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There are just a lot more programmers today. All the same hackers and stuff who used to be there are still there, but there's a lot more of everyone else. If H

There are just a lot more programmers today. All the same hackers and stuff who used to be there are still there, but there's a lot more of everyone else. If Harvard started admitting 50,000 students a year, the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find.

goodpoint 3y ago
Zuckerbergs?! What the hell?
- ahartmetz 3y ago
  Growth "hacker", I guess Ew
- jdm2212 3y ago
  I was using that as a shorthand for "geniuses who found multi-billion dollar companies".
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    I think I agree with goodpoint and I also think that my own usage of "Zuckerberg" is the exact opposite of yours.
  - throwmeaaayayy 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg and Jobs are notoriously not hackers nor even software developers and even less so geniuses. They are businessmen.
margalabargala 3y ago
> They'd still be there Unfortunately. Not sure the concentration of Zuckerbergs and the concentration of hackers is particularly related, except maybe the latter attracts the former. Zuckerberg's no genius, he was in the right place at the right time near the right people. He's competent, but no more than most of the people here. His morals (or the flexibility thereof) were what made him rich.
- jdm2212 3y ago
  I really wish I was so brimming with self-confidence as to say that I'm just as competent as the guy who founded the eighth or so most valuable company on Earth, and he was just in the right place at the right time. Zuckerberg is clearly a not-great guy in some ways, but the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    I with I was as starry-eyed as to think he did it because of his "hacker skills"... >the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday. There are people who post regularly in HN (even in the top-50 contributors) who as hackers and programmers (and work ethic) run not just circles, but the 10-dimensional equivalent of a circle, around Zuckenberg, and have no "multi-billion dollar" companies...
    - jdm2212 3y ago
      so in the original context of my post... Zuckerberg : Harvard :: hacker : software industry. it's an analogy. I wasn't saying he's a great hacker. But also the dude obviously is a great hacker. There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale -- you need exceptional depth and breadth of computer knowledge, as well as great focus and an ability to prioritize and satisfice.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        >There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale Well, he didn't do that. He just wrote a crappy basic PHP backend. The "scaling at Facebook scale" part happened later, after people were hired and VC money flew in. Same like early Twitter was a crap Rails app that they even had to restart a few times a day because of memory leaks. It still got them through to attract users (even though it crashed all the time) and money, so they eventually were able to fix that and grow to Twitter scale. None of those things happened because of very talented hacker founders. Those kind of apps aren't even very technical or different to the average CRUD app - not until the scale/infrastructure people come in much later: those do the actual hard work. Cloudflare, Redis, SQLlite, Nginx, ElasticSearch etc, on the other hand, are a different story. Those are absolutely apps/platforms made from scratch by seriously talented hackers, even if others were involved to improve them later on.
908B64B197 3y ago
> the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find. Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career, with offshoring replacing expensive American engineers.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career Believed by whom? Because AFAIR this was never either the general public sentiment or consistent with BLS projections across the fields that CS feeds into.
  - 908B64B197 3y ago
    > this was never either the general public sentiment Post dotcom crash in the early 00's? Everyone was saying this was a dead market. Cost-cutting was everywhere.
    - zorked 3y ago
      Not sure of what the downvote is about because this is an accurate representation of the post-dotcom time. Enrollments in CS went down, programmers would be offshored to India, nobody wanted to be in tech anymore, unemployment was high. Hard to belive now but people enrolling in CS at this time were mocked and ridiculed.
      - bcrosby95 3y ago
        Yep. I decided upon my major in a similar time period. People thought I was stupid, and my advisor advised me against it. There was a lot of doom and gloom on the internet - way more than any downturn since then. Way more than what you see about ChatGPT replacing programmers. The options I was weighing were philosophy, math, or CS. I chose CS because I liked building things. I figured I could at least make minimum wage. If it turned out so terrible I could just go back to school for something else. Much to my relief, my first job out of college paid me $50k.

