This speaks to me, but I'm also reflective enough to wonder about whether I'm just observing from a different place in life than I was in the 1990ies when all this stuff started happening.
I was young and didn't have many responsibilities then, and lots of free time. Now I'm a dad with a mortgage and an interest in local politics because I want to 'leave it better than I found it'.
All that said... I do think there have been some shifts over time. I grew up in the era of open source taking off, and it was pretty great in a lot of ways. We changed the world! It felt like over time, software became mainstream, and well-intentioned ideas like PG's writing about startups also signaled a shift towards money. In theory, having F U money is great for a hacker in that they don't have to worry about doing corporate work, but can really dig into satisfying their curiosity. But the reality is that most of us never achieve that kind of wealth.
Now we find ourselves in a time with too much concentrated corporate power, and the possibility that that gets even worse if LLM's become an integral part of developer productivity, as there are only a handful of big ones.
Perhaps it's time for a new direction. At my age I'm not sure I'll be leading that charge, but I'll be cheering on those who are.
I'm very skeptical of the article - it sounds to me like classic "good old days" thinking¹.
It's certainly true that IT has grown vastly since those good old days, but there has always been a proportion of people who're just... not that interested in what they're doing. For example I remember being mildly horrified in around 1998 that a colleague didn't know how to run his compiler from the command line; without an IDE he was lost - but I doubt he was the only one.
Meanwhile the idea that there's a dearth of cool new stuff seems quite quaint to me. There's a whole bunch of cool things that pop up almost daily right here on Hacker News². Just because they haven't spread to ubiquity doesn't mean they're not going to. Linux was not mainstream right out of Linus's Usenet announcement - that took time.
As to corporate power? They ebb and flow and eat each other (Data General, Compaq, DEC ... remember them? Remember when Microsoft was the major enemy? Or IBM?)
² Edit: Not to mention, there's also a whole bunch of crap that's not very interesting. But survivor bias means we'll have forgotten those in 20 years time when we're surveying this time period; as Sturgeon's law reminds us, "90 percent of everything is crap."
Yes of course there have always been people who clock in and clock out and don't have a ton of passion for what they do. I don't begrudge that, but personally I need some of the curiosity and joy in hacking on stuff. And I enjoy the camaraderie of being around others who feel that way too.
It just feels like "it's a job" is more of the zeitgeist these days.
And yes, I'm also well aware of what came before 'my time' - mainframes and such were definitely an era where the power was more with the large companies. One of the reasons Linux (and *BSD) was so cool is that finally regular people could get their hands on this powerful OS that previously was the exclusive purview of corporations or, at best, universities.
As to cool projects, sure. They're fun, interesting and creative, but perhaps not part of (a very vague, admittedly) "something bigger", like "the open source movement" was back in the day.
The frontier moves over time. If you stay at any one spot, it will eventually mature and become less fun and interesting. There will be more of the clock-in / clock-out types, and that's perfectly fine -- as you pointed out above, at different stages in life, people may be looking for different things, like stability.
But if you're looking for that spark and excitement again, you need to get back out to the frontier. One frontier that is particularly exciting to me is using AI to speed up the tedious parts of the development process, and to tackle areas where I don't have specialist knowledge. Similarly to how Linux opened up a powerful OS to individuals, AI is enabling individuals to create things that would have previously required large teams.
You're correct about AI seeming to be "where it's at" right now, but I'm really not thrilled with the corporate concentration that seems to be the natural result of requiring massive amounts of computing power.
Perhaps over time it'll get efficient enough to run outside of huge companies; that could be an interesting aspect to keep an eye on.
I don't see how over time we could get to a place where an entity with orders of magnitude less computing power can run AI that is anywhere near as powerful as the huge companies. Maybe for certain narrow applications, maybe even for many such applications, but hard to imagine it happening in a way that un-concentrates power.
Though certain novel uses could lead to new individuals or entities gaining power.
I'd like to be hopeful and would like to hear good arguments for how this could happen - but it seems to me improved technology on the whole leads to increased concentration of power - with exceptions and anomalies but that being the dominant trend.
I am sure the same thing was thought about never getting to a point where every person would have a tiny computer in their pocket that was orders of magnitudes faster than the multi-million dollar computers that took up whole rooms and were only owned by the largest companies.
You mean a tiny computer in your pocket that you can mostly just consume content with and chat with others. Sure there are some neat, useful apps out there, but you can't really learn how technology works on a tablet or phone unless you're allowed to build that specific kind of app. You don't even have a filesystem. 10 year old me in today's world would have not been able to break my phone like I did my old DOS / Win95 PC and actually learn something. Shit I used to spend hours just browsing the filesystem, and the install media to see what I could find and learn and use. That's how I found the Weezer music video, and the pinball game on the Win95 I still CD. There is no equivalent to this with phones.
If you take human brains as the limit (a questionable assumption) they do it all for 20 watts (and hardware that makes itself!) The training is often years and can be expensive.
In all seriousness though there’s plenty of room for improvement both in current models and hardware.
I agree entirely; just because VC focused startups are eager to "rub some AI on" their products doesn't mean that AI itself is boring; it's incredibly cool! Some of the applications are ghastly, but LLMs and diffusion models? Oh my!
Or, you know, if AI is the mainstream hotness or just doesn't float your boat, look for what the iconoclasts are up to and go dive into that, not whatever the VCs are flinging their gold at today.
> I enjoy the camaraderie of being around others who feel that way too.
But... they're still there. They're a little diluted, but I've not yet worked somewhere where I had no like-minded tinkerers amongst my colleagues. I don't think I'd want to, but it just hasn't come up.
> As to cool projects, sure. They're fun, interesting and creative, but perhaps not part of (a very vague, admittedly) "something bigger", like "the open source movement" was back in the day.
But the free software movement dates back to the early 80s, not the 2000s that we're talking about. Open source itself was being seen as a dilution of the principles of free software in the late 90s/early 2000s. More to the point, free and open source software is still very much here - we're absolutely surrounded by it.
> mainframes and such were definitely an era where the power was more with the large companies
It's oscillated. DEC used to be the zippy young upstart snapping at IBM's heels you know. Microsoft didn't start out big and evil; nor did Google if it comes to that. Put not thy faith in shiny new companies for they shall surely betray thee once they devour the opposition... :D
>I'm very skeptical of the article - it sounds to me like classic "good old days" thinking¹
That's a cheap dismisal. There's nothing wrong with "good old days" thinking if old days were actually better.
>Meanwhile the idea that there's a dearth of cool new stuff seems quite quaint to me. There's a whole bunch of cool things that pop up almost daily right here on Hacker News²
Hardly of the breadth and ambition of the 1998-2012 or so period.
>As to corporate power? They ebb and flow and eat each other (Data General, Compaq, DEC ... remember them? Remember when Microsoft was the major enemy? Or IBM?)
Yes, and also remember then players like Sun did cool stuff in the UNIX space. Or when FOSS wasn't basically billion dollar corporate owned wholesale, with mere corporate employees buying the majority of contributors and IBM, Oracle, Google and co running the show. Even RedHat was considered too corporate and now it's IBM...
When I was doing job interviews during my last year of college, I was able to chat with all my interviewers about the morning's Slashdot headlines. Everyone had checked the /. front page that morning and I was able to have a nice ice breaker about the day's stories.
That isn't the case anymore. That sort of monoculture where everyone is reading the same stories, discussing the same topics, and reading about shared values and principles, is long gone.
I'd say "good old days" thinking is probably involved, but not the full explanation. Over the past few decades, software has gone from a fairly obscure profession to being seen as a great way (maybe the best way) to make a lot of money. In absolute numbers, there are probably at least as many engaged, curious engineers as before. There are almost certainly drastically more uninterested engineers who are there partially or fully because of the money, though.
Dunno. I’ve been at this since the late ‘80’s, and have run into precious few developers who were interested in software and programming for its own sake. For most of them it was just a job.
I was a the kind of person who was happy as a pig in mud to be paid to do my hobby of programming computers! Was ecstatic that people would pay money to a young kid to do that!
But most of the people I went to uni to study computer science with at the end of the nineties were there for the money. Even back then it was all about money for most programmers.
There is a generation of programmers that became interested in computers only because they felt that computers were cool. Mostly useless, except for playing games, but cool. Only later the knowledge also turned out to be a source of money.
And then there is a generation that grew up knowing that there was money in computers, so many of them learned to use them even if they didn't care about them per se. This generation also contains many hackers, but they are surrounded by at least 10x more people who only do it for money.
Twenty years ago, most programmers were nerds. These days, nerds are a minority among the programmers. Talking about programming during an IT department teambuilding event is now a serious faux pas.
The only tangible difference between then and now is that many more problems have already been solved. This certainly leaves fewer holes where an enthusiastic developer can flex their muscle.
Then again, I did spend some time in e.g. lisp and Haskell just for the heck of it. And there ate still plenty more unsolved problems outside of the mainstream today.
There are still a ton of vertical markets that have crap for technology stacks, e.g. public transit. There is tons of opportunity out there to improve processes and optimize work.
I mention this when this comes up - my personal view is that it has to do with saturation. At some point being in computers became a 'good job' once that happens a field still has its curious people, but they're not as visible as they're in a sea of people who were just looking for a steady check.
Ironically, LLMs are exactly what drives a lot of curiosity and learning without a purpose. I see it all the time on twitter — people getting chatbots into weird mental states, toying around with different systems on top of them, jailbreaking. More for the fun of the game than anything else.
You can't keep that curiosity and at the same time see one of the most wonderful and awe-inspiring technologies of the last decades as something threatening.
The technology itself isn't threatening. The fact that it's currently concentrated in the hands of a very few large US corporations is what's ... less than stellar from my point of view.
I'm still here, curious as ever. And for the truly curious, it's just gotten better. The ocean we swim in has gotten bigger and deeper.
I lamented when my career first started (2000 or so) that there were devs I worked with who didn't even own computers at home. While my bookshelves were full of books I aspired to learn and my hard drive was full of half-baked projects, they clocked out and their thinking was done.
I still know a few of those now 25 years after the fact. Some of them have made a career out of software. But they never got curious. It was a means to an end. I don't begrudge them that. But as someone who is internally driven to learn and improve and produce, I can't relate.
My primary fustration today is how many of my software peers are satisfied with updating a Jira status and not seeking to build excellent software. I've seen it at all levels - engineers, managers, and executives. I'm actualized by shipping good, useful software. They seem to be actualized by appearing busy. They don't appear to deliver much value, but their calendars are full. It has me at my professional wits end.
Truth be told, the phenomenon of appearing productive without being productive is an epidemic across multiple industries. I've had conversations with people in manufacturing and agriculture and academia and they all echo something similar. Eventually, Stein's law indicates that the productivity charade will end. And I fear it will be ugly.
>My primary fustration today is how many of my software peers are satisfied with updating a Jira status and not seeking to build excellent software. Truth be told, the phenomenon of appearing productive without being productive is an epidemic across multiple industries.
This is hardly a new phenomenon. Dilbert and its ilk have been lampooning this since the 80s.
> The ocean we swim in has gotten bigger and deeper.
IMO this is the part that the author is missing. Back in the 2000's, software development was a much smaller field and your main focus was the "curiosity pond" where all the developers went to tinker.
Now software dev has expanded into an ocean. That pond is still there but the author missed the pond for the ocean.
