5 ms·

I feel changes a lot between locations A lot changes between times, too. Decades ago, those of us who did computer "stuff" in places like the Bay Area were typ

by SiVal 5y ago

I feel changes a lot between locations A lot changes between times, too. Decades ago, those of us who did computer "stuff" in places like the Bay Area were typically nerdy science/math lovers who were an unfashionable segment of society with hobbies like ham radio, astronomy, homemade electronics, science fiction, math competitions, etc. Meetups like the West Coast Computer Faire, little shops like Weird Stuff, amateur radio "hamfests", astronomy clubs, and so on were everywhere. Programmers knew how to use soldering irons and slide rules. Tech companies were rounding errors compared to, say, car companies. But the intellectual fashion enforcers with wealth and power that tech companies are now, with tools to make society submit to their will are not the culture we were. Like Wall Street before them, they have bigger plans than ordinary, little people with their quaint hobbies. So even though we pocket protector and slide rule types still exist and can form a quorum online, the in-person meetings mostly (not entirely but mostly) vanished back in the dot-com mania.

world_peace42 5y ago
Bizarre this was downvoted.
- ehnto 5y ago
  There are plenty of people from both groups in their comment who participate in HN. It's not too surprising, he was not too kind. It's the tyranny of the internet, the bigger a group of people the harder it is to keep everyone happy and in agreeance, and not tread on any toes. Disagreement isn't the end of the world though.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
Related is the common misconception that the well-known tech companies, corporations and startups alike, are part of that same "nerd" scene you mention. They aren't. They're just another flavor of business, and the people running them are just businessmen.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  That's almost like making a website for people who dream about making big money managing an IT company, and calling it "hacker news".
shaan7 5y ago
> A lot changes between times, too. Decades ago, those of us who did computer "stuff" in places like the Bay Area were typically nerdy science/math lovers who were an unfashionable segment of society with hobbies like ham radio, astronomy, homemade electronics, science fiction, math competitions, etc. Dammit. So this is not something I merely suspected but is really true. I grew up around the year 2000 and programming was all I could think about, I read about people/meetups you describe and was eager to be a part of them. By the time I grew up, attended university and started a job, things seemed very different. The stuff that got me excited about programming are now considered "boring" or "legacy". Makes you wonder if you should give up on what you like doing and do what is considered amazing now (AI etc) even though you don't find it fun :/
- auto 5y ago
  > Makes you wonder if you should give up on what you like doing Absolutely not. All these things people are talking about in this thread are still out there, you just have to keep looking. Posts show up on HN occasionally that hint at it, but one of my favorite places to go browse when I need a hit of that passion project ecosystem is hackaday.com. There are so many people out there doing cool stuff just to do it, especially given the fact that everything is literally orders of magnitude more accessible than it was even 10 years ago when you consider resources like YouTube, and the race to the bottom on cost of things like Arduinos, 3D printing, etc. If this does circle back to finding a job, then that's a matter of finding the right fits. I got my first job out of college writing iOS apps for motorcoach bus schedules by showing the company a game I released on the app store, and my most recent position for a Senior iOS dev (which has translated to a firmware position), I spent most of my interview talking about my homebrew synth project: https://imgur.com/a/FZ6GFsI https://imgur.com/a/FZ6GFsI There are people out there who will be interested, and they also happen to be people who hire people! I show my coworkers my side projects all the time, sometimes they're somewhat relevant to what we do, sometimes they don't relate at all.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  I stayed all my life at the same location, and I noticed the change between the times, too. My guess is that this is because of different motivations people had to learn computer programming. Did you learn programming because making simple programs in Basic was irresistibly fascinating? Or did you learn programming because people told you that this was how you could make a lot of money? Of course the former type of software developer is more likely to play with "useless" (i.e. not immediately profitable) stuff than the latter. When I was a kid, personal computers existed, but they were mere toys. It was not obvious that something like today's IT industry will exist one day. Therefore, only nerds played with personal computers. And the first IT companies were full of nerds, because those were the only people who knew how to write code. When it became obvious that IT jobs are well paid and the demand for programmers is large, people motivated mostly by money started studying computer science, too. These days they probably are a majority at most workplaces. Nerds had their moment in the spotlight, now they are being displaced by normies. Being fascinated by tech for tech's sake is uncool again. It is cool to be fascinated by tech for money's sake, though. By firing James Damore, even Google made it official that people on the autistic spectrum are no longer welcome.
agent008t 5y ago
I really feel this. At some point, all those hobbies became metrics to optimize for monetary gain, things to put on a cv. Somehow that seems to have changed everything.
- huachimingo 5y ago
  There is this modern phylosopher, Byung-Chul Han[0], who talks about this and similar stuff on his essays and books. You could read him on a weekend, his books are short. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byung-Chul_Han https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byung-Chul_Han
valand 5y ago
In contrast, I always found myself feeling like a fake not being familiar with soldering irons, hardware, kernel programming, nerdy and rocket sciency stuff. Those things are exciting to me. But I notice my work colleagues, especially the ones from newer generations and those working more on high level stuffs, are rarely interested in these computational/communication device hobby thingies at the fundamental levels. They are more interested in what to make out of them rather than what are they made of.
- SiVal 5y ago
  I always found myself feeling like a fake... No, no! It was about how interested you were, not how skilled. These things are exciting to me And there you go: you're the real McCoy. When I say, "programmers knew how to use soldering irons and slide rules," I mean that you, a programmer among other things, would get together with friends at an astronomy club meeting, and somebody would know how to estimate a rough comet orbit from some observations with pencil and slide rule, and everyone else would say, "ooh, show me how!", even though the Naval Observatory was going to do it for you and do it better. Yes, but how can I do this magic myself? Most programmers were the kind of people who wanted these other skills but didn't necessarily have them. I'd go to a hamfest barely knowing how to spell "ohm", discover someone building his own computer, and he'd show me how to solder a joint that didn't look like a little silver snowman, and I'd teach him that, no, surprisingly, there is more than one algorithm for sorting, and we'd both hear that someone had just picked up a communications satellite overhead on his HeathKit shoebox receiver, and we'd run off to see it. Was there money in it? More likely to cost money than make money. Couldn't NASA do this? [puzzled look:] Sure, but look at this! We're picking up a signal from SPACE!
  - Folcon 5y ago
    Ok wow, I feel like this really describes me, I'm playing Kerbal Space Program Multiplayer and one of my friends has completed the game so knows how to do everything and I'm still trying to do each bit that's already been done. It's very much, "look I get that we've done it, but I want to know how to do it", how else am I going to learn? I never really got into ham, I should see if there's anything locally...

