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What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

126 点作者 tkrajcar超过 10 年前

32 条评论

cromwellian超过 10 年前
I started two companies and I am not sad to see the days of renting rack space, buying hardware, and sys-admining everything yourself disappear, anymore than I&#x27;m sad to see that I don&#x27;t need to build my own power plant to run my stuff, or farm my own food.<p>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&#x27;s ability to deliver their core product.<p>I don&#x27;t know what brogrammers are. Maybe he&#x27;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&#x27;t care for the same reason you do. It&#x27;s not unique to tech. You see it the gaming community (&quot;you&#x27;re not a real gamer!&quot;, &quot;fake geek girls&quot;, etc)<p>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&#x27;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.
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eastbayjake超过 10 年前
tl;dr: People are suddenly interested in something I&#x27;m passionate about, they&#x27;re all poseur johnny-come-latelys, I&#x27;m the authentic hacker<p>This is maybe the tenth HN post I&#x27;ve read that&#x27;s some iteration of this gut feeling by people who entered tech after a life-long obsession with computers. It&#x27;s really cool that you&#x27;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&#x27;re not bad people for doing that. They&#x27;re just acting in rational self-interest. Sorry it upsets you. Almost every industry is full of people who toil at jobs they&#x27;re not passionate about, and it doesn&#x27;t make their employers bad companies. It&#x27;s okay to work a job and define your life satisfaction by raising a family, making art, enjoying the outdoors, etc.<p>There&#x27;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 &quot;How can I help more people become excellent craftsmen?&quot; than &quot;AGHHH MORE PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL AT THIS THING I LOVE, IT&#x27;S SO OVER&quot;
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BatFastard超过 10 年前
Seems like some people are missing the point. He loved it when people enjoyed tech for the pure &quot;creation&quot; and &quot;exploration&quot; aspect. Not the money money money that it has often become. I also disagree with him on this point. I see a huge amount of new ideas and work from people who just like to create, but it tends to be at a more grass roots level like the Arduino community, or the hackerspace groups. So I say to him &quot;Your love not only still exists, it has grown to encompass the whole world&quot;. Just don&#x27;t look for it in Silicon Valley.
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navyrain超过 10 年前
What is omitted from the article is the difference in the _size_ of the tech industry during the last 20 years. In 1995, the year the author romances, he emphasizes that doing anything in tech was hard. Two decades later, the hard problems have not gone away; the industry has broadened such that there are more opportunities across the entire spectrum of &quot;noble challenge&quot;. There are more opportunities in making fluff, and more opportunities for even more difficult, admirable, and impactful undertakings than were ever possible before.<p>The industry has not been overtaken by the get-rich-quick charlatans, it has expanded enough that they can find a place.
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noname123超过 10 年前
Hello, I wrote pretty much the same thing about five years ago. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762121" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=762121</a><p>PG wrote me a response here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762357" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=762357</a><p>Nothing has changed and actually has gotten worse in my opinion (so I hear you, bro(grammer)).<p>However, I&#x27;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&#x2F;Techcrunch&#x2F;Hacker News.<p>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.<p>It&#x27;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.)<p>In my humble opinion, there are more important things in life like doing a job that you&#x27;re suppose to be doing, like editing the cron-job according to the JIRA ticket or washing the dishes when the sink is full.
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jonpress超过 10 年前
I have seen several people on LinkedIn describe themselves as &#x27;Visionary Entrepreneurs&#x27; - One of them had never even started a company company in his life - Just deciding that he was &#x27;going to do it&#x27; was sufficient to convince himself that he was actually an entrepreneur (and a visionary one too!). A more accurate word to use there would be &#x27;illusionary&#x27;.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;t call myself an entrepreneur - I think being an entrepreneur these days implies that you got VC funding.<p>My previous 2 projects failed in a large part due to strong competitors who were really well funded - On my own, I just didn&#x27;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&#x2F;company through all that noise.<p>I&#x27;m actually hoping that the economy will crash this year - That would clean out my current competitors - I&#x27;m sure most of them will give up as soon as VC money disappears.
jacquesm超过 10 年前
&#x2F;me throws one blogpost in the making in the trashcan for fear of being labeled a plagiarist and checks the room for webcams.
