All the Technology but None of the Love
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
Personally, I think it's wonderful that the future I (we?) foresaw 25-30 years ago has come alive, albeit with many odd and sometimes disconcerting twists and nooks.
Remember the effort us lifers put into making tools that allowed "the masses" access to programming, like BASIC, Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal and all of that? How can we now, with any credibility, bemoan the very future so many of us tried to build?
It’s a craft and an art, as much as people have been trying to make it into an industry, without creativity you can’t make good software.
I'm a semi-professional musician, and I've been telling non-technical friends for a lifetime that programming hits of the same creative notes that playing guitar and writing music does, although they can never really feel what I'm saying.
I think the problem I see is that the future we tried to build hasn't come to fruition. The future I was trying to build around the turn of the millennium was one in which people had information to make educated decisions and to achieve their goals. The actuality that has come about is that more than ever people are falling for hype and being sidetracked from their goals.
It used to be that if you wanted to become a more educated voter, going online would result in you landing on a few political-science related resources and you'd end up reading some pretty hardcore theory: Bob Black, Michel Foucault, Karl Marx. Maybe it was a bit extremist but you would actually have a theoretical understanding of the issues. Now it's more likely you'll come across carefully-crafted "grassroots" political blogs that hype one side or the other without actually encouraging you to make an educated decision.
It used to be that if you wanted to bike across the country, Sheldon Brown's webpage[1] would help you figure out how to do it. Now it's more likely that you'll get distracted by Reddit and Facebook while your bike rusts.
I, for one, didn't work for this future. I don't give a fuck about cat pictures and I'm actively against the advertising, astroturfing, and distraction that social media results in. I think that while the internet allows us to potentially make our lives better, the majority of people aren't using it that way, and the future we have built makes most people's lives worse.
People have been provided with access to one of the greatest multipurpose tools of all time. How they choose to use that tool is up to them. The fact that most people choose to use it to look up cat videos and share pics on instagram is revealing.
It is partially the fault of the average person, but from a stoic perspective, that's not something we can do much about, so we shouldn't waste time thinking about it.
What we can do is refuse to write socially irresponsible software. The internet is what mindless people make it, but it's also what software developers make it.
EDIT: Also, I'm not really down on cat pictures, I just don't care about them. If the worst people did online was view cat pictures, I'd be less frustrated by the current state of the internet. My frustration comes from the fact that the internet has become a better tool for predatory corporations and authoritarian governments than it has become for the average person.
But I also had really close friends who had similar experiences and when I remember spending time with them, I think life was awesome in high school! I had a band, and we threw parties for our nerd friends, and we played technical pranks on each other. It was great!
These days, we have video available instantly on demand without advertisements. But we also have crappy websites that try to throw up an interstitial ad before you can even read the content. I find the tools make it really easy for me to ignore ads and get at content that is as in-depth as I want in just about any direction (for better or worse).
I'm a very cynical person overall, but I love where we are. I have a supercomputer in my pocket that can get just about any piece of data I want instantly. (I was video chatting with a friend while walking my dog the other day! And it was no big deal!) I can also play scrabble with someone I've never met in a country I'll never visit 10,000 miles away. If other people want to keep track of which celebrity slept with whom, so be it. But I'm enjoying life like never before, and it seems like most of what I can do is accessible to most people (at least here in the US).
I'm not down on talking about dogs or playing scrabble, but does doing these things online instead of in person really improve your life? I mean, you're not actually learning about this person's culture by playing scrabble with them, or seeing life through their eyes. The internet enables these facile interactions between people. Again, it's fun, but it's at best equivalent to things we could do before. I play Scrabble too, but I don't think that playing it on my phone with someone 10,000 miles away is any better than playing it with my neighbor. If I couldn't play Scrabble on my phone it would be no loss to me.
I'd argue differently. Sure, me playing Scrabble with a guy from Albania isn't really imparting any specific education about Albanian culture - but does it need to?
More to the point, the non-tech world that existed before didn't offer any specific education about Albanian culture, either.
