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What if I told you.. Most of the actual groundwork has already been laid by passionate, actual engineers. Today big tech is just a place people go to make mon

What if I told you.. Most of the actual groundwork has already been laid by passionate, actual engineers. Today big tech is just a place people go to make money, and they don’t necessarily care about long term vision. Mostly filled with the most uninspiring, forced-to-do-kumon types who have little “passion” for engineering or computers. Zero imagination and outside the box thinking. Just rote memorization to get in and then getting PIP’d or laid off to go do the same at the other big corps. TC or GTFO types. Better luck at startups that are the Google’s of yesteryear.

blitzar 1y ago
20-30 years ago when you graduated if you wanted to get paid you targeted banks, accountancies or consultancies. Now you go for big tech (and startups). The cliche of the young "banker" personality type is now the "tech" personality type, and is coming soon to an Ai startup near you.
- tmpz22 1y ago
  I've always used the analogy of 90's Wall Street to explain the Tech industry behind the curtains. Our 2008 moment will be when society realizes AI is nothing but a tool for wealth transfer from what remains in the middle class to the top ultra wealthy. We had a brief window in the mid 2010s when folks started to throw rocks at the tech buses where I thought people were starting to realize it. Around Bernie's presidential run - which makes sense because he preached wealth inequality. But somehow during COVID tech slithered back into everybody's good graces. * I don't condone people throwing rocks at the buses for both the humanitarian reasons and the fact that few if any executive or social changes could result from that behavior. But it struck me as a microcosm of the prevailing sentiment towards technology workers.
  - spacemadness 1y ago
    Tech provided some means to stay connected during that time, so it’s not surprising. People felt even more disconnected initially and extroverts were not getting their needs met as easily. However I think the added exposure to algorithmic feeds caused an acceleration of social decay and a growing disenchantment with social media in some camps.
  - ayrtondesozzla 1y ago
    > AI is nothing but a tool for wealth transfer from what remains in the middle class to the top ultra wealthy. Refreshing to hear that stated so clearly. On your general point, I don't know if I feel the same optimism at this stage, much as I'd love to be proven wrong. Populations seem to never tire of jumping from one tech fairy tale to the next. Developers seem to never tire of burying their head in the sand either, and I sometimes wonder if the two are correlated. Why do you think this recent AI push will be the straw that breaks the camel's back? What if the camel just keeps plodding along?
    - pbh101 1y ago
      What should individual developers do?
      - -__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
        https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25930212/the-scouring-of-the-shire.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25930212/the-scouring... That's a good start ^^. It was true before Trump too, but it's still better late than never
  - evmaki 1y ago
    > AI is nothing but a tool for wealth transfer from what remains in the middle class to the top ultra wealthy. Is that inherent to the technology, or is that just inherent to the way we've chosen to organize society? Really, any technological paradigm shift going back to the industrial revolution has mainly served to enrich a small few people and families, but that's not some immutable property of technology. Like you say, it's a tool. We've chosen (or allowed) it to be wielded toward one end rather than another. I can smash my neighbor's head in with a hammer, or I can build a home with it. At one point in the United States, there was political will to update our social structures so that the fruits of technological and economic progress did not go disproportionately to one class of society (think early 20th century trust busting, or the New Deal coming out of the Great Depression). I'm afraid we find ourselves with a similar set of problems, yet the political will to create some other reality beyond further wealth concentration seems to be limited.
    - pbh101 1y ago
      Fundamentally and writ large, tech makes us more efficient. Efficient means doing more with less labor. Which is good because it is deflationary: things get cheaper over time from tech advances, and without any tech we would all be subsistence farmers. But it also means that yes, tech intrinsically enables capital to do more with less labor, thereby shifting the balance of power towards capital and empowering those with more capital. What ‘we decide’ to do with that is another largely unrelated matter.
      - kridsdale1 1y ago
        Those big anti-capital actions took bold class-betrayals from the inside. Notably Teddy Roosevelt (born with a silver spoon but wished he’d been in a log cabin) going after Standard Oil after taking their money for the campaign.
  - blitzar 1y ago
    I simply was talking about the talent. Nevertheless the "parasite" "no societal value" reputation of Banking remains. I would suggest however, that doing M&A is less parasitic and has greater social value than any ad-tech.
    - kridsdale1 1y ago
      I loathe ads as a consumer. But I can’t agree they’re parasitic. If I put myself in the shoes of a small business selling something I created, a well targeted IG ad can keep me alive where I’d have no chance against a company that can make (traditionally) a TV, Print, or billboard ad. I do support the notion that tech monopolies have killed a lot of the software industry dynamism by subsidizing anti competitive products. Like Android being free where Windows Mobile needed to make revenue from OEMs.
  - munksbeer 1y ago
    I've only been reading HN for about six years, and a member for less than that. Has this anti-tech view always been around? I'm not commenting if it is founded or unfounded, it is just surprising to see it so prevalent on what seems like it should be a place for tech people to hang out and discuss tech ideas.
    - beautron 1y ago
      My perception is that there's always been some dissonance between loving tech intrinsically for itself vs. the Silicon Valley venture capitalist business model. Conflating tech with its dominant business model enables the paradox where a person deeply in love with tech can also be anti-tech.
  - kridsdale1 1y ago
    Your post reminded me of circa-2017 when I emerged from the subway station, wearing my Facebook shirt (which was a normal thing to do for years) but now noticed the sneers of hatred and disgust from people on the street. They’d look at my chest, recognize, then look in my eyes and nonverbally insult me. That was the end of techy swag wearing for me.
- dmoy 1y ago
  I mean even today, if you really want to make a ton of money in software, you're still targeting finance stuff. Not banks, but like HRT or similar.
