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What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

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Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#101

Post by kendallpark »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #4

Interesting to watch the term "brogrammer" evolve. I'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 "inexperienced programmer" - one who doesn't want to peak in the lower levels of the stack more s…

Interestingly enough, I'm the only female developer on my team and it has been universally decided that I am also the only brogrammer. So take that as you will.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#102

Post by georgemcbay »

notacoward wrote: post #16
jacquesm wrote: post #2

/me throws one blogpost in the making in the trashcan for fear of being labeled a plagiarist and checks the room for webcams.

Same here. I'll probably get slammed for saying this here, of all places, but if you manage to push out a product in six months then either you're brilliant or what you're doing just wasn't that hard. The thing is, every single person in this position assumes that they're in the first group, but it's not even possible for more than a few of them to be right. Even accounting for the nine out of ten startups that fail,…

I've met a couple of the relatively recent "tech luminaries" often waxed poetic about in terms of their technical genius and found their understanding of actual technology (as it relates to overall software development) to range from very superficial to non-existent.

OTOH they are wildly rich and I am a wage slave, so I guess the joke's on people who think the actual quality of the technology matters rather than the way it is marketed.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#103

Post by norseboar »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #57
eastbayjake wrote: post #19

tl;dr: People are suddenly interested in something I'm passionate about, they're all poseur johnny-come-latelys, I'm the authentic hacker This is maybe the tenth HN post I've read that's some iteration of this gut feeling by people who entered tech after a life-long obsession with computers. It's really cool that you're passionate about CS -- there are also a lot of people who are rational actors making rational deci…

'Rational Self Interest' is a myth. For self interest to be truly rational you'd have to be able to model long term consequences of short term decisions extremely well. This would be a useful way to make sure you wouldn't do something incredibly stupid and ultimately self-defeating just so you could to make a quick buck in the next quarter, if the ultimately consequence was that the same 'rational decision' was going…

Rational self interest might be a myth when applied to the extent that some economic models apply it, but at a basic level holds up. I know /tons/ of people that have taken one job over another because it pays more, even if it's one that they're less interested in.

Not everybody has the luxury of being passionate about something lucrative -- that's not something you really have control over (maybe some, but I don't think much. This is another issue entirely, though). I get that it might be lamentable that an industry isn't full of the most passionate people anymore, but the tradeoff is that it became a large-scale industry. If the original author wants the kind of deep, nerdy devotion he used to have, he can find it! There are plenty of research institutes and startups investing in long-term big bets that need this kind of thing. But being mad that /everybody/ isn't that way anymore seems childish.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#105

Post by Blackthorn »

wpietri wrote: post #27
saschajustin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's insane to think that the least powerful members of a field are the ones controlling it. Is the medical field controlled by medical students, or by 60 year old medical authorities? Is chemical engineering controlled by new graduates, or by 60 year old engineering authorities? It's completely ludicrous to imply that programming is somehow being led astray by young people. Young people have no power. They do what t…

This is probably a good rant for some other topic. But Zuckerberg is only 30, even now. The people I see turning up at entrepreneurship events and in the fundraising news aren't 60. They're ~25.

The people getting the funding aren't the ones with the power. It's the people giving it.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#106

Post by Blackthorn »

gaius wrote: post #97
astrodust wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did seem like everyone plus dog had a startup in 1995 and most were working on the absolutely stupidest ideas possible just that they were more B2B focused than B2C in that era. I'd argue the CueCat ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat ) was the iconic culmination of five years of feverish insanity.

You say that, but at least it was an actual technological product. These days you get Buzzfeed whose product is "lists" and Upworthy whose product is "misleading headlines".

Buzzfeed is an outlet that performs real journalism. If you cannot see what their product is and what they are doing, perhaps you need to open your eyes.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#107

Post by drvdevd »

navyrain wrote: post #35

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 "noble challenge". There are more opportunities in making fluff,…

Yeah when I read the post, I kept thinking about the fact that there are a number of areas in which the just plain interested individual could focus their efforts to achieve the same general feeling of depth the author had back then. And this can also transfer across technical domains in unexpected ways. For example, in-depth knowledge of how the Linux Kernel's network stack works could transfer to a large eventual cost savings when some BGP implementation is improved based on that knowledge. And maybe that improvement turns out to be mostly 'algorithmic' and maybe that algorithm was devised by someone working in JavaScript.

I think the network hardware issue alone is a good example of where the complexity in the stack has probably increased exponentially since the 90s.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#108

Post by Noelkd »

dlhdesign wrote: post #69
cromwellian wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is application specific. The same points are often made about programming, and there are certainly circumstances where you need to know how your code is compiled to assembly, or how the kernel works, for many, this isn't an issue. Sure, if you need to hit a target 30fps or 60fps in a game, then that implies what much be understood in the whole stack. Since 99+% of all startup ideas will fail, it makes no…

> You should consider the first version a throwaway. If you start out knowing that you are writing something that will be trashed, why would you invest yourself in it? It's hard to tell someone to build something that will be thrown away; to trade the time they can never get back for something that will most likely fail. That will almost certainly _not_ get their best work - which means your odds of success go down;…

The Mythical Man Month has an entire chapter why it is a good idea to "Plan to Throw One Away"[1]. But I think you know what's going on.

[1] https://archive.org/stream/mythicalmanmonth00fred#page/114/

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#109

Post by jacquesm »

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #62
jacquesm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is his main point. I think it is far more about the fact that just the surface layers aren't enough to build good solutions to problems, that's good enough for demos and mock-ups but not good enough for production. For that you need some deeper level of insight.

Look at some of Facebook's early code: https://gist.github.com/philfreo/7257723 https://gist.github.com/nikcub/3833406 There are plenty of people in this industry who would have told you this code wasn't fit for production. People frequently overestimate both what's needed to build commercially-viable solutions and how easy it becomes to recruit the right people to improve (or reimplement) poorly-architected solution…

Good enough, ship it!

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#110

Post by kansface »

fat0wl wrote: post #51
fat0wl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i went on a rant about this stuff in a recent comment asking about Tech Bootcamps that i deleted half of cuz i knew it would just piss ppl off & was a waste of breath (all other comments were pretty much from ppl who lOoooOooOove 'em, half commenters had vested interest). but yeah tech bootcamps, consultant scammers, open source hipsters.... i see this stuff is rampant & it seems to be a downer in cyberspace. I code…

if you downvoted this can you please explain why? I am actually desperate for reasons not to be so cynical about my job so i can at least scrape something out of my days until i find a better place... I wish I had a sunnier view of things but I am someone who wants to work hard but feels like an ant on an ant farm. ppl have advised me to go into startup scene but all the startups i've interviewed at in NY are mock co…

I downvoted your post for the reasons:

1. Too much bile: | tech bootcamps, consultant scammers, open source hipsters... pure scum... i deleted half of cuz i knew it would just piss ppl off & was a waste of breath

If you know enough to not write this, why did you write it?

2. The lack of proper grammar. If you can't take the time to neatly express your ideas, why do you expect anyone to take them time to understand them?

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