I'm an old-timer, and I can totally see where Jacques was trying to go with this essay, but in the end it pretty much missed the mark.
Personally, I think it's wonderful that the future I (we?) foresaw 25-30 years ago has come alive, albeit with many odd and sometimes disconcerting twists and nooks.
Remember the effort us lifers put into making tools that allowed "the masses" access to programming, like BASIC, Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal and all of that? How can we now, with any credibility, bemoan the very future so many of us tried to build?
It’s a craft and an art, as much as people have been trying to make it into an industry, without creativity you can’t make good software.
I'm a semi-professional musician, and I've been telling non-technical friends for a lifetime that programming hits of the same creative notes that playing guitar and writing music does, although they can never really feel what I'm saying.
> Remember the effort us lifers put into making tools that allowed "the masses" access to programming, like BASIC, Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal and all of that? How can we now, with any credibility, bemoan the very future so many of us tried to build?
I think the problem I see is that the future we tried to build hasn't come to fruition. The future I was trying to build around the turn of the millennium was one in which people had information to make educated decisions and to achieve their goals. The actuality that has come about is that more than ever people are falling for hype and being sidetracked from their goals.
It used to be that if you wanted to become a more educated voter, going online would result in you landing on a few political-science related resources and you'd end up reading some pretty hardcore theory: Bob Black, Michel Foucault, Karl Marx. Maybe it was a bit extremist but you would actually have a theoretical understanding of the issues. Now it's more likely you'll come across carefully-crafted "grassroots" political blogs that hype one side or the other without actually encouraging you to make an educated decision.
It used to be that if you wanted to bike across the country, Sheldon Brown's webpage[1] would help you figure out how to do it. Now it's more likely that you'll get distracted by Reddit and Facebook while your bike rusts.
I, for one, didn't work for this future. I don't give a fuck about cat pictures and I'm actively against the advertising, astroturfing, and distraction that social media results in. I think that while the internet allows us to potentially make our lives better, the majority of people aren't using it that way, and the future we have built makes most people's lives worse.
This reminds me of how people feel when they remember high school. Like many technical people, I was picked on and had a lot of social problems. When I think about those things, I feel like my life was horrible in high school.
But I also had really close friends who had similar experiences and when I remember spending time with them, I think life was awesome in high school! I had a band, and we threw parties for our nerd friends, and we played technical pranks on each other. It was great!
These days, we have video available instantly on demand without advertisements. But we also have crappy websites that try to throw up an interstitial ad before you can even read the content. I find the tools make it really easy for me to ignore ads and get at content that is as in-depth as I want in just about any direction (for better or worse).
I'm a very cynical person overall, but I love where we are. I have a supercomputer in my pocket that can get just about any piece of data I want instantly. (I was video chatting with a friend while walking my dog the other day! And it was no big deal!) I can also play scrabble with someone I've never met in a country I'll never visit 10,000 miles away. If other people want to keep track of which celebrity slept with whom, so be it. But I'm enjoying life like never before, and it seems like most of what I can do is accessible to most people (at least here in the US).
At the risk of being cynical, perhaps the problem lies more with the people themselves. Perhaps most people aren't that driven; perhaps they aren't that skeptical; perhaps they don't really care about doing deep dives on topics.
People have been provided with access to one of the greatest multipurpose tools of all time. How they choose to use that tool is up to them. The fact that most people choose to use it to look up cat videos and share pics on instagram is revealing.
> Remember the effort us lifers put into making tools that allowed "the masses" access to programming, like BASIC, Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal and all of that? How can we now, with any credibility, bemoan the very future so many of us tried to build?
I don't think the current situation is the result of that. From where I stand, the history seems pretty clear:
1) Nerdy people like me get into a field because something about it tickles their fancy.
2) They happen to invent stuff that solves important problems or improves life in some way.
3) Eventually, non-nerdy or semi-nerdy people notice this, get into the mix and get rich as a result.
4) People at large start noticing this. The field becomes more and more lucrative and popular, until it turns into an industry.
5) The industry now attracts not only talented, passionate people, but all sorts of other people too: people who want to get rich quick, people who want to get famous, people who are in it because it was a popular choice when they had to pick a career, etc.
You'll notice that the inflection point in this story was #3, when some people got rich. The "culprit", therefore, is not making tools that allowed "the masses" access to programming; it's capitalism.
> You'll notice that the inflection point in this story was #3, when some people got rich. The "culprit", therefore, is not making tools that allowed "the masses" access to programming; it's capitalism.
