The innovation in the cloud space in the last couple of years has removed an enormous burden from working on ideas. You could waste enormous time just setting up an email or web machine in the past that these days is just a click away. Knowing how to configure BGP has little to do with most people's ability to deliver their core product.
I don't know what brogrammers are. Maybe he's talking about what I used to call tech-carpetbaggers in the dot-com boom. Essentially, every area of human endeavor starts out with the truly passionate, the truly dedicated, and later becomes mainstreamed if successful. Some percentage of those who arrive later will have other motivations, and won't care for the same reason you do. It's not unique to tech. You see it the gaming community ("you're not a real gamer!", "fake geek girls", etc)
As tech becomes easier, and the barriers fall, more and more people will be able to participate. Geeks and neckbeards will become a minority. I don't think we should mourn for the era when tech required priestly dedication. We should be happy another 4 billion people are now getting access, and greater and greater numbers of people can translate ideas to products efficiently.
Since 99+% of all startup ideas will fail, it makes no sense to invest and optimize upfront. If your startup runs into scalability problems, you can always fix those later. You should consider the first version a throwaway. More than likely, your investments will be wasted. Even if your startup succeeds, it will often be a pivot away from the original mission.
The only case where I would say this doesn't hold is your security/privacy architecture. You don't want to fix this later after you've let your customer's data be stolen, you want this done right up front. You can rewrite everything else about your product, except for the things, which if they go wrong, will result in people being hurt materially or physically.
https://gist.github.com/philfreo/7257723
https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406
There are plenty of people in this industry who would have told you this code wasn't fit for production.
People frequently overestimate both what's needed to build commercially-viable solutions and how easy it becomes to recruit the right people to improve (or reimplement) poorly-architected solutions if they become popular.
Getting a good idea is usually harder than getting the tech right. Being able to quickly make prototypes is the most important thing in a start up.
FYI I'm not a "brogrammer". I work at a large established company and one of my main jobs is making systems work at large scale. But that's not what you do when starting a company. If you make it you can sort out those issues later.
This is maybe the tenth HN post I've read that's some iteration of this gut feeling by people who entered tech after a life-long obsession with computers. It's really cool that you're passionate about CS -- there are also a lot of people who are rational actors making rational decisions when presented with market signals, and they're not bad people for doing that. They're just acting in rational self-interest. Sorry it upsets you. Almost every industry is full of people who toil at jobs they're not passionate about, and it doesn't make their employers bad companies. It's okay to work a job and define your life satisfaction by raising a family, making art, enjoying the outdoors, etc.
There's a legitimate complaint here about poor craftsmanship, but: (1) Poor craftsmen often wash out in the interview process or torpedo the companies sloppy enough to hire them, and (2) Everyone starts off as a poor craftsman, and it would be cool if people like OP asked themselves "How can I help more people become excellent craftsmen?" than "AGHHH MORE PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL AT THIS THING I LOVE, IT'S SO OVER"
As someone who is somewhat of an old timer in a few things that are popular now (flying RC helicopters (gas) since the 80's, photography (70's) (had a darkroom) 70's, and "computers" (70's) (I can do programming somewhat but am not a programmer) and lastly "entrepreneur" (right out of college and things in high school). Also I was in the entrepreneurial program at b school and it was so long ago that people frowned upon it (and I was at Wharton) here's the thing: I'm actually glad there is so much attention paid to things that very few people cared about years ago when it seemed that only I did.
Edit: Oh yeah Unix in the 80's as well as macintosh and Apple as well.
Those who seek the frontier must keep moving or they'll end up surrounded by a community they might not be able to tolerate. To stand your ground, shotgun in hand, yelling at kids to get off your lawn is not helping anyone.
Let's face it: Kids are holding hardware in their hands that researchers in the 1980s would kill for, an iPhone 6 has a CPU so powerful it would easily crush the most powerful computers in the world in 1993 (http://www.top500.org/list/1993/06/) but they use it to take selfies.
This would be a useful way to make sure you wouldn't do something incredibly stupid and ultimately self-defeating just so you could to make a quick buck in the next quarter, if the ultimately consequence was that the same 'rational decision' was going to kill you - financially or literally - a year or ten later. (Or at least you'd be fully aware that it was likely to kill you, and were just fine with that.)
