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.
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?)
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."
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.
>I'm very skeptical of the article - it sounds to me like classic "good old days" thinking¹
That's a cheap dismisal. There's nothing wrong with "good old days" thinking if old days were actually better.
>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
Hardly of the breadth and ambition of the 1998-2012 or so period.
>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?)
Yes, and also remember then players like Sun did cool stuff in the UNIX space. Or when FOSS wasn't basically billion dollar corporate owned wholesale, with mere corporate employees buying the majority of contributors and IBM, Oracle, Google and co running the show. Even RedHat was considered too corporate and now it's IBM...
I'd say "good old days" thinking is probably involved, but not the full explanation. Over the past few decades, software has gone from a fairly obscure profession to being seen as a great way (maybe the best way) to make a lot of money. In absolute numbers, there are probably at least as many engaged, curious engineers as before. There are almost certainly drastically more uninterested engineers who are there partially or fully because of the money, though.
When I was doing job interviews during my last year of college, I was able to chat with all my interviewers about the morning's Slashdot headlines. Everyone had checked the /. front page that morning and I was able to have a nice ice breaker about the day's stories.
That isn't the case anymore. That sort of monoculture where everyone is reading the same stories, discussing the same topics, and reading about shared values and principles, is long gone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm still here, curious as ever. And for the truly curious, it's just gotten better. The ocean we swim in has gotten bigger and deeper.
I lamented when my career first started (2000 or so) that there were devs I worked with who didn't even own computers at home. While my bookshelves were full of books I aspired to learn and my hard drive was full of half-baked projects, they clocked out and their thinking was done.
I still know a few of those now 25 years after the fact. Some of them have made a career out of software. But they never got curious. It was a means to an end. I don't begrudge them that. But as someone who is internally driven to learn and improve and produce, I can't relate.
My primary fustration today is how many of my software peers are satisfied with updating a Jira status and not seeking to build excellent software. I've seen it at all levels - engineers, managers, and executives. I'm actualized by shipping good, useful software. They seem to be actualized by appearing busy. They don't appear to deliver much value, but their calendars are full. It has me at my professional wits end.
Truth be told, the phenomenon of appearing productive without being productive is an epidemic across multiple industries. I've had conversations with people in manufacturing and agriculture and academia and they all echo something similar. Eventually, Stein's law indicates that the productivity charade will end. And I fear it will be ugly.
>My primary fustration today is how many of my software peers are satisfied with updating a Jira status and not seeking to build excellent software. Truth be told, the phenomenon of appearing productive without being productive is an epidemic across multiple industries.
This is hardly a new phenomenon. Dilbert and its ilk have been lampooning this since the 80s.
By the time I got my first job in 1996, I had been a hobbyist for 10 years and graduated from college. The last thing I was thinking about doing as a single 22 year old who had just moved to the big city and had free cash flow was sit down at a computer after work.
I have never in 30 years written a single line of code that I didn’t get paid for except a little work I did for charity.
> The ocean we swim in has gotten bigger and deeper.
IMO this is the part that the author is missing. Back in the 2000's, software development was a much smaller field and your main focus was the "curiosity pond" where all the developers went to tinker.
Now software dev has expanded into an ocean. That pond is still there but the author missed the pond for the ocean.
Somewhat related, the partial-illusion of "where did all the old developers go, they seem way too rare, something is happening to them." While attrition and ageism do exist, there's a bigger factor.
The total workforce has expanded dramatically over time, so even if everybody in the started-40-years-ago cohort remained alive and employed, those (now much older) people would still be a tiny minority among the bigger and bigger cohorts that kept joining since then.
this doesn't make sense to me. early on in my career I was permitted, even asked, to make operating systems, languages, and distributed protocols. in todays world I'm lucky if I'm allowed to write a dashboard.
where is this ocean? that I have all these big pre-cooked components I can use to make saas spaghetti?
Couldn't agree more. Like many, I've had my honeymoon phase with AI and have now learned what it is good for and what it is not. What it has truly been good for is satisfying the nauseating number of topics I want to learn about. I can spend $20 a month and drill down into any topic I like for as long as I like in an incredibly efficient way. What a time to be alive.