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anateus超过 10 年前
This always happens when a scene&#x2F;subculture hits the mainstream. You could madlibs this article and get a description of every musical genre. It&#x27;s sad to see what you were so passionate about appear in a diluted form, and external perception be distorted by this new image.<p>But there always remains an underground where true innovation and passion thrives.
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venomsnake超过 10 年前
&gt; I can&#x27;t subscribe to the flawed philosophy that a developer shouldn&#x27;t have to know how an application is talking to his database, or the fine details of what goes on in the underlying system or storage cluster. Those people are like ticking time bombs for some company to hire to build out their platform. They&#x27;ll get your prototype out the door at light speed, but put any traffic on it and prepare yourself for a bill the size of a Pirates of the Caribbean movie.<p>This. A billion times this. We should have &quot;Law of minimal needed abstractions&quot; :<p>Look at every abstraction as global variable accessed only from lines with goto on them. It better have a good reason for existing.
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Fede_V超过 10 年前
I&#x27;m a bit ambivalent about the overall theme of the essay, but this bit in particular is spot on:<p>&quot;But worse than the brogrammers, I think it&#x27;s the &#x27;entrepreneurs&#x27; that bug me the most. The word feels so tainted now&quot;<p>The word entrepreneur is approaching &#x27;thought leader&#x27; 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 &#x27;entrepreneurs&#x27; are so utterly shameless. Even worse are the subtle variations on the theme - serial entrepreneur, social-media entrepreneur, etc etc...
kra34超过 10 年前
If it makes you feel any better:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;California_Gold_Rush</a><p>&quot;Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush&quot;
MicroBerto超过 10 年前
I think the biggest complaint he has, but doesn&#x27;t realize what it really is, is the deterioration of the signal-to-noise ratio in his respective communities.<p>And he&#x27;s right. When 3 of every 5 people you meet in the space has more buzzwords than lines of code written, it gets old.<p>For me, I&#x27;ve found that HN satisfies my need for a better quality forum of like minds. He doesn&#x27;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.<p>But, unlike him, I just can&#x27;t be mad that that barrier to entry has been reduced. Sure, there&#x27;s more wantrapreneurs around now. But it&#x27;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&#x27;t seem to grasp.
vezzy-fnord超过 10 年前
Interesting to watch the term &quot;brogrammer&quot; evolve. I&#x27;m not entirely sure what it means anymore, but I do recall it was typically used for programmers with stereotypical frat boy mentalities, then it went on to imply misogynistic tendencies, then it became a sort of generic slur and now the author uses it as a synonym for &quot;inexperienced programmer&quot; - one who doesn&#x27;t want to peak in the lower levels of the stack more specifically, lack of desire to learn in other words.<p>I&#x27;ve only ever seen the term &quot;brogrammer&quot; used in SV circles, though. It&#x27;s hardly a phenomenon for the tech industry as a whole.<p>Other than that, I somewhat agree. Most of our software hasn&#x27;t evolved conceptually much since the 80s, with some notable exceptions in academic and PL circles that haven&#x27;t gained mainstream acceptance, predictably.
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kendallpark超过 10 年前
&gt; But worse than the brogrammers, I think it&#x27;s the &#x27;entrepreneurs&#x27; that bug me the most. The word feels so tainted now.<p>+1<p>&gt; it doesn&#x27;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.<p>There&#x27;s a flip side to this article, which is that the &quot;Golden Age&quot; 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.
daktanis超过 10 年前
&quot;In those days, a startup wasn&#x27;t a guy who paid some overseas software shop to crank out an MVP to run on a couple of cloud instances hoping to be the next WhatsApp&quot;<p>Don&#x27;t really have an opinion on the rest of the essay but I do hate this when I see it.