>Remember the effort us lifers put into making tools that allowed "the masses" access to programming, like BASIC, Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal and all of that? How can we now, with any credibility, bemoan the very future so many of us tried to build?
First of all, you should keep in mind that while the hacker culture may have been tightly knit, we have never been a hivemind. (One only needs to look at the various holy wars as proof of that.) While I'm sure there were plenty of people working to make programming easier to learn for newbies (BASIC is a good, perhaps misguided example of this), not all fit into this category. Case in point, Turbo Pascal. Perhaps you know something I don't, but that was created as a commercial venture. It was sold to companies to make a profit. Its relative ease of use was just something marketing said to managers to get them to buy licenses. Yes, both were created to be easier to learn, but I feel the reasons matter here. One was created to spread the joy of learning, to get more people hooked on programming. The other was created to lower the barrier of entry to programming so that companies could hopefully hire dumber, less motivated people to do the same work.
Personally, the article resonated with me. It reminded me of the first time I turned God Mode on in DoomII, only to discover it completely ruined the fun of the game. Yes, everything is easier these days, and I can prototype an application far easier than I could 20 years ago. But it's not as fun. I used to think it was just me, that I was running out of motivation or ideas, but now I'm wondering if it's actually something else.
> But it's not as fun. I used to think it was just me, that I was running out of motivation or ideas, but now I'm wondering if it's actually something else.
I don't know your background, so I'd like to ask you; aside from programming, what motivates you?
Corporate programming is easy to become disenchanted with as it's very repetitive and the end result is often safe but underwhelming. There are tons of programmers who could build CRUD apps or eCommerce websites in their sleep, but do they find the work stimulating?
I can't tell you what you'd find more stimulating than cookie cutter corporate work, but it's clear there's a great deal of barely explored ways for computer programming to make a positive difference in our world. The way I like to think about it sometimes is I want to work for the world, any other employer is just a means to that end. Having that goal in mind helps me decide what's worth doing in the here and now. Perhaps it could help you find what you want too?
This piece is rather tepid in my opinion. The author bemoans a future that never came because of
>>an enormous influx of people into tech that are in it just for the money and that couldn’t give a damn about how they achieve their goals.
He continues talking about how things were harder in the old days, and how easy it is today, but paradoxically, too easy?
>>The barrier to entry was so high that those that made it across really knew their stuff.
>>Of course that’s not what you want, you want all this to be as accessible as possible but real creativity starts when resources are limited.
It all seems like a variation on a theme Alan Kay addressed some time ago[1]:
>>Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.
> He continues talking about how things were harder in the old days, and how easy it is today, but paradoxically, too easy?
It's easy to make crap and to dress it up as something good, people will pay for it and will in the end be underwhelmed by what 'computers can do', whereas it's just as hard today as it was in the 80's to make something really good. Unfortunately the crap will usually win out due to marketing.
WordPerfect came with a beautifully printed manual in a cloth covered custom ring binder and unlimited telephone support. It was a world of professionals because release cycles were a year and customers were part of the business community...as was WordPerfect.
Now everybody is a just consumer. The phrase "consumer community" may just have been invented in this sentence. [1]
There are two sources of crap. One is businesses that deliberately make stuff that sucks in the hopes that marks will buy it and keep their mouths shut out of embarrassment over being taken as a rube. There's more of that in software and everywhere else today.
The other source of crap is amateurs. There's more of that in software because access has improved. The software is analogous to homeowner construction projects. The roof is likely to leak, the walls be without insulation, and the room shaped like a scalene triangle. HomeDepot's prices help make it happen.
People are expressing their ideas more often. Most ideas are bad. The execution of laypeople is often poor.
Especially funny when people quit "soul-crushing" corporate enterprise to work unpaid overtime producing unmaintainable code (because it's about quit exit) for junk equity.
I mean even their technology choices fit it - always dynamic, the "scriptier" the better, just ship it!
I can agree with this sentiment. There's a big narratives on HN about corporate drones using C# and Java to implement specifications from on high versus the elite hackers using cool languages such as Clojure, Ruby, Python etc. The truth, of course, is that narrative is not 100% accurate. I think it really boils down to the individual's interest in technology and willingness to engage in the workplace. Those who develop software as a profession, regardless of the workplace, will seek to engaged and active in the technology being used, even if it just means debating with coworkers. Those who are in technology for a job, on the other hand, will simply do what is asked of them without thought. Despite claims to the obvious, both paths are valid.