If you try to model long term wide area consequences you eventually have to accept that rational actors work within some very irrational belief systems, and long term modelling is very much a minority interest.
This is partly because you get as much useful information about the future from 'market signals' as you get from any stampeding herd, flock or school of animals - which is not much.
This has been covered over and over in the literature (e.g. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, etc).
>Almost every industry is full of people who toil at jobs they're not passionate about, and it doesn't make their employers bad companies.
Maybe not. But it certainly makes them extremely dull and horribly inefficient, economically and politically.
>There's a legitimate complaint here about poor craftsmanship,
I don't think it's a complaint about poor craftsmanship. I think it's a complaint about questionable cultural ethics.
Not everybody has the luxury of being passionate about something lucrative -- that's not something you really have control over (maybe some, but I don't think much. This is another issue entirely, though). I get that it might be lamentable that an industry isn't full of the most passionate people anymore, but the tradeoff is that it became a large-scale industry. If the original author wants the kind of deep, nerdy devotion he used to have, he can find it! There are plenty of research institutes and startups investing in long-term big bets that need this kind of thing. But being mad that /everybody/ isn't that way anymore seems childish.
but yeah tech bootcamps, consultant scammers, open source hipsters.... i see this stuff is rampant & it seems to be a downer in cyberspace. I code because its a passion, got a web dev job because one was offered & am desperately trying to get out of it so i can get some of the bloody CRUD out of my eyes (though thankfully I'm in Java web services which is much more expansive/rewarding than previous web technologies i've used).
my coworkers complain that no one will throw raises/promotions at them. I look around & think "Why would you want to continue down this path? You're making well above a living wage and you claim to hate being in such a dispassionate workplace, why not just look for something more rewarding?" The response is always some utter bollocks about wanting to have a house so that when their parents visit they can have a nice place to spend time (for the sake of those 3 days/year, a major lifestyle choice is made).
These ppl are pure scum and I see completely unqualified devs with this mindset making more money than myself & other much more intellectual programmers (the high rate guys are generally migrant consultants who blow with the wind). Then I see bootcamp classes advertised to overpriveleged failure-to-launch types, teaching them to be just as scummy/desperate.
There is a joy to coding as there is to other creative disciplines, but the market doesn't encourage it so you need to look elsewhere. It's true that its there, but I bet it was much more prevalent in the cowboy days when the whole industry was a hacker movement. I also bet it was more difficult to sort things out when you couldn't just Google easily for the trending libs, so I suspect the concentration of pseudo-intellectuals was much lower.
And in fact the venom I have against tech bootcamps is that the greatest takeaway I have from years of programming is the ability to self-educate. If I didn't gain this wonderful skill, I would not want to be in this industry at all. Programming without the ability to go above & beyond is a recipe for a dead-end job.
I wish I had a sunnier view of things but I am someone who wants to work hard but feels like an ant on an ant farm. ppl have advised me to go into startup scene but all the startups i've interviewed at in NY are mock corporations -- ad delivery, ad multimedia, analytics, facebook ripoff.... bleh. where to go?
I also have been dissatisfied with the industry and what it has become. I got into this to create solutions, not to glue others' solutions together. This isn't fun anymore. I'm looking for something more artistic like concept art drawing. I like what you said, "can't wait to get the CRUD out of my eyes"!
I also agree on the startup point you made. Everything is about ads and how to make them better. Yawn to the max. So uninteresting. I'm afraid I don't have a cure for your cynicism. But I want to leave you with something. I was watching an instructional video of an artist teaching environment drawing technique. He said one of the fun things about drawing professionally is he has been doing it for 50 years and it's still interesting to him. Programming is mercurial and will have different "interesting" periods that will appeal to different people as it progresses. This era in programming is not my favorite.
The industry has not been overtaken by the get-rich-quick charlatans, it has expanded enough that they can find a place.
I'd argue the CueCat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat) was the iconic culmination of five years of feverish insanity.
1998-2001 is when things got really crazy. Arguably things getting almost as bad now.
