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Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to
by claudiulodro 4y ago
Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be. If I had a time machine I would warn young me that it's really more like a combination of Office Space and Wolf of Wall Street.
It would be awesome to listen to Prodigy or Megadeth while hackin' with the gang though. I'm still down for that if it exists somewhere in the now-corporatized tech industry.
- orblivion 4y agoVisit Noisebridge
- ramesh31 4y ago>Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be. I think it comes down to the fact that our industry has become rigid and beholden to the university education system. John Carmack and John Romero were both college dropouts. Their stories would probably be impossible today. What we have now is a world of people coloring between the lines and going straight from one set of rules to another. There truly is no more punk rock left in tech.
- ed312 4y agoAre startups the closest you can still get to "punk rock in tech"? I would love for the dream of the 90s to still be alive somewhere...
- codingdave 4y agoStartups are the least punk rock thing in tech. Follow patterns and rules to match the expectations of VCs so they give you money... and then they drive what you do. I'm not saying people should not work in startups - they have their place in the industry. But there is nothing "punk rock" about them. If you want to break rules and work outside the lines, we have come full circle to the 90s - bootstrapped small businesses are the way to go.
- johnzim 4y agoThe more expensive the Bay Area is to live in, the more the VC approach becomes the only game in town
- ethbr0 4y agoAngel / friends / family was always more punk than VC, because VCs literally distill the funding transaction down to a business science. Unfortunately... because most of the world has taken their eyes off keeping markets competitive, it's less viable now than it once was, because the table stakes capital requirements are larger.
- halper 4y agoI think it's because most tech jobs are not in tech. If you work for a bank, you work for bank. If you work for a fashion retailer, you work for a fashion retailer. I've worked for a big pension fund and it was exactly like one imagines. Many meetings, a quiet office, slow and boring. I've also worked for small tech-focussed companies with technical nerds as founders; they were rather different, with music, dogs, vodka and late nights. Oh and age matters too: after I had a kid, the late nights and vodka were not something I had the energy for.
- eddieroger 4y agoI used to think that, too, but be warned: SaaS companies quickly become beholden to the sales org, and all of a sudden, working for a "tech" company becomes working for all the industries you serve. Very few tech companies are pure tech anymore. Basically only the private ones like Valve.
- ethbr0 4y agoThe meeting:work ratio is a decent proxy. If it's too high, you're not in a technology company in the sense we're idolizing here. ... And I'm also not sure "that" sort of tech company can exist above a certain size. No corporate silo firewall is strong enough to keep the business bullshit at bay.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoConsidering Valve's game output I'd say they too have become drunk on easy money being a storefront. (Which isn't all bad, though I'd rather have HL3.)
- ionwake 4y agoHL3 = IRL
- mtberatwork 4y agoThere are all kinds of people in tech who are self taught without CS degrees though. I don't think it's that beholden to the universities...at least not like other professions. I think it's simply that people took notice that all the money was being funneled into tech. The MBAs all followed.
- xhrpost 4y agoJohn Carmack was also constantly working on the cutting edge. I think that makes a big difference. IIRC from reading MoD, he was the first person to get true side-scrolling working on an x86 chip, before it was thought to not be powerful enough vs the chips used in consoles at the time. Problem is that most of us just don't get to work on the cutting edge usually. A lot of the software that needs building often doesn't need much in the way of creativity.
- greggman3 4y agoWhat part of their story are you referring to? There are lots of indie devs that appear to be having great fun making games and doing well to boot. Valheim, Black Rock Galactic, Celeste, Dead Cells, Papers Please, Stardew Valley, Enter the Gungeon, Don't Starve, Undertale, etc. were all pretty bit hits, certainly made their developers millions of dollars, and AFAIK the developers were having fun making them.
- ramesh31 4y ago> There are lots of indie devs that appear to be having great fun making games and doing well to boot. See: the other posters comment about small profitable bootstrapped businesses being the only way to do this now. Successful indie devs are an anomaly. But my point was more that companies are far more risk averse these days than to let a group like Romero et. al. run loose on a new product idea without strict controls in place, and that the types of people selected for by these companies now ensures that.
- greggman3 4y agoI guess I'm not aware of their history. I thought they (Carmack and Romero) were indie bootstrapped business. Their success is being repeated today by 10x to 20x the indie teams, or so it seems to me.
