What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry | Hacker News Reader

What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

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126 pointstkrajcar135 comments

I started two companies and I am not sad to see the days of renting rack space, buying hardware, and sys-admining everything yourself disappear, anymore than I'm sad to see that I don't need to build my own power plant to run my stuff, or farm my own food.

The innovation in the cloud space in the last couple of years has removed an enormous burden from working on ideas. You could waste enormous time just setting up an email or web machine in the past that these days is just a click away. Knowing how to configure BGP has little to do with most people's ability to deliver their core product.

I don't know what brogrammers are. Maybe he's talking about what I used to call tech-carpetbaggers in the dot-com boom. Essentially, every area of human endeavor starts out with the truly passionate, the truly dedicated, and later becomes mainstreamed if successful. Some percentage of those who arrive later will have other motivations, and won't care for the same reason you do. It's not unique to tech. You see it the gaming community ("you're not a real gamer!", "fake geek girls", etc)

As tech becomes easier, and the barriers fall, more and more people will be able to participate. Geeks and neckbeards will become a minority. I don't think we should mourn for the era when tech required priestly dedication. We should be happy another 4 billion people are now getting access, and greater and greater numbers of people can translate ideas to products efficiently.

I don't think that is his main point. I think it is far more about the fact that just the surface layers aren't enough to build good solutions to problems, that's good enough for demos and mock-ups but not good enough for production. For that you need some deeper level of insight.

I think it's a bit of both (more of the first though), but the second one is only a temporary problem. Given another 10 years (I say 10, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's less than 5) of development the surface layers will be enough to build all except the amazon's or apple's of the world.

I think that is application specific. The same points are often made about programming, and there are certainly circumstances where you need to know how your code is compiled to assembly, or how the kernel works, for many, this isn't an issue. Sure, if you need to hit a target 30fps or 60fps in a game, then that implies what much be understood in the whole stack.

Since 99+% of all startup ideas will fail, it makes no sense to invest and optimize upfront. If your startup runs into scalability problems, you can always fix those later. You should consider the first version a throwaway. More than likely, your investments will be wasted. Even if your startup succeeds, it will often be a pivot away from the original mission.

The only case where I would say this doesn't hold is your security/privacy architecture. You don't want to fix this later after you've let your customer's data be stolen, you want this done right up front. You can rewrite everything else about your product, except for the things, which if they go wrong, will result in people being hurt materially or physically.

> You should consider the first version a throwaway.

If you start out knowing that you are writing something that will be trashed, why would you invest yourself in it? It's hard to tell someone to build something that will be thrown away; to trade the time they can never get back for something that will most likely fail. That will almost certainly _not_ get their best work - which means your odds of success go down; perhaps drastically. And if the first version DOES happen to work, you still have to throw it away at some point and start over (or else live in pain for the life of the product). Either way; you loose.

Now think about the approach where you take the time to think through your ideas. Where you expect the best from your people right from the start because you're all building to last. When you earnestly expect the best of people, they generally give you that (or close to it, at least). You get a better result. So then the first version doesn't work. But you've learned a lot, because the thought process you went through taught you things; things you took the time to learn. Things you can leverage in your next venture; things that will speed it up, make it stronger, get it quicker. But what if it worked? Now you're not fettered with the task of rebuilding what you've just built because what you have is solid. It can be built on. So that momentum you have as the first version works can be leveraged into the second, third and fourth versions. And momentum means something; it means happier employees and - ultimately - better returns.

The former (get it quick) is (for the most part) the world of today. The latter (get it right) was the world the author remembers - and pines for.

You should be investing yourself into the problem being solved, not the particular snapshot of what a solution looks like right now.

It's a different perspective that believes most (tech) businesses these days are not failing because of their codebase. It's the school of thought that believes the effort invested in exceeding the Pareto principle in writing code will only have a marginal effect on likelihood of success.

Cutting corners during development may build technical debt, but for the first N iterations, it also saves time. The argument goes that it's more important to get more versions in front of your customers than to build the perfect codebase off the bat.

Also, in any startup, you're going to need to significantly adjust the codebase as your business changes products (pivots). All the effort invested up front on a feature that isn't relevant is essentially wasted.

Speed of iteration is the primary objective (to people who think this way).

I think there are two different problems here: building a good solution, and building a solution for a problem that people have to begin with.

If you /don't know/ if there will be any customers for your product (no matter how well-built it might be), spending time and money on building a very solid v1 is a waste. Sure you will have experience that you can leverage in your next venture, but that's an extremely expensive way to get it. And if you're bootstrapping, or have hired other people, you're potentially spending the financial stability of you or your employees to get this experience.

If you /do know/ you will have customers (either because you're sure it's a problem people have, or you've got people giving you money for basic R&D without any guarantee of returns), then I completely agree with you and the author -- build the product right and it will pay dividends later on.

In the prototype-then-throw-away model, you might not get the engineers' best development work, but you will get the best brainstorming and design work, because everybody's comfortable adjusting the product until they're confident they have something that people want. If you marry yourself to it beforehand, if you commit people's livelihoods to it, people will naturally try to rationalize what they're doing because they're committing so much to it, even if it's wrong. And if you've got the smartest people working with you, they'll be incredibly good at it. This creates a much bigger problem years down the line if it fails.

The Mythical Man Month has an entire chapter why it is a good idea to "Plan to Throw One Away"[1]. But I think you know what's going on.

[1] https://archive.org/stream/mythicalmanmonth00fred#page/114/

> If you start out knowing that you are writing something that will be trashed, why would you invest yourself in it?

This basically boils down to: why would you make a high-risk bet? The answer: Because they sometimes pay off big.

I like building things to last. But building something to last when odds of success are 50 to 1 against is foolish. If you are trying to test a startup idea, the only sensible approach is to bet the absolute smallest amount necessary to find out if the idea is worthwhile.

I've built great systems for ideas that didn't work, and it sucks. For example, in 2004 I put together a team and spent 9 months building an awesome implementation of an excellent idea that was just 5 years too early. We were all really proud of our technical work, but since we ended up with a trivial number of users, it was all, in the end, wasted effort.

Later I realized, thanks to people like Eric Ries, that the thing to do early on was to invest just enough to see if there was something to the idea. Most things won't, which means you save enough time to rebuild the few that do properly.

The "think through your ideas" thing is a false hope. You can only think so much about limited data. People can be just as happy working on something they're planning to throw away. Artists often do plenty of sketches before they do the real one, and software developers can do the same.

Look at some of Facebook's early code:

https://gist.github.com/philfreo/7257723

https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406

There are plenty of people in this industry who would have told you this code wasn't fit for production.

People frequently overestimate both what's needed to build commercially-viable solutions and how easy it becomes to recruit the right people to improve (or reimplement) poorly-architected solutions if they become popular.

Good enough, ship it!

Premature optimisation ...

Getting a good idea is usually harder than getting the tech right. Being able to quickly make prototypes is the most important thing in a start up.

FYI I'm not a "brogrammer". I work at a large established company and one of my main jobs is making systems work at large scale. But that's not what you do when starting a company. If you make it you can sort out those issues later.

If you lay things out well that it has a much better chance of succeeding than if you lay things out poorly. And knowledge helps with that.

If you optimize more than you need to then that is premature optimization. But if it takes 5 seconds to load a page (or more) then any level of success will kill you and that's bad for business. You need to scale just ahead of the needs of your users. Too much and you're going down the premature optimization rabbit hole, too little and you'll end up with angry users and competitors will likely eat you.

tl;dr: People are suddenly interested in something I'm passionate about, they're all poseur johnny-come-latelys, I'm the authentic hacker

This is maybe the tenth HN post I've read that's some iteration of this gut feeling by people who entered tech after a life-long obsession with computers. It's really cool that you're passionate about CS -- there are also a lot of people who are rational actors making rational decisions when presented with market signals, and they're not bad people for doing that. They're just acting in rational self-interest. Sorry it upsets you. Almost every industry is full of people who toil at jobs they're not passionate about, and it doesn't make their employers bad companies. It's okay to work a job and define your life satisfaction by raising a family, making art, enjoying the outdoors, etc.