Some of the best experiences I've had developing have been with the uncool languages where we've had the ability to design the system end-to-end, get feedback from stakeholders, and adjust as necessary. Crunch was rare because we knew the system in and out, and could easily manage our technical debt as we went. These days, everyone [here] thinks programming is little more than throwing as many ready-made pieces at a problem and duct-taping them together to call it a solution, because productivity and don't reinvent the wheel and community.
The result is mediocre products with bog-standard interfaces (productivity), suboptimal architectures (so devs are easily replaced), and speed prized over quality. We cling to design fads, rather than creating original designs.
In short, it reflects a culture-wide lack of ambition. It's easy to create a cat picture sharing app. It's not easy to think beyond that because we're mentally beholden to the idea that there isn't enough money, and we need to get ours now, and then we can go after our big ideas.
Tech was supposed to be transformative. Now it asks us to be impressed with business models that prey on addictive behaviors, advertising, and annoying users because we lack the imagination and will to do anything better.
To be blunt, I don't think this perspective is accurate or well thought out, and it comes in the form of an emotional attack which is not likely to be well received as an argument.
Inevitably when a sector grows, you're bound to have a diversity of approaches and types of people involved, and in most cases that diversity is a profoundly good thing. It means that not only are there people who are in the work for the zen-like essence ('love of technology' as you put it), but also those who can apply that work to other fields and areas of knowledge.
And capitalism (which appears to be the true target of attack here) has its flaws and abstracts away the love in favor of a general approach to value—but it also allows resources to be condensed and put toward big problems that would not otherwise be possible. Sometimes it ends up just extracting wealth from a triviality, but often it is a complex mix of value for a complex mix of people, and sometimes something truly profound and major comes of it.
I suggest that there's something else going on here; some personal frustration or observation that is likely true in the right context, but I think it needs development and focus to be a more universal critique.
A diversity of approaches, tempered by capitalism, can be beneficial.
But that's not the same thing as entryism, which unfortunately we have in tech. Entryism is when diverse approaches don't attempt to win in the field of capitalism - instead, they attempt to parasitically take over the capitalistic winners.
Capitalistic diversity would consist of MBAs, SJWs, and all the other entrants building their own companies. Then customers could pick the winner. In contrast, entryism consists of some company (e.g. Google) "winning", and then the MBAs, SJWs, etc joining google and changing it from the inside.
In fact, entryism is very difficult to combat capitalistically. The problem is simply that creative destruction can't necessarily kill the entrants. For example, suppose the MBAs destroy MS. Then what happens - do they vanish forever, never to kill again, with MBA-ism as a disgraced ideology? Or do they simply shift jobs to Google and Apple and try to do it again?
If you feel attacked by this post, then you are not in the target audience that Jacques is trying to talk to. It may make sense for you to be in technology, but you're not in technology for the reasons that he was.
If so, then that's fine. He's not trying to change your mind, and his career advice isn't appropriate for you you. Move along. Find something addressed to you.
I'm not in his target audience either. I enjoy interacting with people and ideas more than getting a computer to do what I want. This is why in my teens I spent more time reading math books than playing with computers.
But I know and respect a lot of people who are like him. I get where he is coming from. And I've seen enough of them burn out of their dream profession that I think he has a point.
> I'm not in his target audience either. I enjoy interacting with people and ideas more than getting a computer to do what I want. This is why in my teens I spent more time reading math books than playing with computers.
Interesting perspective, and similar to mine. I gravitated towards this industry because of the problems to solve, not the means of solving them. I have been taking things apart to figure out how they work since I was 6 or so. I didn't even have a computer until I was 17, but I was already dead set on becoming some sort of engineer because I loved those sorts of challenges. In fact, I ended up going electrical because in undergrad I decided I hated programming but loved physical electronics and electrical wiring. I came back to programming after I had been working for a few years and discovered that real-world programming was not like the classes I hated.
I don't know where that puts me in Jacques' eyes. I like using knowledge and technology to solve problems, but I don't care what particular technology it is. Sometimes I feel like an outsider in this industry, because I interact with so many people who love programming in itself and tend to look down on those who do not. I don't feel attacked by this post but I do feel he is drawing up a false dichotomy between those who "[l]earned to program as a kid" and "totally fell in love with it", and those who are in this industry for the money, have little or no technical knowledge, and no desire to gain any more than the bare minimum of technical knowledge required to achieve their financial goals.