One of the biggest problems we face in the modern age - if not the biggest problem - is the lack of empathy. We've become a society of sociopaths - maybe we always were, but just found more and more destructive ways to manifest it. Doxxings, bomb threats, death threats, and that's just the stuff that doesn't involve shooting anyone or blowing anyone up.
If playing Scrabble with a guy from Albania, even without engaging in deep philosophical or political learning, results in me having more empathy for Albanians or just a very shallow increase in understanding about their people or culture, we're already better off.
Hell, just the appreciation that they are people, just like us, who play the same games as us, already moves us forward.
There's a particularly toxic post further down the thread that decries "entryism" into the tech industry that is, IMO, symptomatic of the problem. Apparently people who are different but share a common interest joining a field is now an invasion of usurpers. This whole worldview rests upon something that is fundamentally xenophobic and sociopathic - as if everyone who wishes to join a group does so only for their own benefit and wishes to disenfranchise whoever is already in the group.
And if playing Scrabble, or sharing animated gifs, or arguing about which sports team is best, contributes to just a tiny bit more understanding and empathy, I'll call it a win.
I don't think the current situation is the result of that. From where I stand, the history seems pretty clear:
1) Nerdy people like me get into a field because something about it tickles their fancy.
2) They happen to invent stuff that solves important problems or improves life in some way.
3) Eventually, non-nerdy or semi-nerdy people notice this, get into the mix and get rich as a result.
4) People at large start noticing this. The field becomes more and more lucrative and popular, until it turns into an industry.
5) The industry now attracts not only talented, passionate people, but all sorts of other people too: people who want to get rich quick, people who want to get famous, people who are in it because it was a popular choice when they had to pick a career, etc.
You'll notice that the inflection point in this story was #3, when some people got rich. The "culprit", therefore, is not making tools that allowed "the masses" access to programming; it's capitalism.
It's both.
First of all, you should keep in mind that while the hacker culture may have been tightly knit, we have never been a hivemind. (One only needs to look at the various holy wars as proof of that.) While I'm sure there were plenty of people working to make programming easier to learn for newbies (BASIC is a good, perhaps misguided example of this), not all fit into this category. Case in point, Turbo Pascal. Perhaps you know something I don't, but that was created as a commercial venture. It was sold to companies to make a profit. Its relative ease of use was just something marketing said to managers to get them to buy licenses. Yes, both were created to be easier to learn, but I feel the reasons matter here. One was created to spread the joy of learning, to get more people hooked on programming. The other was created to lower the barrier of entry to programming so that companies could hopefully hire dumber, less motivated people to do the same work.
Personally, the article resonated with me. It reminded me of the first time I turned God Mode on in DoomII, only to discover it completely ruined the fun of the game. Yes, everything is easier these days, and I can prototype an application far easier than I could 20 years ago. But it's not as fun. I used to think it was just me, that I was running out of motivation or ideas, but now I'm wondering if it's actually something else.
I don't know your background, so I'd like to ask you; aside from programming, what motivates you?
Corporate programming is easy to become disenchanted with as it's very repetitive and the end result is often safe but underwhelming. There are tons of programmers who could build CRUD apps or eCommerce websites in their sleep, but do they find the work stimulating?
I can't tell you what you'd find more stimulating than cookie cutter corporate work, but it's clear there's a great deal of barely explored ways for computer programming to make a positive difference in our world. The way I like to think about it sometimes is I want to work for the world, any other employer is just a means to that end. Having that goal in mind helps me decide what's worth doing in the here and now. Perhaps it could help you find what you want too?
I love this...it's so true and such a positive way of looking at the state of software development circa 2015.
Never before has so much technology been laid before us, available at whim...perhaps the sheer volume of choice is what many oldsters bemoan, as it can often feel pointless to choose one knowing it will probably be unsupported and abandoned in the near future.