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    People really over exaggerate how much a rank-and-file software IC actually makes at these companies. Yea, they make a decent amount, but they're not casually making $2M bonuses like the investment banker types over at Goldman Sachs are, unless they are those rare outlier high-level employees. A lot of it might be stock, too, so their "good year" comp might be 3X to 4X their "bad year" comp. People see their cousin's uncle's neighbor's roommate making $400K at Meta and just assume every single employee there makes that much. Or they point to those salary sharing sites where people self-report their best salary + highest possible bonus + equity as if every year was 2021, and think of them as representative.
    - orangecat 1y ago
      People see their cousin's uncle's neighbor's roommate making $400K at Meta and just assume every single employee there makes that much. Every single employee, no. But the average L5 really does make over $300k in total compensation. Yes some of that is stock, but the companies are now stable enough so that doesn't cause a ton of variation.
      - whiplash451 1y ago
        I’ll be that guy, but $300k pre-tax at current cost of life is not an insane number at all.
        alabastervlog 1y ago
        I both agree that $300k household income is roughly the bottom edge to support a Fussellian upper-middle lifestyle these days (and that edge is retreating upwards fast…), but also notice that it’s about 94th percentile for US household income. Household. A married couple both making that are 98th percentile.
- asadotzler 1y ago
  Maybe 30-40 years ago it was finance, but by 1996 with the Netscape IPO, it was clear to anyone coming out of school (as I was then) that tech was the future and finance was already old and tired after 15 years of dominance. There was a mad rush between mid-1997 and mid-2001 to get into tech, then the dot-com bust happened, but that only lasted about 2 years before things ramped up again. That was 20 years ago. Suggesting that the first decade of the web didn't flip the bit from finance to tech is ahistorical.
  - absolutelastone 1y ago
    Their timeline sounds right to me. The dot com bubble was about big dreams but ended up with far less reality when stock options crashed to nothing. There was a finance bubble after the internet bubble and you could make a lot more money as a quant. The big tech firms finally started doing RSU's insteda of stock options in the early 2000's, though most startups still were (and are) lagging way behind.
  - pm90 1y ago
    Tech only started attracting real attention starting in 2008 when finance imploded. I remember very well that nerds/geeks were still considered weird outcasts back then. After the financial meltdown, tech really exploded and offered a much better lifestyle than finance, and thus became more accepted in American society.
  - hnfong 1y ago
    I still think it was different in the early 2000s, even after the dot com bubble. "Big Tech" had not been assembled yet. Microsoft was the only tech megacorp in town, and they were _hated_ back then. Apple was still recovering from shambles. Google was a startup nobody heard of. Facebook wasn't a thing yet. Tech investment money wasn't on the same scale as today. Money was measured in millions instead of the billions today. Most of the money I think was still towards finance at the time. If you look at the public companies with largest market cap before 2010 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... ), you'll see there's quite a couple banks on the list. You're absolutely correct though that this trend was foreseeable in the 1990s. Which is kinda why the dot-com boom/bust happened -- everyone knew it was the future, I guess people were just a bit too excited for the future, and the companies who'd actually create that future weren't even founded yet, leading to all the mis-investment and subsequent bust.
WWLink 1y ago
I have never worked at google, but when I was in college 10+ years ago the allure was that they were making all kinds of cool new stuff, and they had enough money to not just pay you well, but they (could afford to) have 80/20 time where you could work on developing cool new stuff while on the clock! But really, Google was cool. Google was hip. So was Apple. Lots of cool things were coming from those companies between 2000 and 2012 or so. My interest in Meta was similar - the reality labs projects seemed really cool when I looked into them back before all the giant cuts lol. In addition to those things, these were all seen as companies run by engineers, where the software and the tech was seen as the big core thing the company cared about. People thought programmers at google weren't treated as "cost centers" like they often are at companies where software is just a piece of the puzzle. But yea, times change. In a way a lot of it was just infatuation and dreams that may not have had a basis in reality.
- johannes1234321 1y ago
  > may not have had a basis in reality. I believe there is a lot of reality. As well as they gave a lot of brilliant co-workers which seems to have made it a great place to spin ideas. Also from stories too leader ship was at least open to listen to criticism in "thanks God it's Friday" meetings. While from observing some friends the promotion play was always tough as well. If you wanted to be promoted you always had to use your 20% time "wisely" which for some meant to still work on the main project. For other to strategically work on a side project they could use for the promotion panel. Today's Google seem to be fully focused on numbers, where a lot of the spirit is gone. Back in the days when I visited some friends working for Google we went to Google for breakfast or met at Google for dinner as it was just a good place to hangout. (Which motivated people to stay at Google for more than their regular hours) Nowadays it seem to be more of a workplace.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - pixl97 1y ago
PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
What if I told you that ... in 1992?
ok_dad 1y ago
Because that’s what tech companies want today. They don’t want hackers and shit, they want corporate automatons who will code for scraps.
- babyent 1y ago
  Wasn’t that my point? Innovation is mostly dead there, and it makes sense why people who want to build feel like they need to leave. Innovation is alive and thriving outside of FANG. And honestly after my experience I don’t get why anyone would work there. Join a series A-C unicorn track startup and stay like 5 years til IPO. Your vested shares will 10-30x and gg.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  Or to rephrase, they want reliable, stable developers to actually keep things running instead of impatient people always chasing the next cool thing.
laidoffamazon 1y ago
> Mostly filled with the most uninspiring, forced-to-do-kumon types What a strange thing to say. You’re describing the elite pedigreed type with this, but then allude to the types of people that PIPed. I really don’t think elite pedigreed types get PIPed outside of rare situations.
- babyent 1y ago
  I have a lot of friends who went to elite schools (top 5-10 in the world) for CS and some of them have gotten PIP’d or laid off. It’s not that hard to do well academically. Especially for kumon types. There’s builder types (rare af) and there’s worker types (plenty aka literally everyone else). And getting into tech isn’t hard. A principal staff or something like that? Impressive. Senior or staff is not that impressive anymore. Personally I prefer to work with people way, way smarter than me. I’ve worked with ex-FANG people and they’re robots. They came in after IPO and made me quit lol.