Especially in recent years I've encountered a growing number of entrepreneurs who proudly called their companies tech start-ups, but who had no affection for technology whatsoever.
But worse, they actively seemed to dislike the kind of people that do love tech, i.e. nerds, hackers, engineers and such. These were young kids, the stereotypical "cool" start-up founders, but the way they talked about engineers and engineering made you think you were talking to 50 year old pointy haired bosses with not an ounce of respect for technology.
And they keep saying completely the opposite, they keep saying "we love tech", and they actually seem to mean it. Except everything else they do or say indicates the opposite. They just like to use tech, but are completely uninterested in the process of developing tech.
These people aren't just greedy cunts who are in it for the money. These are people who have grown up in a world where consuming technology has become so normal and easy that they simply don't get that creating technology is a totally different process.
And I'm not yet sure whether these people should be avoided or educated.
Half of the companies that are routinely called tech startups these days don't have much to do with technology and engineering.
They want to be called tech startups, because tech is cool, and they have an app, because apps are cool, but their core business has nothing to do with tech.
What was called tech in 1995 used 1990s technology, pretty exciting at that time.
Whats called tech in 2015 generally means uses the same 1990s technology with some numerical metric improvements but nothing fundamentally unrecognizable by someone in the 90s, coupled with 2015 business model, 2015 financialization, 2015 art and styling, and 2015 marketing.
Unfortunately both types of companies are called tech. I think the author is basically bored with the 90s and wants 2010s technology jobs.
Wheres the companies doing 2015 tech in a 2015 company? Not, in general, in "tech".
I think my father in 1975 would have been pretty mystified by my 1995 desktop and programming. So you guys aren't running batched punchcards anymore, OK then. Object oriented derivative of C instead of cobol, interesting. WIMP GUI, very interesting despite unproductive. On the other hand imagine how bored someone from 1995 would be when introduced to 2015 desktop, after the initial irrelevant numerical surprises, which wouldn't even be a surprise despite every generation thinking they're the first to ever discover / appreciate Moore's law. Dominant corporate language is still a OO C derivative, although different, whatever. Tired old WIMP GUI still got the start button in the lower left corner, eh?
There's a tremendous amount of love in the world of technology. I'm writing in Firefox on Linux on HN. I spent all morning writing a post organized in Trello using Emacs. Each is excellent because of people who are motivated to create something that make the world suck less. And not just some little corner of it, but as much of it as kind find its way to the door.
That's not to say the world of technology hasn't found new ways to suck. Yesterday I got an email from Sasan Goodarzi
General Manager, Intuit TurboTax. He was offering a coupon in exchange for adding suck to TurboTax. Intuit took the Schedule C out of the Deluxe skew.
I replied (probably into the void). I've been using the TurboTax for more than two decades. The reasons are a trust of Intuit and the faith that using it this year would make life easier next year because I could import one return into the other. The product was deliberately made worse. The reasons for using it are gone. Intuit doesn't care. I'm not sufficiently profitable. Beyond this I'm not even going to rant about them making the world suck.
In the 1980's everyone used Basic because a C compiler was $600. Rexx for the Amiga was $100. And Lisp? Buy a Lisp Machine.
Today, the mountain of love that is Ruby is free. The heap that is Rails, that's free. The pile that is Racket, free as well. Audacity, Gimp, Mono, etc. - love is winning. Lots of businesses suck and now there are lots of software businesses.
Yet even Darth MicroSoft is serious about producing open source projects. What more evidence could there be?
FWIW, I've been programming for about as long as the OP, and I still enjoy the creativity very much [0]. I also think that those of us who enjoy SW development are incredibly lucky in that we can get paid quite well doing what we love [1].
Unsurprisingly, I disagree with a lot of the tenor of the comments so far on this article on HN. It might be memories of various international issues in the 80s and 90s, or just my personal bit of growing up, but I think the tenor of this post is spot on.
Of course, this is my judgement as a contralto in French, so shrug
Readit News
Personally, I think it's wonderful that the future I (we?) foresaw 25-30 years ago has come alive, albeit with many odd and sometimes disconcerting twists and nooks.
Remember the effort us lifers put into making tools that allowed "the masses" access to programming, like BASIC, Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal and all of that? How can we now, with any credibility, bemoan the very future so many of us tried to build?