by SiVal 5y ago

world_peace42 5y ago

Bizarre this was downvoted.

ehnto 5y ago
There are plenty of people from both groups in their comment who participate in HN. It's not too surprising, he was not too kind. It's the tyranny of the internet, the bigger a group of people the harder it is to keep everyone happy and in agreeance, and not tread on any toes. Disagreement isn't the end of the world though.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

Related is the common misconception that the well-known tech companies, corporations and startups alike, are part of that same "nerd" scene you mention. They aren't. They're just another flavor of business, and the people running them are just businessmen.

Viliam1234 5y ago
That's almost like making a website for people who dream about making big money managing an IT company, and calling it "hacker news".

shaan7 5y ago

> A lot changes between times, too. Decades ago, those of us who did computer "stuff" in places like the Bay Area were typically nerdy science/math lovers who were an unfashionable segment of society with hobbies like ham radio, astronomy, homemade electronics, science fiction, math competitions, etc. Dammit. So this is not something I merely suspected but is really true. I grew up around the year 2000 and programming was all I could think about, I read about people/meetups you describe and was eager to be a part of them. By the time I grew up, attended university and started a job, things seemed very different. The stuff that got me excited about programming are now considered "boring" or "legacy". Makes you wonder if you should give up on what you like doing and do what is considered amazing now (AI etc) even though you don't find it fun :/

