5 ms·

There are always opportunities, at least in the USA. I started programming in 1985 and thought I was very likely too late. I was the same age as Chris Espinosa

• up2isomorphism 3y ago
  Give an example in 1985 to show there are opportunities today is not convincing.
  • asynchronous 3y ago
    Older people cannot fathom this logic for some reason.
    • jachee 3y ago
      Fine. Give up. Don’t chase a dream. Just go find some drudgery for a paycheck. Don’t bother saving. You won’t need it. You never had a shot anyway. Your ideas are stupid. Any time you think of a thing, someone else has thought of it first. There’s no point in trying to make anything better. It’s all as good as it can possibly be. Such a perfect world doesn’t need your contribution; can’t be changed by the likes of you; won’t care, even if you do manage to come up with something novel. You’re too young to be taken seriously, and too late for everything, so why bother? So get out there and fulfill your failure, and don’t worry about dreaming. All the dreamers woke up ages ago.
      • szundi 3y ago
        Also even all the little things are already invented. Even locally. Everything, done.
      • mattgreenrocks 3y ago
        A pig. In a cage. On antibiotics.
    • latency-guy2 3y ago
      Spell it out, what logic specifically?
      • jovial_cavalier 3y ago
        People say "There don't seem to be as many opportunities nowadays compared to my parents' generation..." and the response from some older quite successful person who has not had to hunt for opportunities in the current regime is always "You fool! There's opportunity everywhere! Just get a paper route and in 5 years you'll be able to buy a mansion!"
        • stavros 3y ago
          I find it interesting how the older person who hasn't had to hunt for opportunities in the current regime is wrong, but it's taken for granted that the younger person who hasn't had to hunt for opportunities in the old regime is right. I doubt that people 50 years ago were all rich.
        • tomcam 3y ago
          Is it your thought that I called someone a fool?
    • tomcam 3y ago
      Might just be the other way around
  • GuardianCaveman 3y ago
    The point was people thought it was too late then. And again at microsoft ten years later. I thought it was convincing.
    • arcanemachiner 3y ago
      Don't worry, I thought it was.
  • tomcam 3y ago
    I like people with your attitude! Leaves more for people willing to work and to learn things. I upvoted your comment out of pity. That era represented the collapse of 8 bit microcomputers. They were huge, then nothing. Silicon Valley had boomed, then gone bust. No one had much use for computers except brave financial analysts willing to use the toylike Apple ][ for primitive spreadsheets. No one took the Mac seriously until Postscript and laser printers happened. In October 1987 Black Monday hit, causing the worst market crash since the Depression. I hit up a bunch of angel investors—a term that didn’t even exist—to raise money for a batch file compiler. A compiler! That supported me and several employees for years. Point is that you can always make opportunities happen even in hard times.
    • waihtis 3y ago
      I'm not nearly as successful as you but agree wholeheartedly - there's 8 billion humans on the planet with constantly refreshing interests, and it's absolutely preposterous to think this doesn't provide a recurring, increasing source of opportunity
      • tomcam 3y ago
        Meh, be careful with the word successful. You have no idea how successful I am. I’m way better off than most people, way poorer than many folks on HN, but I could be a complete jerk, or someone who pissed it all away, or someone who abandoned his family. Those things and so many others would disqualify me as successful in my book. To me if you’re living in alignment with your values and aren’t too much of a drain on society most of the time, you’re successful.
    • mr_mitm 3y ago
      No need to be patronizing. Pointing out that an argument is not a good one doesn't necessarily mean one holds the opposite view. Just because people though once that situation A was the case while it was actually situation B, and now it seems again that situation A is the case doesn't mean it is necessarily again situation B, only that it might be situation B. It also actually might be situation A. But if it is actually situation B, extrapolating from the past is not a good argument. Doesn't mean that there are no other good arguments.
  • grodriguez100 3y ago
    I think the point is that he thought it was too late in 1985, then people thought the same ten years later (1996), then the original article (from 2014) tries to explain how 2014 is not too late either (“the best time is now”). In other words, it is always easy to think it is too late when looking back. But it is never too late if we try to look forward and imagine the things that have not invented yet and which will be around in 10-20 years time.