There's a legitimate complaint here about poor craftsmanship, but: (1) Poor craftsmen often wash out in the interview process or torpedo the companies sloppy enough to hire them, and (2) Everyone starts off as a poor craftsman, and it would be cool if people like OP asked themselves "How can I help more people become excellent craftsmen?" than "AGHHH MORE PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL AT THIS THING I LOVE, IT'S SO OVER"

This is also another version of "last man over the bridge" which oddly enough I can't seem to find a link to define it. I thought it was a fairly well know concept. In other words it's similar in a way to old timers on an island and how they react when a flux of newcomers arrive with their new ideas and different motivations. And they aren't "authentic". Same as in a way hazing newbies in the marines, fire department etc. The newcomers then do it to further newcomers. Hence "last man over the bridge" is the place in line you are at. (I'd like to hear other definitions but that's the way I see it.)

As someone who is somewhat of an old timer in a few things that are popular now (flying RC helicopters (gas) since the 80's, photography (70's) (had a darkroom) 70's, and "computers" (70's) (I can do programming somewhat but am not a programmer) and lastly "entrepreneur" (right out of college and things in high school). Also I was in the entrepreneurial program at b school and it was so long ago that people frowned upon it (and I was at Wharton) here's the thing: I'm actually glad there is so much attention paid to things that very few people cared about years ago when it seemed that only I did.

Edit: Oh yeah Unix in the 80's as well as macintosh and Apple as well.

It's more than that, it's more like having pride in being an early adopter only to find yourself standing in the middle of a crowd.

Those who seek the frontier must keep moving or they'll end up surrounded by a community they might not be able to tolerate. To stand your ground, shotgun in hand, yelling at kids to get off your lawn is not helping anyone.

Let's face it: Kids are holding hardware in their hands that researchers in the 1980s would kill for, an iPhone 6 has a CPU so powerful it would easily crush the most powerful computers in the world in 1993 (http://www.top500.org/list/1993/06/) but they use it to take selfies.

'Rational Self Interest' is a myth. For self interest to be truly rational you'd have to be able to model long term consequences of short term decisions extremely well.

This would be a useful way to make sure you wouldn't do something incredibly stupid and ultimately self-defeating just so you could to make a quick buck in the next quarter, if the ultimately consequence was that the same 'rational decision' was going to kill you - financially or literally - a year or ten later. (Or at least you'd be fully aware that it was likely to kill you, and were just fine with that.)

If you try to model long term wide area consequences you eventually have to accept that rational actors work within some very irrational belief systems, and long term modelling is very much a minority interest.

This is partly because you get as much useful information about the future from 'market signals' as you get from any stampeding herd, flock or school of animals - which is not much.

This has been covered over and over in the literature (e.g. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, etc).

>Almost every industry is full of people who toil at jobs they're not passionate about, and it doesn't make their employers bad companies.

Maybe not. But it certainly makes them extremely dull and horribly inefficient, economically and politically.

>There's a legitimate complaint here about poor craftsmanship,

I don't think it's a complaint about poor craftsmanship. I think it's a complaint about questionable cultural ethics.

This is a strawman of my argument. If you can make $40k in one job or $85k in another by completing a 12-week course, it is a purely rational decision. (You may be passionate enough about your $40k job to turn down more money in other areas, but only you are capable of weighing that trade-off. It's still a rational process.) I'm not making the claim that all humans are purely rational all the time.

Rational self interest might be a myth when applied to the extent that some economic models apply it, but at a basic level holds up. I know /tons/ of people that have taken one job over another because it pays more, even if it's one that they're less interested in.

Not everybody has the luxury of being passionate about something lucrative -- that's not something you really have control over (maybe some, but I don't think much. This is another issue entirely, though). I get that it might be lamentable that an industry isn't full of the most passionate people anymore, but the tradeoff is that it became a large-scale industry. If the original author wants the kind of deep, nerdy devotion he used to have, he can find it! There are plenty of research institutes and startups investing in long-term big bets that need this kind of thing. But being mad that /everybody/ isn't that way anymore seems childish.

Seems like some people are missing the point. He loved it when people enjoyed tech for the pure "creation" and "exploration" aspect. Not the money money money that it has often become. I also disagree with him on this point. I see a huge amount of new ideas and work from people who just like to create, but it tends to be at a more grass roots level like the Arduino community, or the hackerspace groups. So I say to him "Your love not only still exists, it has grown to encompass the whole world". Just don't look for it in Silicon Valley.

i went on a rant about this stuff in a recent comment asking about Tech Bootcamps that i deleted half of cuz i knew it would just piss ppl off & was a waste of breath (all other comments were pretty much from ppl who lOoooOooOove 'em, half commenters had vested interest).

but yeah tech bootcamps, consultant scammers, open source hipsters.... i see this stuff is rampant & it seems to be a downer in cyberspace. I code because its a passion, got a web dev job because one was offered & am desperately trying to get out of it so i can get some of the bloody CRUD out of my eyes (though thankfully I'm in Java web services which is much more expansive/rewarding than previous web technologies i've used).

my coworkers complain that no one will throw raises/promotions at them. I look around & think "Why would you want to continue down this path? You're making well above a living wage and you claim to hate being in such a dispassionate workplace, why not just look for something more rewarding?" The response is always some utter bollocks about wanting to have a house so that when their parents visit they can have a nice place to spend time (for the sake of those 3 days/year, a major lifestyle choice is made).

These ppl are pure scum and I see completely unqualified devs with this mindset making more money than myself & other much more intellectual programmers (the high rate guys are generally migrant consultants who blow with the wind). Then I see bootcamp classes advertised to overpriveleged failure-to-launch types, teaching them to be just as scummy/desperate.

There is a joy to coding as there is to other creative disciplines, but the market doesn't encourage it so you need to look elsewhere. It's true that its there, but I bet it was much more prevalent in the cowboy days when the whole industry was a hacker movement. I also bet it was more difficult to sort things out when you couldn't just Google easily for the trending libs, so I suspect the concentration of pseudo-intellectuals was much lower.

And in fact the venom I have against tech bootcamps is that the greatest takeaway I have from years of programming is the ability to self-educate. If I didn't gain this wonderful skill, I would not want to be in this industry at all. Programming without the ability to go above & beyond is a recipe for a dead-end job.

if you downvoted this can you please explain why? I am actually desperate for reasons not to be so cynical about my job so i can at least scrape something out of my days until i find a better place...

I wish I had a sunnier view of things but I am someone who wants to work hard but feels like an ant on an ant farm. ppl have advised me to go into startup scene but all the startups i've interviewed at in NY are mock corporations -- ad delivery, ad multimedia, analytics, facebook ripoff.... bleh. where to go?

Consider revising your writing style to be more formal and less conversational. Make an attempt to use punctuation where appropriate, especially with respect to commas and capitalization.

Grammar errors will impact a reader's perception of you, regardless of whether your original intent had true merit or not. Your goal should be to communicate exactly the ideas you wish you convey, as concisely as possible.

Natural language is the transfer protocol for ideas between humans. If you do not adhere to the published standards, you risk experiencing data loss in strict clients.

lol that is too true.... i don't mind conversational hippie-styling but HN is the one forum where i get regularly shredded for it

I have a casual and uncaring writing style in many places, but HN is not one of them. This is a place where I enjoy writing properly and reading properly-written comments, mostly because it forces commenters to put some thought into what they write.

When you're here, you know that the majority of comments will have something insightful to add to the discussion and you do not feel like you're wasting your time reading them.

Don't hate on this mindset. It's not appropriate everywhere, but it's not just a hippie concept, it has merits here.

