3 ms·

> 2) It feels like the enthusiasm and excitement has gone out of tech. This may be UK specific, or perhaps it's just me, but being part of the tech industry doe

> 2) It feels like the enthusiasm and excitement has gone out of tech. This may be UK specific, or perhaps it's just me, but being part of the tech industry doesn't feel so shiny as it once did. Just conjecture here (from a fellow British person), but I think it might be something to do with tech employment that's changed. Listicles and blogs about Google's workplace culture were being churned out week on week in the mid 2010s, and working at a startup was portrayed as a futuristic, modern type of employment where you published a crowdfunding campaign, arrived at a makerspace to draw sketches of gadgets and GUI mockups with a team of enthusiastic colleagues, then, I don't know, did a TED talk before going out for a drink. The results for searching stock image sites with the term 'startup culture' bears witness to that stereotype! I was never part of that, so I can't tell how accurate that portrayal was. However, since then, the press has now moved to reporting scandal after scandal: fraud in high places with companies like Theranos, well-meaning but naive founders falling victim to hostile takeovers, all punctuated by the routine whack-a-mole of cryptocurrency scams. So perhaps it is not that technologists have become less enthusiastic as a whole, but the enthusiastic ones don't join many startups and FAANG-adjuncts any longer. Without the blank cheque of such an employer, financing a £££+ trip across the country for a meetup isn't so viable. I would certainly go to more conferences and hackathons if money weren't something to consider. And on a personal note; your comment history suggests that we're not so very far away geographically, so make sure to post on HN if you do decide to restart your event :)

jlengrand 3y ago
Thanks for your additional comments folks, it's good to hear from other experiences. It still love Tech as much as before, but I also saw the "vibe" change over the past years. I was wondering if it really was a thing, or mostly me growing older :). It seems it might be a combination of both.
noneeeed 3y ago
Hah, yeah, I think that's a pretty accurate portrail. There was a real feeling that we were part of the future. Now we just seem to be part of turbocharging the worst aspects of ultra-capitalism. Combined with the endlessly frustrating hype-cycles, it really doesn't surprise me that it's all lost its shine. I was reading some comment last week by someone bemoaning the cynicism around LLMs/GPT etc, and I couldn't really agree with it. Being in my mid-forties, I have been around for at least half a dozen major hype-cycles (including the previous couple of AI based ones), all of which have, at best taken a lot longer to come to fruition, and at worst have had sod all impact on the world. I can understand why people are sceptical that "this time it's different".

jlengrand 3y ago

Thanks for your additional comments folks, it's good to hear from other experiences. It still love Tech as much as before, but I also saw the "vibe" change over the past years. I was wondering if it really was a thing, or mostly me growing older :). It seems it might be a combination of both.

noneeeed 3y ago

Hah, yeah, I think that's a pretty accurate portrail. There was a real feeling that we were part of the future. Now we just seem to be part of turbocharging the worst aspects of ultra-capitalism. Combined with the endlessly frustrating hype-cycles, it really doesn't surprise me that it's all lost its shine. I was reading some comment last week by someone bemoaning the cynicism around LLMs/GPT etc, and I couldn't really agree with it. Being in my mid-forties, I have been around for at least half a dozen major hype-cycles (including the previous couple of AI based ones), all of which have, at best taken a lot longer to come to fruition, and at worst have had sod all impact on the world. I can understand why people are sceptical that "this time it's different".