Somewhat related, the partial-illusion of "where did all the old developers go, they seem way too rare, something is happening to them." While attrition and ageism do exist, there's a bigger factor.
The total workforce has expanded dramatically over time, so even if everybody in the started-40-years-ago cohort remained alive and employed, those (now much older) people would still be a tiny minority among the bigger and bigger cohorts that kept joining since then.
this doesn't make sense to me. early on in my career I was permitted, even asked, to make operating systems, languages, and distributed protocols. in todays world I'm lucky if I'm allowed to write a dashboard.
where is this ocean? that I have all these big pre-cooked components I can use to make saas spaghetti?
I've been in that situation where I was coding by day and didn't have a computer at home. Or at least, I didn't have one that was the same platform as the one I was using at work. Growing up there was at one point a Commodore 64, some kind of Tandy, and a UNIX workstation, but at work I was developing on Windows NT, Solarix, and HP/UX.
In another case, I had recently moved to a new city and we were targeting an internal proprietary platform (again with Windows NT) and also targeting Solaris.
There was a time when you would go to work and you would be working with header files and libraries that were proprietary and for which your company was paying an exorbitant per-head license fee.
Couldn't agree more. Like many, I've had my honeymoon phase with AI and have now learned what it is good for and what it is not. What it has truly been good for is satisfying the nauseating number of topics I want to learn about. I can spend $20 a month and drill down into any topic I like for as long as I like in an incredibly efficient way. What a time to be alive.
By the time I got my first job in 1996, I had been a hobbyist for 10 years and graduated from college. The last thing I was thinking about doing as a single 22 year old who had just moved to the big city and had free cash flow was sit down at a computer after work.
I have never in 30 years written a single line of code that I didn’t get paid for except a little work I did for charity.
That’s completely different. One of my good friends is a bartender. But his passion is his music. He’s practicing with friends, performing in front of people, etc. It is a social event - not sitting at a computer all day.
For years I was a part time fitness instructor and runner. I loved hanging out with friends, being in front of people, meeting them at races and us training together. It’s completely different than being at a computer at home - after working all day on one.
You're missing the point. Your good friend has to work on his music outside of his paid profession. It's a hobby that is not financially viable for him as a career.
You expect someone who writes software for 8+ hours a day professionally to go home and do more of it for fun?
Those who are interested in doing that are free to do so, but most people have more than 1 interest or would like to be compensated for the additional hours they are effectively working in their profession.
Rereading I can't edit now, but I meant there are plenty of respectable musicians who are not like this as well as plenty of great talents that only perform professionally.
Not that one or the other is a less-respectable approach.
What "hackers" don't understand is that at certain scale, social cohesion is extremely important. A huge army of socially cohesive morons will achieve greater things than a small group of dedicated geniuses. This means that for any entity that grows beyond certain scale, socially cohesive morons are actually preferable over dedicated geniuses. The fact that your coworkers are unmotivated lazy stupid fucks is not a bug, it's a feature. They're not there to be smart, they're there to be socially cohesive.
I agree overall, but to push back: 20 years ago, we HAD to be more curious. If you wanted a way to store your code and there wasn't anything that worked for you out there, you had to go and invent Git over a long weekend. Now, there's so many great tools (thanks to thousands or millions of curious devs) that 0-to-1 improvements aren't nearly as possible to discover.
There's still people taking on new frontiers... even if you don't love crypto (and I don't!), a lot of very curious developers found a home there. AI is tougher (due to the upstart costs of building a model), but still discovery is happening there.
I don't think curious developers are gone... there's just an increase of un-curious developers looking for a paycheck. You just have to look harder now (although I think it only seems like we had a cohort of curious devs because we're looking at it in hindsight, where the outcomes are obvious).
The biggest gap was information - though I think you have to go back a bit further really. Until the late 90s if you wanted to know about a topic you generally depended upon printed material or direct transfer of knowledge.
I'm rather envious of kids today who have access to Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and (with caveats) ChatGPT when they're truly interested in a topic. They can dive a lot deeper than I had the opportunity to without bringing in adult assistance.
Sure, but look at the average person. The average person has all the world's knowledge at their fingertips. The access is there. But do people use it? Or do they use it in that way? How many people just scan a wiki article looking to mic drop on someone else instead of trying to understand what they meant or what the material is actually about? Has something similar to that occurred in this thread?
Sure, but most people just want to go to the pub and watch TV. It's still exciting that for the ones who want to do something the horizon has expanded.
I'm not sure, were you contradicting me in the first place? I just thought your point was a bit cynical and I'm giving you my more positive spin on it.
I remember being a kid in the 80s and fascinated by the SDI "Star Wars" project for missile defense. I wanted to learn everything I possibly could about how lasers and particle beams worked, how they were built, how much power they could project, how far, what targeting capabilities were realistic, where you might actually have to place ground stations to fully cover the sky, some raw basics of how spherical geometry and orbital mechanics worked. Most weekends, and definitely every summer for several years, I rode my bike down to the LA County Public Library and checked out the maximum number of books they allowed you to check out, and I did just this. I learned everything I possibly could. I barely remember any of it cause I was like 8 years old, but still, enormous amounts of information have been available to anyone, at least in the US, for a long time. I don't think "printed material" should be a barrier. It takes longer to get to the library than it does to open your laptop or unlock your phone, but the flip side of that is getting outside and riding your bike around incidental to gathering information has quite a few ancillary health benefits you'll never realize if you're tied to a computer all the time.
Ok, but the equivalent for me was in the very early 1980s and I lived in an English village outside a small market town. Their library certainly didn't have any current in-depth book on the computing topics I was interested in. I recall coming across the term "cybernetics" in some tome from the 1950s that was about all they had and being completely unable to connect it to the microcomputers that I was fascinated by.
Probably it would have been possible to get something via inter-library loan, but I would have been 9 or 10, didn't know this was possible and didn't think to ask. The handful of topical books I obtained from parents and schoolfriends was a far cry from just scrolling on your phone to the information you want.
It's not better in every way. But it is better in some ways.
Even my small town in south GA had the latest magazines or you could go the bookstore. Like you said the inter library loan was a thing if you knew about it.
If I wanted to know everything about my first computer - an Apple //e - i needed two books. I needed Apple’s official Applesoft Basic manual and another book I checked out from the library about programming in 65C02 assembly on the Apple //e.
What were those “gaps”? There were decent compilers and IDEs at least in the mid 90s.
MySQL was available for free in 2000 and anyone could download any number of language runtimes for free like Perl and Java. If your corporate overlords weren’t cheap (or you were in college) an MSDN subscription was amazing.
Sure, things existed. mySQL is a great database, but so is Mongo and so is Clickhouse and so is Firebase, etc. Those alternatives all filled a gap MySQL couldn't, and now the bar for creating a new type of database is significantly higher because there's fewer gaps (schema-less, good for logs, good for fulltext search, realtime, etc).
JavaScript has been around for decades. But jQuery made it so much easier, and then React built on top of that even more. And jQuery wasn't the first DOM library, nor was React the first framework – but both were where it seemingly clicked between ideas, usability and whatever else made them successful.
(I will agree that Microsoft had a run of things where anyone who bought in to their ecosystem had a lot of things that worked well together.)
Exactly, the web as an app platform didn’t really take off until 2008. If you were a pure Microsoft shop from top to bottom, all you needed was an MSDN subscription provided by your employer.
Those IDEs sucked compared to what you can download in 5 minutes for free today. The number of libraries available (and where you could find them) was miniscule, and most had very bad documentation for beginners.
People here talking like we've made no progress in the last few decades... which we're that true then that'd also contradict their point and only agree with you... I'm really confused looking at all these replies
What’s the point of having a 0-1 mindset in a corporate environment? A majority of the time it’s wasted. It gets shelved and never used again. Maybe some upstart in the company picks up the effort again 5-6 years.
We (ie, people that do not have a safety net) do not have this luxury you people did in the 1990s of experimentation and curiosity. Boomers and leaders using shitty Reaganomic economic policies have decimated our safety nets by so much that it makes experimentation a luxury for the rich and powerful.
Cost of living is higher than ever. Inflation is higher than ever. We are handcuffed to this shitty system in America called “private health insurance.” Get sick? No job? You are fucked m8.
The risks of "curiousity" are much much higher than it was during your time buddy
I don't think that the curious developer is gone, very much like I don't think that the organic, non-corporate Web is not gone. But the curious and passionate developer is hard to notice in the crowd of developers who learned the craft just for the money it was bringing. Similarly, an indie Web site built as a passion project is hard to come by among the numerous Web sites built to extract money.
There was time when being a software developer was not a particularly prestigious or well-paying job in corporations, or maybe a weird hobby of developing games for the toy 8-bit entertainment computers of the day. It was mostly attracting people who enjoyed interacting with computers, were highly curious, etc.
Then there was a glorious time when the profession of software engineering was growing in importance by the day, hackers became heroes, some made fortunes (see e.g. Carmack or, well, Zuckerberg). But this very wave was the harbinger of the demise: the field became a magnet for people who primarily wanted money. These people definitely can be competent engineers! But the structure of their motivation is different, so the culture was shifting, too. Now programming is a well-paid skilled trade, like being a carpenter or a nurse.
If you want hacker ethos again, look for an obscure field which is considered weird, is not particularly well-paid, but attracts you.
Yes, the author reveals implicitly that he is a web developer. As far as I am concerned, not having a new JS framework innovation neither impacts innovation nor creativity.
If you don't own the company you work at, you shouldn't be curious, at least not for their benefit if they don't compensate you accordingly.
In the past I did many mistakes like pulling all nighters to because I found a way to make checkout experience more pleasant. That resulted in massive increase of revenue and none of that benefitted me. Or unblocked other team, they couldn't find a reason why their app would randomly crash. Board was panicking as client was going to pull out. I saved the day. Multi-million contract gone through. "Thank yous" didn't help me pay off debts.
Only be curious for your own stuff. For corporations? Do bare minimum.
You should be curious if you wan to progress within the company, or when changing jobs. Knowing significantly more than a job requires was propelling me quite effectively when I was younger. This slowed down when I started to spend less time on lateral research (aka "curiosity").
Look at the leveling guidelines of every major tech company. You don’t get promoted based on “knowing more”. You get promoted based on your ability to handle a larger scope of work, your “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”. Different companies state it differently. But it all boils down to this.
As far as knowing more, the best way to get promotions raises and job opportunities is via networking, the ability to market yourself inside and outside of the company and soft skills.
Well the best way to make more money is to work for companies that pay more money - ie BigTech and adjacent [1] - and then learn the politics of promotions.
[1] Yes “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions)
I weep for a world that is increasingly dominated by corporations, filled with people who are insistent (probably correctly) that they are being taken advantage of, doing the bare minimum, all resulting in an awful experience for everyone. Behind every support ticket that you just can't seem to get resolved, every horrible experience trying to use some product seemingly designed to drive you insane, behind every hare-brained decision that makes your life miserable for seemingly no reason, there's an apathetic worker who's taken your mindset. The impact of your efforts doesn't just affect your employer. We all work together to create the world. What kind of world do you want to live in?
I would hope there to be a healthy medium between "pulling all nighters" and "Do bare minimum" -- perhaps somewhere where we all try to do our best, but don't push ourselves too hard for no reason? I mean, that's more reasonable than imagining we'll one day overthrow our corporate overlords. Probably, I'm naive and idealistic. But I can't help but feel like the result of apathy is not satisfaction.