I didn't downvote, but maybe it was the tone. "These ppl are pure scum" qualifies for me for others than some devs with other motivations than what I have.

There are definitely good jobs which one can be passionate about out there. I didn't easily find that job myself when I was sick of my job and ended up creating it instead. This industry offers so much potential that I feel it is nearly only a matter of looking around to see what needs to be done. Not a given one will be successful, but doing ok so far. Done give up, look around yourself, the good stuff is out there.

thx... I think the reason I get a bit heated is because I come from an arts background actually. There are a lot of slippery slopes in industry, and I am on one. It disgusts me when I see that my peers are just tumbling over one another to reach the bottom first, just to put another $5/hr on their rate whereas I used to work with people who didn't care if they spent their whole careers as penniless musicians so long as they got to experience the feeling of genuine pursuit of passion.

A lot of tech feels like a very spiritually empty game, and I resent it for becoming this gruesome when really programming is a beautiful pursuit. I'm trying to be patient, there is a company that has expressed interest in me that is much more into embracing proper design paradigms and new approaches to back-end code. At my current gig we are handcuffed by lots of legacy code, layers of bureaucracy, "Senior Devs & Architects" who are really at about junior level, and people who are difficult just for the sake of slowing down the average pace of work.

Living with this for 2 years has been maddening & I am relieved that I have enough on my post-academia resume now to escape it one of these days.

thanks... I think the reason I get a bit heated is because I come from an arts background actually. There are a lot of slippery slopes in industry, and now I am on one. It disgusts me when I see that my peers are just tumbling over one another to reach the bottom first, just to put another $5/hr on their rate whereas I used to work with people who didn't care if they spent their whole careers as penniless musicians so long as they got to experience the feeling of genuine pursuit of passion. I see a lot of devs implementing a mess of seriously nasty sweat-shop code with tools/langs they only embraced because of some perceived gap in the market. It seems unethical to me as a developer to do things in an inefficient manner, or its at least sad in that it means you have no sense of personal efficacy or investment in your own growth (beyond how a corporation views you).

A lot of tech feels like a very spiritually empty game, and I resent it for becoming this gruesome when really programming can be a beautiful pursuit as well. I'm trying to be patient, there is a company that has expressed interest in me that is much more into embracing proper design paradigms and modern approaches at least. At my current gig we are handcuffed by lots of legacy code, layers of bureaucracy, "Senior Devs & Architects" who are really at about junior level, and people who are difficult just for the sake of slowing down the pace of work.

Even in academia, I saw a lot of music tech students receive their masters degrees only to promptly jump into a tech bootcamp so they could then assume the position of low-end web dev rather than use any of the audio research skills they spent years trying to assimilate (bit of pot calling the kettle black here but I purposely ditched Ruby for a Java-based job so that I can get back into coding DSP & performance-intensive research apps -- I also spend a lot of time decompiling audio libs).

Living with this job for 2 years has been maddening & I am relieved that I have enough on my post-academia resume now to escape it one of these days. I really need to meet artists who code. Have even been considering going into indie game programming just to meet more of those types, though really my passion is more in electronic art than gaming (but electronic art is barely an industry at all outside advertising!)...

You (and others with real software development skills and drive) are in an incredible position today. You've graduated into a very exciting market (I went through the previous boom and it was frenzied, but this is one is even more so) with opportunities everywhere. If you can't seem to find anything on the 'art and design technology' side, take a look into organizations like EyeBeam [http://eyebeam.org/] and AdaFruit's job page [https://www.adafruit.com/jobs/] to start with; they may not be trivial to find, but some are out there. Before I became a software developer, I was in audio engineering (didn't last long) and am an occasional musician, so I've seen both sides. There is definitely an incredible amount of boring stuff out there, but there's also exciting stuff to be found.

Many people do just jump in for the money, and others in this thread have addressed it, so I won't except to say that there are people who start out in an industry because they need the money (for example, I had to live on my own and start work at 17, no familial support), but then realize they really enjoy it and stay for the other stuff: problem solving, puzzles, building elegant things, and all the rest. Perhaps not most, but there are some.

As far as the passion vs. profit stuff, there's no denying that there's a serious tension there, and that's not going anywhere anytime soon. I've dealt with this too, and I saw three choices:

1) You can live like a pauper in an expensive area/decently in a very cheap area and do what you enjoy, even if no one ever buys it. There are people who do this with code - I've seen plenty of indie game devs pick a cheap area in the US, work the occasional freelance job, and spend every other moment working on their games. This can be a totally valid path if you're OK with its limitations. You know what this is like from the art side already, too.

2) You can try to get wealthy and then do whatever you want - no more working terrible jobs, being paid a fraction of what you're worth, being engulfed in [other] company politics, working for others when you'd rather be working for yourself, etc. I'm sure many people of us here on HN are doing exactly that.

3) You can try to find a decent compromise - some companies will give you 5% time, others may pay you to just do research (a previous company I worked for paid a few people to do nothing but work on an audio/3D visual coding framework, for example), others simply hit that sweet spot of giving you interesting stuff to work on for decent money.

thanks for the suggestions. I actually spent some time as an "intern" (hang out making art & doing whatever) at Harvestworks [http://www.harvestworks.org/], which is very similar to EyeBeam. I just decided it wasn't for me when I saw that artists spent so much time on grant-writing just for a chance at a sum of money most of them (they were pretty tech-savvy) could make through a few days of freelance if they sharpened their coding skills a bit.

I didn't mean to come off as a spoiled brat chastising hard-working people. I definitely understand that folks have to take jobs and make a wage, not always doing what they want. My criticism is much more directed toward those who have reached the intermediate level but then choose to excel at mediocrity. I work with some devs who are shining examples of this. They use a rapid dev tool that encourages awful programming practices, and they jump from shop to shop leaving piles of code-dung behind. They are slightly jealous as I refine my Java skills to becoming increasingly more powerful & effective, but not to the point where they would actually commit to learning. Instead, they are content knowing they have a niche skill and will be consistently overpaid for poor quality implementations.

Anyway I digress.... your breakdown seems pretty deadon. I wish I had the stomach for #1 but didn't, so I thought it would be easier to do #3 to pave the way for #2 (I had this idea that working corporate gigs was the only true test of and exercise for my coding skills)....

I guess I need to find a better #3 or jump ship to 1 or maybe even 2 if I can handle a startup run... it's just hard to leave because the current gig actually doesn't work us very hard its just too much politicking within a very dull talent pool, kinda lulls me to sleep (though trust me I would take a more challenging job in an instant, its not about being lazy just lack of opportunities thus far).

I downvoted your post for the reasons:

1. Too much bile: | tech bootcamps, consultant scammers, open source hipsters... pure scum... i deleted half of cuz i knew it would just piss ppl off & was a waste of breath

If you know enough to not write this, why did you write it?

2. The lack of proper grammar. If you can't take the time to neatly express your ideas, why do you expect anyone to take them time to understand them?

Thanks for writing this. HN is full of touchy-feely folks, hence the downvotes. For many, it's hard to look past tone. They react emotionally. Sure, maybe your grammar could be better or maybe if we forced everyone to have perfect grammar we'd never had read your post.

I also have been dissatisfied with the industry and what it has become. I got into this to create solutions, not to glue others' solutions together. This isn't fun anymore. I'm looking for something more artistic like concept art drawing. I like what you said, "can't wait to get the CRUD out of my eyes"!

