7 ms·

What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

126 points by tkrajcar 12y ago

DSWEPT13 12y ago
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.
jacquesm 12y ago
/me throws one blogpost in the making in the trashcan for fear of being labeled a plagiarist and checks the room for webcams.
- fidotron 12y ago
  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.
- NhanH 12y ago
  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 ...
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    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.
- notacoward 12y ago
  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.
  - taurath 12y ago
    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.
  - taurath 12y ago
    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.
  - taurath 12y ago
    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.
  - georgemcbay 12y ago
    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.
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  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.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
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.
- mason240 12y ago
  Now that "nerd" is no a gendered insult, "bro{anything}" and "neckbeard" have taken their place.
- forgottenpass 12y ago
  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.
- kendallpark 12y ago
  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.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
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.
- saschajustin 12y ago
  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.
saschajustin 12y ago
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?
- typicalrunt 12y ago
  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.
  - saschajustin 12y ago
    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."
anateus 12y ago
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.
- throwaway90446 12y ago
  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.
  - saschajustin 12y ago
    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.
  - Chinjut 12y ago
    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.
BatFastard 12y ago
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.
- fat0wl 12y ago
  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.
venomsnake 12y ago
> 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.
- VanL 12y ago
  > We should have "Law of minimal needed abstractions" We have it. Occam's Razor - the original version: "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity"
Fede_V 12y ago
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...
eastbayjake 12y ago
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"
- larrys 12y ago
  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.
NhanH 12y ago
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.
- fragmede 12y ago
  http://paulgraham.com/mean.html 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.
  - NhanH 12y ago
    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.
cromwellian 12y ago
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.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  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.
  - solarmist 12y ago
    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.
  - cromwellian 12y ago
    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.
caoilte 12y ago
Maybe it's him that's changed. He should try going back to South Carolina. He might like it now.
navyrain 12y ago
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.
- astrodust 12y ago
  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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat) was the iconic culmination of five years of feverish insanity.
  - gaius 12y ago
    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".
    - Blackthorn 12y ago
      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.
      - UrMomReadsHN 12y ago
        Is this sarcasm?
        Blackthorn 12y ago
rglover 12y ago
Okay, so I'm not crazy. Phew.
theevilcellist 12y ago
The scene is never what it used to be.
noname123 12y ago
Hello, I wrote pretty much the same thing about five years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762121 PG wrote me a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762357 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.
- Goladus 12y ago
  > PG wrote me a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762357 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.
cmrdporcupine 12y ago
It's over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGqN3AKOsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGqN3AKOsA
icedchai 12y ago
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.
daktanis 12y ago
"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.
benihana 12y ago
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).
- thomasfromcdnjs 12y ago
  Ouch! That was too well said.
- coldcode 12y ago
  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.
MicroBerto 12y ago
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.
sargegood 12y ago
Thank you.
kra34 12y ago
If it makes you feel any better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush "Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush"
kra34 12y ago
If it makes you feel any better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush "Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush"
kra34 12y ago
If it makes you feel any better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush "Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush"
kra34 12y ago
If it makes you feel any better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush "Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush"
rifung 12y ago
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.
kendallpark 12y ago
> But worse than the brogrammers, I think it's the 'entrepreneurs' that bug me the most. The word feels so tainted now. +1 > 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.
Blackthorn 12y ago
Wistful remembering of a "golden age"? Check. Whining about "entitled millenials"? Check. I foresee a fantastic career in print magazine ahead of you.
jonpress 12y ago
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.
mattmurdog 12y ago
Agree to all of this!

126 points by tkrajcar 12y ago

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.

jacquesm 12y ago

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

fidotron 12y ago
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.
NhanH 12y ago
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 ...
- jacquesm 12y ago
  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.
notacoward 12y ago
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.
- taurath 12y ago
  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.
- taurath 12y ago
  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.
- taurath 12y ago
  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.
- georgemcbay 12y ago
  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.
georgemcbay 12y ago
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.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

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.

mason240 12y ago
Now that "nerd" is no a gendered insult, "bro{anything}" and "neckbeard" have taken their place.
forgottenpass 12y ago
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.
kendallpark 12y ago
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.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

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.

saschajustin 12y ago
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.

saschajustin 12y ago

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?

typicalrunt 12y ago
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.
- saschajustin 12y ago
  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."

anateus 12y ago

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.

throwaway90446 12y ago
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.
- saschajustin 12y ago
  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.
- Chinjut 12y ago
  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.

BatFastard 12y ago

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.

fat0wl 12y ago
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.

venomsnake 12y ago

> 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.

VanL 12y ago
> We should have "Law of minimal needed abstractions" We have it. Occam's Razor - the original version: "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity"

Fede_V 12y ago

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...

eastbayjake 12y ago

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"

larrys 12y ago
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.

NhanH 12y ago

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.

fragmede 12y ago
http://paulgraham.com/mean.html 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.
- NhanH 12y ago
  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.

cromwellian 12y ago

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.

jacquesm 12y ago
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.
- solarmist 12y ago
  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.
- cromwellian 12y ago
  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.

caoilte 12y ago

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

navyrain 12y ago

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.

astrodust 12y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat) was the iconic culmination of five years of feverish insanity.
- gaius 12y ago
  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".
  - Blackthorn 12y ago
    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.
    - UrMomReadsHN 12y ago
      Is this sarcasm?
      - Blackthorn 12y ago

rglover 12y ago

Okay, so I'm not crazy. Phew.

theevilcellist 12y ago

The scene is never what it used to be.

noname123 12y ago

Hello, I wrote pretty much the same thing about five years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762121 PG wrote me a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762357 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.

Goladus 12y ago
> PG wrote me a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762357 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.

cmrdporcupine 12y ago

It's over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGqN3AKOsA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGqN3AKOsA

icedchai 12y ago

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.

daktanis 12y ago

"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.

benihana 12y ago

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).

thomasfromcdnjs 12y ago
Ouch! That was too well said.
coldcode 12y ago
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.

MicroBerto 12y ago

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.

sargegood 12y ago

Thank you.

kra34 12y ago

If it makes you feel any better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush "Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush"

kra34 12y ago

rifung 12y ago

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.

kendallpark 12y ago

> But worse than the brogrammers, I think it's the 'entrepreneurs' that bug me the most. The word feels so tainted now. +1 > 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.

Blackthorn 12y ago

Wistful remembering of a "golden age"? Check. Whining about "entitled millenials"? Check. I foresee a fantastic career in print magazine ahead of you.

jonpress 12y ago

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.

mattmurdog 12y ago

Agree to all of this!