What "hackers" don't understand is that at certain scale, social cohesion is extremely important. A huge army of socially cohesive morons will achieve greater things than a small group of dedicated geniuses. This means that for any entity that grows beyond certain scale, socially cohesive morons are actually preferable over dedicated geniuses. The fact that your coworkers are unmotivated lazy stupid fucks is not a bug, it's a feature. They're not there to be smart, they're there to be socially cohesive.
I've been in that situation where I was coding by day and didn't have a computer at home. Or at least, I didn't have one that was the same platform as the one I was using at work. Growing up there was at one point a Commodore 64, some kind of Tandy, and a UNIX workstation, but at work I was developing on Windows NT, Solarix, and HP/UX.
In another case, I had recently moved to a new city and we were targeting an internal proprietary platform (again with Windows NT) and also targeting Solaris.
There was a time when you would go to work and you would be working with header files and libraries that were proprietary and for which your company was paying an exorbitant per-head license fee.
I agree overall, but to push back: 20 years ago, we HAD to be more curious. If you wanted a way to store your code and there wasn't anything that worked for you out there, you had to go and invent Git over a long weekend. Now, there's so many great tools (thanks to thousands or millions of curious devs) that 0-to-1 improvements aren't nearly as possible to discover.
There's still people taking on new frontiers... even if you don't love crypto (and I don't!), a lot of very curious developers found a home there. AI is tougher (due to the upstart costs of building a model), but still discovery is happening there.
I don't think curious developers are gone... there's just an increase of un-curious developers looking for a paycheck. You just have to look harder now (although I think it only seems like we had a cohort of curious devs because we're looking at it in hindsight, where the outcomes are obvious).
What’s the point of having a 0-1 mindset in a corporate environment? A majority of the time it’s wasted. It gets shelved and never used again. Maybe some upstart in the company picks up the effort again 5-6 years.
We (ie, people that do not have a safety net) do not have this luxury you people did in the 1990s of experimentation and curiosity. Boomers and leaders using shitty Reaganomic economic policies have decimated our safety nets by so much that it makes experimentation a luxury for the rich and powerful.
Cost of living is higher than ever. Inflation is higher than ever. We are handcuffed to this shitty system in America called “private health insurance.” Get sick? No job? You are fucked m8.
The risks of "curiousity" are much much higher than it was during your time buddy
I don't think that the curious developer is gone, very much like I don't think that the organic, non-corporate Web is not gone. But the curious and passionate developer is hard to notice in the crowd of developers who learned the craft just for the money it was bringing. Similarly, an indie Web site built as a passion project is hard to come by among the numerous Web sites built to extract money.
There was time when being a software developer was not a particularly prestigious or well-paying job in corporations, or maybe a weird hobby of developing games for the toy 8-bit entertainment computers of the day. It was mostly attracting people who enjoyed interacting with computers, were highly curious, etc.
Then there was a glorious time when the profession of software engineering was growing in importance by the day, hackers became heroes, some made fortunes (see e.g. Carmack or, well, Zuckerberg). But this very wave was the harbinger of the demise: the field became a magnet for people who primarily wanted money. These people definitely can be competent engineers! But the structure of their motivation is different, so the culture was shifting, too. Now programming is a well-paid skilled trade, like being a carpenter or a nurse.
If you want hacker ethos again, look for an obscure field which is considered weird, is not particularly well-paid, but attracts you.
If you don't own the company you work at, you shouldn't be curious, at least not for their benefit if they don't compensate you accordingly.
In the past I did many mistakes like pulling all nighters to because I found a way to make checkout experience more pleasant. That resulted in massive increase of revenue and none of that benefitted me. Or unblocked other team, they couldn't find a reason why their app would randomly crash. Board was panicking as client was going to pull out. I saved the day. Multi-million contract gone through. "Thank yous" didn't help me pay off debts.
Only be curious for your own stuff. For corporations? Do bare minimum.