I also agree on the startup point you made. Everything is about ads and how to make them better. Yawn to the max. So uninteresting. I'm afraid I don't have a cure for your cynicism. But I want to leave you with something. I was watching an instructional video of an artist teaching environment drawing technique. He said one of the fun things about drawing professionally is he has been doing it for 50 years and it's still interesting to him. Programming is mercurial and will have different "interesting" periods that will appeal to different people as it progresses. This era in programming is not my favorite.

heh yes its funny i dont karma points seriously, i was mainly interested in hearing some qualitative sort of discussion but the main complaints i got were about grammar & negativity, neither of which i am particularly apologetic about. anyway, glad u appreciated & provided a thoughtful response :)

i think you are right about the "mercurial" nature. my boss says it used to be much more fun before lots of mature libraries & package software existed. It was literally about algorithm design at all points. Now things are more about vetting existing technologies to see what the most widely-accepted & reliable standards are. And honestly, there are design patterns you can learn from that but realistically I've been in enterprise Java for 2 years and with that small amount of experience, I am already finding that 99% of the work we do is trivial. Anything that would be over my head is provided in a vendor API, and with modern code we can keep our own domain logic slim enough that it almost never gets out of hand.

I think there is still a lot of interesting stuff to accomplish with code but as others pointed out, the industry is sortof over-expanded. Ideas are not leading programming so much as programming is leading to iteration through mundane ideas. The boring startup problem is the result of there being way less thinkers in the industry than do-ers, I'm sure... or that entrepreneurialism is in reality just planting the seeds of micro-corporations rather than acting as an incubator for mind-bending ideas.

Having to be a part of this mundane period is probably my fault (for straying from art toward a career in programming) but maybe I can redeem myself somehow & take a last shot at heaven. I've been thinking of starting my own company, but as a deep-sleeper cell for DSP algorithms development... continue my machine learning / AI research from my master's degree, develop some really powerful tools with heavily optimized algorithms, then try to integrate them into the commercial space (audio editing software, most likely). Hmm... we'll see. Best of luck, again I appreciate u taking the time.

Funny we've both been seduced away from arts by programming. :)

Best of luck to you.

What is omitted from the article is the difference in the _size_ of the tech industry during the last 20 years. In 1995, the year the author romances, he emphasizes that doing anything in tech was hard. Two decades later, the hard problems have not gone away; the industry has broadened such that there are more opportunities across the entire spectrum of "noble challenge". There are more opportunities in making fluff, and more opportunities for even more difficult, admirable, and impactful undertakings than were ever possible before.

The industry has not been overtaken by the get-rich-quick charlatans, it has expanded enough that they can find a place.

It did seem like everyone plus dog had a startup in 1995 and most were working on the absolutely stupidest ideas possible just that they were more B2B focused than B2C in that era.

I'd argue the CueCat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat) was the iconic culmination of five years of feverish insanity.

You say that, but at least it was an actual technological product. These days you get Buzzfeed whose product is "lists" and Upworthy whose product is "misleading headlines".

Buzzfeed is an outlet that performs real journalism. If you cannot see what their product is and what they are doing, perhaps you need to open your eyes.

Is this sarcasm?

Have you ever read the site? Like, actually read it, not just glanced at something someone linked you or the front page?

My opinion on BuzzFeed isn't relevant. I was asking if it was sarcasm or not because I was interested in looking into it myself if it wasn't. Wasn't going to waste my time if you were trying to make a joke.

No, it is not sarcasm.

1995 was actually a few years before the insanity took hold. Most people still didn't know what the Internet was back then.

1998-2001 is when things got really crazy. Arguably things getting almost as bad now.

Yeah when I read the post, I kept thinking about the fact that there are a number of areas in which the just plain interested individual could focus their efforts to achieve the same general feeling of depth the author had back then. And this can also transfer across technical domains in unexpected ways. For example, in-depth knowledge of how the Linux Kernel's network stack works could transfer to a large eventual cost savings when some BGP implementation is improved based on that knowledge. And maybe that improvement turns out to be mostly 'algorithmic' and maybe that algorithm was devised by someone working in JavaScript.

I think the network hardware issue alone is a good example of where the complexity in the stack has probably increased exponentially since the 90s.

Hello, I wrote pretty much the same thing about five years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762121

PG wrote me a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762357

Nothing has changed and actually has gotten worse in my opinion (so I hear you, bro(grammer)).

However, I've gotten a bit older and made a conscious decision to do work that is interesting to me over money and prestige. Mirroring what the other poster said, I try not to worry too much anymore about what people do in Silicon Valley/Techcrunch/Hacker News.

It bothered me before because I was torn between being true to myself and keeping up with the jones to show that I can still hang with the bro(grammer) of RapGenius, Color, Yo, the kid with the AI app whom Marissa Meyer acquired and whatever else is cool now.

It's harder than it sounds because it was easy for me to get caught up in the frenzy of how important developers are, coding is the future, you can get rich etc so I can go to the cool clubs and start a charity foundation at the same time, do a revenge of a nerd kind of thing and get the girl and buy mom a house too (or at the very least, keep up with all of the peeps who are humble-bragging about their career advancements and buying real estate etc.)

In my humble opinion, there are more important things in life like doing a job that you're suppose to be doing, like editing the cron-job according to the JIRA ticket or washing the dishes when the sink is full.

> PG wrote me a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762357

I think one way to address this is to limit the scope and talk about specific groups or organizations rather than attempting to make an overly broad assertion about the culture of the entire region.

I have seen several people on LinkedIn describe themselves as 'Visionary Entrepreneurs' - One of them had never even started a company company in his life - Just deciding that he was 'going to do it' was sufficient to convince himself that he was actually an entrepreneur (and a visionary one too!). A more accurate word to use there would be 'illusionary'.

I'm 25, I have been an employee at 4 different startups and 1 big company, I have 2 failed projects of my own under by belt (long term side projects - Working late nights and weekends and for a total of 6 years). I have one somewhat promising project in the pipeline, but I wouldn't call myself an entrepreneur - I think being an entrepreneur these days implies that you got VC funding.

My previous 2 projects failed in a large part due to strong competitors who were really well funded - On my own, I just didn't have the manpower to compete with that (not in those particular fields). Regular people who have a vision and really care about a product (and enjoy working on it) unfortunately cannot compete with well funded entrepreneurs. VC funding creates very loud noises in the market and your target users just cannot hear about your small project/company through all that noise.

I'm actually hoping that the economy will crash this year - That would clean out my current competitors - I'm sure most of them will give up as soon as VC money disappears.

/me throws one blogpost in the making in the trashcan for fear of being labeled a plagiarist and checks the room for webcams.

Odd that: me too.

I was hitting my now regular frustration with things which actually seem to get harder with time instead of simpler. It feels like we are no longer standing on the shoulders of giants, but attempting to stand on a billion ants and then struggling to see daylight as they swarm all over us.

As someone who've always liked your writing, please do write the blog post even if it's similar to this one. While it has some merits in term of ideas, the writing is quite horrible, if not confusing ...

For example, while he's bashing on the younger generations, his one anecdote is about an "entrepreneur" with 20 years of experience: that's neither Gen Y or millennial ...

I'll think about it. My reputation as a cranky old guy doesn't need any further boosting either.

What struck me from this essay is the point that if you do something because you love it (rather than just that you get paid for it) you tend to dive deeper and your degree of understanding will over time increase. If money is what motivates you all you will care about is shortcuts to the point where you can invoice, or in the case of the so called 'entrepreneurs' how you can screw your customers/co-founders/investors best.

So we get this collision of two worlds: one group wants to make cool stuff and learn, one group sees dollar bills in large quantities. And somehow the one group is able to co-opt the other and as a side effect pulls in vast numbers of people that have no idea what this is all about but that start to crank out stuff in unprecedented quantity. It's like landing in an ikea when you come from a carpentry shop, only the furniture is made of bits instead of wood.

Same here. I'll probably get slammed for saying this here, of all places, but if you manage to push out a product in six months then either you're brilliant or what you're doing just wasn't that hard. The thing is, every single person in this position assumes that they're in the first group, but it's not even possible for more than a few of them to be right. Even accounting for the nine out of ten startups that fail, there just aren't that many brilliant people. It's like Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. If everybody's brilliant, nobody is.

