An Interview with Paul Graham: Hackers & Painters 10 Years Later

I just say what the dictionary entry is for recursion: see recursion.

No, that has not made me cooler.

"Nothing matters unless that shit works" applies to painting as well - the paint still has to stick to the canvas. And plenty of coded "utter shit" gets heaps of recognition - like every middleman-creating user-disempowering "web 2.0" data silo.

Those are all accurate statements.

In 2003, I was entering my senior year of CS. When I was taking classes that weren't really my cup of tea (operating systems, networking, processor architecture), I was constantly hearing news about offshoring, Indian IT grads, how dumb startups/Silicon Valley/tech were, how the tech boom had robbed and ruined America, etc.

I finished the CS degree but rather than try to find a job (which I assumed would be unstable and at risk of company collapse or outsourcing), I went to grad school for Urban Planning. Found out that there's plenty of programming work, plenty of tech fields outside of the C systems programming that I didn't enjoy, and that even bad programming jobs are way better than good jobs in other fields, wrt pay, benefits, flexibility, hours, etc.

If they weren't cool in 2003, it was only as a short-term aftereffect of the dot-com collapse. Those were certainly cool things when I graduated in 1998 and shortly afterwards.

In 2003 the state of the art with startup talking was Guy Kawasaki, a guy who did some marketing in the 80s and has ridden that wave since. Nothing actionable.

In 2003, there wasn't a way, as an "outsider," to get into the funding scene. The system felt more closed than now. You still need to "know someone who knows someone," but before, everybody who knew anybody was probably out of reach.

In 2003, Google was still a mystery. Nobody knew they were making billions of dollars a year.

In 2003, a startup wasn't something you just did. Startups were for serious people doing serious things who would give 60% of their company to a VC for a $3M A round. Seed rounds were $20k friends and family or $100k "I know a rich guy" rounds.

...and if you were in elementary school in 2003, I feel tragically old and unsuccessful.

I entered college in Fall 2001 and enrolled in my university's CS program in Spring 2003. While in high school, I witnessed the high flying late 90s dot-com boom from the sidelines, at times wondering if I should drop out of high school or skip college to join in on the good times. Then the dot-com crash and 9/11 happened and the country went into a recession. I had friends telling me I should not major in computer science, and that most jobs are being outsourced away. To be honest, the truth on the ground did not invalidate that opinion at the time. Internships were hard to come by, you either submitted your resume into the dark pits of corporate job portals, or you emailed your resume to small local companies no one has ever heard of. Even in a top tier university at the time (Univ. of Washington), many classmates of mine were happy to get interviews with IT departments of companies whose core business is not computer-driven, e.g. logistics or healthcare companies. Not every CS major lined up a lucrative summer internship then, and some had to graduate with minimal to no work experience, throwing them into the catch-22 of no-experience = no-hire. Must've been frustrating for many. The first sign of life came with the success of "web 2.0" sites like Flickr and Google Maps 1.0, and "modern" developer tools like Ruby on Rails & jQuery. What felt like grunt work just a few years before had turned into more of a joy. Within 2005-2007, I noticed increased enthusiasm from the web community to re-build old ideas with modern user experiences, and the web became exciting again. Then in 2007 the iPhone happened, which led to enthusiasm for mobile-optimized sites, followed by the native iOS craze of late 2008/2009. After that, YC and some of its early companies got recognized in mainstream press, Google succeeded with Android, and open source got real exciting with the emergence of Git & GitHub. From that point on, it was just a dizzying pace of change in web and data technologies.

I graduated in December 2001, with a BS and M.Eng in CS from a well known school. This was almost precisely the low point after the dot com crash. I spent 4 months at home with my parents doing nothing. I had some random uninteresting interviews; the most interviewing was for JPL in Pasadena, but it wasn't a fit. Then I managed to find a summer internship at EA in April 2002. Not even a full time job.

The game industry was the only thing in software "going well". It's completely decoupled from the web/dotcom business. I think EA's stock doubled from 2002-2004 because everything else in tech was completely stagnant, at least business-wise.

I moved to Redwood City first, then SOMA later in 2002. SOMA was completely different -- sort of tumbleweed-y as someone here put it. My roommate from craigslist was 5 years older and worked at a company in San Mateo, but otherwise I met almost no other tech people.

Everyone I knew from college said they wanted to move out to California, but not many did because they couldn't find jobs (although most of my college friends were not in tech).

I did have a college acquaintance who started at Google in 2002, and I found that interesting because I had used Google since summer 2000, but not noteworthy as far as I can remember.

After that summer internship in 2002, I converted to full time at EA for a $60K salary. That sounds ridiculously low now!

In 2003, I was sick of my job at EA, but I wanted to stay in SF. The only decent companies I could find with programming jobs (i.e. not doing IT at a bank) were Dolby and I think Macromedia, which later was bought by Adobe. That was kinda it for the city? Most jobs then were on the peninsula.

"Startups" weren't a thing. I don't know when they became a thing again, but I think it did have something to do with the Google IPO in 2004 (I've worked there since 2005, after they posted a recruiting billboard near EA/Oracle in Redwood City).

I think I bought Hackers and Painters around 2004 or so. I was reading the Joel on Software forum at the time, and I think I got the recommendation there. That was my Hacker News. I learned so much as a green programmer from reading that forum and Joel's essays.

(To a lesser extent I learned from Paul Graham's essays, which at that time weren't only about startups. Although I thought he was sort of arrogant until I saw him speak in person at Google, I think in 2005 or 6 when he was starting YC.)

All of that wisdom still applies, so for the younger people who haven't seen them, start with the top 10 essays here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ .

I don't have first-hand experience on either of the coasts, but I was a CS major at a state school in the Midwest at the time and my impression now, working as a programmer, still in the Midwest, isn't much different from what it was then. People are slightly more aware of what I do now -- not all of them think I fix computers, anymore -- but they consistently think I make less than I do, for example, and it carries zero prestige here. A very good friend just started working as an optometrist and all of our acquaintances are much more impressed by that and assume he is much more well off, which isn't really true, especially given his debt load and opportunity cost over the last 8 years.

That said, my company has an office in Mountain View and when I'm there (a couple times a year) the feeling is completely different. If you go out on Castro St, people at bars just assume you work in tech and are comfortable chatting about your work. It's obviously not like that in Missouri.

Edit: I feel like I should point out that there is a startup culture here now and it's growing. There was nothing like that in 2003, so it's not exactly the same.

Choice comments from important people in my life during my college career (2000 to 2004):

Why would you study engineering? It's Wall Street hours for teacher pay. [family member]

[Classmate X] has gotten a job at Google? That's interesting. Who are they? A [management] consulting company? They're not? That's curious, X seems like they're smart enough to work for a consulting company. [Numerous classmates, top 10 research university.]

You should think about dropping one of your degrees (East Asian Studies and CS) since the combination of the two will make you virtually unemployable. [Academic advisor, top 10 research university. Her concern was that I'd be seen as a flight risk from any job which didn't allow me to exercise both areas at once, and that there existed virtually no jobs that would allow that.]

You should come work in our research lab while persuing your Master's in engineering. We'll offer you a $20k a year salary to do this. This is one of the best offers you'll get in the current economy. [an academic I worked with during undergraduate, who I believe was not attempting to deceive me with this line, although he was clearly mistaken. I was positive I could swing $30k, somewhere.]

Own a business? Don't be crazy. Get a job at a nice safe megacorp, that way you'll have job security and health insurance. [parents and self]