It’s a craft and an art, as much as people have been trying to make it into an industry, without creativity you can’t make good software.
I'm a semi-professional musician, and I've been telling non-technical friends for a lifetime that programming hits of the same creative notes that playing guitar and writing music does, although they can never really feel what I'm saying.
I think the problem I see is that the future we tried to build hasn't come to fruition. The future I was trying to build around the turn of the millennium was one in which people had information to make educated decisions and to achieve their goals. The actuality that has come about is that more than ever people are falling for hype and being sidetracked from their goals.
It used to be that if you wanted to become a more educated voter, going online would result in you landing on a few political-science related resources and you'd end up reading some pretty hardcore theory: Bob Black, Michel Foucault, Karl Marx. Maybe it was a bit extremist but you would actually have a theoretical understanding of the issues. Now it's more likely you'll come across carefully-crafted "grassroots" political blogs that hype one side or the other without actually encouraging you to make an educated decision.
It used to be that if you wanted to bike across the country, Sheldon Brown's webpage[1] would help you figure out how to do it. Now it's more likely that you'll get distracted by Reddit and Facebook while your bike rusts.
I, for one, didn't work for this future. I don't give a fuck about cat pictures and I'm actively against the advertising, astroturfing, and distraction that social media results in. I think that while the internet allows us to potentially make our lives better, the majority of people aren't using it that way, and the future we have built makes most people's lives worse.
[1] http://sheldonbrown.com/tires.html
But I also had really close friends who had similar experiences and when I remember spending time with them, I think life was awesome in high school! I had a band, and we threw parties for our nerd friends, and we played technical pranks on each other. It was great!
These days, we have video available instantly on demand without advertisements. But we also have crappy websites that try to throw up an interstitial ad before you can even read the content. I find the tools make it really easy for me to ignore ads and get at content that is as in-depth as I want in just about any direction (for better or worse).
I'm a very cynical person overall, but I love where we are. I have a supercomputer in my pocket that can get just about any piece of data I want instantly. (I was video chatting with a friend while walking my dog the other day! And it was no big deal!) I can also play scrabble with someone I've never met in a country I'll never visit 10,000 miles away. If other people want to keep track of which celebrity slept with whom, so be it. But I'm enjoying life like never before, and it seems like most of what I can do is accessible to most people (at least here in the US).
People have been provided with access to one of the greatest multipurpose tools of all time. How they choose to use that tool is up to them. The fact that most people choose to use it to look up cat videos and share pics on instagram is revealing.
I don't think the current situation is the result of that. From where I stand, the history seems pretty clear:
1) Nerdy people like me get into a field because something about it tickles their fancy.
2) They happen to invent stuff that solves important problems or improves life in some way.
3) Eventually, non-nerdy or semi-nerdy people notice this, get into the mix and get rich as a result.
4) People at large start noticing this. The field becomes more and more lucrative and popular, until it turns into an industry.
5) The industry now attracts not only talented, passionate people, but all sorts of other people too: people who want to get rich quick, people who want to get famous, people who are in it because it was a popular choice when they had to pick a career, etc.
You'll notice that the inflection point in this story was #3, when some people got rich. The "culprit", therefore, is not making tools that allowed "the masses" access to programming; it's capitalism.
It's both.
First of all, you should keep in mind that while the hacker culture may have been tightly knit, we have never been a hivemind. (One only needs to look at the various holy wars as proof of that.) While I'm sure there were plenty of people working to make programming easier to learn for newbies (BASIC is a good, perhaps misguided example of this), not all fit into this category. Case in point, Turbo Pascal. Perhaps you know something I don't, but that was created as a commercial venture. It was sold to companies to make a profit. Its relative ease of use was just something marketing said to managers to get them to buy licenses. Yes, both were created to be easier to learn, but I feel the reasons matter here. One was created to spread the joy of learning, to get more people hooked on programming. The other was created to lower the barrier of entry to programming so that companies could hopefully hire dumber, less motivated people to do the same work.
Personally, the article resonated with me. It reminded me of the first time I turned God Mode on in DoomII, only to discover it completely ruined the fun of the game. Yes, everything is easier these days, and I can prototype an application far easier than I could 20 years ago. But it's not as fun. I used to think it was just me, that I was running out of motivation or ideas, but now I'm wondering if it's actually something else.
I don't know your background, so I'd like to ask you; aside from programming, what motivates you?