That means the vast majority of these people are deluding themselves and others. Not only does their expertise not carry over into other fields, but it wasn't expertise to begin with. Their swagger is unwarranted, and intensely annoying to those who'd rather build something new than swirl around in an infinite disrupt/reinvent loop.

There's just too much hype and churn in the industry today, not enough true innovation. Of course the old-timers who got us here get frustrated to see such opportunity wasted.

Define true innovation. There's been amazing advances in many industries. I think your perspective may be one that is looking a little too hard at the startup hype cycle and not enough at the whole of technology.

I've met a couple of the relatively recent "tech luminaries" often waxed poetic about in terms of their technical genius and found their understanding of actual technology (as it relates to overall software development) to range from very superficial to non-existent.

OTOH they are wildly rich and I am a wage slave, so I guess the joke's on people who think the actual quality of the technology matters rather than the way it is marketed.

You're absolutely correct that the actual quality of the technology is not the main determinant of success. Neither is how it's marketed. The biggest factor is the time and place in which both are done, and therefore how their product matches up against buyers or competitors. That's almost entirely beyond the "brilliant" entrepreneur's control. I don't begrudge them their success, but I also don't take it as proof of anything above base-level competence.

I didn't have a blog post about this in the works and my gripes aren't 100% the same (though there is a lot of overlap), but this blog post resonates with me as well.

I'm 41 and have been doing software development professionally since the mid-90s (as a hobby since 1983) and I find the vast majority of the tech industry just so disappointing these days in that it is basically just another "widget factory" industry and I thought/hoped for something better.

If you start a cranky old tech man club, send me an invite.

This always happens when a scene/subculture hits the mainstream. You could madlibs this article and get a description of every musical genre. It's sad to see what you were so passionate about appear in a diluted form, and external perception be distorted by this new image.

But there always remains an underground where true innovation and passion thrives.

This isn't music, or anything like it. The article touches on the Millenials' refusal to learn anything below their chosen layer of abstraction to be a systemic risk to anything they build.

It's more akin to every bridge engineer not bothering with materials science or integral calculus because they know how to throw a bunch of trusses together than it is akin to every hipster on the planet learning to play Stairway to Heaven.

Blaming this on millenials rather than the training they receive by employers and professors is insane.

I would love to dig down into every nuance and detail. I don't have time for that because I'm working 60 hour weeks churning out deliverables to keep up velocity. My employers don't have time or budget for me to drill down into the details, they just want features and they want them yesterday.

My employers are not millenials. The VCs who fund my company are not millenials.

It's absurd to blame the most powerless group of people for this. Blame the powerful--the ones who dictate the work culture.

Everyone's knowledge is at some layer of abstraction. Very few people know all the details of every field connected to every other field. There's no reason the person who understands the details of band bending, the person who understands the details of Hindley-Milner type inference, the person who knows the ins and outs of the unified shader model in both OpenGL and Direct3D, and the expert in routing algorithms need to all be the same person, even if all their fields may ultimately play a role in one product. And bridge engineers, quantum physicists, automobile engineers, geologists, politicians, emergency rescue personnel, etc., all work together to keep your favorite bridge functioning smoothly and our understanding of the behavior around it progressing, with only a partial or even negligible understanding of the areas of expertise of each other.

Refusal to learn is no great virtue, but that one is specialized in their knowledge is no great vice either; the world is large and no one can wrap their arms around the whole thing. You grab a piece and trust your neighbors will help you out with theirs.

God, you people who don't understand silicon culture and polishing make me sick. A bunch of hipster poseurs who just want to play with their little "programs" without even understanding the wafers that make it all possible! Get a clue!

> I can't subscribe to the flawed philosophy that a developer shouldn't have to know how an application is talking to his database, or the fine details of what goes on in the underlying system or storage cluster. Those people are like ticking time bombs for some company to hire to build out their platform. They'll get your prototype out the door at light speed, but put any traffic on it and prepare yourself for a bill the size of a Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

This. A billion times this. We should have "Law of minimal needed abstractions" :

Look at every abstraction as global variable accessed only from lines with goto on them. It better have a good reason for existing.

> We should have "Law of minimal needed abstractions"

We have it. Occam's Razor - the original version:

"entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity"

I'm a bit ambivalent about the overall theme of the essay, but this bit in particular is spot on:

"But worse than the brogrammers, I think it's the 'entrepreneurs' that bug me the most. The word feels so tainted now"

The word entrepreneur is approaching 'thought leader' as far as being eyeroll worthy. I have deep admiration for people who start their own business and work hard, but some LinkedIn profiles of self described 'entrepreneurs' are so utterly shameless. Even worse are the subtle variations on the theme - serial entrepreneur, social-media entrepreneur, etc etc...

If it makes you feel any better:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush

"Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush"

I think the biggest complaint he has, but doesn't realize what it really is, is the deterioration of the signal-to-noise ratio in his respective communities.

And he's right. When 3 of every 5 people you meet in the space has more buzzwords than lines of code written, it gets old.

For me, I've found that HN satisfies my need for a better quality forum of like minds. He doesn't seem to have found an acceptable community and is just telling the kids to get off his lawn instead of finding a good place and group of friends to discuss fun stuff with.

But, unlike him, I just can't be mad that that barrier to entry has been reduced. Sure, there's more wantrapreneurs around now. But it's also made life easier for those of us who are still willing to work hard for long amounts of time on something real -- something wantrapreneurs just can't seem to grasp.

Interesting to watch the term "brogrammer" evolve. I'm not entirely sure what it means anymore, but I do recall it was typically used for programmers with stereotypical frat boy mentalities, then it went on to imply misogynistic tendencies, then it became a sort of generic slur and now the author uses it as a synonym for "inexperienced programmer" - one who doesn't want to peak in the lower levels of the stack more specifically, lack of desire to learn in other words.

I've only ever seen the term "brogrammer" used in SV circles, though. It's hardly a phenomenon for the tech industry as a whole.

Other than that, I somewhat agree. Most of our software hasn't evolved conceptually much since the 80s, with some notable exceptions in academic and PL circles that haven't gained mainstream acceptance, predictably.

Now that "nerd" is no a gendered insult, "bro{anything}" and "neckbeard" have taken their place.

Interesting to watch the term "brogrammer" evolve. I'm not entirely sure what it means anymore

It means people with personalities more than one standard deviation away from the speakers' personal social preferences w/r/t techies (and "neckbeard" is reserved for the other end of the curve).

Choosing "bro" as the label is not a particularly meaningful descriptor, it's just a subgroup that is OK to openly deride.

Interestingly enough, I'm the only female developer on my team and it has been universally decided that I am also the only brogrammer. So take that as you will.

> But worse than the brogrammers, I think it's the 'entrepreneurs' that bug me the most. The word feels so tainted now.

> it doesn't feel like there will be another wave of innovation that will bring us back to those magical times when such an earth shattering revolution of technology will be solely in the hands of those that love it for what it is.

There's a flip side to this article, which is that the "Golden Age" of tech has huge deficits in terms of access that we are still trying to correct in the 21st century. There are a lot of people that because of race, gender, economic status, geographic location that could not get their hands on such technology and therefore had no opportunity to enter the field.

"In those days, a startup wasn't a guy who paid some overseas software shop to crank out an MVP to run on a couple of cloud instances hoping to be the next WhatsApp"

Don't really have an opinion on the rest of the essay but I do hate this when I see it.

Its an interesting bit of nostalgia which I can find much to relate too. But I take a more practical view of the future. The author makes this statement:

"In contrast to those golden days, the tech industry today seems to lie at this horrible intersection of the mysteriously entitled generation Y, the millenials, and the extremely cheap and available resources for getting a product to market that the cloud and inexpensive overseas outsourcing shops have created."

When I think about these things and the dot com explosion, I realize that these markets are best created by the people living in them. Specifically, if you're primary labor supply consists of "mysteriously entitled generation Y and millenials" then if you are building tools for these people you need to understand what they like and what they don't like. As engineers we tend to create things that "we" would like, and if "we" are no longer a close match for what the overall market is looking like, then our instincts will lead us astray.