blitzar 1y ago

20-30 years ago when you graduated if you wanted to get paid you targeted banks, accountancies or consultancies. Now you go for big tech (and startups). The cliche of the young "banker" personality type is now the "tech" personality type, and is coming soon to an Ai startup near you.

tmpz22 1y ago
I've always used the analogy of 90's Wall Street to explain the Tech industry behind the curtains. Our 2008 moment will be when society realizes AI is nothing but a tool for wealth transfer from what remains in the middle class to the top ultra wealthy. We had a brief window in the mid 2010s when folks started to throw rocks at the tech buses where I thought people were starting to realize it. Around Bernie's presidential run - which makes sense because he preached wealth inequality. But somehow during COVID tech slithered back into everybody's good graces. * I don't condone people throwing rocks at the buses for both the humanitarian reasons and the fact that few if any executive or social changes could result from that behavior. But it struck me as a microcosm of the prevailing sentiment towards technology workers.
- spacemadness 1y ago
  Tech provided some means to stay connected during that time, so it’s not surprising. People felt even more disconnected initially and extroverts were not getting their needs met as easily. However I think the added exposure to algorithmic feeds caused an acceleration of social decay and a growing disenchantment with social media in some camps.
- ayrtondesozzla 1y ago
  > AI is nothing but a tool for wealth transfer from what remains in the middle class to the top ultra wealthy. Refreshing to hear that stated so clearly. On your general point, I don't know if I feel the same optimism at this stage, much as I'd love to be proven wrong. Populations seem to never tire of jumping from one tech fairy tale to the next. Developers seem to never tire of burying their head in the sand either, and I sometimes wonder if the two are correlated. Why do you think this recent AI push will be the straw that breaks the camel's back? What if the camel just keeps plodding along?
  - pbh101 1y ago
    What should individual developers do?
    - -__---____-ZXyw 1y ago
      https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25930212/the-scouring-of-the-shire.pdf https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25930212/the-scouring... That's a good start ^^. It was true before Trump too, but it's still better late than never
- evmaki 1y ago
  > AI is nothing but a tool for wealth transfer from what remains in the middle class to the top ultra wealthy. Is that inherent to the technology, or is that just inherent to the way we've chosen to organize society? Really, any technological paradigm shift going back to the industrial revolution has mainly served to enrich a small few people and families, but that's not some immutable property of technology. Like you say, it's a tool. We've chosen (or allowed) it to be wielded toward one end rather than another. I can smash my neighbor's head in with a hammer, or I can build a home with it. At one point in the United States, there was political will to update our social structures so that the fruits of technological and economic progress did not go disproportionately to one class of society (think early 20th century trust busting, or the New Deal coming out of the Great Depression). I'm afraid we find ourselves with a similar set of problems, yet the political will to create some other reality beyond further wealth concentration seems to be limited.
  - pbh101 1y ago
    Fundamentally and writ large, tech makes us more efficient. Efficient means doing more with less labor. Which is good because it is deflationary: things get cheaper over time from tech advances, and without any tech we would all be subsistence farmers. But it also means that yes, tech intrinsically enables capital to do more with less labor, thereby shifting the balance of power towards capital and empowering those with more capital. What ‘we decide’ to do with that is another largely unrelated matter.
    - kridsdale1 1y ago
      Those big anti-capital actions took bold class-betrayals from the inside. Notably Teddy Roosevelt (born with a silver spoon but wished he’d been in a log cabin) going after Standard Oil after taking their money for the campaign.
- blitzar 1y ago
  I simply was talking about the talent. Nevertheless the "parasite" "no societal value" reputation of Banking remains. I would suggest however, that doing M&A is less parasitic and has greater social value than any ad-tech.
  - kridsdale1 1y ago
    I loathe ads as a consumer. But I can’t agree they’re parasitic. If I put myself in the shoes of a small business selling something I created, a well targeted IG ad can keep me alive where I’d have no chance against a company that can make (traditionally) a TV, Print, or billboard ad. I do support the notion that tech monopolies have killed a lot of the software industry dynamism by subsidizing anti competitive products. Like Android being free where Windows Mobile needed to make revenue from OEMs.
- munksbeer 1y ago