This author saw a few examples of the metric chasing phenomenon, promptly forgot how many counter-examples exist, and wrote this lovely article for you to latch on to with matching outrage.
But it is simply untrue.
Just the other day a single engineer completed a 25 year project to emulate VideoDisc games. There’s a new JS framework or a new static site generator every day of the week. And with LLMs it’s never been easier to be curious about something and go tinker.
I agree with the author but I think a key driver of this is overall loss of psychological safety in the world.
People play and tinker when they feel that they are in a secure enough environment to fritter away time without feeling like they've incurred risk by doing so.
Given the state of the climate, economy and politics today, I think a whole lot of people feel a whole lot less secure. When I look back at recent US history when there seemed to be the most innovation going on, it was the 90s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before 9/11. That was probably the "OK-est" a lot of folks in the US felt in their lives.
You might rightly point out that people are wasting lots of time these days, staring at screens, binging TV shows, re-reading giant sci-fi and fantasy series. That's true. But there's a big difference between wasting time escaping the world versus "wasting" time creatively engaging with it.
Deflating that theory is the tsunami of innovation in computing in the '60s-'80s in spite of the even worse state of the economy and politics in that era. (Indirectly the climate too if you count the widespread air and water pollution back then.)
The 90s was just the crest of the momentum of the tech enthusiasm built up during the 70s and 80s. You know, the Vietnam War, petroleum crisis 70s and the culmination of Cold War, Reagan and Thatcher, oh God we're all going to die 80s.
You do not own it, you only rent it is the crucial point, but it's buried inside a distracting outer point.
The distracting outer point is "Build what you Can’t Ship", which has limits, and is just another iteration of the old don't sell out idea about art. It's like saying "be an outsider artist". That's not a good goal. It's all very well spending years writing a book in secret - supposedly without a thought for the audience - but if you accidentally wrote it in a private language that nobody can ever read, or made it unrelatable or incoherent, then that's not creative brilliance, it just isn't any good. Without pandering to popularity, you should still write for some audience, and if you're making art at all, imagining an audience is inherent to that. Similarly if your software only runs on your own machine, or (referencing a recent HN post) you perhaps spent years writing an adventure game in QBasic for the love of it, but accidently made it 64-bit so nobody can run it on DosBox, well, that's suboptimal.
So another point is that writing for a niche market is a fine attitude. On the other hand all this you only rent it stuff makes the niches smaller and more obscure, and that's a bad thing. You want a comfortably-sized niche where there's a medium-sized audience, so you get some attention in return for being subject to only some pressure to perform and conform.
Interestingly, I feel the opposite for myself, as an experienced senior engineer.
I am doing more side projects, and finishing more projects, and feel a much greater level of confidence in starting new projects since I feel more confident that I will get at least an MVP working. These are not commercial efforts, I am just tinkering and scratching my own itches.
I attribute 3 reasons to this change:
- Vibe coding helps me do parts of the tech stack that I used to procrastinate on (UI, css)
- Gemini helps me solve all the inscrutable devops issues that used to block me in the past.
- A great open source tech stack that just works (Postgres, docker, node, ollama....)
AI helping me with the above has allowed me to focus on the "fun" parts of the side projects that I do. And the UIs also end up being much prettier than what I could create myself, which gives me the confidence to share my creations with friends and family.
I very much agree with this. I'm sure that dev culture as a whole has gotten less curious as it has gotten more mainstream. However, I think that the absolute number of curious devs has grown. There are ways to convert that advantage to replace what is lost, but it does take effort. Although, I suspect that it took effort to be in tech 20 years ago---people just forget that (or had more effort to spare when they were younger).
Friend of mine just got laid off from 15 years at google, he's in his mid/late 40s. He's started to learn about embedded systems, hardware controllers, he's playing with haskell and erlang and doing work he's never done before, actually very far from webscale DB architecture, he's the most happy i've seen him in his life, he's following his curiosity and he's like a pig in mud.
After 15 years at Google he’s most likely at a point where he doesn’t have to work for a living anymore, and still afford a comfortable life for his family. I imagine that’s a big part of his happiness.
In the last 50 years, software has morphed from a hobbyist pursuit, to a nerdy subculture, to a trillion+ dollars industry. This has caused a pretty significant mix shift in the software developer community: the reason driving the mean developer into this field in 2025 is very different from that of the 2015 developer, and that of the 2005 developer.
Arguably there might be more curious tinkerers nowadays, but they might represent a smaller slice of the pie.
And before software became a hobbyist pursuit (with the advent of the PC and the home computer) it was entirely the world of large enterprises and governments. Think large main frames and minicomputers: IBM or Burroughs or DEC. It was also a different age.
Maybe only possible once you could finally own a whole "system" single-handedly and do whatever you wanted, for the first time ever.
Perhaps the fundamental concepts of "owning" your own and doing whatever you want with it have been allowed to dwindle so badly it seems like no comparison.
Okay lol. The curious tinkerer developer is still very curious, but the culture around his or her job is probably wringing the enthusiasm of the field out of them.
Cause the median developer is now someone who went into it for the money. It's what happens when there's no other comparable growth careers/opportunities available.
I love computers, but I'm tired. I spend all day doing stand-ups and scrum and SAFE and then trying to build microservices that talk to other microservices that other teams have built and I just want to get it done with the minimal amount of explosions and call it a day. I can't afford to tinker at my job, and I have no energy at night. I made my hobby my job and it killed it.
Yes I think your experience sums up about >95% of all dev experience. I am doing about same thing as you for last 8-10 years or so. I guess it is about same time where Agile took hold of IT/Software industry.
Apart from may be few core infrastructure primitives at public Cloud providers most of IT stuff today is API calling API calling API and so on.
It will be the case until Human is Out Of Loop from most of the IT work.
I agree. My enjoyment of my career as a software developer dropped dramatically about 10-15 years ago when "agile" started taking off. Even in some of the companies I worked at that didn't actually use it, it was mentioned in pitches by sales to show how modern we were and then used as an excuse to shoehorn in all kinds of random features that made no sense.
And it's unlikely that more than a low 1s% of companies do agile as originally conceived. "Agile" has become everything it was originally opposed to: tons of process, specialized roles that have nothing to do with development (scrum masters), little to no direct communication with customers (at least in the places where I've worked). The dominant tool for doing "Agile" (Jira) says it all - a slow, heavy, bug tracking system with everything and the kitchen sink in terms of features often imposed on teams from the top down. Very "agile" indeed.
I can 100% guarantee you my SAFe company still thinks of themselves as Agile. Sure, we just planned out what were doing in every sprint for the next quarter, but we still do the ceremonies, and that's what's important, right?
I have no metrics on this, but I've been seeing/hearing of scrum popping up in all sorts of places, not just in software but in other firms where it doesn't belong. For example, my relative works in a chemical engineering firm and they use scrum. A friend of mine is in another flavor of engineering field and they use scrum as well. The sad truth is agile/scrum has really lost the plot in most places and is mostly used as a way to justify micromanagement of developers (or other roles) and lack of proper long term planning.
I mean computerization has always been about automation. There are a massive number of tasks of humanity that have been automated or mechanized away and more will continue to do so in the future.
Honestly some of my best jobs were at places that had a nicely balanced practice in place and the backbone to remind execs that if they interrupt makers daily with new shiny asks they will in effect get nothing (because nothing would ever be completed)...
But obviously we can both have worked at places with those labels with vastly different implementations and thus experiences :)
I was at the same place you are for a while until I realized my obsession with doing everything "right" was killing my enjoyment of programming. I read through Let Over Lambda a couple of months ago and was blown away at how deeply unmaintainable some of his code examples are, but I got inspired to start letting myself do weird unmaintainable shit while programming instead of constantly acting like my code has to pass a code review and I've found its a lot more fun.
I used to have a lot more mental bandwidth and energy to be "curious" and to tinker once upon a time. But now the world is so literally and figuratively on fire and every executive is so rabidly frothing at the mouth over AI that now I just want things to "just work" with the least amount of bullshit so I can just go home on time and forget about work until the next business day.
I just want this fucked decade to be over already.
While I do agree things can always be worse (and seem to want to continue to be worse), I think there has to be a rock bottom of sorts past which the unwashed masses will simply not tolerate. Maybe that's what's left of my optimism talking.
for me it feels like I have to spend all day fighting with folks who are constantly “holding it wrong” and using libraries and frameworks in really weird/buggy ways who then seem completely uninterested in learning.
In my free time I love working on my own projects because I don’t have to deal with this bullshit and I can just craft things finely without any external pressure.
Exactly the situation in pretty much every company I worked at in the last 10 years.
Fighting the Product Manager, fighting the Designer, sometimes even fighting some micromanaging stakeholder that won't leave you alone.
It's definitely fights I can win, but do I even have the energy anymore? Development work involves more than meets the eye. While there are some folks who understand the technical intricacies, it's tiring having to join discussions you know won't go anywhere.
I wish it was 2000-2010 again, when my biggest problems were Sales promising features we don't have and then having fun with the other devs coding it.
If you don't have energy, then you are doing too much. Pace yourself. If you think something can be delivered in 5 days, say it needs 10 days. Otherwise this is just a road to burnout and exploitation.
World will not end if project is delayed by few weeks. You get time for your own tinkering (never tinker on company stuff, even if that would improve things, unless you are shareholder).
This so much. When there’s a real urgency, you will know it (aka the whole team will be brought in). A good pace (as in not ruining your mental health) is feasible.
damn this was me for a few years. I hate corporate work environments so much. Then they hire bottom of the barrel contractors and expect you to get them up to speed in less than a week or so.
Final straw for me was RTO. Silently quitting and getting my ticket punched (laid off) was the best thing for me.
There are current efforts along these lines! For example, permitting is a huge bottleneck - software could be part of the solution (carefully and thoughtfully integrated, of course).
Disclosure: I work at govstream.ai - we work in this space [we're hiring!]
This is the root of it all. 8-10 years of experience with an above average pay rate means you can just start to afford a starter home in any of the tech hubs.
It is super bleak: yeah, as a software person, you can think about what it would take to afford a home.
As a teacher or many other professions? Forget about it. You need to either marry someone with a more lucrative career, or move somewhere more affordable.
Yes exactly. There is a huge amount of people going into software development so they can have the basic security of owning their own dwelling. Prices have gone up even in non tech hubs. Home pricing vs what people earn is the reason for so much destitution in this country, and so many people are locked in its a complete non-issue for them, or a benefit.
The single biggest determinant of people's cost of living, and the single biggest driver of backsliding living standards in many of the most productive cities in the US.
When math starts falling from the sky, generated by AI of course and proved with theorem provers, then everything will start falling from the sky. There will be a way to have more houses than anyone would ever need, for every person on the planet.
It's not just housing. Imagine you want to start a business. There is not much commercial property available and if there is something, it is too expensive and wildly taxed.
That number is not tax as a percent of profit like corporation Tax, but includes all contributions. For example 23.5 from that number is just social security paid by the company. In other developed countries like the UK we also have those sort of taxes (at 15% of pay in the UK). It is misleading of the report to give this number as a % of profit since then if a company makes no profit, it technically has an infinite tax rate, despite the fact the tax owed does not depend on the profit.
