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

251–260 of 351 posts

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#251

Post by JohnFen »

Mezzie wrote: post #230
sph wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

> somehow are here just to post and comment about non-programming topics. I comment way more on non-programming topics because that's where I think I can contribute - most people on here are better programmers than I am but I have life experiences that are fairly unusual for this particular bubble. I do read the technical posts but I don't have much to say. As for the 'somehow', I was raised by hackers and I used to…

> I'm too much of a generalist

But one of the primary traits of hackers is that they tend to be generalists.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#252

Post by TechBro8615 »

They're busy building stuff without blogging about it. It's tough to assess a change in culture when your heuristics are limited by selection bias favoring loud contributors over productive builders. That's not to say there aren't great hackers who blog; but there are certainly bloggers who are bad hackers, and by definition they're more immediately visible than great hackers who don't blog.

I'm sure there is a term for this phenomenon, but usually you see it within corporate bureaucracies - the skills that take you to the top are not necessarily the skills that make you good at your job. You get promoted by getting noticed. And creating value is one way of getting noticed. But you don't need to get noticed to create value. Same goes for any builder culture.

So take the opinions of the bloggers with a grain of salt. Eschew the RSS feed for the GitHub commit log. Read the source code, not the blogs. There you'll see that hacker culture is alive and well. Indeed, it's thriving.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#253

Post by safety1st »

jdm2212 wrote: post #205
coldtea wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are vanishingly few people who can bootstrap the infrastructure that will let a company grow to Facebook scale Well, he didn't do that. He just wrote a crappy basic PHP backend. The "scaling at Facebook scale" part happened later, after people were hired and VC money flew in. Same like early Twitter was a crap Rails app that they even had to restart a few times a day because of memory leaks. It still got them…

> He just wrote a crappy basic PHP backend. lol. citation needed. Among geniuses who can build a FAANG company from scratch, I'm sure Zuck is not the strongest software engineer or hacker or whatever. Like, Jeff Dean is undoubtedly a better engineer. Craig Silverstein, too. And Bret Taylor. But if you're going to tell me Zuck is a mediocrity -- not just "a lesser light than Jeff Dean" but an actual mediocrity like us…

If Mark was a hacker of some kind, he was a growth hacker. That's what Facebook was (in)famous for in its early days - implementing various little psychological tricks that drove adoption. A lot of that came from Mark (initially, pretty much all of it).

I'm not aware of any evidence that he was an exceptional engineer. So what? Why would he even care about being that? As long as you can hire engineers that are better than you, you don't need to be a great one to grow a social network. We're not talking about AI here.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#254

Post by tracker1 »

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 it's more about the culture and circle you are in. When you are in education, first starting out, or in irc/slack support channels, you're much more likely to see people with more passion about the technology. If you're in an office or working on a team in an established business it's much more about getting the work done.

Beyond this, priorities shift over time. The priorities of someone in their early 20's that is single will be different than someone in their late 40's with children heading towards college, or even younger children. As you mention, there's also the boot camps and people that simply come in without interest in the technology aspects.

In the end, there's many more people that will get into the gritty details today than decades ago, but there's also many more people that are more concerned about getting work done. This is part of why entropy is really hard to overcome. Trying to get movement in a company towards a new approach can be very hard. If company X is using Java or C#, their developers have likely been using it for many years, know it well and don't see a reason to shift. And for the most part, they are right. You can get work done in many languages, scale and adapt in many ways. Most applications don't even need to scale that much. Most apps are line of business apps that only a few dozen people ever even see and for those that aren't, you can scale vertically quite a bit before you really need to go horizontal.