  I've only been reading HN for about six years, and a member for less than that. Has this anti-tech view always been around? I'm not commenting if it is founded or unfounded, it is just surprising to see it so prevalent on what seems like it should be a place for tech people to hang out and discuss tech ideas.
  - beautron 1y ago
    My perception is that there's always been some dissonance between loving tech intrinsically for itself vs. the Silicon Valley venture capitalist business model. Conflating tech with its dominant business model enables the paradox where a person deeply in love with tech can also be anti-tech.
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  Your post reminded me of circa-2017 when I emerged from the subway station, wearing my Facebook shirt (which was a normal thing to do for years) but now noticed the sneers of hatred and disgust from people on the street. They’d look at my chest, recognize, then look in my eyes and nonverbally insult me. That was the end of techy swag wearing for me.
dmoy 1y ago
I mean even today, if you really want to make a ton of money in software, you're still targeting finance stuff. Not banks, but like HRT or similar.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  People really over exaggerate how much a rank-and-file software IC actually makes at these companies. Yea, they make a decent amount, but they're not casually making $2M bonuses like the investment banker types over at Goldman Sachs are, unless they are those rare outlier high-level employees. A lot of it might be stock, too, so their "good year" comp might be 3X to 4X their "bad year" comp. People see their cousin's uncle's neighbor's roommate making $400K at Meta and just assume every single employee there makes that much. Or they point to those salary sharing sites where people self-report their best salary + highest possible bonus + equity as if every year was 2021, and think of them as representative.
  - orangecat 1y ago
    People see their cousin's uncle's neighbor's roommate making $400K at Meta and just assume every single employee there makes that much. Every single employee, no. But the average L5 really does make over $300k in total compensation. Yes some of that is stock, but the companies are now stable enough so that doesn't cause a ton of variation.
    - whiplash451 1y ago
      I’ll be that guy, but $300k pre-tax at current cost of life is not an insane number at all.
      - alabastervlog 1y ago
        I both agree that $300k household income is roughly the bottom edge to support a Fussellian upper-middle lifestyle these days (and that edge is retreating upwards fast…), but also notice that it’s about 94th percentile for US household income. Household. A married couple both making that are 98th percentile.
asadotzler 1y ago
Maybe 30-40 years ago it was finance, but by 1996 with the Netscape IPO, it was clear to anyone coming out of school (as I was then) that tech was the future and finance was already old and tired after 15 years of dominance. There was a mad rush between mid-1997 and mid-2001 to get into tech, then the dot-com bust happened, but that only lasted about 2 years before things ramped up again. That was 20 years ago. Suggesting that the first decade of the web didn't flip the bit from finance to tech is ahistorical.
- absolutelastone 1y ago
  Their timeline sounds right to me. The dot com bubble was about big dreams but ended up with far less reality when stock options crashed to nothing. There was a finance bubble after the internet bubble and you could make a lot more money as a quant. The big tech firms finally started doing RSU's insteda of stock options in the early 2000's, though most startups still were (and are) lagging way behind.
- pm90 1y ago
  Tech only started attracting real attention starting in 2008 when finance imploded. I remember very well that nerds/geeks were still considered weird outcasts back then. After the financial meltdown, tech really exploded and offered a much better lifestyle than finance, and thus became more accepted in American society.
- hnfong 1y ago
  I still think it was different in the early 2000s, even after the dot com bubble. "Big Tech" had not been assembled yet. Microsoft was the only tech megacorp in town, and they were _hated_ back then. Apple was still recovering from shambles. Google was a startup nobody heard of. Facebook wasn't a thing yet. Tech investment money wasn't on the same scale as today. Money was measured in millions instead of the billions today. Most of the money I think was still towards finance at the time. If you look at the public companies with largest market cap before 2010 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... ), you'll see there's quite a couple banks on the list. You're absolutely correct though that this trend was foreseeable in the 1990s. Which is kinda why the dot-com boom/bust happened -- everyone knew it was the future, I guess people were just a bit too excited for the future, and the companies who'd actually create that future weren't even founded yet, leading to all the mis-investment and subsequent bust.

WWLink 1y ago

I have never worked at google, but when I was in college 10+ years ago the allure was that they were making all kinds of cool new stuff, and they had enough money to not just pay you well, but they (could afford to) have 80/20 time where you could work on developing cool new stuff while on the clock! But really, Google was cool. Google was hip. So was Apple. Lots of cool things were coming from those companies between 2000 and 2012 or so. My interest in Meta was similar - the reality labs projects seemed really cool when I looked into them back before all the giant cuts lol. In addition to those things, these were all seen as companies run by engineers, where the software and the tech was seen as the big core thing the company cared about. People thought programmers at google weren't treated as "cost centers" like they often are at companies where software is just a piece of the puzzle. But yea, times change. In a way a lot of it was just infatuation and dreams that may not have had a basis in reality.

johannes1234321 1y ago
> may not have had a basis in reality. I believe there is a lot of reality. As well as they gave a lot of brilliant co-workers which seems to have made it a great place to spin ideas. Also from stories too leader ship was at least open to listen to criticism in "thanks God it's Friday" meetings. While from observing some friends the promotion play was always tough as well. If you wanted to be promoted you always had to use your 20% time "wisely" which for some meant to still work on the main project. For other to strategically work on a side project they could use for the promotion panel. Today's Google seem to be fully focused on numbers, where a lot of the spirit is gone. Back in the days when I visited some friends working for Google we went to Google for breakfast or met at Google for dinner as it was just a good place to hangout. (Which motivated people to stay at Google for more than their regular hours) Nowadays it seem to be more of a workplace.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - pixl97 1y ago

PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago

What if I told you that ... in 1992?

ok_dad 1y ago

Because that’s what tech companies want today. They don’t want hackers and shit, they want corporate automatons who will code for scraps.

babyent 1y ago
Wasn’t that my point? Innovation is mostly dead there, and it makes sense why people who want to build feel like they need to leave. Innovation is alive and thriving outside of FANG. And honestly after my experience I don’t get why anyone would work there. Join a series A-C unicorn track startup and stay like 5 years til IPO. Your vested shares will 10-30x and gg.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
Or to rephrase, they want reliable, stable developers to actually keep things running instead of impatient people always chasing the next cool thing.

laidoffamazon 1y ago

> Mostly filled with the most uninspiring, forced-to-do-kumon types What a strange thing to say. You’re describing the elite pedigreed type with this, but then allude to the types of people that PIPed. I really don’t think elite pedigreed types get PIPed outside of rare situations.

babyent 1y ago
I have a lot of friends who went to elite schools (top 5-10 in the world) for CS and some of them have gotten PIP’d or laid off. It’s not that hard to do well academically. Especially for kumon types. There’s builder types (rare af) and there’s worker types (plenty aka literally everyone else). And getting into tech isn’t hard. A principal staff or something like that? Impressive. Senior or staff is not that impressive anymore. Personally I prefer to work with people way, way smarter than me. I’ve worked with ex-FANG people and they’re robots. They came in after IPO and made me quit lol.