What you say about overwhelming choice is true too, it is undoubtedly a challenge to balance getting things done and advancing the state of the art. The role of compromise is one we all learn sooner or later, to be comfortable trading minor inconvenience for major benefits. Our field is still relatively young, so there are numerous choices over compromise to make, but we'll be going around in circles unless we're committed to our toolset for the long haul. That's not to say we block out trying other things, but it is about having a 'main' language. I've personally chosen to stick with F# for a while, I hope others will find the tools they want to stick with too, we'll all benefit.
>>an enormous influx of people into tech that are in it just for the money and that couldn’t give a damn about how they achieve their goals.
He continues talking about how things were harder in the old days, and how easy it is today, but paradoxically, too easy?
>>The barrier to entry was so high that those that made it across really knew their stuff.
>>Of course that’s not what you want, you want all this to be as accessible as possible but real creativity starts when resources are limited.
It all seems like a variation on a theme Alan Kay addressed some time ago[1]:
>>Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.
It's easy to make crap and to dress it up as something good, people will pay for it and will in the end be underwhelmed by what 'computers can do', whereas it's just as hard today as it was in the 80's to make something really good. Unfortunately the crap will usually win out due to marketing.
Now everybody is a just consumer. The phrase "consumer community" may just have been invented in this sentence. [1]
There are two sources of crap. One is businesses that deliberately make stuff that sucks in the hopes that marks will buy it and keep their mouths shut out of embarrassment over being taken as a rube. There's more of that in software and everywhere else today.
The other source of crap is amateurs. There's more of that in software because access has improved. The software is analogous to homeowner construction projects. The roof is likely to leak, the walls be without insulation, and the room shaped like a scalene triangle. HomeDepot's prices help make it happen.
People are expressing their ideas more often. Most ideas are bad. The execution of laypeople is often poor.
I mean even their technology choices fit it - always dynamic, the "scriptier" the better, just ship it!
The result is mediocre products with bog-standard interfaces (productivity), suboptimal architectures (so devs are easily replaced), and speed prized over quality. We cling to design fads, rather than creating original designs.
In short, it reflects a culture-wide lack of ambition. It's easy to create a cat picture sharing app. It's not easy to think beyond that because we're mentally beholden to the idea that there isn't enough money, and we need to get ours now, and then we can go after our big ideas.
Tech was supposed to be transformative. Now it asks us to be impressed with business models that prey on addictive behaviors, advertising, and annoying users because we lack the imagination and will to do anything better.
Inevitably when a sector grows, you're bound to have a diversity of approaches and types of people involved, and in most cases that diversity is a profoundly good thing. It means that not only are there people who are in the work for the zen-like essence ('love of technology' as you put it), but also those who can apply that work to other fields and areas of knowledge.
And capitalism (which appears to be the true target of attack here) has its flaws and abstracts away the love in favor of a general approach to value—but it also allows resources to be condensed and put toward big problems that would not otherwise be possible. Sometimes it ends up just extracting wealth from a triviality, but often it is a complex mix of value for a complex mix of people, and sometimes something truly profound and major comes of it.
I suggest that there's something else going on here; some personal frustration or observation that is likely true in the right context, but I think it needs development and focus to be a more universal critique.
But that's not the same thing as entryism, which unfortunately we have in tech. Entryism is when diverse approaches don't attempt to win in the field of capitalism - instead, they attempt to parasitically take over the capitalistic winners.
Capitalistic diversity would consist of MBAs, SJWs, and all the other entrants building their own companies. Then customers could pick the winner. In contrast, entryism consists of some company (e.g. Google) "winning", and then the MBAs, SJWs, etc joining google and changing it from the inside.
In fact, entryism is very difficult to combat capitalistically. The problem is simply that creative destruction can't necessarily kill the entrants. For example, suppose the MBAs destroy MS. Then what happens - do they vanish forever, never to kill again, with MBA-ism as a disgraced ideology? Or do they simply shift jobs to Google and Apple and try to do it again?
