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

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#91

Post by ZenoArrow » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 8:57 PM UTC

dlhdesign wrote: post #29

saschajustin wrote: post #7

So to summarize... a man born into privilege is annoyed by poor people. The guy equates working for a paycheck with entitlement... how out of touch can you be? Working for a paycheck is something you do out of economic neccessity--for survival, NOT entitlement. Getting paid to work on your hobbies in the tech industry in 1995 is basically winning the lottery. Most people would kill to have this chance. This guy is co…

Better summary: A man (who has enjoyed his career for the challenges it brings regardless of the pay level) is frustrated that the majority of his current peers don't seem to share the same passion for the work that he has.

It's possible to interpret these types of past vs. today articles many different ways, but they often have a similar slant...

1. A rose-tinted view of the past (in case the author forgot, the technical challenges didn't prevent a whole lot of dross on the 90's internet).

2. A less than balanced view of today (is it really that hard to think of encouraging aspects of the modern web?)

3. A yearning for days gone by.

The way I see it, these types of articles are less about criticising the present, and more about glorifying the past, a past that the author had some extra connection to by having lived through it. We're meant to marvel at the hardships that were faced, and recognise that the knowledge they accumulated isn't obsolete, so they still have a thing or two to teach us. Every generation will go through this, the generation before this guy did, the generation after will too. The truth is, some knowledge is only truly pertinent to its era. I wouldn't expect to read a book on starting an ISP in the 90s and then think I knew how best to do it now, even if the book might be interesting to read.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#92

Post by forgottenpass » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 8:58 PM UTC

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…

Interesting to watch the term "brogrammer" evolve. I'm not entirely sure what it means anymore

It means people with personalities more than one standard deviation away from the speakers' personal social preferences w/r/t techies (and "neckbeard" is reserved for the other end of the curve).

Choosing "bro" as the label is not a particularly meaningful descriptor, it's just a subgroup that is OK to openly deride.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#93

Post by rjberry » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 9:01 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.

Premature optimisation ...

Getting a good idea is usually harder than getting the tech right. Being able to quickly make prototypes is the most important thing in a start up.

FYI I'm not a "brogrammer". I work at a large established company and one of my main jobs is making systems work at large scale. But that's not what you do when starting a company. If you make it you can sort out those issues later.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#94

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 9:04 PM UTC

rjberry wrote: post #93

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.

Premature optimisation ... Getting a good idea is usually harder than getting the tech right. Being able to quickly make prototypes is the most important thing in a start up. FYI I'm not a "brogrammer". I work at a large established company and one of my main jobs is making systems work at large scale. But that's not what you do when starting a company. If you make it you can sort out those issues later.

If you lay things out well that it has a much better chance of succeeding than if you lay things out poorly. And knowledge helps with that.

If you optimize more than you need to then that is premature optimization. But if it takes 5 seconds to load a page (or more) then any level of success will kill you and that's bad for business. You need to scale just ahead of the needs of your users. Too much and you're going down the premature optimization rabbit hole, too little and you'll end up with angry users and competitors will likely eat you.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#95

Post by rifung » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 9:05 PM UTC

Im new to the industry but I definitely agree with the author. On the other hand, I think its only natural that with the high salaries developers can get more people who don't necessarily love it will join the industry.

Not only that but I've definitely noticed that even among those who are passionate, they usually fall into one of two groups: the ones who like CS and the ones who like building things. That is, the first group is really interested in learning how computers work and theory and the latter group is really interested in building products.

I think the authors point might be that there are many more of the second group of people now, which makes sense since there us so much abstraction you really don't need to know too much about what's "actually" happening to make something.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#96

Post by georgemcbay » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 9:06 PM UTC

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.

I didn't have a blog post about this in the works and my gripes aren't 100% the same (though there is a lot of overlap), but this blog post resonates with me as well.

I'm 41 and have been doing software development professionally since the mid-90s (as a hobby since 1983) and I find the vast majority of the tech industry just so disappointing these days in that it is basically just another "widget factory" industry and I thought/hoped for something better.

If you start a cranky old tech man club, send me an invite.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#97

Post by gaius » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 9:09 PM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #66

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,…

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".

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#98

Post by kendallpark » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 9:10 PM UTC

> But worse than the brogrammers, I think it's the 'entrepreneurs' that bug me the most. The word feels so tainted now.

+1

> it doesn't feel like there will be another wave of innovation that will bring us back to those magical times when such an earth shattering revolution of technology will be solely in the hands of those that love it for what it is.

There's a flip side to this article, which is that the "Golden Age" of tech has huge deficits in terms of access that we are still trying to correct in the 21st century. There are a lot of people that because of race, gender, economic status, geographic location that could not get their hands on such technology and therefore had no opportunity to enter the field.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#99

Post by norseboar » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 9:10 PM UTC

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;…

I think there are two different problems here: building a good solution, and building a solution for a problem that people have to begin with.

If you /don't know/ if there will be any customers for your product (no matter how well-built it might be), spending time and money on building a very solid v1 is a waste. Sure you will have experience that you can leverage in your next venture, but that's an extremely expensive way to get it. And if you're bootstrapping, or have hired other people, you're potentially spending the financial stability of you or your employees to get this experience.

If you /do know/ you will have customers (either because you're sure it's a problem people have, or you've got people giving you money for basic R&D without any guarantee of returns), then I completely agree with you and the author -- build the product right and it will pay dividends later on.

In the prototype-then-throw-away model, you might not get the engineers' best development work, but you will get the best brainstorming and design work, because everybody's comfortable adjusting the product until they're confident they have something that people want. If you marry yourself to it beforehand, if you commit people's livelihoods to it, people will naturally try to rationalize what they're doing because they're committing so much to it, even if it's wrong. And if you've got the smartest people working with you, they'll be incredibly good at it. This creates a much bigger problem years down the line if it fails.

Re: What Bums Me Out About the Tech Industry

#100

Post by VanL » Tue, Jan 06, 2015, 9:12 PM UTC

venomsnake wrote: post #15

> I can't subscribe to the flawed philosophy that a developer shouldn't have to know how an application is talking to his database, or the fine details of what goes on in the underlying system or storage cluster. Those people are like ticking time bombs for some company to hire to build out their platform. They'll get your prototype out the door at light speed, but put any traffic on it and prepare yourself for a bil…

> We should have "Law of minimal needed abstractions"

We have it. Occam's Razor - the original version:

"entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity"