5 ms·

This speaks to me, but I'm also reflective enough to wonder about whether I'm just observing from a different place in life than I was in the 1990ies when all t

by davidw 1y ago

This speaks to me, but I'm also reflective enough to wonder about whether I'm just observing from a different place in life than I was in the 1990ies when all this stuff started happening. I was young and didn't have many responsibilities then, and lots of free time. Now I'm a dad with a mortgage and an interest in local politics because I want to 'leave it better than I found it'. All that said... I do think there have been some shifts over time. I grew up in the era of open source taking off, and it was pretty great in a lot of ways. We changed the world! It felt like over time, software became mainstream, and well-intentioned ideas like PG's writing about startups also signaled a shift towards money. In theory, having F U money is great for a hacker in that they don't have to worry about doing corporate work, but can really dig into satisfying their curiosity. But the reality is that most of us never achieve that kind of wealth. Now we find ourselves in a time with too much concentrated corporate power, and the possibility that that gets even worse if LLM's become an integral part of developer productivity, as there are only a handful of big ones. Perhaps it's time for a new direction. At my age I'm not sure I'll be leading that charge, but I'll be cheering on those who are.

dcminter 1y ago
I'm very skeptical of the article - it sounds to me like classic "good old days" thinking¹. It's certainly true that IT has grown vastly since those good old days, but there has always been a proportion of people who're just... not that interested in what they're doing. For example I remember being mildly horrified in around 1998 that a colleague didn't know how to run his compiler from the command line; without an IDE he was lost - but I doubt he was the only one. Meanwhile the idea that there's a dearth of cool new stuff seems quite quaint to me. There's a whole bunch of cool things that pop up almost daily right here on Hacker News². Just because they haven't spread to ubiquity doesn't mean they're not going to. Linux was not mainstream right out of Linus's Usenet announcement - that took time. As to corporate power? They ebb and flow and eat each other (Data General, Compaq, DEC ... remember them? Remember when Microsoft was the major enemy? Or IBM?) ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_old_days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_old_days ² Edit: Not to mention, there's also a whole bunch of crap that's not very interesting. But survivor bias means we'll have forgotten those in 20 years time when we're surveying this time period; as Sturgeon's law reminds us, "90 percent of everything is crap."
- davidw 1y ago
  Yes of course there have always been people who clock in and clock out and don't have a ton of passion for what they do. I don't begrudge that, but personally I need some of the curiosity and joy in hacking on stuff. And I enjoy the camaraderie of being around others who feel that way too. It just feels like "it's a job" is more of the zeitgeist these days. And yes, I'm also well aware of what came before 'my time' - mainframes and such were definitely an era where the power was more with the large companies. One of the reasons Linux (and *BSD) was so cool is that finally regular people could get their hands on this powerful OS that previously was the exclusive purview of corporations or, at best, universities. As to cool projects, sure. They're fun, interesting and creative, but perhaps not part of (a very vague, admittedly) "something bigger", like "the open source movement" was back in the day.
  - jonas21 1y ago
    The frontier moves over time. If you stay at any one spot, it will eventually mature and become less fun and interesting. There will be more of the clock-in / clock-out types, and that's perfectly fine -- as you pointed out above, at different stages in life, people may be looking for different things, like stability. But if you're looking for that spark and excitement again, you need to get back out to the frontier. One frontier that is particularly exciting to me is using AI to speed up the tedious parts of the development process, and to tackle areas where I don't have specialist knowledge. Similarly to how Linux opened up a powerful OS to individuals, AI is enabling individuals to create things that would have previously required large teams.
    - davidw 1y ago
      You're correct about AI seeming to be "where it's at" right now, but I'm really not thrilled with the corporate concentration that seems to be the natural result of requiring massive amounts of computing power. Perhaps over time it'll get efficient enough to run outside of huge companies; that could be an interesting aspect to keep an eye on.
      - 1y ago
libraryatnight 1y ago
I mention this when this comes up - my personal view is that it has to do with saturation. At some point being in computers became a 'good job' once that happens a field still has its curious people, but they're not as visible as they're in a sea of people who were just looking for a steady check.
- kps 1y ago
  I blame the dotcom boom. Yes, the business-records jobs were always part of the field, but they didn't seem so dominant. We're all writing COBOL now. Old man yells at cloud services
wood_spirit 1y ago
I was a the kind of person who was happy as a pig in mud to be paid to do my hobby of programming computers! Was ecstatic that people would pay money to a young kid to do that! But most of the people I went to uni to study computer science with at the end of the nineties were there for the money. Even back then it was all about money for most programmers.
- Viliam1234 1y ago
  There is a generation of programmers that became interested in computers only because they felt that computers were cool. Mostly useless, except for playing games, but cool. Only later the knowledge also turned out to be a source of money. And then there is a generation that grew up knowing that there was money in computers, so many of them learned to use them even if they didn't care about them per se. This generation also contains many hackers, but they are surrounded by at least 10x more people who only do it for money. Twenty years ago, most programmers were nerds. These days, nerds are a minority among the programmers. Talking about programming during an IT department teambuilding event is now a serious faux pas.
Derbasti 1y ago
The only tangible difference between then and now is that many more problems have already been solved. This certainly leaves fewer holes where an enthusiastic developer can flex their muscle. Then again, I did spend some time in e.g. lisp and Haskell just for the heck of it. And there ate still plenty more unsolved problems outside of the mainstream today.
- mycall 1y ago
  There are still a ton of vertical markets that have crap for technology stacks, e.g. public transit. There is tons of opportunity out there to improve processes and optimize work.
golergka 1y ago
Ironically, LLMs are exactly what drives a lot of curiosity and learning without a purpose. I see it all the time on twitter — people getting chatbots into weird mental states, toying around with different systems on top of them, jailbreaking. More for the fun of the game than anything else. You can't keep that curiosity and at the same time see one of the most wonderful and awe-inspiring technologies of the last decades as something threatening.
- davidw 1y ago
  The technology itself isn't threatening. The fact that it's currently concentrated in the hands of a very few large US corporations is what's ... less than stellar from my point of view.