See these two articles for more on entryism and boundaries: http://www.moreright.net/notes-on-boundaries/ http://www.moreright.net/entryism-as-containment-failure/ (Moreright has other articles on the topic, mostly focused on how neoreaction has avoided entryism. To a certain extent tech does the same thing by being a bunch of low status nerds, repelling people who don't really like tech.)
If so, then that's fine. He's not trying to change your mind, and his career advice isn't appropriate for you you. Move along. Find something addressed to you.
I'm not in his target audience either. I enjoy interacting with people and ideas more than getting a computer to do what I want. This is why in my teens I spent more time reading math books than playing with computers.
But I know and respect a lot of people who are like him. I get where he is coming from. And I've seen enough of them burn out of their dream profession that I think he has a point.
Interesting perspective, and similar to mine. I gravitated towards this industry because of the problems to solve, not the means of solving them. I have been taking things apart to figure out how they work since I was 6 or so. I didn't even have a computer until I was 17, but I was already dead set on becoming some sort of engineer because I loved those sorts of challenges. In fact, I ended up going electrical because in undergrad I decided I hated programming but loved physical electronics and electrical wiring. I came back to programming after I had been working for a few years and discovered that real-world programming was not like the classes I hated.
I don't know where that puts me in Jacques' eyes. I like using knowledge and technology to solve problems, but I don't care what particular technology it is. Sometimes I feel like an outsider in this industry, because I interact with so many people who love programming in itself and tend to look down on those who do not. I don't feel attacked by this post but I do feel he is drawing up a false dichotomy between those who "[l]earned to program as a kid" and "totally fell in love with it", and those who are in this industry for the money, have little or no technical knowledge, and no desire to gain any more than the bare minimum of technical knowledge required to achieve their financial goals.
FWIW I think you're doing fine. I got into software through electronics because I saw bits as an endless parts bin. The first year or so I did nothing but write little programs to calculate circuits. Programming as a means to an end in problem solving is exactly why we have computer programs in the first place.
And that's fine, there is nothing wrong with that. But (I quote you) "those who are in this industry for the money, have little or no technical knowledge, and no desire to gain any more than the bare minimum of technical knowledge required to achieve their financial goal" are on the other side of that spectrum.
The dichotomy is only there because I'm me with my specific background and I'm trying to compare what I know with what I see all around me.
But worse, they actively seemed to dislike the kind of people that do love tech, i.e. nerds, hackers, engineers and such. These were young kids, the stereotypical "cool" start-up founders, but the way they talked about engineers and engineering made you think you were talking to 50 year old pointy haired bosses with not an ounce of respect for technology.
And they keep saying completely the opposite, they keep saying "we love tech", and they actually seem to mean it. Except everything else they do or say indicates the opposite. They just like to use tech, but are completely uninterested in the process of developing tech.
These people aren't just greedy cunts who are in it for the money. These are people who have grown up in a world where consuming technology has become so normal and easy that they simply don't get that creating technology is a totally different process.
And I'm not yet sure whether these people should be avoided or educated.
They want to be called tech startups, because tech is cool, and they have an app, because apps are cool, but their core business has nothing to do with tech.
Whats called tech in 2015 generally means uses the same 1990s technology with some numerical metric improvements but nothing fundamentally unrecognizable by someone in the 90s, coupled with 2015 business model, 2015 financialization, 2015 art and styling, and 2015 marketing.
Unfortunately both types of companies are called tech. I think the author is basically bored with the 90s and wants 2010s technology jobs.
Wheres the companies doing 2015 tech in a 2015 company? Not, in general, in "tech".
I think my father in 1975 would have been pretty mystified by my 1995 desktop and programming. So you guys aren't running batched punchcards anymore, OK then. Object oriented derivative of C instead of cobol, interesting. WIMP GUI, very interesting despite unproductive. On the other hand imagine how bored someone from 1995 would be when introduced to 2015 desktop, after the initial irrelevant numerical surprises, which wouldn't even be a surprise despite every generation thinking they're the first to ever discover / appreciate Moore's law. Dominant corporate language is still a OO C derivative, although different, whatever. Tired old WIMP GUI still got the start button in the lower left corner, eh?
