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Where have all the hackers gone?

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Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#211

Post by zorked »

908B64B197 wrote: post #183
dragonwriter wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not sure of what the downvote is about because this is an accurate representation of the post-dotcom time. Enrollments in CS went down, programmers would be offshored to India, nobody wanted to be in tech anymore, unemployment was high. Hard to belive now but people enrolling in CS at this time were mocked and ridiculed.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#212

Post by bcrosby95 »

zorked wrote: post #211
908B64B197 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not sure of what the downvote is about because this is an accurate representation of the post-dotcom time. Enrollments in CS went down, programmers would be offshored to India, nobody wanted to be in tech anymore, unemployment was high. Hard to belive now but people enrolling in CS at this time were mocked and ridiculed.

Yep. I decided upon my major in a similar time period. People thought I was stupid, and my advisor advised me against it. There was a lot of doom and gloom on the internet - way more than any downturn since then. Way more than what you see about ChatGPT replacing programmers.

The options I was weighing were philosophy, math, or CS. I chose CS because I liked building things. I figured I could at least make minimum wage. If it turned out so terrible I could just go back to school for something else.

Much to my relief, my first job out of college paid me $50k.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#213

Post by mech422 »

xtracto wrote: post #114
confoundcofound wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the hacker culture of the ‘90s to early ‘00s is behind us, and it really saddens me. I’ve yet to find a corner of the current tech / startup landscape that ignites the same excitement I felt over a decade ago. It’s too commercial now.

I grew in the 80s 90s. The culture of phrack, 2600, Fravia, phrozen crew, etc was absolutely phenomenal. My take is a bit worse than the GP: Theres people interested in that but nowadays they sell their skills for money. That's why you see lots of ransomware, darkweb sells and whatnot. Even the torrent-ing has shown the change of culture: back in the Napster, kazaa, imem days, people (layman) shared just because. Now…

Dam...I haven't thought of Fravia in ages...

He had some _awesome_ stuff! :-D

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#215

Post by hnarn »

pjmlp wrote: post #56
w0m wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think writing a program that's more than ~10k lines of code in Golang is a mistake isn't Kubernetes mostly Go? Just sounds like an arbitrary limit. I say that when I try to limit shell scripts to a single-scroll in editor.

Yes, because a couple of Go folks joined the team doing the prototype in Java, and drove the rewrite into Go. There is a FOSDEM talk about it.

Just imagining a timeline where Kubernetes was written in Java gives me chills.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#216

Post by themodelplumber »

908B64B197 wrote: post #173
jdm2212 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are just a lot more programmers today. All the same hackers and stuff who used to be there are still there, but there's a lot more of everyone else. If Harvard started admitting 50,000 students a year, the density of Zuckerbergs would be a lot lower. They'd still be there, but harder to find.

> 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.

IIRC this was far from a uniform opinion, because CS feeds careers in so many areas in and out of tech.

I do remember it being a big concern on the part of 9-to-5 coders at large corporations.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#217

Post by danenania »

d1str0 wrote: post #191
Xenoamorphous wrote: post #4

Sorry if this is off-topic but I often see in HN (either in articles posted here, or in the comments) lack of empathy. He talks about a "friend" and then proceeds to say things like "To be honest, I suspect he didn't know or think much about them" or "This was not a fruitful conversation". How is that supposed friend, who might very well be aware of this person's blog, going to feel after reading this? Is it a cultur…

Right? As he explains, there are many different hierarchies of critiquing a programming language. Yet, they heavily imply if you care about “surface” topics, your feelings aren’t as valid as if you were more interested in the garbage collector.

It's a well-worn genre. "Here are the things you need to know to be a real X" where there just so happens to be perfect overlap with every subject the author knows well. Anything the author doesn't know much about is, of course, irrelevant, and not something a real X would waste their time on.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#218

Post by knorker »

> he didn't want to talk about any of that. To be honest, I suspect he didn't know or think much about them

Or, alternatively, you went all "This guy likes Go. I must explain to him why he's wrong, so that he stops thinking wrong".

This whole article just makes me think "yeah, I wouldn't want to talk to you about that, either". And it's not because I don't know what he means, or necessarily even disagree with his conclusion on Go.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#219

Post by sph »

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…

> I think the reason, plain and simple, is that most developers aren't really in it for the passion anymore, but rather the money.

This site is a prime example. There can't be a post about a non-mainstream programming language without someone's comment saying "I don't get the point of this, it is really hard to hire for/it would be really hard to pick up for junior developers."

It seems every small project, library, language is evaluated in the context of the average FAANG developer, or whether it would fit in a startup environment. Hacking, as in enjoying the art of programming computers, is going the way of the dodo, especially on this site. The few remaining hackers are massively outranked by the "I only know Javascript" average dev, the Silicon Valley-adjacent MBAs and the huge number of those that somehow are here just to post and comment about non-programming topics.

On the rare occasion there's a post on Lisp or software-defined radios, for example, you often see the same faces. It seems that on here, the nucleus of hackers has remained more or less constant since 2010, while all other demographics flooded in.

As an average hacker, I must say that I don't give a rat's arse anymore about most mainstream programming topic you can find on this site's front page.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#220

Post by knorker »

bravetraveler wrote: post #202
Xeoncross wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> financial incentive to work on big boring software engineering using the same skills This is so true: as I've made more, my github has grown more silent.

Similarly, as I've been promoted (and spend more time advising), my skills have atrophied I used to be excellent at kernel hacking, random Linux things that would often be several-weeks trials. Now that I'm not 'in it' constantly, mostly just advising, I've lost a lot of that sharpness Doesn't help the onslaught of the day really kills my desire to learn/play around

As I've gotten more senior my need for coding has not gone away, so I may even be doing more opensource coding now, on my free time.

Coding C++ at work all day, maybe not C++ all night at home.

Meetings all day at work? Yeah, I still have code that needs to come out.

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