I think the network hardware issue alone is a good example of where the complexity in the stack has probably increased exponentially since the 90s.
PG wrote me a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762357
Nothing has changed and actually has gotten worse in my opinion (so I hear you, bro(grammer)).
However, I've gotten a bit older and made a conscious decision to do work that is interesting to me over money and prestige. Mirroring what the other poster said, I try not to worry too much anymore about what people do in Silicon Valley/Techcrunch/Hacker News.
It bothered me before because I was torn between being true to myself and keeping up with the jones to show that I can still hang with the bro(grammer) of RapGenius, Color, Yo, the kid with the AI app whom Marissa Meyer acquired and whatever else is cool now.
It's harder than it sounds because it was easy for me to get caught up in the frenzy of how important developers are, coding is the future, you can get rich etc so I can go to the cool clubs and start a charity foundation at the same time, do a revenge of a nerd kind of thing and get the girl and buy mom a house too (or at the very least, keep up with all of the peeps who are humble-bragging about their career advancements and buying real estate etc.)
In my humble opinion, there are more important things in life like doing a job that you're suppose to be doing, like editing the cron-job according to the JIRA ticket or washing the dishes when the sink is full.
I think one way to address this is to limit the scope and talk about specific groups or organizations rather than attempting to make an overly broad assertion about the culture of the entire region.
I'm 25, I have been an employee at 4 different startups and 1 big company, I have 2 failed projects of my own under by belt (long term side projects - Working late nights and weekends and for a total of 6 years). I have one somewhat promising project in the pipeline, but I wouldn't call myself an entrepreneur - I think being an entrepreneur these days implies that you got VC funding.
My previous 2 projects failed in a large part due to strong competitors who were really well funded - On my own, I just didn't have the manpower to compete with that (not in those particular fields). Regular people who have a vision and really care about a product (and enjoy working on it) unfortunately cannot compete with well funded entrepreneurs. VC funding creates very loud noises in the market and your target users just cannot hear about your small project/company through all that noise.
I'm actually hoping that the economy will crash this year - That would clean out my current competitors - I'm sure most of them will give up as soon as VC money disappears.
That means the vast majority of these people are deluding themselves and others. Not only does their expertise not carry over into other fields, but it wasn't expertise to begin with. Their swagger is unwarranted, and intensely annoying to those who'd rather build something new than swirl around in an infinite disrupt/reinvent loop.
There's just too much hype and churn in the industry today, not enough true innovation. Of course the old-timers who got us here get frustrated to see such opportunity wasted.
OTOH they are wildly rich and I am a wage slave, so I guess the joke's on people who think the actual quality of the technology matters rather than the way it is marketed.
For example, while he's bashing on the younger generations, his one anecdote is about an "entrepreneur" with 20 years of experience: that's neither Gen Y or millennial ...
What struck me from this essay is the point that if you do something because you love it (rather than just that you get paid for it) you tend to dive deeper and your degree of understanding will over time increase. If money is what motivates you all you will care about is shortcuts to the point where you can invoice, or in the case of the so called 'entrepreneurs' how you can screw your customers/co-founders/investors best.
So we get this collision of two worlds: one group wants to make cool stuff and learn, one group sees dollar bills in large quantities. And somehow the one group is able to co-opt the other and as a side effect pulls in vast numbers of people that have no idea what this is all about but that start to crank out stuff in unprecedented quantity. It's like landing in an ikea when you come from a carpentry shop, only the furniture is made of bits instead of wood.
I'm 41 and have been doing software development professionally since the mid-90s (as a hobby since 1983) and I find the vast majority of the tech industry just so disappointing these days in that it is basically just another "widget factory" industry and I thought/hoped for something better.
If you start a cranky old tech man club, send me an invite.
I was hitting my now regular frustration with things which actually seem to get harder with time instead of simpler. It feels like we are no longer standing on the shoulders of giants, but attempting to stand on a billion ants and then struggling to see daylight as they swarm all over us.
But there always remains an underground where true innovation and passion thrives.