    • Gare 3y ago
      There will always be winners, bu they're obvious only in hindsight.
      • tomcam 3y ago
        Nope. It was obvious to me then, though not my coworkers. Microsoft had already done creditably against Oracle and IBM in come-from-behind situations. The press decided it was time to put Microsoft in its place. Marc Andreesen said glibly that Windows was nothing more than a poorly debugged set of device drivers. The technical press parroted it without any follow-through. When Microsoft came out with Internet Explorer, new versions of Excel, Word, and IIS, I knew they would win. Because device drivers are hard, nobody wrote them better, and Windows was good enough for millions of customers. I think Microsofties low-key regarded me as a bit dull, because they believed the media had no agenda. I simply looked at the (public) accomplishments of my much younger coworkers and trusted my own observations.
        • ben_w 3y ago
          In the late 90s it was also "obvious" that Apple was about to go bankrupt. The entire dot-com bubble was people who thought it was "obvious" that the early internet was already a winner… and most of those companies failed. When that bubble popped, some people thought it was "obvious" that Amazon would be one of the losers in part thanks to their investment in the (failed) pets.com (not to be confused with the current owners of the same domain). To me, it's been "obvious" for the last US$2 trillion of market capitalisation growth that Apple's going to face monopoly investigations; it's "obvious" that Facebook is, in a deep fundamental sense, not even capable of being compatible with GDPR; and it was "obvious" to me in 2009 that the first true self-driving car sold to the general public (by the quality standard "doesn't come with a steering wheel and that's fine") would be around 2019 or so. There's been a few places I've worked with young energetic co-workers (and I have been a young and energetic coder myself), and… in many cases those groups failed to make enough money and disbanded. One result of a lifetime of not being able to predict the markets is the realisation, a decade ago, that my preferences in many areas are almost anti-correlated with the modal buyer: I like what normal people dislike or even loathe, and dislike or even hate what they prefer.
  • ryanjshaw 3y ago
    I agree that this is a weak argument. I think a stronger argument is simply to say: every year we see people start independent, bootstrapped businesses. There's no reason to believe the potential here has changed. The only way to include yourself in that set is to try, and never give up. EDIT: I will say, it may be a powerful story for anybody experiencing self doubt. Different people need different kinds of motivation.
• kubb 3y ago
  Damn, I better buy some tech stock if it’s gonna go up 13x in 4 years. Actually if everyone just does that, nobody will need to work!
  • jodrellblank 3y ago
    NVidia's gone up 13x in the last 4 years. Bitcoin's up 10x in the last 4 years. Broadcom's up 6x in the last 4 years, 21x in 10 years. Facebook/META's up 5x in the last 2 years, 20x in 11 years. Uber's up 3.5x in 2 years. Tesla was up 11x between 2019 and 2021. Microsoft's up 10x in the last 9 years. Amazon's up 11x in the last 10 years. Apple's up 10x in the last 10 years. Oracle's up 3x in the last 10 years.
    • kubb 3y ago
      I’m buying some Google stock right now. I have a good feeling about it :) How do I pick the perfect moment to buy and sell?
      • stavros 3y ago
        Oh, that's simple, just predict the future with 100% accuracy.
• michaelt 3y ago
  > A decade later in 1996 I started at Microsoft, which virtually all of my peers thought had run its course. People thought Microsoft had run its course, one year after the release of Windows 95? Just as MS Word was dominating WordPerfect? And the likes of AutoCAD were dropping support for AIX, Solaris etc? When Photoshop had just released for Windows, and Apple's market share had dropped to about 3% ? Wow! I know they were kinda late to online stuff, but still - strange how these things turn out, in hindsight!