Corporate programming is easy to become disenchanted with as it's very repetitive and the end result is often safe but underwhelming. There are tons of programmers who could build CRUD apps or eCommerce websites in their sleep, but do they find the work stimulating?
I can't tell you what you'd find more stimulating than cookie cutter corporate work, but it's clear there's a great deal of barely explored ways for computer programming to make a positive difference in our world. The way I like to think about it sometimes is I want to work for the world, any other employer is just a means to that end. Having that goal in mind helps me decide what's worth doing in the here and now. Perhaps it could help you find what you want too?
>>an enormous influx of people into tech that are in it just for the money and that couldn’t give a damn about how they achieve their goals.
He continues talking about how things were harder in the old days, and how easy it is today, but paradoxically, too easy?
>>The barrier to entry was so high that those that made it across really knew their stuff.
>>Of course that’s not what you want, you want all this to be as accessible as possible but real creativity starts when resources are limited.
It all seems like a variation on a theme Alan Kay addressed some time ago[1]:
>>Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.
[1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
It's easy to make crap and to dress it up as something good, people will pay for it and will in the end be underwhelmed by what 'computers can do', whereas it's just as hard today as it was in the 80's to make something really good. Unfortunately the crap will usually win out due to marketing.
Now everybody is a just consumer. The phrase "consumer community" may just have been invented in this sentence. [1]
There are two sources of crap. One is businesses that deliberately make stuff that sucks in the hopes that marks will buy it and keep their mouths shut out of embarrassment over being taken as a rube. There's more of that in software and everywhere else today.
The other source of crap is amateurs. There's more of that in software because access has improved. The software is analogous to homeowner construction projects. The roof is likely to leak, the walls be without insulation, and the room shaped like a scalene triangle. HomeDepot's prices help make it happen.
People are expressing their ideas more often. Most ideas are bad. The execution of laypeople is often poor.
[1] https://www.google.com/webhp#q=%22consumer+community%22
I mean even their technology choices fit it - always dynamic, the "scriptier" the better, just ship it!
The result is mediocre products with bog-standard interfaces (productivity), suboptimal architectures (so devs are easily replaced), and speed prized over quality. We cling to design fads, rather than creating original designs.
In short, it reflects a culture-wide lack of ambition. It's easy to create a cat picture sharing app. It's not easy to think beyond that because we're mentally beholden to the idea that there isn't enough money, and we need to get ours now, and then we can go after our big ideas.
Tech was supposed to be transformative. Now it asks us to be impressed with business models that prey on addictive behaviors, advertising, and annoying users because we lack the imagination and will to do anything better.
Inevitably when a sector grows, you're bound to have a diversity of approaches and types of people involved, and in most cases that diversity is a profoundly good thing. It means that not only are there people who are in the work for the zen-like essence ('love of technology' as you put it), but also those who can apply that work to other fields and areas of knowledge.
And capitalism (which appears to be the true target of attack here) has its flaws and abstracts away the love in favor of a general approach to value—but it also allows resources to be condensed and put toward big problems that would not otherwise be possible. Sometimes it ends up just extracting wealth from a triviality, but often it is a complex mix of value for a complex mix of people, and sometimes something truly profound and major comes of it.
I suggest that there's something else going on here; some personal frustration or observation that is likely true in the right context, but I think it needs development and focus to be a more universal critique.
But that's not the same thing as entryism, which unfortunately we have in tech. Entryism is when diverse approaches don't attempt to win in the field of capitalism - instead, they attempt to parasitically take over the capitalistic winners.
Capitalistic diversity would consist of MBAs, SJWs, and all the other entrants building their own companies. Then customers could pick the winner. In contrast, entryism consists of some company (e.g. Google) "winning", and then the MBAs, SJWs, etc joining google and changing it from the inside.
In fact, entryism is very difficult to combat capitalistically. The problem is simply that creative destruction can't necessarily kill the entrants. For example, suppose the MBAs destroy MS. Then what happens - do they vanish forever, never to kill again, with MBA-ism as a disgraced ideology? Or do they simply shift jobs to Google and Apple and try to do it again?
See these two articles for more on entryism and boundaries: http://www.moreright.net/notes-on-boundaries/ http://www.moreright.net/entryism-as-containment-failure/ (Moreright has other articles on the topic, mostly focused on how neoreaction has avoided entryism. To a certain extent tech does the same thing by being a bunch of low status nerds, repelling people who don't really like tech.)