It's more akin to every bridge engineer not bothering with materials science or integral calculus because they know how to throw a bunch of trusses together than it is akin to every hipster on the planet learning to play Stairway to Heaven.
Refusal to learn is no great virtue, but that one is specialized in their knowledge is no great vice either; the world is large and no one can wrap their arms around the whole thing. You grab a piece and trust your neighbors will help you out with theirs.
I would love to dig down into every nuance and detail. I don't have time for that because I'm working 60 hour weeks churning out deliverables to keep up velocity. My employers don't have time or budget for me to drill down into the details, they just want features and they want them yesterday.
My employers are not millenials. The VCs who fund my company are not millenials.
It's absurd to blame the most powerless group of people for this. Blame the powerful--the ones who dictate the work culture.
This. A billion times this. We should have "Law of minimal needed abstractions" :
Look at every abstraction as global variable accessed only from lines with goto on them. It better have a good reason for existing.
We have it. Occam's Razor - the original version:
"entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity"
"But worse than the brogrammers, I think it's the 'entrepreneurs' that bug me the most. The word feels so tainted now"
The word entrepreneur is approaching 'thought leader' as far as being eyeroll worthy. I have deep admiration for people who start their own business and work hard, but some LinkedIn profiles of self described 'entrepreneurs' are so utterly shameless. Even worse are the subtle variations on the theme - serial entrepreneur, social-media entrepreneur, etc etc...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush
"Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush"
And he's right. When 3 of every 5 people you meet in the space has more buzzwords than lines of code written, it gets old.
For me, I've found that HN satisfies my need for a better quality forum of like minds. He doesn't seem to have found an acceptable community and is just telling the kids to get off his lawn instead of finding a good place and group of friends to discuss fun stuff with.
But, unlike him, I just can't be mad that that barrier to entry has been reduced. Sure, there's more wantrapreneurs around now. But it's also made life easier for those of us who are still willing to work hard for long amounts of time on something real -- something wantrapreneurs just can't seem to grasp.
I've only ever seen the term "brogrammer" used in SV circles, though. It's hardly a phenomenon for the tech industry as a whole.
Other than that, I somewhat agree. Most of our software hasn't evolved conceptually much since the 80s, with some notable exceptions in academic and PL circles that haven't gained mainstream acceptance, predictably.
It means people with personalities more than one standard deviation away from the speakers' personal social preferences w/r/t techies (and "neckbeard" is reserved for the other end of the curve).
Choosing "bro" as the label is not a particularly meaningful descriptor, it's just a subgroup that is OK to openly deride.
+1
> it doesn't feel like there will be another wave of innovation that will bring us back to those magical times when such an earth shattering revolution of technology will be solely in the hands of those that love it for what it is.
There's a flip side to this article, which is that the "Golden Age" of tech has huge deficits in terms of access that we are still trying to correct in the 21st century. There are a lot of people that because of race, gender, economic status, geographic location that could not get their hands on such technology and therefore had no opportunity to enter the field.
Don't really have an opinion on the rest of the essay but I do hate this when I see it.
"In contrast to those golden days, the tech industry today seems to lie at this horrible intersection of the mysteriously entitled generation Y, the millenials, and the extremely cheap and available resources for getting a product to market that the cloud and inexpensive overseas outsourcing shops have created."
When I think about these things and the dot com explosion, I realize that these markets are best created by the people living in them. Specifically, if you're primary labor supply consists of "mysteriously entitled generation Y and millenials" then if you are building tools for these people you need to understand what they like and what they don't like. As engineers we tend to create things that "we" would like, and if "we" are no longer a close match for what the overall market is looking like, then our instincts will lead us astray.
So the challenge is to extract the useful things from your experience and apply the core truths, rather than lament that you cannot reproduce that experience in others. Passing on the truths is important, how you get to, or teach, those truths depends on the current fashion.
Is the medical field controlled by medical students, or by 60 year old medical authorities?
Is chemical engineering controlled by new graduates, or by 60 year old engineering authorities?
It's completely ludicrous to imply that programming is somehow being led astray by young people. Young people have no power. They do what they are told.
The "black box" programming philosophy was not invented by Gen Y. It was invented in the 80s at least and taught by greybeard professors.