So the challenge is to extract the useful things from your experience and apply the core truths, rather than lament that you cannot reproduce that experience in others. Passing on the truths is important, how you get to, or teach, those truths depends on the current fashion.

It's insane to think that the least powerful members of a field are the ones controlling it.

Is the medical field controlled by medical students, or by 60 year old medical authorities?

Is chemical engineering controlled by new graduates, or by 60 year old engineering authorities?

It's completely ludicrous to imply that programming is somehow being led astray by young people. Young people have no power. They do what they are told.

The "black box" programming philosophy was not invented by Gen Y. It was invented in the 80s at least and taught by greybeard professors.

The hip new language trend was not invented by Gen Y but was pushed by VCs and other string pulling money-masters. Paul Graham pushed LISP and Python and generally advocated for the creation of new, hipper languages.

The ageism in the field is not something that is coming from young people either. It is coming from employers with the purse strings who recognize that young people are MORE EXPLOITABLE than old people and so they can get more work for their dollars.

The reason for ageism in tech is to keep industry veterans away from impressionable young workers--what if the veterans and the youngins form some kind of union or association that drives up costs?

Old people lead every field. Young people do what they're told. Old people lead programming too--this guy just isn't one of the influencers. He isn't a 50 year old VC, a 50 year old Comp Sci prof, a 50 year old CEO, a 50 year old BDFL.

Your writing reads like you have a chip on your shoulder. It beats around the bush, but you should just come out an say that you don't like people over a certain age. But be careful, because there's a good chance you will soon be that age (or older) and start griping at younger people who don't seem to hold your viewpoint. Your account is 20 minutes old with only 2 comments, both of which are inflammatory. Please take a breath before clicking Submit.

It's completely ludicrous to imply that programming is somehow being led astray by young people. Young people have no power. They do what they are told.

Young people don't have to do what their told. We are raised to listen to our parents so, yes, we do what we're told for fear of being punished (grounded, yelled at, etc.). Though that doesn't mean you can't break out of that mold.

The "black box" programming philosophy was not invented by Gen Y. It was invented in the 80s at least and taught by greybeard professors.

This doesn't even make sense. You are being insensitive towards people. The entire point of learning how to program and understanding computer science is to open the black box and peer inside.

Ageism exists in every field, but let's just focus on tech. Do you see many 50+ year old programmers? Ever wonder why? There is a bias for younger people because, yes, they can be molded (or exploited, as you put it), but it is up to that young person to identify any exploitation and resolve it. That's the only way it can change.

If you don't like the way you perceive the game being played, then you are completely free to change the rules of the game. It will mean you need to break out on your own, and take your lumps, but just throwing your hands up and complaining that the "old people" own everything isn't going to change anything. You are simply allowing the problem to persist and then complaining that it exists.

Good lord!

Don't confuse envy with hatred. I don't hate old people, I envy them! I envy Wedge Martin who got into tech in a time when it was professionally acceptable and viable to drill down into details. I envy a time when you could have a career based on fundamentals rather than buzzwords and rapidly learning frameworks.

I have tremendous respect for greybeard, which is precisely why I recognize that greybears are NOT all the same.

There are different kinds of greybeards. There is especially a wide gulf between the greybeards that have POWER and INFLUENCE and the ones that have been SIDELINED by other greybeards.

The field is not run by the young. The young dance to the tune of money and expertise. But not all greybeards are allowed into the club of influence.

The ageism is not something that is pushed by 20-somethings. it is pushed by employers and those holding the purse-strings. The employers also pull the strings of the teachers, like my computer science professors (greybeards) who taught us that we should not worry about peeking into the black box. Who taught me the waterfall method. Who taught me the agile method too. Who taught me everything I know.

Powerful and influential greybeards (money & position) taught me everything I know. Other greybeards then get mad at me when they don't like what I was taught.

>If you don't like the way you perceive the game being played, then you are completely free to change the rules of the game.

This is just absurd. No one is free to change the rules of the game, or those rules wouldn't be rules.

The rules of this game are set down by those with the most power. A small handful of elite tech winners at the top of industry, academia, and finance.

C'est la vie

There's a fable, "The Scorpion and the Frog" [1] wherein the moral is (copied from Wikipedia):

The fable is used to illustrate the position that no change can be made in the behavior of the fundamentally vicious.

My point about changing the rules of the game is that if the oppressors are not changing because they have all the power, then don't try to change the oppressors. Instead, find a way to remove yourself from the rules that they created. After all, rules are just constructs and can be changed by anyone.

If enough people stopped allowing employers to push 60-hour work weeks on programmers [2], then we might start to see some change. The way that I stopped employers from abusing my time was to first admit that it was myself that was allowing it to be abused, and then to say no and instead show them what I could accomplish in 8 hours (or 40 hours per week). If an employer violated my rules, I left. That's my rule. It may mean that I miss out on some opportunities, but there are so many more opportunities for people out there that stick to their principles (within reason) and work with other decent people.

Lastly, I'll be more clear. The overall point I'm making to you in this comment and others is that you need to stop thinking in absolutes. There is too much pent up stress that doesn't need to be there, and your life will be a lot better if you stop feeling like things are things are set in stone (because they're not). This is very cliché to write but this is one of the few things that only age can teach you.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

[2] by quitting, talking to labour relations boards or the government, etc. Or, just saying no. It's a very very powerful word.

As a millenial who is very familiar with capitalist exploitation of myself and my peers, I am 100% in favor of unionization, regulation, and association.

It's the boomer and Gen X tech people that I talk to who are the most opposed to unionization, talking about labour relations, etc.

Gen X techies in particular have this strange and incomprehensible hatred for unions.

Anyway I absolutely would like to change the rules of the game through collective action. Doesn't seem like it's in the cards though--the tech industry is under the thumb of a much bigger neoliberal agenda--and the string pullers in tech are either:

1. Billionaires who oppose collective action for obvious selfish reasons

2. Strange Gen X anarchist cyberpunks (or something?) who oppose unionization because they think it's somehow associated with communism and goes against the hacker ethos.

How about I speak for my demographic of tech people vs unions? Its not some blind hatred of communism, or an independent ethos. Its a professional being reduced to a dues-paying blue-collar guy. Dues that I don't get to say how they're being spent. Its workplaces where I cant start a build because that's another guy's job. Its payroll padding for guys that don't even work there but used to. Its somebody else negotiating my pay at a startup instead of me.

Try playing a game called "Nomic".

The initial rules of Nomic are such that any game of Nomic can be subsequently remodeled into any other rules-based game. It can also simulate the functioning of real-world political structures.

The one unwritten rule of Nomic that cannot be repealed--the one that makes the game fun to play--is that you can stop playing Nomic.

Real life is not so forgiving. You start playing on the day you are born, and you can't stop until the day you die. The people who make the rules have already changed the rules such that you are not allowed to change or ignore the rules. If you try, other people who still follow those rules can receive bonus points for impeding you for as long as you are in violation of the rules.

That's not strictly true. The public set of rules are set up so that you cannot change or ignore them, but there are also multiple secret sets of rules that can be used to change both the public set of rules and the secret sets of rules. But most of those secret sets of rules have rules that prevent people who know about them from revealing anything about them to those who don't.

You couldn't design a game that sadistic. No one would ever start playing it. But here we are, still taking our turns, trying to figure out how to win.

Try playing a game called "Nomic".

The initial rules of Nomic are such that any game of Nomic can be subsequently remodeled into any other rules-based game. It can also simulate the functioning of real-world political structures.

The one unwritten rule of Nomic that cannot be repealed--the one that makes the game fun to play--is that you can stop playing Nomic.

You couldn't design a game that sadistic. No one would ever start playing it. But here we are, still taking our turns, trying to figure out how to win.