That's not to say the world of technology hasn't found new ways to suck. Yesterday I got an email from Sasan Goodarzi General Manager, Intuit TurboTax. He was offering a coupon in exchange for adding suck to TurboTax. Intuit took the Schedule C out of the Deluxe skew.
I replied (probably into the void). I've been using the TurboTax for more than two decades. The reasons are a trust of Intuit and the faith that using it this year would make life easier next year because I could import one return into the other. The product was deliberately made worse. The reasons for using it are gone. Intuit doesn't care. I'm not sufficiently profitable. Beyond this I'm not even going to rant about them making the world suck.
In the 1980's everyone used Basic because a C compiler was $600. Rexx for the Amiga was $100. And Lisp? Buy a Lisp Machine.
Today, the mountain of love that is Ruby is free. The heap that is Rails, that's free. The pile that is Racket, free as well. Audacity, Gimp, Mono, etc. - love is winning. Lots of businesses suck and now there are lots of software businesses.
Yet even Darth MicroSoft is serious about producing open source projects. What more evidence could there be?
[0] http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/
[1] http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-dev...
Of course, this is my judgement as a contralto in French, so shrug
What bums me out about the tech industry:
Son, It’s Time We Talk About Where Start-Ups Come From:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/son-its-time-we-talk-abou...
Similar HN thread:
((1-p) * s * e) + r < (m-c)*t
r is the additonal compensation package that companies offer to employees of an acquired company.
In an acquihire, the bulk of the proceeds go to the employees, and it's not in the form of equity payments (which are usually not worth the paper they're written on). Instead, companies offer employees other incentives to come on board.
What they don’t realize is that people who got started in computers in the 1960’s feel that since they started with soldering and electronics and radio and circuits, nobody could possibly learn all that.
It’s easy to start in computers at any time. You simply ignore all the stuff that’s too low level to be worth your time to get bogged down in.
Jacques regularly posts wonderful material that fits HN perfectly. Let's say for rhetorical purposes that this post happens to be a stinker. Question: is its prominence on HN a failure mode (HN is a filter: alpha geek can overcome the filter to get any crap in front of our eyeballs) or a success mode (HN is a community, and Jacques and his fans are a big part of the community)?
I think I covered why what was left on the table after ripping out the heart was less than pretty in the introduction but after being specifically requested to post it anyway (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8846177) I'm surprised at the level of vitriol this post generates.
To the decline or marginalization of hacker culture within tech: Computers and tablets today are proprietary and very complex, unfortunately. Also, there's lots of money to be made in tech now -- but of course there is! (Good old high-paying jobs I mean, not freshly-funded founders trying to rip you off.) An essay on this topic might examine how we can keep hacking alive, or change the world as hackers rather than as entrepreneurs. What aren't we doing with today's hardware that we could be? Also, there are thriving hacker and maker communities if that's your thing.
This comment needs to be supported. Particularly since the author lives in Europe.
A lot of the innovation on hardware, browsers, and programming languages is coming from big companies, academia, and open source projects. And there's still a lot of hacking. It's just a matter of what crowd you hang out in mostly.
I guess I don't see a direct connection between hardware hacking back in the day and wannabe entrepreneurs. I knew a lot of hardware hackers at MIT, and it's just a different crowd from the web start-up crowd. And engineers at Google, Mozilla, or Apple, say, are inventing the future while knowing very little about start-ups.
It makes sense that it's confusing now.
This needs to be said to HN.
The world is what you experience.
Start with HN: reading HN too much can really warp your views on what the tech world is like. HN tends to feature political topics and young tech companies that are good at marketing. But that's far from what's actually going on; it's even far from what YCombinator is doing. For instance, there was a post on the YC blog just yesterday about a really neat thing that a YC-funded biotech startup has done (http://blog.ycombinator.com/one-codex-yc-s14-wins-the-cdcs-n...) -- and it was posted to HN and went basically nowhere. So, be aware that HN is distorting the tech world a bit.
