definitely doing it for the money and the old heads I met back then programming on Dec Vax and Stratus VOS mainframes, clocked in, did their job and clocked out.

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People doing it now for money aren't the same as you likely doing it for the money in the old day.

When I went into comp-sci, it wasn't the cool path to riches it's been marketed as for the past 15 years.

EDIT: you graduated around the same time as me. Sure everyone wanted jobs. But there were easier paths to getting a good job in '95/96 that cramming late night comp-sci work. Almost everyone in my class had grown up in the age of hacking around on Apple IIs, their first PCs, etc. No one just randomly ended up in the Comp Sci part of the university because they just wanted a job to make money.

It wasn’t for the “riches” and there has never been a time where 90% of the developers working weren’t doing boring old enterprise dev making middle class wages.

And most of the people in my class had their first exposure to computer programming at my state school in south GA was in college.

Your experience is localized and perhaps more anecdotal than you admit. I also graduated and started my career in '96. But, I grew up in the SF Bay Area and did my CS major at UC Berkeley. I saw a lot more of the idealist types being described by others in these comments. It's not that we didn't expect to need jobs, but there was more passion-driven interest. Back then, it seemed like people "just in it for money" or to meet family expectations were more often going to pre-law or pre-med.

I had a focus on programming languages in my undergrad studies and went into an academic R&D programming job, basically making tools for computational sciences. I've basically spent my whole career using and writing open source software.

I've definitely seen a kind of culture shift where the frontier nature of our old R&D culture is getting drowned out by boring process. To me, it is largely the influx of cybersecurity compliance that is killing the old culture. The bureaucratic compliance overhead is antithetical to the small team prototyping approach that drove progress during most of my career. It inspires a sort of cargo cult risk-management process that seems more about appearances and plausible deniability than actual secure systems.

You think most developers in the US were located “in the Bay Area”, went to Berkeley , and spent a career doing open source work in computational science and you call my experience “anecdotal”?

Most developers from the beginning worked at banks, government, defense etc doing boring enterprise work. That has always been the case.

They weren’t doing “research” writing COBOL for banks and the government.

In 30 years, I’ve worked at 10 jobs for startups, boring big enterprise companies, BigTech and I’ve been working in consulting (3 of those were working full time in AWS’s consulting department) for five years working with developers from startups, enterprises and government.

I think my exposure to a wide swath of the industry is a little bit more than working in California for 30 years…

Even when I was younger and single, all of us would hang out after work - males and females and go to the bar, the club, the strip club (yes the women too - it was their idea they were mostly BAs and one programmer), and just really enjoy the money we were making. We were all making $50K-$80K back when you could easily get a house built in the burbs for $150k-$170K.

Even as I got older, and change jobs in my mid 30s, by then my coworkers were mostly involved with other hobbies and our families. We weren’t even thinking about computers after work.

Sorry, I didn't mean to discount your experience so much as add another microcosm to the mix. I think we're all anecdotal...

But, I do think HN has a cultural fixation on the fabled Silicon Valley experience. This includes an attachment to (nostalia for?) the old university/startup axis. This used to be a more fluid exchange, rather than just the regular enterprise hiring pipeline.

That’s just the thing - it never was on the meta level.

The tech startup scene was a thing between the mid 90s and 2000 with the first dot com boom and even most of them outside of the hardware companies like Sun, Cisco, Intel and software at Netscape were not doing cutting edge for the time development. The startups were throwing dumb (or some premature) things at the wall with no business plan backed by VC money. The people at startups were definitely there for the money. No one had a “passion” to deliver pet food or groceries (Webvan) or early web advertising.

Tech before the mid 90s were programmers building software on mainframes mostly doing boring things.

You had the dark days between 2001-2008 before mobile, web apps, SaaS and high speed internet took off where all most people really could find were boring enterprise jobs. Back then, I was living in Atlanta and the dot com bust didn’t affect the local market at all. The banks, the airlines, the credit card processing companies were hiring boring Microsoft devs and Java devs like crazy.

I’ve just seen too often where 90% of the devs who spend their career at boring old enterprises don’t have any idea what it’s like for those who are in the top 10% working at BigTech and adjacent while at the same time those 10% can’t fathom the fact that there are “Dark Matter developers” living their lives in tier 2 cities with their big houses in the burbs treating a job as just a job and most people always have.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...

I’ve been on both sides (and now in the middle doing strategy cloud consulting). I had my first house built in 2003 for $170K and even my second house built in the “good school system” in the burbs of Atlanta in 2016 for $335K. We moved and downsized three years ago.

Yeah, my class was full of people going into those Bay Area companies you are dismissing as elite or non-representative. There were "always" startups in Silicon Valley, since that's the origin story of those big 90s companies. It didn't start with the dot-com boom. My friends who chased startups were not going after "foo, but on the web!" cliches. They were more esoteric hardware and software products.

There was also a Small World effect where we kept in touch across these various R&D spaces. I don't mean to sound grandiose, but I think my cohort built up a lot of the open source that props up the current web world. I don't quite agree with the article this HN post links to, as I know a lot of that open source was written on salary. It wasn't all hobbyists in moms' basements. Whether we worked in government, university, or corporation, we had figured out ways to work on these things we wanted to work on and release to the world and be paid a wage to do it.

I do feel like our microcosm is dying out. I'm not sure if it is a net change where the tech world is reverting to just the dominant corporate tech you describe, or if there is some replacement microcosm bubbling into existence and I'm just out of the loop now.

By the number of developers and what they were doing at any time since the 70s, your experience isn’t representative. The startup tech bros back then weren’t doing things out of “passion”. Even in the 60s and 70s Jobs, Bill Gates, the Intel founders, Larry Ellison, Bushnell, Scott McNealy, and all of the early tech founders were driven by money.

And whether startup founders had passion or not, once they took outside funding, money was all that mattered.

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