You should be curious if you wan to progress within the company, or when changing jobs. Knowing significantly more than a job requires was propelling me quite effectively when I was younger. This slowed down when I started to spend less time on lateral research (aka "curiosity").
I weep for a world that is increasingly dominated by corporations, filled with people who are insistent (probably correctly) that they are being taken advantage of, doing the bare minimum, all resulting in an awful experience for everyone. Behind every support ticket that you just can't seem to get resolved, every horrible experience trying to use some product seemingly designed to drive you insane, behind every hare-brained decision that makes your life miserable for seemingly no reason, there's an apathetic worker who's taken your mindset. The impact of your efforts doesn't just affect your employer. We all work together to create the world. What kind of world do you want to live in?
I would hope there to be a healthy medium between "pulling all nighters" and "Do bare minimum" -- perhaps somewhere where we all try to do our best, but don't push ourselves too hard for no reason? I mean, that's more reasonable than imagining we'll one day overthrow our corporate overlords. Probably, I'm naive and idealistic. But I can't help but feel like the result of apathy is not satisfaction.
Yes, the author reveals implicitly that he is a web developer. As far as I am concerned, not having a new JS framework innovation neither impacts innovation nor creativity.
I agree with the author but I think a key driver of this is overall loss of psychological safety in the world.
People play and tinker when they feel that they are in a secure enough environment to fritter away time without feeling like they've incurred risk by doing so.
Given the state of the climate, economy and politics today, I think a whole lot of people feel a whole lot less secure. When I look back at recent US history when there seemed to be the most innovation going on, it was the 90s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before 9/11. That was probably the "OK-est" a lot of folks in the US felt in their lives.
You might rightly point out that people are wasting lots of time these days, staring at screens, binging TV shows, re-reading giant sci-fi and fantasy series. That's true. But there's a big difference between wasting time escaping the world versus "wasting" time creatively engaging with it.
Deflating that theory is the tsunami of innovation in computing in the '60s-'80s in spite of the even worse state of the economy and politics in that era. (Indirectly the climate too if you count the widespread air and water pollution back then.)
The 90s was just the crest of the momentum of the tech enthusiasm built up during the 70s and 80s. You know, the Vietnam War, petroleum crisis 70s and the culmination of Cold War, Reagan and Thatcher, oh God we're all going to die 80s.
Interestingly, I feel the opposite for myself, as an experienced senior engineer.
I am doing more side projects, and finishing more projects, and feel a much greater level of confidence in starting new projects since I feel more confident that I will get at least an MVP working. These are not commercial efforts, I am just tinkering and scratching my own itches.
I attribute 3 reasons to this change:
- Vibe coding helps me do parts of the tech stack that I used to procrastinate on (UI, css)
- Gemini helps me solve all the inscrutable devops issues that used to block me in the past.
- A great open source tech stack that just works (Postgres, docker, node, ollama....)
AI helping me with the above has allowed me to focus on the "fun" parts of the side projects that I do. And the UIs also end up being much prettier than what I could create myself, which gives me the confidence to share my creations with friends and family.
I very much agree with this. I'm sure that dev culture as a whole has gotten less curious as it has gotten more mainstream. However, I think that the absolute number of curious devs has grown. There are ways to convert that advantage to replace what is lost, but it does take effort. Although, I suspect that it took effort to be in tech 20 years ago---people just forget that (or had more effort to spare when they were younger).
Friend of mine just got laid off from 15 years at google, he's in his mid/late 40s. He's started to learn about embedded systems, hardware controllers, he's playing with haskell and erlang and doing work he's never done before, actually very far from webscale DB architecture, he's the most happy i've seen him in his life, he's following his curiosity and he's like a pig in mud.
After 15 years at Google he’s most likely at a point where he doesn’t have to work for a living anymore, and still afford a comfortable life for his family. I imagine that’s a big part of his happiness.
In the last 50 years, software has morphed from a hobbyist pursuit, to a nerdy subculture, to a trillion+ dollars industry. This has caused a pretty significant mix shift in the software developer community: the reason driving the mean developer into this field in 2025 is very different from that of the 2015 developer, and that of the 2005 developer.
Arguably there might be more curious tinkerers nowadays, but they might represent a smaller slice of the pie.
And before software became a hobbyist pursuit (with the advent of the PC and the home computer) it was entirely the world of large enterprises and governments. Think large main frames and minicomputers: IBM or Burroughs or DEC. It was also a different age.
Maybe only possible once you could finally own a whole "system" single-handedly and do whatever you wanted, for the first time ever.
Perhaps the fundamental concepts of "owning" your own and doing whatever you want with it have been allowed to dwindle so badly it seems like no comparison.
Readit News
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.
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
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."
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.
That's a cheap dismisal. There's nothing wrong with "good old days" thinking if old days were actually better.
>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
Hardly of the breadth and ambition of the 1998-2012 or so period.
>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?)
Yes, and also remember then players like Sun did cool stuff in the UNIX space. Or when FOSS wasn't basically billion dollar corporate owned wholesale, with mere corporate employees buying the majority of contributors and IBM, Oracle, Google and co running the show. Even RedHat was considered too corporate and now it's IBM...
edit: I hadn't scrolled down to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303388 when I wrote this
That isn't the case anymore. That sort of monoculture where everyone is reading the same stories, discussing the same topics, and reading about shared values and principles, is long gone.
Hits so much harder as a middle aged adult than when I saw it on tv ~2 decades ago.
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.
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.
Old man yells at cloud services
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.
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.
I lamented when my career first started (2000 or so) that there were devs I worked with who didn't even own computers at home. While my bookshelves were full of books I aspired to learn and my hard drive was full of half-baked projects, they clocked out and their thinking was done.
I still know a few of those now 25 years after the fact. Some of them have made a career out of software. But they never got curious. It was a means to an end. I don't begrudge them that. But as someone who is internally driven to learn and improve and produce, I can't relate.
My primary fustration today is how many of my software peers are satisfied with updating a Jira status and not seeking to build excellent software. I've seen it at all levels - engineers, managers, and executives. I'm actualized by shipping good, useful software. They seem to be actualized by appearing busy. They don't appear to deliver much value, but their calendars are full. It has me at my professional wits end.
Truth be told, the phenomenon of appearing productive without being productive is an epidemic across multiple industries. I've had conversations with people in manufacturing and agriculture and academia and they all echo something similar. Eventually, Stein's law indicates that the productivity charade will end. And I fear it will be ugly.
This is hardly a new phenomenon. Dilbert and its ilk have been lampooning this since the 80s.
I have never in 30 years written a single line of code that I didn’t get paid for except a little work I did for charity.
And plenty who are not, it takes all kinds.
It's a matter of taste and still all tastes may not be satisfied anyway :)
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IMO this is the part that the author is missing. Back in the 2000's, software development was a much smaller field and your main focus was the "curiosity pond" where all the developers went to tinker.
Now software dev has expanded into an ocean. That pond is still there but the author missed the pond for the ocean.
The total workforce has expanded dramatically over time, so even if everybody in the started-40-years-ago cohort remained alive and employed, those (now much older) people would still be a tiny minority among the bigger and bigger cohorts that kept joining since then.
where is this ocean? that I have all these big pre-cooked components I can use to make saas spaghetti?
Couldn't agree more. Like many, I've had my honeymoon phase with AI and have now learned what it is good for and what it is not. What it has truly been good for is satisfying the nauseating number of topics I want to learn about. I can spend $20 a month and drill down into any topic I like for as long as I like in an incredibly efficient way. What a time to be alive.
In another case, I had recently moved to a new city and we were targeting an internal proprietary platform (again with Windows NT) and also targeting Solaris.
There was a time when you would go to work and you would be working with header files and libraries that were proprietary and for which your company was paying an exorbitant per-head license fee.
There's still people taking on new frontiers... even if you don't love crypto (and I don't!), a lot of very curious developers found a home there. AI is tougher (due to the upstart costs of building a model), but still discovery is happening there.
