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Comment by putzdown | Hacker News Reader

A pet peeve: The author sets his story "many years ago at Zynga." "Many years ago" speaks to me of long years past; like, decades—surely at least a decade. But Zynga was founded relatively recently, in 2007. Why do people in the tech industry tend to talk about what is really a few years ago as if it were ancient eons past? Is the author simply so young that < 8 years seems like "many years" to him?

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This might have to do with the accelerating human perception of time. Can't 5 years really feel like eons? If the author were 25, that would be a significant chunk of life, and I'm hoping you're not intending to imply that all 25 year olds should be dismissed out of hand.

But it's interesting -- people who have worked in tech during M$FT's heyday probably do want to dismiss this argument without consideration. Is the real story here that peoples' unconscious attitudinal memory is long enough that some companies' prior actions can never be forgiven?

I'm probably older than the average age here, but 2007 certainly seems a long time ago to me. Especially in technology. No iPhones, no Android, no tablets (that anybody used, anyway), no always-on high-speed internet everywhere, no multi-core CPUs (ok, we had some two-cores), no Twitter (yes, it was going then, but who was using it?). No music streaming.

Seems like a simpler age.

Fwiw, there was definitely music streaming. Internet-streaming royalties were even a political issue as far back as the late '90s, when the DMCA contained a controversial internet-only royalty structure different from traditional radio. Post-dot-com-crash, there was then a renewed burst of launches and acquisitions in the mid-2000s. One of the bigger streaming services of the era was Last.fm, founded in 2002, and acquired by CBS for ~$300m in 2007.

> No music streaming.

Really? Shoutcast was created in 1998, Digitally Imported has been around since 1999. I wrote a hacky thing to stream di.fm to my Nokia 3650 over the air in 2004 (the downloadable real media app could stream mp3, but not handle shoutcast data, so I had to strip it out; plus the achievable bandwidth was less than the lowest bitrate stream, so I had to downsample).

It's just you. Most people would agree 6-7 years counts as "many" in this industry.

It's not just him. "Many" means "a large number" not "it feels like it has been awhile because of the pace of change." Zynga has not been around "many" years, by definition. Even worse, that project was actually completed some time in 2011. I think we can agree that 3-4 years is not "many".

But the worst part of that sentence is the change in tense. ;)

Given how fast things tend to move in the industry, and how a person can be doing very different things now than they were a few short years ago, I think one can forgive the author for perceiving the peak Zynga years as longer than it actually may be.

It's remarkable to look at where I was 8 years ago compared to now, regardless of age really.

OP here. It was 4-5 years ago and feels like an eternity. You're right though, "a few" would make more sense! Corrected :)

I hate you guys sometimes.

Please don't post comments like this, even when another comment is annoying.

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