ChuckMcM超过 10 年前
Its an interesting bit of nostalgia which I can find much to relate too. But I take a more practical view of the future. The author makes this statement:<p><i>&quot;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.&quot;</i><p>When I think about these things and the dot com explosion, I realize that these markets are <i>best</i> created by the people living in them. Specifically, if you&#x27;re primary labor supply consists of &quot;mysteriously entitled generation Y and millenials&quot; then if you are building tools for these people you need to understand what they like and what they don&#x27;t like. As engineers we tend to create things that &quot;we&quot; would like, and if &quot;we&quot; are no longer a close match for what the overall market is looking like, then our instincts will lead us astray.<p>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.
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icedchai超过 10 年前
I remember those same times (early-to-mid 90&#x27;s), worked at a few ISPs, even helped start one, and while it&#x27;s good nostalgia, I&#x27;d never want to go back.<p>Those Sun Servers? They took 4 or 5 minutes to boot up and were dog slow.<p>T1 connections? Amazing for the time, laughable by today&#x27;s standards, when the typical broadband connection is 20x faster.<p>Web development back then? Writing nasty CGI scripts - in Perl if you were lucky - or C if you weren&#x27;t.<p>No thanks.
NhanH超过 10 年前
I just want to point out that the &quot;entrepreneur&quot; with 20 years career did not just start recently: if it&#x27;s bad, then it has been a while.<p>&gt;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.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;t have to do that anymore. On the other hand, it&#x27;s unfortunate that you will surely be spending time in jails if you do something like that.<p>&gt;And there was altruism within the Internet community.<p>There is this community called &quot;Hacker News&quot;, which the head honcho believes that &quot;Mean people fails&quot;. So I&#x27;d strongly disagree that there is no altruism within the Internet community.
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rifung超过 10 年前
Im new to the industry but I definitely agree with the author. On the other hand, I think its only natural that with the high salaries developers can get more people who don&#x27;t necessarily love it will join the industry.<p>Not only that but I&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t need to know too much about what&#x27;s &quot;actually&quot; happening to make something.
DSWEPT13超过 10 年前
Although sometimes I still enjoy a M.A.S.H. rerun more than the fodder I find on the interweb...it has been fairly amazing to watch the birth and transformation, even tertiarily. Well written, WM.
Blackthorn超过 10 年前
Wistful remembering of a &quot;golden age&quot;? Check. Whining about &quot;entitled millenials&quot;? Check.<p>I foresee a fantastic career in print magazine ahead of you.
cmrdporcupine超过 10 年前
It&#x27;s over.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlGqN3AKOsA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=YlGqN3AKOsA</a>
kra34超过 10 年前
If it makes you feel any better:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;California_Gold_Rush</a><p>&quot;Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush&quot;
kra34超过 10 年前
If it makes you feel any better:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;California_Gold_Rush</a><p>&quot;Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush&quot;
kra34超过 10 年前
If it makes you feel any better:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;California_Gold_Rush</a><p>&quot;Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush&quot;
theevilcellist超过 10 年前
The scene is never what it used to be.
rglover超过 10 年前
Okay, so I&#x27;m not crazy. Phew.
caoilte超过 10 年前
Maybe it&#x27;s him that&#x27;s changed. He should try going back to South Carolina. He might like it now.
mattmurdog超过 10 年前
Agree to all of this!
sargegood超过 10 年前
Thank you.
benihana超过 10 年前
Yawn. A whiny, arrogant, grass-is-always-greener post with a bunch of hypotheticals about the filthy unwashed masses encroaching on &quot;our&quot; turf and how much greater it was &quot;back in the day.&quot; Bonus points for laying out the criteria for a &quot;true&quot; hacker is (spoiler alert: it&#x27;s anyone who spent their time almost identically as the author).
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saschajustin超过 10 年前
So to summarize... a man born into privilege is annoyed by poor people.<p>The guy equates working for a paycheck with entitlement... how out of touch can you be?<p>Working for a paycheck is something you do out of economic neccessity--for survival, NOT entitlement.<p>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.<p>But instead of recognizing how neoliberal economics have destroyed the middle class and churned out a new &quot;Depression-Era&quot; generation that are forced to &quot;chase the money&quot; in order to eat... he is going to whine about how kids these days suck and are entitled.<p>Fucking amazing. Gen Y has the worst economic prospects since the actual great depression, how the fuck can we be spoiled?
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