- rz30221 4y agoIndustry, for the most part, needs predictability and scale for it to function well. It's very difficult to accomplish that without at least some rigidity. Punk rock is small by definition. Once it becomes large it changes to mainstream.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dfxm12 4y agoHackers shows the career guys as lame and high strung, but the hobbyists (or as Razor and Blade put it, those hacking as a survival trait) as cool and having fun. It's easy for something fun to have the fun sucked out of it when it becomes a career. I think a part of the hacker sub-culture that Hackers touches on lightly is that you have to make your own space. It's not going to exist for you in some prepackaged easy to consume way and certainly not in a corporation. Cyberdelia was for & by hackers, not a club run by some guy who has a bunch of cookie cutter clubs all over downtown. I don't think this is unique to the hacker sub culture, either.
- itintheory 4y ago> Hackers shows the career guys as lame and high strung, but the hobbyists (or as Razor and Blade put it, those hacking as a survival trait) as cool and having fun. I think The Plague was having fun.
- eddieroger 4y agoHe was only having fun when he was playing cat and mouse with the hackers (or just playing with Lorraine Bracco). When he was in his office being a boring IT guy, he was not enjoying it, nor was Penn Jillette when the Gibson was under attack and his boss was breathing down his neck. The Plague was having fun, but Eugene Belford was not.
- derac 4y agoYes, the whole plot of the movie is his plan to ransom money and get out of the rat race.
- antihero 4y agoToday at lunch I dyed my hair orange and then went back to my SAP consulting engagement.
- ethbr0 4y agoI'm surprised your SAP admin approved that change request.
- jgilias 4y agoIt very much does exist. Just look for places trying to change the very basics of how the world works by hacking on new technology. You know, the places that naturally attract cypherpunks, people distrustful of 'the system' and the like. You can also find people with that ethos in corporate places, but they get swarmed out by suits and people who went to coding school because it pays well.
- derwiki 4y agoAside from crypto startups, could you share an example?
- rz30221 4y agoThe presenters in Defcon seem like they enjoy what they do, for example.
- Enginerrrd 4y agoAmen to that. The reality though seems to be that being a really good hacker/reverser, is still a relatively lonely endeavor. Don't get me wrong, high level stuff is absolutely a team endeavor, but it requires hours and hours and hours of extraordinary concentration and effort done mostly by yourself. It's tough (but not impossible) to do that and conventional things like raise a family and maintain a relationship with your spouse or friends.
- toofy 4y agocrypto startups are infested with people desperately attempting to be the system, but they’ve convinced themselves (and each other) that adopting a different aesthetic somehow means their motivations are totally not the same.
- bamboozled 4y agoA Linux kernel developer ? A lot of those people seem like hackers in every sense of the word. They might not be hacking the Gibson but they are hackers.
- bergenty 4y agoI wish I could code in the time when there were no deadlines and you could gradually plod away at incredibly complex assembly code while hanging out with some like minded folk. That probably stopped being a thing in the 70s though.
- empressplay 4y agohttps://kansasfest.org https://kansasfest.org
- marshray 4y agoSee if there's a local makerspace in your town. It might not be your exact thing, but you're likely to meet people who know about everything going on in the area.
- TheMaskedCoder 4y agoI would liken the portrayal of computer science in Hackers to the portrayal of criminology in Batman Forever
- ethbr0 4y agoPeople miss the trees for the forest when complaining about Hackers. https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Norton-Programmers-Guide-IBM/dp/0914845462 https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Norton-Programmers-Guide-IBM/dp... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYNEX https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYNEX
- vouaobrasil 4y agoI've always felt that an industry or research field goes through multiple stages: Discovery that it exists -> Fumbling -> Golden Age -> Mechanization Mechanization is where the bean counters and optimizers get into it and make it into something boring. I'm not a software engineer but I feel like my own field is in the "Mechanization" stage. My solution is I'm just about to leave and never look back because I stopped caring. I still like the original stuff I learned but I don't care about what's become of it. Honestly, I think who you are as a person is often going to be misaligned with what capitalism and industry does with what looks like your passions, and it's healthy to recognize that and leave while you can. You may be doing software engineering but you're not a software engineer; you're a person and you can reinvent yourself any time you want.
- dehrmann 4y agoThe author of American Psycho said this: > I think that if I had written the book in the past decade, perhaps Bateman would have been working in Silicon Valley, living in Cupertino with excursions into San Francisco or down to Big Sur to the Post Ranch Inn and palling around with Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder.
- actionfromafar 4y agoI think many of us believed that for sure we are going to be the cool ones but we actually turned out more like Office Space people. Not everyone is Crash Override.
- j0hnyl 4y agoA lot of us are crash override when we are 16 years old. Life beats it out of us though.
- actionfromafar 4y agoA sequel/followup to Hackers today could be awesome. The characters all got the override beaten out of them by life. Rallied back together for one last mission.
- 0x445442 4y agoI imagine there’s still cool gigs. It’s just not with The Enterprise doing Webscale.