I don't think curious developers are gone... there's just an increase of un-curious developers looking for a paycheck. You just have to look harder now (although I think it only seems like we had a cohort of curious devs because we're looking at it in hindsight, where the outcomes are obvious).
TFS was introduced in 2005 for Microsoft shops for instance.
We (ie, people that do not have a safety net) do not have this luxury you people did in the 1990s of experimentation and curiosity. Boomers and leaders using shitty Reaganomic economic policies have decimated our safety nets by so much that it makes experimentation a luxury for the rich and powerful.
Cost of living is higher than ever. Inflation is higher than ever. We are handcuffed to this shitty system in America called “private health insurance.” Get sick? No job? You are fucked m8.
The risks of "curiousity" are much much higher than it was during your time buddy
Deleted Comment
There was time when being a software developer was not a particularly prestigious or well-paying job in corporations, or maybe a weird hobby of developing games for the toy 8-bit entertainment computers of the day. It was mostly attracting people who enjoyed interacting with computers, were highly curious, etc.
Then there was a glorious time when the profession of software engineering was growing in importance by the day, hackers became heroes, some made fortunes (see e.g. Carmack or, well, Zuckerberg). But this very wave was the harbinger of the demise: the field became a magnet for people who primarily wanted money. These people definitely can be competent engineers! But the structure of their motivation is different, so the culture was shifting, too. Now programming is a well-paid skilled trade, like being a carpenter or a nurse.
If you want hacker ethos again, look for an obscure field which is considered weird, is not particularly well-paid, but attracts you.
In the past I did many mistakes like pulling all nighters to because I found a way to make checkout experience more pleasant. That resulted in massive increase of revenue and none of that benefitted me. Or unblocked other team, they couldn't find a reason why their app would randomly crash. Board was panicking as client was going to pull out. I saved the day. Multi-million contract gone through. "Thank yous" didn't help me pay off debts.
Only be curious for your own stuff. For corporations? Do bare minimum.
I would hope there to be a healthy medium between "pulling all nighters" and "Do bare minimum" -- perhaps somewhere where we all try to do our best, but don't push ourselves too hard for no reason? I mean, that's more reasonable than imagining we'll one day overthrow our corporate overlords. Probably, I'm naive and idealistic. But I can't help but feel like the result of apathy is not satisfaction.
Luckily though, none of those places would ever even look at my resume.
People play and tinker when they feel that they are in a secure enough environment to fritter away time without feeling like they've incurred risk by doing so.
Given the state of the climate, economy and politics today, I think a whole lot of people feel a whole lot less secure. When I look back at recent US history when there seemed to be the most innovation going on, it was the 90s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before 9/11. That was probably the "OK-est" a lot of folks in the US felt in their lives.
You might rightly point out that people are wasting lots of time these days, staring at screens, binging TV shows, re-reading giant sci-fi and fantasy series. That's true. But there's a big difference between wasting time escaping the world versus "wasting" time creatively engaging with it.
Deleted Comment
I am doing more side projects, and finishing more projects, and feel a much greater level of confidence in starting new projects since I feel more confident that I will get at least an MVP working. These are not commercial efforts, I am just tinkering and scratching my own itches.
I attribute 3 reasons to this change:
- Vibe coding helps me do parts of the tech stack that I used to procrastinate on (UI, css)
- Gemini helps me solve all the inscrutable devops issues that used to block me in the past.
- A great open source tech stack that just works (Postgres, docker, node, ollama....)
AI helping me with the above has allowed me to focus on the "fun" parts of the side projects that I do. And the UIs also end up being much prettier than what I could create myself, which gives me the confidence to share my creations with friends and family.
-- a 28 year old
Arguably there might be more curious tinkerers nowadays, but they might represent a smaller slice of the pie.
Maybe only possible once you could finally own a whole "system" single-handedly and do whatever you wanted, for the first time ever.
Perhaps the fundamental concepts of "owning" your own and doing whatever you want with it have been allowed to dwindle so badly it seems like no comparison.