  • tomcam 3y ago
    > People thought Microsoft had run its course, one year after the release of Windows 95? Not sure if I made this clear, but I am referring to industry publications, and to what seemed to be a vast majority of my colleagues at Microsoft. Experienced business watchers who could read an SEC filing, and who had a mature grasp of business, knew better, but it wasn’t sexy to keep printing opinions like that. I’m sure Department of Justice problems weren’t helping either. So these kids were exercising stock options like crazy because of the bad press. These were people in their mid 20s who had entered these amazing jobs just out of college, and who had experienced several years of astonishing growth. They were both internally and externally very good at taking criticism. I think they just overcorrected at the first sign of trouble. I was a decade older, and had been studying business on my own for about 20 years by that point. I had also worked for many companies that were nowhere near as well put together as Microsoft. Microsoft makes its share of mistakes, but never in ways that jeopardize the company’s existence. That may sound trivial, but if you’ve ever run a company, you’ll understand that it’s a surprisingly rare trait. Just managing not to fuck up too badly is exceedingly rare in the business world, and I think they didn’t quite understand that. Because they were open to criticism, they really couldn’t understand how special the company was at that time. Since they came in fresh from college, they had nothing to compare their jobs to. To them it was what any job should be.
  • throwaway828 3y ago
    There were rumours that the following year would be the year of Linux on the desktop. It had just taken, and was taking, the server world by storm. Windows 2000 was really important for MS staying relevant in anything outside consumer. It really set up the next two decades.
• mchinen 3y ago
  It's interesting to hear your experience at this point in time. Mine was later but noticeably different. I started coding in the 90's as a teen releasing shareware, with my first gig at Adobe in 2001, where they paid me $14/hr as an intern. Even though this was rough times for tech, me and my CS peers at UW felt a lot of optimism and enthusiasm about what could be built because the framework still supported idealists and we cared less about the economy (and we were definitely naive). Both the researchers and entrepreneurial types were very curious about inventing new paradigms. When I talk to younger people now in CS, the enthusiasm seems to be split for 'pure researcher' types and 'entrepreneurial/builder types', with the latter having interest concentrated on what is booming (like AI), and more about what can be built but what will be able to raise large sums or attract more users. I'll caveat this with I don't know to what extent the people I talk to do have a bias, but I do wonder if there are less people willing to explore new frontiers now. One major difference between now and then is that the fraction of US market cap that is tech, and to a lesser extent, tech's importance in the economy. I wonder if this established leader position somehow could make people less optimistic and willing to explore?
  • tomcam 3y ago
    > When I talk to younger people now in CS, the enthusiasm seems to be split for 'pure researcher' types and 'entrepreneurial/builder types' In my view the pure research types who land jobs have always been maybe 1%? UW is research heavy, don’t forget. And at the time I was at Microsoft almost no one had plans to quit and start their own company. Before I started there in 1996 I figured about 80% would—-an early indicator of how distorted my view was from press reports and my own biases. It seems to me that these days the vast majority are happy to be drones. Or am I way off? In my time most of the employees were very smart students who just kind of fell into programming and were hooked in by Microsoft’s pioneering efforts at sending recruiters to colleges (rare at the time) and especially less-obvious choices such as Waterloo and Harvard. What kind of shareware did you publish?
    • mchinen 3y ago
      It makes sense. I should say I'd estimate 70-90% of the class didn't want to work their own ideas, but would be happy to work at a big company forever, and this was the mindset going into the CS program. A fair number of people within my circle of folks that hung out at the CS lab and lounge and discussed ideas eventually launched successful companies, and I'm probably overindexing on these types with survivorship plus hindsight bias, since they were the most memorable to talk to. I interned at Microsoft in 2005, and it felt like most people there were just looking for something stable, with a side of Office Space-esque exit thoughts. The culture and scale was different in ways that seem weird to me today - One example is that Bill Gates invited all of the interns to have dinner at his house, which is something that is probably reserved only for startups nowadays, if even. Re: shareware, I released a crappy checkers twist game for Mac, which was also very educational, and I was proud to have it on the MacAddict Magazine CD. [1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5196-checkerwarz https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5196-checkerwarz
• begueradj 3y ago
  >I started programming in 1985 and thought I was very likely too late. Lots of skilled programmers started coding when they were kids. But that does not mean starting to learn coding when you are 30 years old won't make you an excellent programmer: actually, you can learn even faster at that age because concepts like logic, dividing an issue into several small ones, and iterating step by step until the final solution are more intuitive to you than to a kid.