4 ms·

It wasn’t for the “riches” and there has never been a time where 90% of the developers working weren’t doing boring old enterprise dev making middle class wage

It wasn’t for the “riches” and there has never been a time where 90% of the developers working weren’t doing boring old enterprise dev making middle class wages. And most of the people in my class had their first exposure to computer programming at my state school in south GA was in college.

saltcured 1y ago
Your experience is localized and perhaps more anecdotal than you admit. I also graduated and started my career in '96. But, I grew up in the SF Bay Area and did my CS major at UC Berkeley. I saw a lot more of the idealist types being described by others in these comments. It's not that we didn't expect to need jobs, but there was more passion-driven interest. Back then, it seemed like people "just in it for money" or to meet family expectations were more often going to pre-law or pre-med. I had a focus on programming languages in my undergrad studies and went into an academic R&D programming job, basically making tools for computational sciences. I've basically spent my whole career using and writing open source software. I've definitely seen a kind of culture shift where the frontier nature of our old R&D culture is getting drowned out by boring process. To me, it is largely the influx of cybersecurity compliance that is killing the old culture. The bureaucratic compliance overhead is antithetical to the small team prototyping approach that drove progress during most of my career. It inspires a sort of cargo cult risk-management process that seems more about appearances and plausible deniability than actual secure systems.
- JustExAWS 1y ago
  You think most developers in the US were located “in the Bay Area”, went to Berkeley , and spent a career doing open source work in computational science and you call my experience “anecdotal”? Most developers from the beginning worked at banks, government, defense etc doing boring enterprise work. That has always been the case. They weren’t doing “research” writing COBOL for banks and the government. In 30 years, I’ve worked at 10 jobs for startups, boring big enterprise companies, BigTech and I’ve been working in consulting (3 of those were working full time in AWS’s consulting department) for five years working with developers from startups, enterprises and government. I think my exposure to a wide swath of the industry is a little bit more than working in California for 30 years… Even when I was younger and single, all of us would hang out after work - males and females and go to the bar, the club, the strip club (yes the women too - it was their idea they were mostly BAs and one programmer), and just really enjoy the money we were making. We were all making $50K-$80K back when you could easily get a house built in the burbs for $150k-$170K. Even as I got older, and change jobs in my mid 30s, by then my coworkers were mostly involved with other hobbies and our families. We weren’t even thinking about computers after work.
  - saltcured 1y ago
    Sorry, I didn't mean to discount your experience so much as add another microcosm to the mix. I think we're all anecdotal... But, I do think HN has a cultural fixation on the fabled Silicon Valley experience. This includes an attachment to (nostalia for?) the old university/startup axis. This used to be a more fluid exchange, rather than just the regular enterprise hiring pipeline.
    - JustExAWS 1y ago
      That’s just the thing - it never was on the meta level. The tech startup scene was a thing between the mid 90s and 2000 with the first dot com boom and even most of them outside of the hardware companies like Sun, Cisco, Intel and software at Netscape were not doing cutting edge for the time development. The startups were throwing dumb (or some premature) things at the wall with no business plan backed by VC money. The people at startups were definitely there for the money. No one had a “passion” to deliver pet food or groceries (Webvan) or early web advertising. Tech before the mid 90s were programmers building software on mainframes mostly doing boring things. You had the dark days between 2001-2008 before mobile, web apps, SaaS and high speed internet took off where all most people really could find were boring enterprise jobs. Back then, I was living in Atlanta and the dot com bust didn’t affect the local market at all. The banks, the airlines, the credit card processing companies were hiring boring Microsoft devs and Java devs like crazy. I’ve just seen too often where 90% of the devs who spend their career at boring old enterprises don’t have any idea what it’s like for those who are in the top 10% working at BigTech and adjacent while at the same time those 10% can’t fathom the fact that there are “Dark Matter developers” living their lives in tier 2 cities with their big houses in the burbs treating a job as just a job and most people always have. https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-unseen-99 https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un... I’ve been on both sides (and now in the middle doing strategy cloud consulting). I had my first house built in 2003 for $170K and even my second house built in the “good school system” in the burbs of Atlanta in 2016 for $335K. We moved and downsized three years ago.
      - saltcured 1y ago

