
What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry - tkrajcar
http://blog.shutdown.com/#bums
======
cromwellian
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
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.

~~~
cromwellian
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.

~~~
dlhdesign
> You should consider the first version a throwaway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
eastbayjake
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"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

------
BatFastard
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
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.

~~~
fat0wl
if you downvoted this can you please explain why? I am actually desperate for
reasons not to be so cynical about my job so i can at least scrape something
out of my days until i find a better place...

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

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

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

~~~
fat0wl
thanks... I think the reason I get a bit heated is because I come from an arts
background actually. There are a lot of slippery slopes in industry, and now I
am on one. It disgusts me when I see that my peers are just tumbling over one
another to reach the bottom first, just to put another $5/hr on their rate
whereas I used to work with people who didn't care if they spent their whole
careers as penniless musicians so long as they got to experience the feeling
of genuine pursuit of passion. I see a lot of devs implementing a mess of
seriously nasty sweat-shop code with tools/langs they only embraced because of
some perceived gap in the market. It seems unethical to me as a developer to
do things in an inefficient manner, or its at least sad in that it means you
have no sense of personal efficacy or investment in your own growth (beyond
how a corporation views you).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
fat0wl
thanks for the suggestions. I actually spent some time as an "intern" (hang
out making art & doing whatever) at Harvestworks
[[http://www.harvestworks.org/](http://www.harvestworks.org/)], which is very
similar to EyeBeam. I just decided it wasn't for me when I saw that artists
spent so much time on grant-writing just for a chance at a sum of money most
of them (they were pretty tech-savvy) could make through a few days of
freelance if they sharpened their coding skills a bit.

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

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

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

------
navyrain
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
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
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
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
Is this sarcasm?

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

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

~~~
Blackthorn
No, it is not sarcasm.

------
noname123
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
> 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.

------
jonpress
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.

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

~~~
notacoward
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.

~~~
georgemcbay
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.

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

------
anateus
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
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.

~~~
Chinjut
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.

------
venomsnake
> 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
> 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
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...

------
kra34
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"

------
MicroBerto
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.

------
vezzy-fnord
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.

~~~
forgottenpass
_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
> 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.

------
daktanis
"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.

------
ChuckMcM
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
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.

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

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

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

Of course people showing up at newbie events are newbies!

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

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

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

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

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

------
icedchai
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.

------
NhanH
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
[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
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.

------
rifung
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.

------
DSWEPT13
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.

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

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

------
cmrdporcupine
It's over.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGqN3AKOsA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGqN3AKOsA)

------
kra34
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
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
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"

------
theevilcellist
The scene is never what it used to be.

------
rglover
Okay, so I'm not crazy. Phew.

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

------
mattmurdog
Agree to all of this!

------
sargegood
Thank you.

------
benihana
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).

~~~
coldcode
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.

------
saschajustin
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
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
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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook was a business success not a technology success.

