What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry • Hacker News Board

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#41

Post by noname123 » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 7:28 PM UTC

Hello, I wrote pretty much the same thing about five years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762121

PG wrote me a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762357

Nothing has changed and actually has gotten worse in my opinion (so I hear you, bro(grammer)).

However, I've gotten a bit older and made a conscious decision to do work that is interesting to me over money and prestige. Mirroring what the other poster said, I try not to worry too much anymore about what people do in Silicon Valley/Techcrunch/Hacker News.

It bothered me before because I was torn between being true to myself and keeping up with the jones to show that I can still hang with the bro(grammer) of RapGenius, Color, Yo, the kid with the AI app whom Marissa Meyer acquired and whatever else is cool now.

It's harder than it sounds because it was easy for me to get caught up in the frenzy of how important developers are, coding is the future, you can get rich etc so I can go to the cool clubs and start a charity foundation at the same time, do a revenge of a nerd kind of thing and get the girl and buy mom a house too (or at the very least, keep up with all of the peeps who are humble-bragging about their career advancements and buying real estate etc.)

In my humble opinion, there are more important things in life like doing a job that you're suppose to be doing, like editing the cron-job according to the JIRA ticket or washing the dishes when the sink is full.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#42

Post by cromwellian » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 7:30 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #32

cromwellian wrote: post #22

I started two companies and I am not sad to see the days of renting rack space, buying hardware, and sys-admining everything yourself disappear, anymore than I'm sad to see that I don't need to build my own power plant to run my stuff, or farm my own food. The innovation in the cloud space in the last couple of years has removed an enormous burden from working on ideas. You could waste enormous time just setting up a…

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.

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 sense to invest and optimize upfront. If your startup runs into scalability problems, you can always fix those later. You should consider the first version a throwaway. More than likely, your investments will be wasted. Even if your startup succeeds, it will often be a pivot away from the original mission.

The only case where I would say this doesn't hold is your security/privacy architecture. You don't want to fix this later after you've let your customer's data be stolen, you want this done right up front. You can rewrite everything else about your product, except for the things, which if they go wrong, will result in people being hurt materially or physically.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#43

Post by larrys » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 7:30 PM UTC

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…

This is also another version of "last man over the bridge" which oddly enough I can't seem to find a link to define it. I thought it was a fairly well know concept. In other words it's similar in a way to old timers on an island and how they react when a flux of newcomers arrive with their new ideas and different motivations. And they aren't "authentic". Same as in a way hazing newbies in the marines, fire department etc. The newcomers then do it to further newcomers. Hence "last man over the bridge" is the place in line you are at. (I'd like to hear other definitions but that's the way I see it.)

As someone who is somewhat of an old timer in a few things that are popular now (flying RC helicopters (gas) since the 80's, photography (70's) (had a darkroom) 70's, and "computers" (70's) (I can do programming somewhat but am not a programmer) and lastly "entrepreneur" (right out of college and things in high school). Also I was in the entrepreneurial program at b school and it was so long ago that people frowned upon it (and I was at Wharton) here's the thing: I'm actually glad there is so much attention paid to things that very few people cared about years ago when it seemed that only I did.

Edit: Oh yeah Unix in the 80's as well as macintosh and Apple as well.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#44

Post by icedchai » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 7:32 PM UTC

I remember those same times (early-to-mid 90's), worked at a few ISPs, even helped start one, and while it's good nostalgia, I'd never want to go back.

Those Sun Servers? They took 4 or 5 minutes to boot up and were dog slow.

T1 connections? Amazing for the time, laughable by today's standards, when the typical broadband connection is 20x faster.

Web development back then? Writing nasty CGI scripts - in Perl if you were lucky - or C if you weren't.

No thanks.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#45

Post by daktanis » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 7:32 PM UTC

"In those days, a startup wasn't a guy who paid some overseas software shop to crank out an MVP to run on a couple of cloud instances hoping to be the next WhatsApp"

Don't really have an opinion on the rest of the essay but I do hate this when I see it.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#46

Post by Goladus » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 7:32 PM UTC

noname123 wrote: post #41

Hello, I wrote pretty much the same thing about five years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762121 PG wrote me a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762357 Nothing has changed and actually has gotten worse in my opinion (so I hear you, bro(grammer)). However, I've gotten a bit older and made a conscious decision to do work that is interesting to me over money and prestige. Mirroring what the…

> PG wrote me a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=762357

I think one way to address this is to limit the scope and talk about specific groups or organizations rather than attempting to make an overly broad assertion about the culture of the entire region.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#47

Post by benihana » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 7:34 PM UTC

Yawn. A whiny, arrogant, grass-is-always-greener post with a bunch of hypotheticals about the filthy unwashed masses encroaching on "our" turf and how much greater it was "back in the day." Bonus points for laying out the criteria for a "true" hacker is (spoiler alert: it's anyone who spent their time almost identically as the author).

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#48

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 7:34 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#49

Post by MicroBerto » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 7:34 PM UTC

I think the biggest complaint he has, but doesn't realize what it really is, is the deterioration of the signal-to-noise ratio in his respective communities.

And he's right. When 3 of every 5 people you meet in the space has more buzzwords than lines of code written, it gets old.

For me, I've found that HN satisfies my need for a better quality forum of like minds. He doesn't seem to have found an acceptable community and is just telling the kids to get off his lawn instead of finding a good place and group of friends to discuss fun stuff with.

But, unlike him, I just can't be mad that that barrier to entry has been reduced. Sure, there's more wantrapreneurs around now. But it's also made life easier for those of us who are still willing to work hard for long amounts of time on something real -- something wantrapreneurs just can't seem to grasp.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#50

Post by kyled » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 7:37 PM UTC

saschajustin wrote: post #17

typicalrunt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy shit, settle down for a second. The guy equates working for a paycheck with entitlement... how out of touch can you be? I didn't read any of what you said in the author's blog. He even mentions, at the end, about "waxing nostalgic". So his argument going to be a bit one-sided but then, it is his argument after all. I agree with the overall sentiment of the author's rant. I miss some of the geeking out that was d…

Young people, new programmers, and other groups who have no power are not responsible for the nature of a field. Old people control the nature of every field. Old greybeards are the ones who made computer science this way--it's just those greybeards that this man disaproves of. This man isn't a billionaire VC, a tenured Comp Sci professor, an author of programming books, or a CEO hiring and training the kinds of empl…

You're missing the point. He's talking about the passion for learning about computers. When was the last time you reversed engineered a binary that had self modifying code, just for the fun of it and to learn how it works? Play same code golf games or war games, purely for the challenge? There's nothing wrong with people making money. It's the fact that people are doing it just for the money. I think there is a video called the bbs documentary. Check it out. The culture surrounding computers has changed, a lot.