saltcured 1y ago

Your experience is localized and perhaps more anecdotal than you admit. I also graduated and started my career in '96. But, I grew up in the SF Bay Area and did my CS major at UC Berkeley. I saw a lot more of the idealist types being described by others in these comments. It's not that we didn't expect to need jobs, but there was more passion-driven interest. Back then, it seemed like people "just in it for money" or to meet family expectations were more often going to pre-law or pre-med. I had a focus on programming languages in my undergrad studies and went into an academic R&D programming job, basically making tools for computational sciences. I've basically spent my whole career using and writing open source software. I've definitely seen a kind of culture shift where the frontier nature of our old R&D culture is getting drowned out by boring process. To me, it is largely the influx of cybersecurity compliance that is killing the old culture. The bureaucratic compliance overhead is antithetical to the small team prototyping approach that drove progress during most of my career. It inspires a sort of cargo cult risk-management process that seems more about appearances and plausible deniability than actual secure systems.

JustExAWS 1y ago
You think most developers in the US were located “in the Bay Area”, went to Berkeley , and spent a career doing open source work in computational science and you call my experience “anecdotal”? Most developers from the beginning worked at banks, government, defense etc doing boring enterprise work. That has always been the case. They weren’t doing “research” writing COBOL for banks and the government. In 30 years, I’ve worked at 10 jobs for startups, boring big enterprise companies, BigTech and I’ve been working in consulting (3 of those were working full time in AWS’s consulting department) for five years working with developers from startups, enterprises and government. I think my exposure to a wide swath of the industry is a little bit more than working in California for 30 years… Even when I was younger and single, all of us would hang out after work - males and females and go to the bar, the club, the strip club (yes the women too - it was their idea they were mostly BAs and one programmer), and just really enjoy the money we were making. We were all making $50K-$80K back when you could easily get a house built in the burbs for $150k-$170K. Even as I got older, and change jobs in my mid 30s, by then my coworkers were mostly involved with other hobbies and our families. We weren’t even thinking about computers after work.
- saltcured 1y ago
  Sorry, I didn't mean to discount your experience so much as add another microcosm to the mix. I think we're all anecdotal... But, I do think HN has a cultural fixation on the fabled Silicon Valley experience. This includes an attachment to (nostalia for?) the old university/startup axis. This used to be a more fluid exchange, rather than just the regular enterprise hiring pipeline.
  - JustExAWS 1y ago
    That’s just the thing - it never was on the meta level. The tech startup scene was a thing between the mid 90s and 2000 with the first dot com boom and even most of them outside of the hardware companies like Sun, Cisco, Intel and software at Netscape were not doing cutting edge for the time development. The startups were throwing dumb (or some premature) things at the wall with no business plan backed by VC money. The people at startups were definitely there for the money. No one had a “passion” to deliver pet food or groceries (Webvan) or early web advertising. Tech before the mid 90s were programmers building software on mainframes mostly doing boring things. You had the dark days between 2001-2008 before mobile, web apps, SaaS and high speed internet took off where all most people really could find were boring enterprise jobs. Back then, I was living in Atlanta and the dot com bust didn’t affect the local market at all. The banks, the airlines, the credit card processing companies were hiring boring Microsoft devs and Java devs like crazy. I’ve just seen too often where 90% of the devs who spend their career at boring old enterprises don’t have any idea what it’s like for those who are in the top 10% working at BigTech and adjacent while at the same time those 10% can’t fathom the fact that there are “Dark Matter developers” living their lives in tier 2 cities with their big houses in the burbs treating a job as just a job and most people always have. https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-unseen-99 https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un... I’ve been on both sides (and now in the middle doing strategy cloud consulting). I had my first house built in 2003 for $170K and even my second house built in the “good school system” in the burbs of Atlanta in 2016 for $335K. We moved and downsized three years ago.
    - saltcured 1y ago