The hip new language trend was not invented by Gen Y but was pushed by VCs and other string pulling money-masters. Paul Graham pushed LISP and Python and generally advocated for the creation of new, hipper languages.
The ageism in the field is not something that is coming from young people either. It is coming from employers with the purse strings who recognize that young people are MORE EXPLOITABLE than old people and so they can get more work for their dollars.
The reason for ageism in tech is to keep industry veterans away from impressionable young workers--what if the veterans and the youngins form some kind of union or association that drives up costs?
Old people lead every field. Young people do what they're told. Old people lead programming too--this guy just isn't one of the influencers. He isn't a 50 year old VC, a 50 year old Comp Sci prof, a 50 year old CEO, a 50 year old BDFL.
It's completely ludicrous to imply that programming is somehow being led astray by young people. Young people have no power. They do what they are told.
Young people don't have to do what their told. We are raised to listen to our parents so, yes, we do what we're told for fear of being punished (grounded, yelled at, etc.). Though that doesn't mean you can't break out of that mold.
The "black box" programming philosophy was not invented by Gen Y. It was invented in the 80s at least and taught by greybeard professors.
This doesn't even make sense. You are being insensitive towards people. The entire point of learning how to program and understanding computer science is to open the black box and peer inside.
The ageism in the field is not something that is coming from young people either. It is coming from employers with the purse strings who recognize that young people are MORE EXPLOITABLE than old people and so they can get more work for their dollars.
Ageism exists in every field, but let's just focus on tech. Do you see many 50+ year old programmers? Ever wonder why? There is a bias for younger people because, yes, they can be molded (or exploited, as you put it), but it is up to that young person to identify any exploitation and resolve it. That's the only way it can change.
Old people lead every field. Young people do what they're told. Old people lead programming too--this guy just isn't one of the influencers. He isn't a 50 year old VC, a 50 year old Comp Sci prof, a 50 year old CEO, a 50 year old BDFL.
If you don't like the way you perceive the game being played, then you are completely free to change the rules of the game. It will mean you need to break out on your own, and take your lumps, but just throwing your hands up and complaining that the "old people" own everything isn't going to change anything. You are simply allowing the problem to persist and then complaining that it exists.
Those Sun Servers? They took 4 or 5 minutes to boot up and were dog slow.
T1 connections? Amazing for the time, laughable by today's standards, when the typical broadband connection is 20x faster.
Web development back then? Writing nasty CGI scripts - in Perl if you were lucky - or C if you weren't.
No thanks.
>We did it because there was an inexhaustible quantity of information to be learned about a subject that was dear to us. We used archie and gopher to transfer open source software around and share knowledge. We snuck into computer labs at neighboring universities to get our hands on computers that we otherwise would have no access to.
I've always found the stories of people snucking into computer labs (mostly MIT or near by universities, I believe) of the past inspiring. In a sense, luckily nowadays we don't have to do that anymore. On the other hand, it's unfortunate that you will surely be spending time in jails if you do something like that.
>And there was altruism within the Internet community.
There is this community called "Hacker News", which the head honcho believes that "Mean people fails". So I'd strongly disagree that there is no altruism within the Internet community.
Not that it's fine being "evil", but that's another discussion.
Not only that but I've definitely noticed that even among those who are passionate, they usually fall into one of two groups: the ones who like CS and the ones who like building things. That is, the first group is really interested in learning how computers work and theory and the latter group is really interested in building products.
I think the authors point might be that there are many more of the second group of people now, which makes sense since there us so much abstraction you really don't need to know too much about what's "actually" happening to make something.
I foresee a fantastic career in print magazine ahead of you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush
"Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush
"Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush
"Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush"
The guy equates working for a paycheck with entitlement... how out of touch can you be?
Working for a paycheck is something you do out of economic neccessity--for survival, NOT entitlement.
Getting paid to work on your hobbies in the tech industry in 1995 is basically winning the lottery. Most people would kill to have this chance. This guy is completely blind to his privilege.
But instead of recognizing how neoliberal economics have destroyed the middle class and churned out a new "Depression-Era" generation that are forced to "chase the money" in order to eat... he is going to whine about how kids these days suck and are entitled.
