Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where have all the hackers gone?

morepablo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 351 posts

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#181

Post by 908B64B197 »

TheDong wrote: post #74

Have other people observed the sentiment the author observes, around hackers being less common? The author has a list of reasons (VC money, business culture, managers, fear of the unknown). I, personally, have observed this reduction over my career, and I have my own idea of why that might be, my own phrasing of it. Perhaps it gets at the same thing as the author from a different angle. I think the reason, plain and…

> However, as the idea of "programming makes money" became more well known, and bootcamps + college both upped their game, more and more people started coding just with the hopes to make money. To get good enough to make money, not care about "huh, how does the bootloader actually work" or "Why did chrome just crash, let me open up gdb...".

To me, bootcamps are a complete red flag when considering candidates. I don't think I ever saw a single good hire out of a bootcamp (and we just flat out stopped interviewing them at one point because the signal to noise ratio just became too low).

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#182

Post by goat_whisperer »

spacemadness wrote: post #176
drones wrote: post #44

I think the author of this article grossly misunderstood the purpose of his interaction which lead to this article. You aren't architecting a new programming language, man, you're talking to a guy about computers because you're wearing a shirt of a computer thing he liked. He wanted to talk to you because he had a mutual passion he wanted to share, and you openly challenged him in front of other people. Sorry, you we…

This very much read like the comic book guy of programmers to me.

lol you nailed it

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#183

Post by 908B64B197 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #175
908B64B197 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find. Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career, with offshoring replacing expensive American engineers.

> Interestingly, he enrolled in CS at a time it was believed to be a dead career Believed by whom? Because AFAIR this was never either the general public sentiment or consistent with BLS projections across the fields that CS feeds into.

> this was never either the general public sentiment

Post dotcom crash in the early 00's? Everyone was saying this was a dead market. Cost-cutting was everywhere.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#184

Post by fndex »

> Elm and Clojure both have something like "if Evan/Rich didn't think you should have that thing you wanted, have you considered that maybe you're wrong? "

Might be true for Elm, but how is that the case for Clojure? Clojure, like any other Lisp, has a very powerful macro system. If Rich didn't think you should have that thing you wanted, build it yourself.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#185

Post by ivxvm »

Lyngbakr wrote: post #132
ivxvm wrote: post #75

Another reason is that being a fan of less popular tech is heavily punishing to career and job hunting. Hell, it's quite a challenge to find a job even in React/JavaScript (took me a good month or even a bit more last time, and I'm a senior dev), and it would be a nightmare for languages/ecosystems like Haskell or Rust. I wouldn't even want to find another JS job because I don't want to go through a month of such str…

But presumably there is also more competition for jobs using popular technologies? Perhaps the more important metric is supply of devs relative to demand. The top paying languages, according to the Stack Overflow's 2022 survey, are generally less popular: Clojure, Erlang, F#, LISP are the top 4. While certainly not an ideal metric (e.g., perhaps salaries are skewed due to more senior devs using these languages), this…

> But presumably there is also more competition for jobs using popular technologies?

Maybe, but personally I don't feel it has such a significant contribution as number of positions you can apply to. In these languages you basically can find a dozen of positions worldwide open at any given moment of time and apply to them, in JS you can find hundreds upon hundreds of positions every day and just filter and keep applying, and it still can take weeks or months to get an offer, a lot of your applications aren't even processed at that moment, which could be the case with less popular tech positions as well.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#186

Post by klodolph »

Mc91 wrote: post #130
klodolph wrote: post #92

To be honest, it feels like engaging in a cultural war. I don’t want to liken this to any kind of mainstream cultural war, but instead liken it to the old tech cultural wars, like Emacs versus Vim or some shit like that. I feel like saying positive things about Go is a bit of a fucking minefield, because somebody (especially here on HN) is going to talk about how Go is Awful and Bad and made for stupid people or some…

> Like, the people who say that they can’t work for a manager unless the manager could do their job! I've worked in IT for over 25 years. Other than a CTO or senior tech executive reporting to CEO, I have seen problems with technical people reporting to non-technical people that I never see with technical people reporting to, if not technical people, at least formerly technical people. A technical manager can have pr…

I’ve equally seen problems with technical people who have been promoted into management, buck lack management skills. However, I’m not going to draw some kind of conclusion from this—“technical people shouldn’t be in management” is as wrong a conclusion as “technical competence is a primary consideration for choosing managers”.

People are also really bad at understanding if management is doing a good or bad job. Most people try to figure out if they like their manager on some kind of personal level.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#187

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

dimgl wrote: post #131

This is an annoying, pretentious article. You don’t need to know all of the intricate internals of a language and its runtime to appreciate its features. Similarly, you don’t need to learn all of the frameworks in the TypeScript ecosystem to be productive in TypeScript. So clearly there’s a disconnect between what the author wishes programming would be and the reality of programming.

> you don’t need to learn all of the frameworks in the TypeScript ecosystem to be productive in TypeScript

but you should hold in the back of your head a realization that your understanding of said ecosystem and the compiler is limited. Likely always will be, as there are multiple not stupid people working on it, and there's one of you.

It happened to me that I knew how to do X (and then did it) which had been boldly declared as impossible to do by the resident senior expert. I knew it not because I liked those minutiae, just was willing to dig to the bottom when solving some problem earlier. I dunno, but it's likely that both geeks who just absorb niche and arcane knowledge to feel superior and bone-minded resident experts are equally bad (and sometimes, rarely, but still, they are the same guy).

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#188

Post by nixpulvis »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #47
luma wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have fruitful conversations with friends, and exactly none of them have been arguments about our favorite programming languages. This dude just wanted a pretense for a blog post about Very Strongly Held Feelings Concerning PLangs.

I have fruitful arguments about programming with friends. You just have to find people that enjoy banter and aren't insecure, which isn't very easy.

No idea why this is being downvoted. It's true.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#189

Post by nixpulvis »

seydor wrote: post #38
nixpulvis wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can absolutely have friends that you have unfruitful conversations with. The idea that every interaction needs to be positive to constitute friendship is extremely unhealthy and sterilizing.

you can have such conversations with anyone, they are not a friend. friendship implies a certain emotional investment, which implies a certain bias

I don't understand your point.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#190

Post by nixpulvis »

daveslash wrote: post #178
seydor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can have such conversations with anyone, they are not a friend. friendship implies a certain emotional investment, which implies a certain bias

I agree. I think in modern American vocabulary, "Friend" is thrown around quite loosely to mean "somebody who I know and I'm not adversarial with". Personally, I have very few friends - people with whom I have an emotional investment, who I'd trust to call if I had a bad breakup or needed money or some sort of personal help. But I have tons of casual relationships with folks that I'm on friendly terms with.

Perhaps you're describing an "ally"?
Post reply on HN