I got started in the 1980s, and super-curious and technical people were the norm. We were incredibly strongly attracted to computers.
The first real growth in computers in that kind of era was Wall Street and banks. Wall Street in particular started paying huge bonuses to developers because it was clear that software could make huge piles of money. Then we started seeing more people joining in for the money who were not necessarily passionate about technology.
Then came the dot com era and bust, and then the rise of social media, FAANG, and absurd corporate valuations allowing ridiculous total comp to developers, and the needle moved even more towards money.
The net result is the curious and the passionate are still here, but our numbers are massively diluted.
I come places like here to find that passionate niche.
In defence, it's not just the developer. Every tech company seems to be copying the FAANG template of constantly having to prove your value and looking over your shoulder. There's no more "tenure" if you want to call it that. We've gone like academia where it's publish or perish and now everyone games the system to keep their luxury jobs.
> It's what happens when there's no other comparable growth careers/opportunities available.
That's not entirely true. We (society, definitely US) pushed going to college HARD for the last 3-4 decades and glamorizing how much money you'll make. Now, we have an overabundance of people with college degrees and thousands of dollars in debt to those degrees.
There's plenty of career paths where you could make decent money that don't require a college degree.
We should have been pushing people to figure out what they wanted to do, not "Make lots of money", and figure out the path that gets them there.
We should have figured out how that get some of the benefits of productivity gains to go to workers. We were promised a rising tide lifts all ships, but now that the tide rose and is started to go back out, those that promised didn't deliver but keeping hoping we won't notice.
You're acting like it's something we don't have a solution for... that's not the issue, it's about insuring the investor class from winning capitalism and owning everything.
We did push people into what they wanted to do: make money.
The sad reality is that "everyone learn to code" was by and large a marketing distraction from the severe structural unemployment the fast and loose economy is in. No a coal miner can't just learn to code and get a job in WV, certainly not 1,000's of other miner sin the same position, not can the millions of people that corporate laid off over those same decades.
Coding was a way out of poverty, but for most people it was just a distraction to keep them from seeing how bad the economy is.
You say this as if it is a negative connotation and it seems to be ignoring realities of the modern world.
My first trip through college I studied business and then the economy collapsed. Most people my age eeked their way through menial jobs (like me) and survived, found a way to break through, or, (like me) went back to school years later when the economy improved to try to find another opportunity. For me the choices were CS or nursing at that time, and I have always been good at math and with computers, so I chose that.
I wouldn't say I ever "loved" development, especially not the current corporate flavor of it. I've had some side projects when I get time and energy. But there's never really been a point in my life where I could ever have afforded getting the level of expertise I possess now just for the "curiosity" of it. Not everyone has a trust fund or safety nets.
I interviewed many people from top universities and they absolutely scream "I couldn't care less about the field, I'm just here to maximize the compensation".
At the same time I get 19 year old self taught kids who are miles better at programming, learning and are genuinely passionate.
The people who hated thinking about and writing code think everyone else does (or should) too. Unfortunately these folks manipulated their way into management.
And it's all a consequence of the dollar being so worthless by now that you need a six-figure income and still may not be able to afford a middle-class lifestyle in a growing number of places any more :\
This has been happening since the 2008 financial crash when a lot of people would have normally gone into careers on Wall Street, but the shrinking Wall Street job market led people into tech as a high-performant, decent paying career.....
(U.S. biased opinion, of course)
Don't know about other countries, but here in the UK there is no longer money in the development.
Subsequent governments turned the profession into the captive market, where you can only realistically work for corporations who fix the wages by following so called "market rates" and you cannot create your own job if you disagree with the rates.
I was always under the impression that high level UK engineers tend to become freelance consultants so as to get paid an appropriate amount - is this not true (anymore)?
This used to be the case, but now with IR35 rules you are generally treated as an employee for tax purposes not a business, which heavily complicates the situation. This in turn brought down expected rates to the point where most would rather the employment option since the risk of being self employed no longer came with a substantial reward.
Median pay for a dev in London is about £60-65k(a out $87,000). This isn't that high given the cost of living in the city, with your average shared flat with a few roommates going at about £1k a month nowadays. Add in that you'll be hitting the marginal tax rate of 40% plus 9% student loan tax and about 8% national insurance (ok income under 4k a month) and you don't end up with that much to live on.
The average university grad would be better off in law/finance/medicine by income in London. This isn't to stay the top software Devs don't get paid a lot, but it's a minority compared to the legions of high paid people in finance in London and the surrounding industries.
Funny thing being is that doing that exploring and tinkering is what makes them more money. Otherwise you're just stuck with trying to make a thinner iPhone and that doesn't seem to be going all that well...
The best model I've seen is the 3M-style "10% Time"
Under that model, 10% of your time is completely up to you (within reason) to work on things that aren't your main project or scope.
Works out well for R&D or more open ended positions, since you can have the flexibility to explore hunches without having to justify a whole project around it.
It always makes me groan when I see this sentiment like back in the olden times, people got into development for “passion”.
Sure I was a hobbyist in the 80s programming in assembly language on four separate architectures by the time I graduated college in 1996 in CS. But absolutely no one in my graduating class did it for the “passion” we all did it because we needed to exchange money for food and shelter.
The people jumping into tech during the first tech boom were definitely doing it for the money and the old heads I met back then programming on Dec Vax and Stratus VOS mainframes, clocked in, did their job and clocked out.
People doing it now for money aren't the same as you likely doing it for the money in the old day.
When I went into comp-sci, it wasn't the cool path to riches it's been marketed as for the past 15 years.
EDIT: you graduated around the same time as me. Sure everyone wanted jobs. But there were easier paths to getting a good job in '95/96 that cramming late night comp-sci work. Almost everyone in my class had grown up in the age of hacking around on Apple IIs, their first PCs, etc. No one just randomly ended up in the Comp Sci part of the university because they just wanted a job to make money.
It wasn’t for the “riches” and there has never been a time where 90% of the developers working weren’t doing boring old enterprise dev making middle class wages.
And most of the people in my class had their first exposure to computer programming at my state school in south GA was in college.
Your experience is localized and perhaps more anecdotal than you admit. I also graduated and started my career in '96. But, I grew up in the SF Bay Area and did my CS major at UC Berkeley. I saw a lot more of the idealist types being described by others in these comments. It's not that we didn't expect to need jobs, but there was more passion-driven interest. Back then, it seemed like people "just in it for money" or to meet family expectations were more often going to pre-law or pre-med.
I had a focus on programming languages in my undergrad studies and went into an academic R&D programming job, basically making tools for computational sciences. I've basically spent my whole career using and writing open source software.
I've definitely seen a kind of culture shift where the frontier nature of our old R&D culture is getting drowned out by boring process. To me, it is largely the influx of cybersecurity compliance that is killing the old culture. The bureaucratic compliance overhead is antithetical to the small team prototyping approach that drove progress during most of my career. It inspires a sort of cargo cult risk-management process that seems more about appearances and plausible deniability than actual secure systems.
You think most developers in the US were located “in the Bay Area”, went to Berkeley , and spent a career doing open source work in computational science and you call my experience “anecdotal”?
Most developers from the beginning worked at banks, government, defense etc doing boring enterprise work. That has always been the case.
They weren’t doing “research” writing COBOL for banks and the government.
In 30 years, I’ve worked at 10 jobs for startups, boring big enterprise companies, BigTech and I’ve been working in consulting (3 of those were working full time in AWS’s consulting department) for five years working with developers from startups, enterprises and government.
I think my exposure to a wide swath of the industry is a little bit more than working in California for 30 years…
Even when I was younger and single, all of us would hang out after work - males and females and go to the bar, the club, the strip club (yes the women too - it was their idea they were mostly BAs and one programmer), and just really enjoy the money we were making. We were all making $50K-$80K back when you could easily get a house built in the burbs for $150k-$170K.
Even as I got older, and change jobs in my mid 30s, by then my coworkers were mostly involved with other hobbies and our families. We weren’t even thinking about computers after work.
Sorry, I didn't mean to discount your experience so much as add another microcosm to the mix. I think we're all anecdotal...
But, I do think HN has a cultural fixation on the fabled Silicon Valley experience. This includes an attachment to (nostalia for?) the old university/startup axis. This used to be a more fluid exchange, rather than just the regular enterprise hiring pipeline.
That’s just the thing - it never was on the meta level.
The tech startup scene was a thing between the mid 90s and 2000 with the first dot com boom and even most of them outside of the hardware companies like Sun, Cisco, Intel and software at Netscape were not doing cutting edge for the time development. The startups were throwing dumb (or some premature) things at the wall with no business plan backed by VC money. The people at startups were definitely there for the money. No one had a “passion” to deliver pet food or groceries (Webvan) or early web advertising.
Tech before the mid 90s were programmers building software on mainframes mostly doing boring things.
You had the dark days between 2001-2008 before mobile, web apps, SaaS and high speed internet took off where all most people really could find were boring enterprise jobs. Back then, I was living in Atlanta and the dot com bust didn’t affect the local market at all. The banks, the airlines, the credit card processing companies were hiring boring Microsoft devs and Java devs like crazy.
I’ve just seen too often where 90% of the devs who spend their career at boring old enterprises don’t have any idea what it’s like for those who are in the top 10% working at BigTech and adjacent while at the same time those 10% can’t fathom the fact that there are “Dark Matter developers” living their lives in tier 2 cities with their big houses in the burbs treating a job as just a job and most people always have.
I’ve been on both sides (and now in the middle doing strategy cloud consulting). I had my first house built in 2003 for $170K and even my second house built in the “good school system” in the burbs of Atlanta in 2016 for $335K. We moved and downsized three years ago.
Did the author miss it when this happened twenty years ago?
In 2000, at my very first job, was when I first met a developer who got into it for the money and not for the love. When he told us he picked computer science in college because it seemed like it was a good way to make a living, and a lot easier than law or medicine, the rest of us programmers looked at him like he had sprouted a second head. By 2010, people like him were the norm.
Who cares, though?
If you're a "curious" developer, the existence of a massive preponderance of incurious engineers who are in it for the money doesn't change who you are. It doesn't have to change how you see yourself.
Socially, there are more "curious" developers to connect with and learn from than ever before.
The downside is that people outside of the industry will draw conclusions about you based on their perception of engineers as a whole. Boring and mercenary.
But let's face it, in the eyes of most of the population, boring and mercenary is a step up from how we were perceived when it was just us nerds who were weird enough to enjoy it.
There's a funny correlation with UC Berkeley comp sci requirements. Dot com bubble pushed the minimum GPA to declare up. Bubble burst, GPA requirement went down. 2014-2018 it crept up again.
I could've been annoyed that everyone was doing it for the money while I really cared, but you know what, most people cannot afford to go to college for a low paying career. And I took a high paying job in the end when I could've easily done research or tinkering instead, so can't complain.
Now if anything, I'm pissed off at the few coworkers who also care a lot and act superior doing stuff the "real coder" ways, actually don't get very much done, and hold others back.
As a professional musician, every very few years you sit down and you write new songs and record an album. But then you have to go on tour to make money and engage your fanbase and demonstrate what you've learned and finessed in a way that delivers immediate value to your customers. Touring is not fundamentally creative, but it is enjoyable in it's own right. Or you can be a hobbyist composer (pure creativity). Or a session musician (pure craft). Or play in a covers band (pure work). I don't see this as any different.