Fucking amazing. Gen Y has the worst economic prospects since the actual great depression, how the fuck can we be spoiled?
The guy equates working for a paycheck with entitlement... how out of touch can you be?
I didn't read any of what you said in the author's blog. He even mentions, at the end, about "waxing nostalgic". So his argument going to be a bit one-sided but then, it is his argument after all.
I agree with the overall sentiment of the author's rant. I miss some of the geeking out that was done in the tech industry, because it now seems to be filled with people looking to get rich quick with barely-working MVPs, or building services that have no revenue stream. The industry has turned very "business-y", IMO, but maybe it is just the natural cycle of every industry.
UPDATE: Adding a bit of substance to my comment.
Old people control the nature of every field. Old greybeards are the ones who made computer science this way--it's just those greybeards that this man disaproves of.
This man isn't a billionaire VC, a tenured Comp Sci professor, an author of programming books, or a CEO hiring and training the kinds of employees he wants.
This guy isn't in charge, so he blames young people and assumes they are in charge. Ridiculous. Young people are just followers. They follow the money, they do what they're told, they adopt fashions in order to SURVIVE, not out of some kind of "strange entitlement."
We live in a world where job postings are looking for RoR developers, job interviews test you on FizzBuzz, UML, and vague logic problems, and managers encourage developers to move fast and churn out releases. When exactly was anybody supposed to learn compilers, assembly, or low-level internet routing infrastructure? It was in a CS classroom years ago, and without any practical reason to refresh that knowledge ever since.
Furthermore, the "applications" produced by this "golden age" of the internet were complete shit by today's standards. If they were so wonderful, why do we like to laugh at their miserable UX, ugly design, and lack of functionality?
As if in 1995 they needed to think about javascript frameworks, CSS frameworks, responsive design, mobile anything, (quality) animations, asset servers, enormous databases, application and user analytics, clustered applications with message-passing, advanced caching strategies, an enormous variety of user input, or any of the other multitudinous things I forgot to mention.
In 1995 they thought of everything up to the point where a static HTML document gets sent to the user, and that's where they stopped thinking. In 2015 we have a lot more to think about after that initial transfer. In 2015 we have to, y'know, make applications.
The people who come here looking for riches and playing at entrepreneurship are not "working for a paycheck". They are people who crave social standing, who crave money. They don't want to be comfortably middle class; they want to be elite. There was a giant wave of them during Bubble 1.0, but come 2001 most of them went back to wherever they were before. In the last few years they are thick on the ground again. They are very different than the people who came to make a difference, who came to create for the joy of it.
I don't see the current crop of them as any worse than the 1990s invasion. But they're sure not any better.
I also think this guy definitely does recognize how lucky he was. He opens talking about "more than I ever could have dreamed" and ends with feeling like he was lucky enough to witness "the very birth of rock and roll".
Millenials are at the bottom of a pyramid in a stagnating economy that doesn't offer the same choice that was offered to their parents. We are a depression generation. Programming is one of the few lower middle class career paths still available. Most new jobs in this new economy (that are available to millenials) are working class as part of the service economy.
Jobs that do provide a middle class living are either dissapearing as the boomers retire from them, or require a lot of competition to win.
The amount of money you need to live a middle class life is much harder to achieve in 2015 than it was 40 years ago in 1975.
1. A rose-tinted view of the past (in case the author forgot, the technical challenges didn't prevent a whole lot of dross on the 90's internet).
2. A less than balanced view of today (is it really that hard to think of encouraging aspects of the modern web?)
3. A yearning for days gone by.
The way I see it, these types of articles are less about criticising the present, and more about glorifying the past, a past that the author had some extra connection to by having lived through it. We're meant to marvel at the hardships that were faced, and recognise that the knowledge they accumulated isn't obsolete, so they still have a thing or two to teach us. Every generation will go through this, the generation before this guy did, the generation after will too. The truth is, some knowledge is only truly pertinent to its era. I wouldn't expect to read a book on starting an ISP in the 90s and then think I knew how best to do it now, even if the book might be interesting to read.