Along the same lines, you only heard about Dennis, the owner of Klippers barbershop, because someone took the time to sing his ballad. Before January 19, you probably didn't know he existed. Well, there are a lot of people out there, just like Dennis, except nobody's written about them yet.
One of the things I appreciate about my business is that I meet such a wide variety of other businesses and people all the time, and it helps to re-adjust how I see the world.
For every "github announcement of some two bit project with a catchy name and a super nicely designed logo but only an initial commit of a blank page", I bet there are at least two github projects that have gone unannounced that are labors of love by some developer somewhere just trying to improve something. For every "[company] with two people, non-technical co-founders looking for a ‘first hire’ at a terribly low salary and with 0.05% stock to create their ‘vision’ which will surely ‘change the world’", I bet there's at least two companies full of really smart people who have been fighting the good fight to actually change the world. (My go-to example for this is always HN's own daniellefong, of http://lightsailenergy.com/, which YC declined to fund years ago.)
We have arduino and Beagleboard and quadcopters and all kinds of fun things now, and kids love them, and these represent "toy computing" in exactly the same way that the Commodore did when I was young -- only now the computers can fly, swim, crawl, and roll.
I think your advice to avoid crap projects is good, but ... even then, I think that helping people cultivate "a job is just a job" attitude might be better. Go to work, do a good job, get paid ... then go home and do what you really love. The part of crap work that really screws people over is that we invest so much of our self-worth in our jobs. You can "keep the love for the tech alive" at home, and still work for the "get rich quick types" -- just make sure you get paid.
I guess I'm not feeling very curmudgeonly today. I don't think a few comments from a few people that are unhappy with the way their parts of the world has turned out actually means things are all that bad. Things actually seem pretty good to me still.
Because `p`, `e` and `t` are so easy to estimate ...
You can also do a sensitivity analysis and determine what the room for error is in those quantities.
Startups are a form of speculation, you shouldn't expect the same sort of certainty that you'd get from wage labor.
- p: at seed stage (90% failure?) - e: average exit. Should I make the average including instagram, flikr, ... or is 2015 dead for photo sharing apps? What about all the apps with a medium (but undisclosed) exit? How does the calculation change if it's 2009? - t: 2 years because ... instagram. Or will it never happen again?
I think the key is that those values are 100% unknown if you're joining an actual startup. _e_ is unknown, because you're at the beginning of a trend, _t_ is unknown too, because it's too early to know and could be 5 or 10 in your industry.
Could you give me the value of p,e,t for the fourth engineer at Instagram in 2010? (for my area, in data for solar lead generation I don't know of any public exit, let alone the average _t_).
But feel free to totally ignore that part of the post if you feel that that serves you best. And more power to you if you get to actually make bank that way.
But for the people that are capable of making their own way I strongly believe that their best interest lies in doing what they love best and charting their own path, eventually possibly founding their own company where they have a direct say in the success or failure rather than an indirect one and where their chances of getting screwed over are far lower.
The problem I see is access to the data to build that average. But I think we agree on everything else.
I'm a scientist/engineer and became a founder. I'm also distrustful when I meet the typical MBA starting a tech company to get rich quick. I'm just arguing that the uncertainties in that inequality will require some other way to make the decision (Is the pay fair (considering the market rate, the funding, the revenue)? I'm I a valued member of the team? Do I believe in the mission? etc).
He started in a time where if you just made something work people thought you were awesome. Now you have to make it work, make it look good, have a better user experience than everyone else, charge less money (often meaning funded startups instead of bootstrapping), not eat up battery or data plans, etc.. His dislike of design doesn't really make me think he has much of a chance any more.
I tend to agree. Its one of the reasons I'm being lured towards finance - thats a place where the best tech actually makes you win, marketers be damned.
As for me not having much of a chance, as you correctly note 'stuff still has to work' and as long as that is the case those old 'aged consultants' will be in more demand than what they can satisfy.