Yeah I’ve noticed the sage/wizard archetype has been pushed out.
SWE culture was very different in a low interest rate environment. Teams were over staffed. No new tech came around for a long time so everyone was focused inward on how to improve the quality of the craft. At my big tech company some teams had 2-3 people dedicated to purely writing tests, maintainability, documentation, and this was for a <1m MAU product.
Then boom free money gone. Endless layoffs year over year. Companies pushing “AI” to try and get SWEs to deprecate themselves. It’s basically just trying to survive now.
That wizard that used to nag everyone about obscure C++ semantics or extremely rare race conditions at distributed scale has disappeared. There’s no time for any of that stuff.
Like all cultures, this was all performative. People astutely observed how to say and care about the things that they saw, the people above them, saying and caring about, and mimicked them to promotions. That doesn’t work anymore, so that wizard culture is long gone.
If you've ever wondered what's worth making yourself, it really comes down to the goal of building skills, or obtaining the unobtainable.
The latter is all over cuisine. There are lots of dishes and ingredients that are not economically viable as products. Factors like shelf-life, seasonal availability, cost of production, complexity of preparation - all that stuff is absolutely worth taking on yourself. We never see a huge portion of the world's cuisine at the supermarket for those reasons. Restaurants are better since they cook meals, but they're limited by similar economics and making money at volume & scale. The only way to go deeper is to DIY.
Just like with cooking, there is a huge range of possibilities outside economic viability that applies to any technology. Build a kit car that can't be manufactured on an assembly line. Make stuff out of wood that you'll never see at a craft fair. Build electronics and software with insane BoMs that no entrepreneur would touch with a 10-foot pole. Renovate a room in your house to taste in a way that no contractor would dare take on. If this stuff scratches an itch or enriches your life in some way, learn, explore, and go do it.
I'm a new grad/junior dev and my observation/experience, for what it's worth, is that most of my peers just want to keep their heads down and get employed. I can think of 2 people that are genuinely super into exploratory dev stuff and tinker with projects (as opposed to hey, I need to make a side project for my resume) out of the very large amount of CS students I know.
For me, it's simple. If I didn't need to earn a paycheck I'd be tinkering day in, day out, chasing anything and everything that piqued my interest even a little. That's what I did when I was young with no responsibilities and no worries about the future, and it's my natural state.
That isn't reality, however, and so most of that energy is consumed by my day job, and it feels wasteful to put what little remains into projects that have little chance of any practical return. Any time I start settling into work taken up out of pure personal interest, the "responsible adult" part of my personality starts stratching at the back of my mind and pushing me to go do something more productive.
Pedantic pet peeve: the past tense of “lead” as in “leader” is "led". NOT "LEAD". Lead is a metal. “When Curiosity Lead the Way” is a nonsensical phrase.
There were also mistakes in using “it’s” instead of “its”.
But these things are ignored by most people anyway. I guess my problem with the article is that it’s a bit confusing. It started talking about people not being curious and using tech they hate, then later he’s annoyed that people like to experiment and tinker with new frameworks. Then later it’s talking about some other thing, and there doesn’t seem to be anything tying all of the author’s complaints. As if it’s just a freestyle rambling instead of trying to get to a point.
This drives me crazy, too, but it seems like the misspelled version is now more common than the correct one. I imagine the dictionaries will eventually cave to common usage and say both versions are correct, and I'll remain bitter about it for the rest of my days.
Omarchy is by DHH, Bitchat is by Jack Dorsey, Ghostty is by Mitchell Hashimoto. These aren't examples of individual hackers moved by curiosity. These are examples of people who have won their escape from capitalism and get to be free doing as they please.
I’ve been there, looking for pennies in the couch to be able to afford a burger while I waited for my next contract gig deposit. Even if your project doesn’t become the next big thing, you’ll end up with something to show in your resume. That will open tons of doors.
Not really. Hiring processes seem to no longer even take a look at repositories and projects. I have tons of projects, some even finished and described on my website. Have yet to take part in any interview, in which someone wants to talk about my projects or ask me anything about it. They are all just unaware and clueless.
I have been with my company now for 13 years. Back then we had plenty of slack time which we used to try stuff. We introduced git, spent months on figuring out if UI automation works, invented a distributed test runner, spent weeks on building shielding enclosures so our tests that use RF communication won't fail in the crowded test lab. All of these resulted in huge leaps forward and improved productivity enormously.
Since then devs got squeezed more and more so that nobody has any time for trying out stuff. Tech debt accumulates and nothing improves. When you have an idea, you have to submit a proposal to a review board which approves requests from politically connected people and rejects other requests because other deadlines.
This development has taken out everything that made me enjoy about the job and I am good at. Thankfully I am reaching retirement so I am happy to leave.
What you wrote sounds like a good description of processes at my previous job, which I left after 7y. At the beginning I saw a problem, I solved it, got my hands in everything that needed a solution. I basically built the whole initial platform.
Later it was just all scrum wannabe agile and task after task, while experimentation was phased out and engineers were even forbidden to explore other topics than the team lead wanted, because according to him those topics were not close enough to the job. Guess what, all good engineers left. Now that team lead left as well, and if they didn't learn anything from that experience, I am sure they will wreak havoc somewhere else.
This feels like a careful what you wish for scenario.
The industry has flooded with money motivated people, rising the income of the curious (but not exactly marketable) engineer. Yes those people who flooded in might be uninspired, loathsome, buffoons (in the eyes of elite nerds). But also it's the opportunity for your hobby to be mainstream, encountered by those who likely never would have, to not be denigrated for your skill with technology etc.
I'm grateful for how software has progressed from IQ 160, to 140, to 100, to 95 segments of the populace. It means we're winning culture over. It means we're solving problems (including how difficult it used to be to engage with). We've made previously wildly difficult things be table stakes for todays app. (one trite example: long polling became websocket pushes)
We should be celebrating how mainstream we've become.
Taking a contrarian point here, I went into software to make money doing a craft I can enjoy. I love software because its *useful*. Useful enough I can finance a lifestyle I enjoy for myself and my family, while still feeling moments of creativity and autonomy.
I think there needs to be a distinction between artist and artisan. Art exists for its own sake, code exists because its useful. I don't want code that reads like poetry, I want code that works so I read actual poetry later.
> Have a project in mind that you’ve always wanted to tackle but it never made sense to you to do it because it would never be used by anyone else or it would never make you any money?
I appreciate the tinker's and hobbyists, software is endlessly interesting as a career, and I'm thankful to be here. But I only want to build code that is useful.
That may be so, but the thing you are paid for depends on a colossal mountain of unpaid labor by tinkerers. There’s no job for you if people with real curiosity weren’t interested in installation and packaging, fixing bugs, Rust, CSS expressiveness, authorization expressiveness, virtual machines, standard library algorithms, etc. Something tells me the $250/mo you might spend on some GitHub sponsorships and Patreons - if even that - is not paying for anyone’s kids’ private schools.
And anyway, how useful is your code, really? I will not generalize or make assumptions, but you’re also not going to tell me what it is, right? So scrutiny for thee, but not for me?
And if it’s like, “I make Dagger wrapped implementations 17 layers deep in a Google product you’ve heard of”: by now you should know that the thing sincere people say about insincere people, “We watch what Hollywood says is good,” applies to shit that Google, Apple, Amazon and all these super high paying job companies do too. If you are conflating many users with useful, that’s the problem. Facebook, TikTok and Instagram could vanish tomorrow, and literally nothing meaningful would be lost.
Is “useful” to you, “everything that I do is useful, and everything I don’t do, maybe”? You don’t get to decide if your POVs are reductive. They just are.
I appreciate exposing yourself for a contrarian point of view, noble if fatally flawed.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the software we write tends to reflect our beliefs about the world. For example one of the best developers I’ve worked with had this unshakable belief that software could solve a lot of the worlds little problems. He was constantly coming up with these little programs that would solve some nit that he had in his day to day life.
I think a lot of people have lost faith that technology can improve the things that they care about. Even open source doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference in preventing, well anything bad in the last few years.
If we want to have a better dev culture there has to be a reason for people to believe that the software they make is actually going to improve people’s lives and not just accelerate the profits of multi billion dollar corporations.
Theres a layer of pessimism to engineers and hacker news that has been steadily growing (as I assume the average age increases).
To me it's hit a critical level and I have to disregard most negative comments here by default because I can no longer trust the average commenter to have a productive balance of optimism and curiousity.
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On a different note, the point the author is trying to make is massively undercut by the ad spam all over their page.
It was so grotesque (and out of character for a dev blog) that my first assumption was that I had a malicious extension somewhere.
Just recently we got an e-mail from a consulting company we work with, their devs are 100% allocated to the client. The letter was something along the lines: "We hear you guys are using Github Copilot, and we would appreciate if from now on you could provide the number of lines from each developer that was created with AI, that was helped by AI (they are distinct metrics), and how many the developer created on their own. Per month". We, the paying client, that work with several consulting companies, got that e-mail.
I understand the author, and if these days the developers are on it for the money and deliver, but don't bring up stupid shit like this, I don't care much. Not everybody is on it for any kind of creativity relief. Spending hours on their Lottie animations or shaving off miliseconds out of request is not really for everybody either. We are lucky to cross paths with people that care.
I think it's github and "social" coding. You used to be able to build something out of curiosity or for your own use and be happy with that.
Now it's on github, and if you don't get enough followers or forks or it's not in a popular language or framework or you haven't updated it recently enough it's seen as a "dead project" or a failure. A project can never be "done" because then it's dead. That's demotivating.
Who says it's dead, people opening issues? Guess I've never made a popular enough repo to even get there.
The most social coding I've ever experienced was Bukkit, the old Minecraft server thing. I was noob in high school, made plugins for little things I wanted, people installed them, they gave good/critical feedback, I learned, it was great.
In many ways I'd argue that a popular project is worse, as you end up dealing with a bunch of social factors that take time away from actually making or improving things.
100% it is.
there is a whole mix of why innovation and creativity are lacking in tech today.
The industry has matured, so the code written is cleaner, safer, and in most cases more organized. Projects are done in a more methodical way with less try something until you make it work experimentation.
Companies have more people at management levels who understand the structured process of software development, even if they do not know how to code. This allows them to put in more requirements for reporting and monitoring the process and more oversight of unstructured process development.
Most of the people working as coders are more professional than they used to be. They spend their time writing good proposals, better documentation, good pull requests, unit tests, e2e tests, structured design documents etc. This time spent on bookkeeping is not being spent on experimentation.
Lack of profit motive (mostly). Sadly gone are the days of making a killer app and getting fame and fortune. So it is harder to justify spending years of all your free time to build something new.
Through the early 2000's most people entering the IT fields did so for paychecks. There are far fewer pure geeks (as a percentage) than there used to be. My first job out of college as a programmer paid about a dollar an hour over minimum wage. I did not go into this field to compete with the finance bro's financially. I went for the love of technology. That changed so more people started doing this as a job not a lifestyle. These people are not nearly as interested in the experimentation that leads to new innovations.
For me, the push to single page applications and the unnecessary complexity that brought with it made me just sick of fooling around with web things- we had solved the problem and they invented nonsense that made it harder. There has been so much to explore over the past 7 years in machine learning though- it just requires a lot more compute than most people have available on their desktop.