by davidw 1y ago

dcminter 1y ago

I'm very skeptical of the article - it sounds to me like classic "good old days" thinking¹. It's certainly true that IT has grown vastly since those good old days, but there has always been a proportion of people who're just... not that interested in what they're doing. For example I remember being mildly horrified in around 1998 that a colleague didn't know how to run his compiler from the command line; without an IDE he was lost - but I doubt he was the only one. Meanwhile the idea that there's a dearth of cool new stuff seems quite quaint to me. There's a whole bunch of cool things that pop up almost daily right here on Hacker News². Just because they haven't spread to ubiquity doesn't mean they're not going to. Linux was not mainstream right out of Linus's Usenet announcement - that took time. As to corporate power? They ebb and flow and eat each other (Data General, Compaq, DEC ... remember them? Remember when Microsoft was the major enemy? Or IBM?) ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_old_days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_old_days ² Edit: Not to mention, there's also a whole bunch of crap that's not very interesting. But survivor bias means we'll have forgotten those in 20 years time when we're surveying this time period; as Sturgeon's law reminds us, "90 percent of everything is crap."

davidw 1y ago
Yes of course there have always been people who clock in and clock out and don't have a ton of passion for what they do. I don't begrudge that, but personally I need some of the curiosity and joy in hacking on stuff. And I enjoy the camaraderie of being around others who feel that way too. It just feels like "it's a job" is more of the zeitgeist these days. And yes, I'm also well aware of what came before 'my time' - mainframes and such were definitely an era where the power was more with the large companies. One of the reasons Linux (and *BSD) was so cool is that finally regular people could get their hands on this powerful OS that previously was the exclusive purview of corporations or, at best, universities. As to cool projects, sure. They're fun, interesting and creative, but perhaps not part of (a very vague, admittedly) "something bigger", like "the open source movement" was back in the day.
- jonas21 1y ago
  The frontier moves over time. If you stay at any one spot, it will eventually mature and become less fun and interesting. There will be more of the clock-in / clock-out types, and that's perfectly fine -- as you pointed out above, at different stages in life, people may be looking for different things, like stability. But if you're looking for that spark and excitement again, you need to get back out to the frontier. One frontier that is particularly exciting to me is using AI to speed up the tedious parts of the development process, and to tackle areas where I don't have specialist knowledge. Similarly to how Linux opened up a powerful OS to individuals, AI is enabling individuals to create things that would have previously required large teams.
  - davidw 1y ago
    You're correct about AI seeming to be "where it's at" right now, but I'm really not thrilled with the corporate concentration that seems to be the natural result of requiring massive amounts of computing power. Perhaps over time it'll get efficient enough to run outside of huge companies; that could be an interesting aspect to keep an eye on.
    - 1y ago

libraryatnight 1y ago

I mention this when this comes up - my personal view is that it has to do with saturation. At some point being in computers became a 'good job' once that happens a field still has its curious people, but they're not as visible as they're in a sea of people who were just looking for a steady check.

kps 1y ago
I blame the dotcom boom. Yes, the business-records jobs were always part of the field, but they didn't seem so dominant. We're all writing COBOL now. Old man yells at cloud services

wood_spirit 1y ago

I was a the kind of person who was happy as a pig in mud to be paid to do my hobby of programming computers! Was ecstatic that people would pay money to a young kid to do that! But most of the people I went to uni to study computer science with at the end of the nineties were there for the money. Even back then it was all about money for most programmers.

Viliam1234 1y ago
There is a generation of programmers that became interested in computers only because they felt that computers were cool. Mostly useless, except for playing games, but cool. Only later the knowledge also turned out to be a source of money. And then there is a generation that grew up knowing that there was money in computers, so many of them learned to use them even if they didn't care about them per se. This generation also contains many hackers, but they are surrounded by at least 10x more people who only do it for money. Twenty years ago, most programmers were nerds. These days, nerds are a minority among the programmers. Talking about programming during an IT department teambuilding event is now a serious faux pas.

Derbasti 1y ago

The only tangible difference between then and now is that many more problems have already been solved. This certainly leaves fewer holes where an enthusiastic developer can flex their muscle. Then again, I did spend some time in e.g. lisp and Haskell just for the heck of it. And there ate still plenty more unsolved problems outside of the mainstream today.

mycall 1y ago
There are still a ton of vertical markets that have crap for technology stacks, e.g. public transit. There is tons of opportunity out there to improve processes and optimize work.

golergka 1y ago

Ironically, LLMs are exactly what drives a lot of curiosity and learning without a purpose. I see it all the time on twitter — people getting chatbots into weird mental states, toying around with different systems on top of them, jailbreaking. More for the fun of the game than anything else. You can't keep that curiosity and at the same time see one of the most wonderful and awe-inspiring technologies of the last decades as something threatening.

davidw 1y ago
The technology itself isn't threatening. The fact that it's currently concentrated in the hands of a very few large US corporations is what's ... less than stellar from my point of view.