Try playing a game called "Nomic".

The initial rules of Nomic are such that any game of Nomic can be subsequently remodeled into any other rules-based game. It can also simulate the functioning of real-world political structures.

The one unwritten rule of Nomic that cannot be repealed--the one that makes the game fun to play--is that you can stop playing Nomic.

You couldn't design a game that sadistic. No one would ever start playing it. But here we are, still taking our turns, trying to figure out how to win.

Try playing a game called "Nomic".

The initial rules of Nomic are such that any game of Nomic can be subsequently remodeled into any other rules-based game. It can also simulate the functioning of real-world political structures.

The one unwritten rule of Nomic that cannot be repealed--the one that makes the game fun to play--is that you can stop playing Nomic.

You couldn't design a game that sadistic. No one would ever start playing it. But here we are, still taking our turns, trying to figure out how to win.

This is probably a good rant for some other topic. But Zuckerberg is only 30, even now. The people I see turning up at entrepreneurship events and in the fundraising news aren't 60. They're ~25.

The people getting the funding aren't the ones with the power. It's the people giving it.

Zuckerberg dances to the tune of the greybeards just as I do. Did Zuckerberg code the backend of facebook? Hell no. He hired people to do it. What programming technologies did those people use? Styles and methods passed down by greybeards. Techniques learned at Stanford University. Techniques learned from Hacker News.

Zuckerberg himself played the tech tune sung by greybeards before him--LAMP was not invented by millenials. LAMP was not popularized by millenials. Zuckerberg's Facebook was a LAMP project.

Of course people showing up at newbie events are newbies!

The people pulling the strings sit in boardrooms, academic boards, they have office hours, people come to them!

If you're saying that no generation invents culture completely anew, sure, that's undeniable. And uninteresting.

But there's a big difference between somebody choosing to do what's known to work and that person being forced to do something that doesn't work because other people have the power. Zuckerberg started in the LAMP stack because that's what he liked for his pet projects, not because some mean old Stanford greybeard forced it upon him.

You're reading way too far into it...

I never said greybeards are "mean", I said they are influential. Greybeards are more influential on Zuck than vice versa when it comes to technology choice. That's why Zuck chose greybeard certified tech to erect facebook on.

Ya, I agree with extracting useful things from your experience. It seems the OP fails to do so by realizing that having extremely cheap and available resources for getting a product to market is historically rare and also constitutes a golden age.

I remember those same times (early-to-mid 90's), worked at a few ISPs, even helped start one, and while it's good nostalgia, I'd never want to go back.

Those Sun Servers? They took 4 or 5 minutes to boot up and were dog slow.

T1 connections? Amazing for the time, laughable by today's standards, when the typical broadband connection is 20x faster.

Web development back then? Writing nasty CGI scripts - in Perl if you were lucky - or C if you weren't.

No thanks.

I just want to point out that the "entrepreneur" with 20 years career did not just start recently: if it's bad, then it has been a while.

>We did it because there was an inexhaustible quantity of information to be learned about a subject that was dear to us. We used archie and gopher to transfer open source software around and share knowledge. We snuck into computer labs at neighboring universities to get our hands on computers that we otherwise would have no access to.

I've always found the stories of people snucking into computer labs (mostly MIT or near by universities, I believe) of the past inspiring. In a sense, luckily nowadays we don't have to do that anymore. On the other hand, it's unfortunate that you will surely be spending time in jails if you do something like that.

>And there was altruism within the Internet community.

There is this community called "Hacker News", which the head honcho believes that "Mean people fails". So I'd strongly disagree that there is no altruism within the Internet community.

http://paulgraham.com/mean.html, which I missed the first time around. Which I find very interesting when juxtaposed against the Steve Jobs hero worship that also goes on around here.

I've never liked the characteristics of Steve Jobs (and 90s Bill Gates) as mean. They're what I'd called "evil" - in the sense that they will do anything to get the works done, ethics or social norms be damned. But that's much different than being "mean". You can certainly be "evil" (with the quoted definition of evil above), but not mean.

Not that it's fine being "evil", but that's another discussion.

Im new to the industry but I definitely agree with the author. On the other hand, I think its only natural that with the high salaries developers can get more people who don't necessarily love it will join the industry.

Not only that but I've definitely noticed that even among those who are passionate, they usually fall into one of two groups: the ones who like CS and the ones who like building things. That is, the first group is really interested in learning how computers work and theory and the latter group is really interested in building products.

I think the authors point might be that there are many more of the second group of people now, which makes sense since there us so much abstraction you really don't need to know too much about what's "actually" happening to make something.

Although sometimes I still enjoy a M.A.S.H. rerun more than the fodder I find on the interweb...it has been fairly amazing to watch the birth and transformation, even tertiarily. Well written, WM.

Wistful remembering of a "golden age"? Check. Whining about "entitled millenials"? Check.

I foresee a fantastic career in print magazine ahead of you.

It's over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGqN3AKOsA

If it makes you feel any better:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush

"Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush"

If it makes you feel any better:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush

"Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush"

If it makes you feel any better:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush

"Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush"

The scene is never what it used to be.

Okay, so I'm not crazy. Phew.

Maybe it's him that's changed. He should try going back to South Carolina. He might like it now.

Agree to all of this!

Thank you.

Yawn. A whiny, arrogant, grass-is-always-greener post with a bunch of hypotheticals about the filthy unwashed masses encroaching on "our" turf and how much greater it was "back in the day." Bonus points for laying out the criteria for a "true" hacker is (spoiler alert: it's anyone who spent their time almost identically as the author).

Ouch! That was too well said.

I started my career in 1981 so I predate the author. While I often use examples from back or tell stories in my blog I have zero desire to go backwards in time. To me the good old days are in the future. Worshipping the past just makes you old.

So to summarize... a man born into privilege is annoyed by poor people.

The guy equates working for a paycheck with entitlement... how out of touch can you be?

Working for a paycheck is something you do out of economic neccessity--for survival, NOT entitlement.

Getting paid to work on your hobbies in the tech industry in 1995 is basically winning the lottery. Most people would kill to have this chance. This guy is completely blind to his privilege.

But instead of recognizing how neoliberal economics have destroyed the middle class and churned out a new "Depression-Era" generation that are forced to "chase the money" in order to eat... he is going to whine about how kids these days suck and are entitled.

Fucking amazing. Gen Y has the worst economic prospects since the actual great depression, how the fuck can we be spoiled?

Holy shit, settle down for a second.

The guy equates working for a paycheck with entitlement... how out of touch can you be?

I didn't read any of what you said in the author's blog. He even mentions, at the end, about "waxing nostalgic". So his argument going to be a bit one-sided but then, it is his argument after all.

I agree with the overall sentiment of the author's rant. I miss some of the geeking out that was done in the tech industry, because it now seems to be filled with people looking to get rich quick with barely-working MVPs, or building services that have no revenue stream. The industry has turned very "business-y", IMO, but maybe it is just the natural cycle of every industry.

UPDATE: Adding a bit of substance to my comment.

Young people, new programmers, and other groups who have no power are not responsible for the nature of a field.

Old people control the nature of every field. Old greybeards are the ones who made computer science this way--it's just those greybeards that this man disaproves of.

This man isn't a billionaire VC, a tenured Comp Sci professor, an author of programming books, or a CEO hiring and training the kinds of employees he wants.

This guy isn't in charge, so he blames young people and assumes they are in charge. Ridiculous. Young people are just followers. They follow the money, they do what they're told, they adopt fashions in order to SURVIVE, not out of some kind of "strange entitlement."

One young guy named Linus Torvalds upset a whole pile of holy applecarts, as a student, no less, a guy called Mark Zuckerberg built one of the most visited websites on the planet, two other guys built the most frequented search engine while still in college and so on.