auto 5y ago
> Makes you wonder if you should give up on what you like doing Absolutely not. All these things people are talking about in this thread are still out there, you just have to keep looking. Posts show up on HN occasionally that hint at it, but one of my favorite places to go browse when I need a hit of that passion project ecosystem is hackaday.com. There are so many people out there doing cool stuff just to do it, especially given the fact that everything is literally orders of magnitude more accessible than it was even 10 years ago when you consider resources like YouTube, and the race to the bottom on cost of things like Arduinos, 3D printing, etc. If this does circle back to finding a job, then that's a matter of finding the right fits. I got my first job out of college writing iOS apps for motorcoach bus schedules by showing the company a game I released on the app store, and my most recent position for a Senior iOS dev (which has translated to a firmware position), I spent most of my interview talking about my homebrew synth project: https://imgur.com/a/FZ6GFsI https://imgur.com/a/FZ6GFsI There are people out there who will be interested, and they also happen to be people who hire people! I show my coworkers my side projects all the time, sometimes they're somewhat relevant to what we do, sometimes they don't relate at all.
Viliam1234 5y ago
I stayed all my life at the same location, and I noticed the change between the times, too. My guess is that this is because of different motivations people had to learn computer programming. Did you learn programming because making simple programs in Basic was irresistibly fascinating? Or did you learn programming because people told you that this was how you could make a lot of money? Of course the former type of software developer is more likely to play with "useless" (i.e. not immediately profitable) stuff than the latter. When I was a kid, personal computers existed, but they were mere toys. It was not obvious that something like today's IT industry will exist one day. Therefore, only nerds played with personal computers. And the first IT companies were full of nerds, because those were the only people who knew how to write code. When it became obvious that IT jobs are well paid and the demand for programmers is large, people motivated mostly by money started studying computer science, too. These days they probably are a majority at most workplaces. Nerds had their moment in the spotlight, now they are being displaced by normies. Being fascinated by tech for tech's sake is uncool again. It is cool to be fascinated by tech for money's sake, though. By firing James Damore, even Google made it official that people on the autistic spectrum are no longer welcome.

agent008t 5y ago

I really feel this. At some point, all those hobbies became metrics to optimize for monetary gain, things to put on a cv. Somehow that seems to have changed everything.

huachimingo 5y ago
There is this modern phylosopher, Byung-Chul Han[0], who talks about this and similar stuff on his essays and books. You could read him on a weekend, his books are short. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byung-Chul_Han https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byung-Chul_Han

valand 5y ago

In contrast, I always found myself feeling like a fake not being familiar with soldering irons, hardware, kernel programming, nerdy and rocket sciency stuff. Those things are exciting to me. But I notice my work colleagues, especially the ones from newer generations and those working more on high level stuffs, are rarely interested in these computational/communication device hobby thingies at the fundamental levels. They are more interested in what to make out of them rather than what are they made of.

SiVal 5y ago
I always found myself feeling like a fake... No, no! It was about how interested you were, not how skilled. These things are exciting to me And there you go: you're the real McCoy. When I say, "programmers knew how to use soldering irons and slide rules," I mean that you, a programmer among other things, would get together with friends at an astronomy club meeting, and somebody would know how to estimate a rough comet orbit from some observations with pencil and slide rule, and everyone else would say, "ooh, show me how!", even though the Naval Observatory was going to do it for you and do it better. Yes, but how can I do this magic myself? Most programmers were the kind of people who wanted these other skills but didn't necessarily have them. I'd go to a hamfest barely knowing how to spell "ohm", discover someone building his own computer, and he'd show me how to solder a joint that didn't look like a little silver snowman, and I'd teach him that, no, surprisingly, there is more than one algorithm for sorting, and we'd both hear that someone had just picked up a communications satellite overhead on his HeathKit shoebox receiver, and we'd run off to see it. Was there money in it? More likely to cost money than make money. Couldn't NASA do this? [puzzled look:] Sure, but look at this! We're picking up a signal from SPACE!
- Folcon 5y ago
  Ok wow, I feel like this really describes me, I'm playing Kerbal Space Program Multiplayer and one of my friends has completed the game so knows how to do everything and I'm still trying to do each bit that's already been done. It's very much, "look I get that we've done it, but I want to know how to do it", how else am I going to learn? I never really got into ham, I should see if there's anything locally...