goodpoint 3y ago

Zuckerbergs?! What the hell?

ahartmetz 3y ago
Growth "hacker", I guess Ew
jdm2212 3y ago
I was using that as a shorthand for "geniuses who found multi-billion dollar companies".
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  I think I agree with goodpoint and I also think that my own usage of "Zuckerberg" is the exact opposite of yours.
- throwmeaaayayy 3y ago
  [flagged]
- goodpoint 3y ago
  Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg and Jobs are notoriously not hackers nor even software developers and even less so geniuses. They are businessmen.

margalabargala 3y ago

> They'd still be there Unfortunately. Not sure the concentration of Zuckerbergs and the concentration of hackers is particularly related, except maybe the latter attracts the former. Zuckerberg's no genius, he was in the right place at the right time near the right people. He's competent, but no more than most of the people here. His morals (or the flexibility thereof) were what made him rich.

jdm2212 3y ago
I really wish I was so brimming with self-confidence as to say that I'm just as competent as the guy who founded the eighth or so most valuable company on Earth, and he was just in the right place at the right time. Zuckerberg is clearly a not-great guy in some ways, but the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday.
- coldtea 3y ago
  I with I was as starry-eyed as to think he did it because of his "hacker skills"... >the reason we're all posting on Hacker News during the workday and he's running a centibillion dollar company is because he's an immensely intelligent and talented and focused man and we are... well, the kind of people who post on internet forums during the workday. There are people who post regularly in HN (even in the top-50 contributors) who as hackers and programmers (and work ethic) run not just circles, but the 10-dimensional equivalent of a circle, around Zuckenberg, and have no "multi-billion dollar" companies...
  - jdm2212 3y ago
    so in the original context of my post... Zuckerberg : Harvard :: hacker : software industry. it's an analogy. I wasn't saying he's a great hacker. But also the dude obviously is a great hacker. There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale -- you need exceptional depth and breadth of computer knowledge, as well as great focus and an ability to prioritize and satisfice.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      >There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale Well, he didn't do that. He just wrote a crappy basic PHP backend. The "scaling at Facebook scale" part happened later, after people were hired and VC money flew in. Same like early Twitter was a crap Rails app that they even had to restart a few times a day because of memory leaks. It still got them through to attract users (even though it crashed all the time) and money, so they eventually were able to fix that and grow to Twitter scale. None of those things happened because of very talented hacker founders. Those kind of apps aren't even very technical or different to the average CRUD app - not until the scale/infrastructure people come in much later: those do the actual hard work. Cloudflare, Redis, SQLlite, Nginx, ElasticSearch etc, on the other hand, are a different story. Those are absolutely apps/platforms made from scratch by seriously talented hackers, even if others were involved to improve them later on.

908B64B197 3y ago

> the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find. Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career, with offshoring replacing expensive American engineers.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career Believed by whom? Because AFAIR this was never either the general public sentiment or consistent with BLS projections across the fields that CS feeds into.
- 908B64B197 3y ago
  > this was never either the general public sentiment Post dotcom crash in the early 00's? Everyone was saying this was a dead market. Cost-cutting was everywhere.
  - zorked 3y ago
    Not sure of what the downvote is about because this is an accurate representation of the post-dotcom time. Enrollments in CS went down, programmers would be offshored to India, nobody wanted to be in tech anymore, unemployment was high. Hard to belive now but people enrolling in CS at this time were mocked and ridiculed.
    - bcrosby95 3y ago
      Yep. I decided upon my major in a similar time period. People thought I was stupid, and my advisor advised me against it. There was a lot of doom and gloom on the internet - way more than any downturn since then. Way more than what you see about ChatGPT replacing programmers. The options I was weighing were philosophy, math, or CS. I chose CS because I liked building things. I figured I could at least make minimum wage. If it turned out so terrible I could just go back to school for something else. Much to my relief, my first job out of college paid me $50k.