If so, then that's fine. He's not trying to change your mind, and his career advice isn't appropriate for you you. Move along. Find something addressed to you.
I'm not in his target audience either. I enjoy interacting with people and ideas more than getting a computer to do what I want. This is why in my teens I spent more time reading math books than playing with computers.
But I know and respect a lot of people who are like him. I get where he is coming from. And I've seen enough of them burn out of their dream profession that I think he has a point.
Interesting perspective, and similar to mine. I gravitated towards this industry because of the problems to solve, not the means of solving them. I have been taking things apart to figure out how they work since I was 6 or so. I didn't even have a computer until I was 17, but I was already dead set on becoming some sort of engineer because I loved those sorts of challenges. In fact, I ended up going electrical because in undergrad I decided I hated programming but loved physical electronics and electrical wiring. I came back to programming after I had been working for a few years and discovered that real-world programming was not like the classes I hated.
I don't know where that puts me in Jacques' eyes. I like using knowledge and technology to solve problems, but I don't care what particular technology it is. Sometimes I feel like an outsider in this industry, because I interact with so many people who love programming in itself and tend to look down on those who do not. I don't feel attacked by this post but I do feel he is drawing up a false dichotomy between those who "[l]earned to program as a kid" and "totally fell in love with it", and those who are in this industry for the money, have little or no technical knowledge, and no desire to gain any more than the bare minimum of technical knowledge required to achieve their financial goals.
But worse, they actively seemed to dislike the kind of people that do love tech, i.e. nerds, hackers, engineers and such. These were young kids, the stereotypical "cool" start-up founders, but the way they talked about engineers and engineering made you think you were talking to 50 year old pointy haired bosses with not an ounce of respect for technology.
And they keep saying completely the opposite, they keep saying "we love tech", and they actually seem to mean it. Except everything else they do or say indicates the opposite. They just like to use tech, but are completely uninterested in the process of developing tech.
These people aren't just greedy cunts who are in it for the money. These are people who have grown up in a world where consuming technology has become so normal and easy that they simply don't get that creating technology is a totally different process.
And I'm not yet sure whether these people should be avoided or educated.
They want to be called tech startups, because tech is cool, and they have an app, because apps are cool, but their core business has nothing to do with tech.
Whats called tech in 2015 generally means uses the same 1990s technology with some numerical metric improvements but nothing fundamentally unrecognizable by someone in the 90s, coupled with 2015 business model, 2015 financialization, 2015 art and styling, and 2015 marketing.
Unfortunately both types of companies are called tech. I think the author is basically bored with the 90s and wants 2010s technology jobs.
Wheres the companies doing 2015 tech in a 2015 company? Not, in general, in "tech".
I think my father in 1975 would have been pretty mystified by my 1995 desktop and programming. So you guys aren't running batched punchcards anymore, OK then. Object oriented derivative of C instead of cobol, interesting. WIMP GUI, very interesting despite unproductive. On the other hand imagine how bored someone from 1995 would be when introduced to 2015 desktop, after the initial irrelevant numerical surprises, which wouldn't even be a surprise despite every generation thinking they're the first to ever discover / appreciate Moore's law. Dominant corporate language is still a OO C derivative, although different, whatever. Tired old WIMP GUI still got the start button in the lower left corner, eh?
That's not to say the world of technology hasn't found new ways to suck. Yesterday I got an email from Sasan Goodarzi General Manager, Intuit TurboTax. He was offering a coupon in exchange for adding suck to TurboTax. Intuit took the Schedule C out of the Deluxe skew.
I replied (probably into the void). I've been using the TurboTax for more than two decades. The reasons are a trust of Intuit and the faith that using it this year would make life easier next year because I could import one return into the other. The product was deliberately made worse. The reasons for using it are gone. Intuit doesn't care. I'm not sufficiently profitable. Beyond this I'm not even going to rant about them making the world suck.
In the 1980's everyone used Basic because a C compiler was $600. Rexx for the Amiga was $100. And Lisp? Buy a Lisp Machine.
Today, the mountain of love that is Ruby is free. The heap that is Rails, that's free. The pile that is Racket, free as well. Audacity, Gimp, Mono, etc. - love is winning. Lots of businesses suck and now there are lots of software businesses.
Yet even Darth MicroSoft is serious about producing open source projects. What more evidence could there be?
[0] http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/
[1] http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/08/5-reasons-why-software-dev...
Of course, this is my judgement as a contralto in French, so shrug