He doesn't care at all about not being in charge. He cares about people not wanting nor caring about getting some deeper levels of knowledge required to do their jobs properly and as a cause he sees that they are money oriented first, and tech oriented second.

Linus is 45 years old. He's not a millenial, he's a greybeard.

Zuckerberg never made any technological advances. His company was a market success but it was based on LAMP... nothing technologically novel about it. Not even the concept was novel--it was a direct myspace rip off.

I'm sure there will be millenials who have an influence on the technology and direction of software. But they certainly aren't the people in charge TODAY and they certainly are not responsible for the state of tech today.

If you think 45 years old is a greybeard then I think I've lost you, and Linus made most of his impact before he even had a beard.

Facebook was anything but a Myspace rip-off, Myspace was to Facebook as Geocities was to Digital Ocean or Altavista to Google.

Linus' beard maybe isn't yet long enough to count as "grey" but, in any case, he's not a millenial. He entered the field circa 1990, whereas this self-proclaimed greybeard author started in 1995.

So for the discussion of this article Linus is even older/greyer than the self-proclaimed "get off my lawn" author.

Zuck is a millenial but he's far more of a businessman than he is a programmer.

Zuck hasn't really programmed since Facebook took off. He's a business owner/operator, not an engineer. Writing an MVP LAMP webapp that is then fixed up by others is NOT the same as having an influence on the processes and procedures used in the construction of software--which is what the OP is complaining about.

Facebook was a business success not a technology success.

You're missing the point. He's talking about the passion for learning about computers. When was the last time you reversed engineered a binary that had self modifying code, just for the fun of it and to learn how it works? Play same code golf games or war games, purely for the challenge? There's nothing wrong with people making money. It's the fact that people are doing it just for the money. I think there is a video called the bbs documentary. Check it out. The culture surrounding computers has changed, a lot.

> This guy isn't in charge, so he blames young people and assumes they are in charge.

What makes you think he's not "in charge"?

> Young people are just followers. They follow the money, they do what they're told, they adopt fashions in order to SURVIVE, not out of some kind of "strange entitlement."

If you are young and believe this, I am sad for you.

"Youth" (those in their 20's, for example) have some of the best kind of power - the unfettered kind. As a generalization/simplification, those in their 20's have fewer dedicated costs in their lives (rent and food at the least; car payment perhaps). That gives them the freedom to CHOOSE. That's the power of youth - choice. In youth, a person can choose to lift up and move. Can choose to quit - or stay at - a job because of principals. Can choose to change careers, become an expert in one field or a generalist in many. I won't go so far as to say all things are possible, but there are certainly many paths that could be traveled with relative (key part there - relative) ease. As we get older, the dedicated costs (generally - there are certainly exceptions) go up. House payments. Kids. Medical expenses (personal and family). Income may (or may not) go up, but it's almost certain that key life options will decline. There are still choices to make and control of life to be had for sure, but they are not so numerous; the road does not web outward as it did in youth so much as it forks in minor directional changes.

So - if anyone out there is still in their youth (which is more a state of mind than physical being, mind), I suggest you try different things. Experiment with life. Follow your true passions and see where they lead. The author of this blog (and myself; and others) did that and it turned out that our passions would become an industry that would change the world. I only hope your passions (if you have the heart to chase them) will yield the same so that we can share in that. We can use this thing that we were around to see birthed to do so. Or something better if you prefer; but you'll need to make that happen because we're tired and just want to enjoy our time with our communal child as long as we can, please.

I read your comment before the article, and was all set to agree. But then I read the article.

The people who come here looking for riches and playing at entrepreneurship are not "working for a paycheck". They are people who crave social standing, who crave money. They don't want to be comfortably middle class; they want to be elite. There was a giant wave of them during Bubble 1.0, but come 2001 most of them went back to wherever they were before. In the last few years they are thick on the ground again. They are very different than the people who came to make a difference, who came to create for the joy of it.

I don't see the current crop of them as any worse than the 1990s invasion. But they're sure not any better.

I also think this guy definitely does recognize how lucky he was. He opens talking about "more than I ever could have dreamed" and ends with feeling like he was lucky enough to witness "the very birth of rock and roll".

Millenials do not have a choice between "elite social status" and "comfortable middle class". They have a choice between middle class and lower class. What you are calling elite is actually just middle class.

Millenials are at the bottom of a pyramid in a stagnating economy that doesn't offer the same choice that was offered to their parents. We are a depression generation. Programming is one of the few lower middle class career paths still available. Most new jobs in this new economy (that are available to millenials) are working class as part of the service economy.

Jobs that do provide a middle class living are either dissapearing as the boomers retire from them, or require a lot of competition to win.

The amount of money you need to live a middle class life is much harder to achieve in 2015 than it was 40 years ago in 1975.

That you are calling programmer salaries "lower middle class" makes me think you have no idea what you're talking about.

What I'm calling elite is indeed elite. Your insistence on telling me I'm wrong about what I've actually seen makes me think there's no point in talking to you further.

I'm not contradicting your observations.

I'm pointing out a sociological fact.

You do not know the definition of lower middle class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_middle_class

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer_%2...

The median income for a programmer is $69,708. This falls into the lower middle class.

When Silicon Valley salaries are adjusted to account for cost of living, programmers making over $100,000 still fall into the LOWER middle class.

People who get into software chasing money and elite status are ignorant of the fact that programmers are not elite and do not have high social status. They have lower middle class status and pay--which is better than working class at least.

You're conflating household income and individual salary, and you're also using a technical definition in a a colloquial context. Entertaining for you, I'm sure, but again it doesn't make this look like a serious discussion.

Household income is not the metric being used. It is income associated with a particular occupation that is used to class order those occupations.

I guess you're right about failing to conform to colloquial myths and falsehoods. I tend to want to align my observations with facts and research rather than pop culture misunderstandings and ignorance.

Better summary: A man (who has enjoyed his career for the challenges it brings regardless of the pay level) is frustrated that the majority of his current peers don't seem to share the same passion for the work that he has.

It's possible to interpret these types of past vs. today articles many different ways, but they often have a similar slant...

1. A rose-tinted view of the past (in case the author forgot, the technical challenges didn't prevent a whole lot of dross on the 90's internet).

2. A less than balanced view of today (is it really that hard to think of encouraging aspects of the modern web?)

3. A yearning for days gone by.

The way I see it, these types of articles are less about criticising the present, and more about glorifying the past, a past that the author had some extra connection to by having lived through it. We're meant to marvel at the hardships that were faced, and recognise that the knowledge they accumulated isn't obsolete, so they still have a thing or two to teach us. Every generation will go through this, the generation before this guy did, the generation after will too. The truth is, some knowledge is only truly pertinent to its era. I wouldn't expect to read a book on starting an ISP in the 90s and then think I knew how best to do it now, even if the book might be interesting to read.

Thank you. I rolled my eyes so hard when he started droning on about brogrammers not bothering to learn below their layers of abstraction.

We live in a world where job postings are looking for RoR developers, job interviews test you on FizzBuzz, UML, and vague logic problems, and managers encourage developers to move fast and churn out releases. When exactly was anybody supposed to learn compilers, assembly, or low-level internet routing infrastructure? It was in a CS classroom years ago, and without any practical reason to refresh that knowledge ever since.

Furthermore, the "applications" produced by this "golden age" of the internet were complete shit by today's standards. If they were so wonderful, why do we like to laugh at their miserable UX, ugly design, and lack of functionality?

As if in 1995 they needed to think about javascript frameworks, CSS frameworks, responsive design, mobile anything, (quality) animations, asset servers, enormous databases, application and user analytics, clustered applications with message-passing, advanced caching strategies, an enormous variety of user input, or any of the other multitudinous things I forgot to mention.

In 1995 they thought of everything up to the point where a static HTML document gets sent to the user, and that's where they stopped thinking. In 2015 we have a lot more to think about after that initial transfer. In 2015 we have to, y'know, make applications.

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