101–110 of 236 posts
Hackers is a fun movie. It has a fantastic time capsule soundtrack, fun sets (the arcade, the computer room) and some fun little performances (Matthew Lillard! Fisher Stevens!) It's interesting what the show gets right (little bits of phreaker culture, social engineering) and what it gets wrong (almost everything about how computers actually work). From a realism perspective, Mr. Robot blows this out of the water, bu…
Actually, I take that back. In terms of culture it was not that far off the mark. I went to college near New York City, and it turned out to be a local hotbed for activity in the MOD/tracker scene. I used to pal around with one guy who was a big deal in the KFMF, and he looked like he could have come right off the set of Hackers. Even used the handle "Phreak" for a bit and had Hackers soundtrack posters on the wall. Because you know, awesomest soundtrack(s) of all time and that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's because most tech jobs are not in tech. If you work for a bank, you work for bank. If you work for a fashion retailer, you work for a fashion retailer. I've worked for a big pension fund and it was exactly like one imagines. Many meetings, a quiet office, slow and boring. I've also worked for small tech-focussed companies with technical nerds as founders; they were rather different, with music, dogs, vod…
I used to think that, too, but be warned: SaaS companies quickly become beholden to the sales org, and all of a sudden, working for a "tech" company becomes working for all the industries you serve. Very few tech companies are pure tech anymore. Basically only the private ones like Valve.
If it's too high, you're not in a technology company in the sense we're idolizing here.
... And I'm also not sure "that" sort of tech company can exist above a certain size. No corporate silo firewall is strong enough to keep the business bullshit at bay.
Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be. If I had a time machine I would warn young me that it's really more like a combination of Office Space and Wolf of Wall Street. It would be awesome to listen to Prodigy or Megadeth while hackin' with the gang though. I'm still down for that if it exists s…
Discovery that it exists -> Fumbling -> Golden Age -> Mechanization
Mechanization is where the bean counters and optimizers get into it and make it into something boring. I'm not a software engineer but I feel like my own field is in the "Mechanization" stage. My solution is I'm just about to leave and never look back because I stopped caring. I still like the original stuff I learned but I don't care about what's become of it.
Honestly, I think who you are as a person is often going to be misaligned with what capitalism and industry does with what looks like your passions, and it's healthy to recognize that and leave while you can. You may be doing software engineering but you're not a software engineer; you're a person and you can reinvent yourself any time you want.
The Hackers soundtrack is the root node of all my electronic music discoveries… It all started with Orbital, Underworld, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Leftfield…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are startups the closest you can still get to "punk rock in tech"? I would love for the dream of the 90s to still be alive somewhere...
Startups are the least punk rock thing in tech. Follow patterns and rules to match the expectations of VCs so they give you money... and then they drive what you do. I'm not saying people should not work in startups - they have their place in the industry. But there is nothing "punk rock" about them. If you want to break rules and work outside the lines, we have come full circle to the 90s - bootstrapped small busine…
Unfortunately... because most of the world has taken their eyes off keeping markets competitive, it's less viable now than it once was, because the table stakes capital requirements are larger.
Part of what made this movie so startling when it came out is it was the first (and really only) film that was plainly aware of hacker subculture at the time and is loaded with easter eggs demonstrating that. It was at once a ridiculous parody of it and an homage to it. It’s like a love letter to small-h hackers.
> loaded with easter eggs Like a 28.8 Bps modem. Bps. Not kBps. Just Bps. Perhaps the actor just misread the line and the editors kept it. Still makes me itch to this day.
e: actually that's probably around the speed of morse code or human speech
The Hackers soundtrack is the root node of all my electronic music discoveries… It all started with Orbital, Underworld, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Leftfield…
I literally listened to Halcyon & on & on for something like 2 years on loop while teaching myself programming in QBasic and assembly language.
Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be. If I had a time machine I would warn young me that it's really more like a combination of Office Space and Wolf of Wall Street. It would be awesome to listen to Prodigy or Megadeth while hackin' with the gang though. I'm still down for that if it exists s…
It very much does exist. Just look for places trying to change the very basics of how the world works by hacking on new technology. You know, the places that naturally attract cypherpunks, people distrustful of 'the system' and the like. You can also find people with that ethos in corporate places, but they get swarmed out by suits and people who went to coding school because it pays well.