> you chase every new shiny thing and you write a product or service in that shiny thing
That is a choice you make. Software development doesn't have to be that way.
In fact, it's saner for your productivity, ease of maintenance and onboarding new team members, and ultimately for your users, that you choose boring technology over the shiny new thing that just launched, or that is currently trending. Sure, you won't be able to add yet another buzzword to your CV, but you will deepen your knowledge of the stable technology, won't have to keep track of a constant stream of updates that may or may not break your application, and will have a much better chance of finding developers familiar with the boring tech. Most importantly, you will subject your users to fewer risks, since the product will be built on stable ground.
Developers often forget that the reason we write software is to solve a problem, and not to serve our own nerdy desire to play with tech. Enjoying your work is important, and the choice of tech plays a role in that, but the main motivation should come from solving a problem first, not from the tech itself.
This reminds me of a heated debate I had recently[1] about a popular project that was rewritten multiple times for little reason beyond the developer "felt like it". This is insane to me, yet for some reason, many people don't mind.
The criteria I prefer to use when choosing a tech stack is:
1. Pick the right tool for the job. Depending on your requirements, narrow down your options to those that would be most helpful for building the product, whatever "helpful" means in your context. I.e. if you need it done fast, learning how to use it wouldn't be a good idea.
2. Pick the boring, battle-tested, and proven tool. Discriminate. Do you really need all the features of tool A? Err on the side of simplicity.
3. And other things like: what does the company/environment already use, what is the team most comfortable with, and so on. Consistency and familiarity are important.
But I agree with others here. As much as I lament the current state of the software industry, a lot of it has to do with the sheer explosion in popularity of the field, not with us losing anything. The same people who were building awesome stuff decades ago, are still doing it today. They just have to deal with a lot more bullshit now.
This isn't true. There's still plenty of curious developers building things just because they want to using technologies that aren't flavor of the month. I wouldn't be surprised if there's more than ever. What has changed is the absolute number of developers and the percentage that are just in it for the money.
I think it depends on the circles you're in. For example, I see a lot of interest in the "Handmade" way of doing things, largely inspired by Handmade Hero. Almost feels like a comeback of what you consider to be dying. There are people who are interested, but one needs to look for them. I recommend it.
My theory is that imposter roles have basically taken over the industry. These are job roles which replicate inside an organization, and transfer between organizations laterally through VC, consulting, and management culture. They accumulate power and influence, and impede the organization's ability to function.
Imposter roles are jobs that are created working backwards from "job at company" to something that an individual can realistically claim they do at the company.
They became prominent in the last tech bubble when there was a lot of wealth being created and people wanted to go work at places like software companies, where they could not realistically contribute.
"Product Manager" and "SCRUM Master" are just some of the imposter roles that you've probably encountered.
When you scrutinize the existence of these roles, there is a swift and immediate backlash from people who's lifestyle and livelihood is at stake.
Product managers will point to famous people at Apple called "product managers" to distract from the fact that the median product manager does not add value.
When an organization creates a role that subsumes all of the creative control, and fills it from a pool of entirely unqualified people, the product gets worse, and the industry gets less innovative.
You're either an avid user of the software, or an avid builder of it, and if you don't fit into one of those groups, it's unlikely that you can make a software product better.
Product manager is an extremely important role. Too bad almost no place out there has anybody filling it, but that doesn't mean it's made-up.
But then we get into another problem, just because somebody as a job title it doesn't mean they fill the role that title implies. And if they do, it doesn't mean they do it competently.
> just because somebody as a job title it doesn't mean they fill the role that title implies.
This is the exact problem. When more people subscribing to the title "product manager" are incompetent than competent, then it's not really a legitimate role.
It might be true that there are talented people out there, who when given creative control over a product, add value which pays for their salary many times over.
The grift is the widespread belief that they can be found and hired with a job listing.
It's difficult to tell who these people are, unless you know one through your network you are more likely to be conned by hiring a product manager from the market than not.
A good comparison is to hedge fund managers.
There are some people who can consistently perform better than the market, they exist. But it costs a lot to invest with them, and unless you know of one specifically, just searching for people willing to invest your money for you will not turn out well.
Most companies are better off just listening to their engineers and users, some of them will have a knack for product direction, and leadership can weight their decision that way.
This is honestly a great point, but it does get obscured a bit because it comes off as hackers being cranky that they have to answer to a business in order to get paid. There is an analogy in government tech where my wife works. They have a role called "systems engineer," but it isn't what that normally means in software. It's supposed to be a person with intricate domain knowledge of multiple components of interacting defense and intelligence systems, something like understanding at least a bit of the software used to task satellites, perform ground processing of images, some knowledge of the satellites themselves, the crypto hardware at the ground stations. Think of being a member of the IETF or something where you're supposed to have some idea of how the entire Internet works, not just how to write software.
But somewhere along the way it became just a job title and they somehow manage to hire people fresh out of college to do this thing, which makes no sense and leaves them totally out of their depth, but forces them to do something to attempt to demonstrate to higher management there's a point to keeping them there so they can still have jobs. I don't blame the people in these positions at all. It's the blind leadership that has no understanding of what the role is supposed to be, that realistically you can't just put out a job req for this, it has to be someone who has actually worked already as part of these projects.
At least I think this is what you're saying, that ideally product managers should be people who were engineers at some point and understands how the product they're managing works, as well as the customer needs, not because they majored in business but because they've actually worked with that customer and have some experience meeting those needs.
> I think this is what you're saying, that ideally product managers should be people who were engineers at some point and understands how the product they're managing works, as well as the customer needs.
It takes knowledge of the problem and solution domain to maintain a vision and lead a team. But in this case, the scarcity is with the problem domain. People who really understand what problem the product solves, and the best way to think about it, especially when their view leads the industry, are very hard to find. Too hard to build an organization around the implicit assumption of finding them.
My advice for organization building is not to have product managers, or even allow the term into your company. There are people with good product taste, they occur at some rate, and when you find them doing other things like writing software or supporting users you nudge them in the direction of curating a product vision and controlling resources to execute on it. Framed that way, the importance and hardness of the problem are very clear.
I'm tired. I've been at it since '89' when I was 15. Everything being on fire all the time (in the world and in my current robot project) is just burning me out.
Most of my curiosity is tempered by how it can make me money.
I do appreciate that 50-70% of the boring work can be done with AI agents now. As long as you know enough to have opinions and guide the process along, it can be helpful.
Expertise and learning don't seem to be AS important with the upcoming gen of developers. However, there is also so much out there now that it would be much harder to start from zero as opposed to being there from the beginning.
But I think gen X and Millenials were probably peak interest and curiosity, now it's just a job for the later generations.
I agree with nothing in this post. I see a lot of curiosity I don't reject OP's claim that they are one of the ones "that remember". There is more active development of truly interesting ideas going on now than ever before.
I don't doubt the concern or the observation of the author. I'm not sure if the phenomena observed by the author is any different, statistically, from before. If I look back, it was always a small percentage of people, driven by their innate curiosity, who moonlighted their way to great discoveries. If anything is different, we have more people working in the tech industry, and naturally the concentration of curious and driven people gets diluted. Consequently, one may not observe the same intensity or prevalence of curiosity in her daily life.
I believe the curious developers are now almost all poking hardware, to greater or lesser degrees. The two big projects of Meshtastic and Home Assistant absorb a huge amount of that side of the ecosystem, but also things like OpenWrt.
Web and the whole cloud/backend scene has become toxic because of the work culture around them. I know of a therapist on the west coast that has become completely snowed under by a surge of software developers claiming mental problems on account of their working environments, and she was in such disbelief that she was asking around if what she was hearing was possibly real. Other professionals simply would not accept what has been going on.
I've seen the same and it seems due to people moving down the stack in response to LLMs being able to code at a junior-ish level and everything that entails.
Hardware unfortunately proved to be my limit. I tried getting into various things like FPGAs and various RF/telephony/networking projects, but my math ability is just too weak and decrepit.
I’d rather have bunch of corporate drones building their next failed startup than reading about yet another tinkerer who burned out because big corporations are using his code without paying him anything.
I am coming to believe that I am part of the workers displaced by LLMs. Been looking for a job for a year now and even slashing my salary expectations by half doesn't help. I am curious and still tinker on things I am interested about, but having an actual paying job seems so far from my reality now that I am more inclined on giving up. People here complain while having a job, but please think about us who are struggling and be mindful.
> Been looking for a job for a year now and even slashing my salary expectations by half doesn't help.
Are you still trying for remote? A few years ago when I was down bad and RTO was starting, I found that remote was near impossible to negotiate for “normal” devs even with such extreme concessions.
A side effect of the maturation of the industry, sadly. It comes in waves though. I remember when I first started out as a developer (circa 2003 I think?) things felt pretty boring. I ended up doing C# WinForms/WebForms work because that's what people were doing. Then the iPhone and Android came out and a whole new world exploded. There was so much interesting stuff to learn and, crucially, money to be made doing it.
That wave feels definitively over now, making mobile apps in 2025 is much like doing WinForms in 2003. Hopefully something new will come along that shakes things up. In theory that's AI but as a developer I find AI tremendously unsatisfying. It can do interesting things but it's a black box.
For me personally... I'm older and married with kids. My free time is so much more valuable than it was back in the day. I still try to be a curious developer but at the end of the day I need to get my work done and spend time with my family. There's enough of a financial squeeze that if I did find myself with an excess of free time I'd probably try to spend it doing freelance work. So whenever this next wave does arrive I might not be catching it.
Nah. Most humans are curious, and devs tend to be more curious than average in my experience.
What dampens the Spirit is same as everyone - a treadmill you cannot get off, punishment for independnat thinking.
Dev culture is not one thing that is found in dozens of companies - dozens of companies have their own culture - and if that is a curious and empowering culture you have curious and empowered devs, and salespeople and operations and chemists and …
Every new thing or place is first settled by pioneers who necessarily have the associated personality. But once it is settled, the hordes come in and that changes completely.
It’s fundamental, if you want to find that pioneering spirit again you have to leave your comfort zone and go exploring somewhere off the map.
> It seems to me that the focus has shifted from curiosity, learning and a joy for creating cool things to a focus on metrics, observables, problem solving for your niche audience.
It is very impressive (in a disheartening way) how easy it was for The System to convince us to constantly spy on each other “for our own good”.
Honestly I didn't even read the article because of the number of ads. I'm curious (though not enough to go look at the moment) if the author added the ads just because of it hitting HN.
We invented a summarization/shortcut machine and we're training people off the fundamental behavior and mindset of reading an original source or developing a skill that they could press a button to have an algorithm do.
This may be hitting developer culture hard but it's much broader than that.
This feels less like a dev-specific crisis and more like a timeless human pattern. We romanticize the past and nostalgia makes us believe what we loved is “dying.” In reality it’s not gone, just changed and harder to recognize from our old vantage point because of our own bias.
> I wrote this article to lament the loss of the curious spark in our developer culture
The curiosity hasn't disappeared from the culture, but it might not be brought in to a workplace anymore.
I think a lot of us have stopped bringing the tinkerer itch to work.
Outside of the workplace, there's an entire parade of tinkering by folks who at best post it on Youtube, not here (I watch "Stuff Made Here" for the code).
Of all the events of the past decade, the worst hit to the tinkering visibility has been Github making personal repos private by default.