It's different if you re starting something public facing and want to utilize newer tooling for horizontal scale from the start. Aside: Why CockroachLabs doesn't expose a web api for database queries directly for the likes of Cloudflare Workers or Deno Deploy is beyond me... In the end, it depends on what market you're serving. Getting something working means far more than an optimal approach in one way or aother.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#255

Post by JohnFen »

rlpb wrote: post #224
sph wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

> It seems that on here, the nucleus of hackers has remained more or less constant since 2010, while all other demographics flooded in. I think this also describes those working on software in general. Everyone uses the same interesting-to-hackers low level parts of the stack. But the nature of software is that _use_ scales infinitely, so roughly the same small quantity of developers are needed the same as was needed…

Being a hacker has nothing to do with how far up the stack you operate. It even has nothing to do with software or computers specifically.

Traditionally, being a hacker is being a person who is very interested in learning how things work, and how to use those things in new ways. Historically, proper hackers have focused on things ranging from model railroads to pay phones to bureaucratic systems, to computers and more.

The most common early sign that a child is a hacker is when the child takes apart every machine they can lay their hands on.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#256

Post by JohnFen »

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

This is why I have made it a point to consider my activities that most people would call "hobbies" as my primary and most important activities. What I do for a living is secondary to everything else, and I only do it to give me the funding I need for my real work.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#257

Post by tracker1 »

Xeoncross wrote: post #104
helen___keller wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also: potential hackers might never really form into hackers because there’s a strong career path and financial incentive to work on big boring software engineering using the same skills That’s actually the exact same story of how I ended up in computer science instead of pure mathematics. I was interested in pure logic and set theory, but I could flex the same muscles learning programming language theory and end up…

> 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.

Github came in relatively late for me... so mine is mostly one-off contributions, comments or feature requests. There's a handful of times I'll fork and push my fork out, while waiting on a PR (that sits in queue for a month or more).

I wish I didn't have to have a day job, but alas, I do. I didn't chase the money earlier in my career and I kind of regret it to be honest. I'm closer to 50 now, and while I don't see myself ever retiring, I definitely don't have the energy to put in a 40 hour week and do another 20 on personal or side projects on top all the time. I do spend a good 10-15 hours a week reading, keeping up and exploring, but I find on my own time I'm more in decision paralysis than actually getting stuff done. There's too many good options to explore.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#258

Post by Mezzie »

JohnFen wrote: post #251
Mezzie wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> somehow are here just to post and comment about non-programming topics. I comment way more on non-programming topics because that's where I think I can contribute - most people on here are better programmers than I am but I have life experiences that are fairly unusual for this particular bubble. I do read the technical posts but I don't have much to say. As for the 'somehow', I was raised by hackers and I used to…

> I'm too much of a generalist But one of the primary traits of hackers is that they tend to be generalists.

I care about other things and people as much as tech. I can't just tinker with computers/machines and to stay up to date you have to invest some time in both the work and the communities.

I'm very, very much a generalist. My other hobbies that straddle the line between hobby and professional interest (in that I do them for play but have gotten money for them) include fiction writing, marketing psychology, humanities and qualitative research, and bra fitting.

Currently I'm off on a spree about the physiological nature of emotions and I'm getting really into experiences that are primarily physical and learning about biology in my spare time, which means I don't spend it coding or tinkering.

I can still code/tinker/approach tech problems with a hacker mindset, but I don't like to pretend I'm as good as people who really love it. I'm a dilettante to my core.

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#259

Post by JohnFen »

helen___keller wrote: post #90
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…

Also: potential hackers might never really form into hackers because there’s a strong career path and financial incentive to work on big boring software engineering using the same skills That’s actually the exact same story of how I ended up in computer science instead of pure mathematics. I was interested in pure logic and set theory, but I could flex the same muscles learning programming language theory and end up…

> If I could enjoy my work 30% more that would be great. Is it worth making less than half income though?

I've never once thought of it in those terms, but now that you pose the question... for me the answer is "yes, absolutely, no question about it."

Re: Where have all the hackers gone?

#260

Post by kvathupo »

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'd echo this. I'd also add (perhaps prematurely as a gen-z) that I see a lot less playfulness when it comes to side-projects. Rather, it seems projects start with monetary or career motives. Nothing wrong with this, but I'd like to see more fun!
Post reply on HN