Mostly the folks who were like me still have pet projects, most of them will share their code but only if you ask because it is "Well, not as nice as it should be".
I've got hundreds of repos in my github, but there's a sharp fall-off in what's public (there's ~113 public and 180 private) right when that happened and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
The tinkering is more active than ever now with vibe coding tools, where I can draw an svg out and then ask it to "I want to use manim.py to animate this" to get something which is a neat presentation tool to describe how data moves between systems.
But is it worth showing you when all the fun there was in making?
What if all I am likely to get "So what?" as the only response. Wouldn't that it make it less fun?
At the end of the day, what we have been experienting since the early 2000s is just the industrialisation of software development. 20 years ago it was still a craft and it has become a job. 20 years ago if you needed to do something serious with computers your best bet was to hire a self taught amateur who started working in the video game industry while still in highschool, had build his own 8bits computer and programmed his own operating system as a past-time.
That was not sustainable, the industry needs predictable employees. Even if that means many more of them. "Industrialization" of a process consists of nothing more than splitting that process into smaller, simpler tasks: Front end / back end / system ops / architecture, each split again by technologies, frameworks, languages, etc etc. Gone are the days where you could and needed to know everything.
The workforce increases massively, but since workers no longer need 10 years of intensive practice before being useful they are also cheaper, and most importantly, again : the whole process becomes predictable. You can replace a worker without jeopardizing your business.
The same process happened to many crafts during the industrial revolution, and that spawned similar culture wars between the old gard of craftsmen lamenting the poor quality of the industrial output. Maybe Stallman will be remembered as the Proudhon of our times?
Our times may be a bit more epic, because we were not only craftmen, we were building a new society, or so we though. Computers being machines of logic would help us become more rational, being accessible universal means of production they would blur the distinction between consumers and producers by making everyone a producer, and worldwide networks would turn our divided societies into a global village. Well, in just a few years the oposite happened: the machines locked consumers into walled gardens, greatly reinforced the power structure in place, and made us more divided than ever.
In 20 years from now, very few people will remember how free and powerful we have been.
I still do this all of the time. I'm constantly exploring some new concept. Sometimes it requires programming, other times it doesn't, but either way... I just don't really have a pipeline setup to publish anything I look into. It's just so I can experience it. I feel bad for how much of the world is so focused on increasing metrics. Life is interesting and none of us will die wishing we had spent more of our lives working.
Is anyone interested in starting a community software development system?
Ownership, royalties, voting would be embedded in a block chain. Proof of work would be by vote. And votes given for proof of work. Or something like that. In music they have "royalties" and it seems like that could be used for contributors.
If you would like to be part of a discussion send an email to my firefox relay
3tdm026f9@mozmail.com
I'm pretty skeptical about peer-based remuneration not devolving into unfair (if not toxic) remuneration in practice. "Proof of work by vote" etc seems very much in that direction.
I've already seen how people scratch other's backs in peer feedback during performance reviews, and I've heard plenty of description of negative aspects about promotion-oriented behaviors driving what people work on at companies notorious for that kind of stuff. Not to mention all the actual biases pervasive to the "meritocracy" crowd.
When it comes to me, I'm not privileged enough to be creative or innovative: shipping fast (thing that mattered in my previous and does matter in my current work) requires me to do specific tasks and I simply cannot deviate from that or I will get fired. I read a lot about software and try to be creative, but at the end of the day, what matters the most is to make money so I can take care of my family, it saddens me that I can be looked down upon because more often than not, I treat my job as it is: a job.
What has really changed is in the knowledge of the average developer: once upon a time, they knew something, there were code monkeys, of course, but there were also many with solid knowledge. Today, most have very limited knowledge, if that, and no longer know how to work at a system, hardware, local level, etc., so development is entering a phase described long ago by Lisanne Bainbridge: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...
Take a look at the maker community if you want to see people doing stuff just for the heck of it, with bits or matter. The article from the other day about a guy who put a web server on a vape, for instance.
I do agree that there has been a significant shift in developer culture because of business bros and hustle culture, but it's not nearly gone.
It's not just dev culture - it's *EVERYTHING* culture.
In modern society, if you're not trying to monetize all of your hobbies and every little thing you do you are seen as doing something wrong. Everything has to be a hustle these days. You're not allowed to do things simply because you enjoy it.
Remember when OpenSSL had the Heartbleed bug and there were something like two guys running the project in their spare time with $50k/year in donations (if memory recalls correctly). Well, we are living through a great affordability crisis. Not many people can spend time on a hobby like that to support billionaires anymore. Let the 400 people with half of the wealth in America figure it out. Everyone should monetize their time and explore unionization to counter the new realities of the modern economy.
I think it’s less about culture and more about the world around us.
Who has time to work on free open source projects when your bills and groceries cost far more than they did 10 years ago? The kind of money that being a developer made me in 2015 was enough to pay all my bills, save money and buy cool stuff to experiment on for my hobbies. Now I make twice that much but I’m delaying paying my medical bills until they start leaving voicemails.
My spare time that I used to spend hacking and making things that other people could use is now spent trying to earn a little more, or away from work of any kind dealing with the stress.
The web used to be so much more DIY. Everyone used jQuery but it wasn't prescriptive, it was just a holistic tool (to use Ursala Franklin's framing) to enable us to do whatever. There weren't established practices, there weren't big toolkits/frameworks/libraries under-feet.
The maturation & industrialization of development means that developers no longer are puzzling out the world from first principles. We aren't evaluating each library that comes along to figure out how it might fit into our bespoke apps.
> You become a Next.js developer, a React developer, a Rust developer etc
React in particular is such a distinction of development. It is it's own Terra Firma, solid ground, upon which developers stand, only barely coupled to the underlying platform. Knowing the web itself is still enormously good and helpful, but there is such a huge engine at your back, doing so much work, that is extremely hard to take as more than a black box. Even if you know the web very well, there is still a huge opaque engine between the code you write and the web actual that's targetted.
We don't have the raw experience anymore to be broader developers. Vs React, I think it's more ok to consider oneself a Rust developer, where one is still quite close to the metal, where the only focus-narrowing is to a general purpose language that's good for anything (especially with Rust being such a fore-runner at WebAssembly!).
It seems like big companies are doing some great things with WebComponents, but there's still so little broader attention, and little cultural energy for them. The lack is cyclical: there's scant developer culture around webcomponents, and so scant webcomponent acceptance & knowledge. It feels like such an opportunity for shared knowledge, for excitement, for figuring things out & making patterns, for a more grounded closer to the firm earth potential, and one that obviously needs the curiosity and excitement. But it's React Uber Alles, React on and on.
People completely underestimate how drastically SW development has changed in demographics over the last two decades.
Millions of people entered the field, many of them explicitly because they saw it is a good job opportunity. The average software developer is now a completely different person than they were ten or twenty years ago. Importantly there has been a major shift towards people in India and other Asian countries, where development has been outsourced or where developers are hired from as well as differences in college graduates. This is clearly reflected in the job market, which is getting more competitive.
Part of it (and I think this goes to what the other says about metrics and building for the masses) is a lot of the problems we were solving two or three decades ago are solved.
We used to have to hack things together because nothing worked. There was no consistency, standards were all over the map, software solutions for most things didn't exist, and running software on the major vendor ecosystems was heavily silo'd.
Dozens and dozens of technologies changed that. Web protocols and virtual machines broke siloing. Search engines and community forums made discoverability much, much easier. We passed the tipping point where hardware was only valuable if it could be connected to an ecosystem, so engineers started building standards like USB, wifi, bluetooth, and a TCP-accessible interface into everything. And an army of open-source hobbyists wrote hundreds of thousands of libraries to "X but in Y."
So hacking itself has moved away from problems like "get a telephone multiplexer to translate a bitstream to colors on an anlog TV" and towards "What nine libraries and five gadgets will you glue together to" (for example) "let your refrigerator track your shopping list," or "How can you make setting up email not feel like hacking your left arm off for the average non-computer person?" Because those are the kinds of problems that are still unsolved.
It's a different kind of hacking requiring curiosity at a different level and sometimes a different problem-solving skillset (less experimentation, more curation and cataloguing).
A clerk who once used a physical filing system but now uses a computer may naturally begin to bring the filing system to a higher level of abstraction. Think filing clerk -> database administrator -> relational algebra...
E.g. there would be enormous difficulty in replacing the Dewey Decimal System with something else, if only due to its physical inertia, but with a computer system a curious clerk can invent an alternative categorization and retrieval system which inevitably touches on mathematical topics.
I feel the opposite. Old enough to remember when SE was not an attractive career path but something people stumbled into after hacking around with electronics. The last 10-20 years have felt like an endless September situation starting with the "tech bros" culture and the ever widening firehose of CS majors who seemed to choose CS with as much enthusiasm as most finance majors.
Personally, I am excited that AI is steering people away from tech that aren't actually interested in it. Reverting to the mean a bit. And like the downvoted comment below, I actually think a swath of "vibe coders" are much more inline with the hacker mindset than most developers. A lot of them are the "make a quick buck" types but there is also a ton of insane tinkering going on, which is awesome.
But maybe we are talking about two different things. There is a distinction between "I want to hack on this to see how it works" and "I want to hack on this to see if this IDEA works". So product hackers are ascending while engineering hackers are starting to dwindle.
It reminds me of the shift in car culture when car computers meant you couldn't just rebuild a rusty car over a summer but a new culture of car hackers bubbled up mostly around modding cars for drifting or whatever. The people were different, the work was different, but the curiosity, excitement and subculture grew into something very similar.
That's exactly why I'm here today, after 40 years of passion, penniless, or with very little money, not rich. Disenchanted by the professional aspect of what was initially just a simple obsession with “how it works,” right down to my gut. Then a passion for machine code. Then a megalomaniacal delusion of creating, of bringing ideas to fruition. Not necessarily very elaborate ones. Simple stuff, and sometimes a little less so. Reinventing the wheel, often without even knowing it.
Like my algorithm for drawing lines as fast as possible in 68000 on my ST. Then a few years later, I learned that someone else had invented it almost 30 years before me, and I was able to put a name to my algorithm: Bresenham. Dammit! The Amiga had it natively too. Dammit again!
Again, I invented preemptive multitasking on my 68000. Interrupt, little beast. Vector branch to my task switcher, thanks... save registers, including SP... restore registers from another previously interrupted routine, including SP... write the PC to switch and off we go. A fucking idea, a simple idea. That was cool to see it work, to see the 0 index color changed by each task every 10 scanlines or so. Made me smile. And then a few years later, I learned the word preemptive, and the concept of multitasking that goes with it. And I learned that the Amiga OS (that bastard rival again!) already did it natively. And other machines long before it. DAM-DAM-DAMMIT! I was born too late!
And my email reader on PC, running DOS, in 1991 or 1992, I can't quite remember. It was my first relatively big project in C, because for more than 10 years before that, I swore only by assembler, and I wasn't about to do that in x86, yuck. I didn't know curses or ncurses, but I still made a small TUI with windows and buttons. I was the only one using it for months, for email, mailing lists, newsgroups maybe too, I don't remember... Then one day, a conscientious sysop sent me an email asking me the name of the email reader I was using, because the machine he was administering had flagged a header that wasn't quite right, and he wanted to let the author know :-) My first bug report... under those circumstances, it's not something you forget. “Thanks for the feedback, buddy, but it doesn't have a name, I'm the author, and I'll fix that crap!”
I'm sure you have some fond memories like that too.
These are just examples. There have been others. Maybe even things that no one has ever done before, but that doesn't matter. Because it's still fun, whether we're reinventing the wheel or not. Especially when we don't know anything. It's rewarding when it works. Lots of little moments of pride that we keep to ourselves. Pride in having invented something without anyone's help, when all we had were “XXX Bible” to glean technical informations from, or BBS.
So don't listen to them. They have nothing interesting to say. They never loved programming, they always pretended. And today they tell you that finally, we no longer need to code, that we are finally relieved of this thankless task, that we can finally focus on what really matters.
Bullshit. Either die with your mouth open or let me die in peace! What matters is what we love. The rest is just survival. So if I have to die from my obsession, so be it.
By all means, OP, don't implore them. They've choosen their path, and we've choosen ours. Whatever you say about that won't change anything.
I did not share anything. Am I selfish? Not sure. I did not think it could be fun to others, or worth it. Especially when you consider stuff that already existed since ages, and undoubtedly much more elaborate. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain” :-)
> Does Mark Zuckerberg own Facebook and care about Facebook?
Mark Zuckerberg is a metric, given human form. He smokes meats because statistics show human males engage in meat-smoking behavior.
Ultimately I think it boils down to normie influx, people with no love for the craft getting in it for the money. That said I've seen grown "normies" approaching middle age catch "the bug" and get really into programming for its own sake. They rapidly develop tastes that align with my own.
And computing has always had its share of people whose interest in the technology was entirely in using it to meet business objectives, nothing more. Here's a video from 1975 that shows exactly what I mean. It's about the time-sharing facility recently added to IBM mainframes. Note the utter lack of imagination. Nothing is mentioned about the new things one could do with their mainframe with time-sharing. It's strictly about how much faster you can do the things you're already doing. Time and money saved. Numbers on a balance sheet. Seems stodgy to us, but that's how IT professionals thought in 1975.
It's both. Lot of people vibe coding purely from financial motivations, lot of people vibe coding to rapidly prototype and explore ideas. The latter camp certainly will be the ones to carry the torch forward, now that the cat is out of the bag.
Carry what torch forward where? Vibe coders aren't going to learn more about the languages or techniques the LLM uses, or how to write that code themselves. They aren't going to exercise curiosity about anything beyond the LLMs API and prompts. They aren't going to pursue deep knowledge. By definition they only want to get a viable end product with the least amount of creative or cognitive effort on their part. That seems like the opposite of the "curious developer" archetype the article is talking about.
What the developer learns from the experience of AI programming is more down to the attitude of the individual than that.
Here's an example from my perspective.
Recently while developing a way to output a PAL video signal from two digital lines(an endeavour obviously driven by curoiosity more than utility). I learned a great deal about far more than I would have if I had not have used AI. I wasn't blind to what the AI was emitting, It helped me decide upon shifting one output to 0.285v and the other to .715v. Write a program to use pytorch to learn a a few resistors/capacitors to smooth out the signal and a sample of 2-bit data that when emitted though the filters produced a close sine wave for the color burst. AI enabled me to automatically emit Spice code to test the waveform. I had never used spice before, now I know the pains of creating a piecewise linear voltage source in it.
Yesterday I used an AI to make a JavaScript function that takes a Float32Array of voltage level samples and emits a list of timings for all parts of a scanline along with the min and max voltage levels, calculates the position and frequency of the color burst and uses the measured color burst to perform the quadrature decoding to produce a list of YUV values at a lower sample rate.
This should let me verify the simulated waveform so that I can compare the difference between what I intend to emit, and what should be a correct signal. If there turns out to be a discrepancy between what I am emitting and what I think I am emitting, this will come in quite handy.
Perhaps I might learn more if I did all of this myself unaided by an AI, but it would also take much longer, and likely not get done at all. The time I save writing tests, wrangling libraries and software is not stored in the bank. I used that time too, doing other things, learning about those as I did so.
Exactly, if you are interested in what you are doing, you will learn no matter what tool you use, be it AI or vim without syntax highlighting. A person that's trying to get rich quick, and sees software as a means to that end (and nothing more) will learn pretty much nothing vibe coding.
Luckily, vibe coders have yet to see ACTUAL success, just hyping up CLAIMS of success on social media.
They want to produce something without having the skills to produce it. Which, you know, probably isn't uncommon. I'd love to be able to rock out the guitar solo in Avenged Sevenfold's "Bat Country" [0] or "Afterlife" [1] or the first solo in Judas Priest's "Painkiller" [2], but to get to that skill level takes years of practice, which I'm quite frankly not willing to put in.
The difference is the honesty. A vibe coder produces something barely more than "Hello world" and brags about being able to produce software without learning to code. Nobody grabs a guitar, learns two chords, then claims to be a guitarist.
This speaks to me, but I'm also reflective enough to wonder about whether I'm just observing from a different place in life than I was in the 1990ies when all this stuff started happening.
I was young and didn't have many responsibilities then, and lots of free time. Now I'm a dad with a mortgage and an interest in local politics because I want to 'leave it better than I found it'.
All that said... I do think there have been some shifts over time. I grew up in the era of open source taking off, and it was pretty great in a lot of ways. We changed the world! It felt like over time, software became mainstream, and well-intentioned ideas like PG's writing about startups also signaled a shift towards money. In theory, having F U money is great for a hacker in that they don't have to worry about doing corporate work, but can really dig into satisfying their curiosity. But the reality is that most of us never achieve that kind of wealth.
Now we find ourselves in a time with too much concentrated corporate power, and the possibility that that gets even worse if LLM's become an integral part of developer productivity, as there are only a handful of big ones.
Perhaps it's time for a new direction. At my age I'm not sure I'll be leading that charge, but I'll be cheering on those who are.
I'm very skeptical of the article - it sounds to me like classic "good old days" thinking¹.
It's certainly true that IT has grown vastly since those good old days, but there has always been a proportion of people who're just... not that interested in what they're doing. For example I remember being mildly horrified in around 1998 that a colleague didn't know how to run his compiler from the command line; without an IDE he was lost - but I doubt he was the only one.
Meanwhile the idea that there's a dearth of cool new stuff seems quite quaint to me. There's a whole bunch of cool things that pop up almost daily right here on Hacker News². Just because they haven't spread to ubiquity doesn't mean they're not going to. Linux was not mainstream right out of Linus's Usenet announcement - that took time.
As to corporate power? They ebb and flow and eat each other (Data General, Compaq, DEC ... remember them? Remember when Microsoft was the major enemy? Or IBM?)
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_old_days
² Edit: Not to mention, there's also a whole bunch of crap that's not very interesting. But survivor bias means we'll have forgotten those in 20 years time when we're surveying this time period; as Sturgeon's law reminds us, "90 percent of everything is crap."
Yes of course there have always been people who clock in and clock out and don't have a ton of passion for what they do. I don't begrudge that, but personally I need some of the curiosity and joy in hacking on stuff. And I enjoy the camaraderie of being around others who feel that way too.
It just feels like "it's a job" is more of the zeitgeist these days.
And yes, I'm also well aware of what came before 'my time' - mainframes and such were definitely an era where the power was more with the large companies. One of the reasons Linux (and *BSD) was so cool is that finally regular people could get their hands on this powerful OS that previously was the exclusive purview of corporations or, at best, universities.
As to cool projects, sure. They're fun, interesting and creative, but perhaps not part of (a very vague, admittedly) "something bigger", like "the open source movement" was back in the day.
The frontier moves over time. If you stay at any one spot, it will eventually mature and become less fun and interesting. There will be more of the clock-in / clock-out types, and that's perfectly fine -- as you pointed out above, at different stages in life, people may be looking for different things, like stability.
But if you're looking for that spark and excitement again, you need to get back out to the frontier. One frontier that is particularly exciting to me is using AI to speed up the tedious parts of the development process, and to tackle areas where I don't have specialist knowledge. Similarly to how Linux opened up a powerful OS to individuals, AI is enabling individuals to create things that would have previously required large teams.
You're correct about AI seeming to be "where it's at" right now, but I'm really not thrilled with the corporate concentration that seems to be the natural result of requiring massive amounts of computing power.
Perhaps over time it'll get efficient enough to run outside of huge companies; that could be an interesting aspect to keep an eye on.
I don't see how over time we could get to a place where an entity with orders of magnitude less computing power can run AI that is anywhere near as powerful as the huge companies. Maybe for certain narrow applications, maybe even for many such applications, but hard to imagine it happening in a way that un-concentrates power.
Though certain novel uses could lead to new individuals or entities gaining power.
I'd like to be hopeful and would like to hear good arguments for how this could happen - but it seems to me improved technology on the whole leads to increased concentration of power - with exceptions and anomalies but that being the dominant trend.
I am sure the same thing was thought about never getting to a point where every person would have a tiny computer in their pocket that was orders of magnitudes faster than the multi-million dollar computers that took up whole rooms and were only owned by the largest companies.
You mean a tiny computer in your pocket that you can mostly just consume content with and chat with others. Sure there are some neat, useful apps out there, but you can't really learn how technology works on a tablet or phone unless you're allowed to build that specific kind of app. You don't even have a filesystem. 10 year old me in today's world would have not been able to break my phone like I did my old DOS / Win95 PC and actually learn something. Shit I used to spend hours just browsing the filesystem, and the install media to see what I could find and learn and use. That's how I found the Weezer music video, and the pinball game on the Win95 I still CD. There is no equivalent to this with phones.
If you take human brains as the limit (a questionable assumption) they do it all for 20 watts (and hardware that makes itself!) The training is often years and can be expensive.
In all seriousness though there’s plenty of room for improvement both in current models and hardware.
(Apologies for the bad form of replying twice…)
> it seems to me improved technology on the whole leads to increased concentration of power
Which is why we are dominated by IBM, AT&T, Kodak and Xerox.
I agree entirely; just because VC focused startups are eager to "rub some AI on" their products doesn't mean that AI itself is boring; it's incredibly cool! Some of the applications are ghastly, but LLMs and diffusion models? Oh my!
Or, you know, if AI is the mainstream hotness or just doesn't float your boat, look for what the iconoclasts are up to and go dive into that, not whatever the VCs are flinging their gold at today.
few here recall the "mainframe versus PC" era, as it was.. Basically, there has always been an Oracle
> I enjoy the camaraderie of being around others who feel that way too.
But... they're still there. They're a little diluted, but I've not yet worked somewhere where I had no like-minded tinkerers amongst my colleagues. I don't think I'd want to, but it just hasn't come up.
> As to cool projects, sure. They're fun, interesting and creative, but perhaps not part of (a very vague, admittedly) "something bigger", like "the open source movement" was back in the day.
But the free software movement dates back to the early 80s, not the 2000s that we're talking about. Open source itself was being seen as a dilution of the principles of free software in the late 90s/early 2000s. More to the point, free and open source software is still very much here - we're absolutely surrounded by it.
> mainframes and such were definitely an era where the power was more with the large companies
It's oscillated. DEC used to be the zippy young upstart snapping at IBM's heels you know. Microsoft didn't start out big and evil; nor did Google if it comes to that. Put not thy faith in shiny new companies for they shall surely betray thee once they devour the opposition... :D
>I'm very skeptical of the article - it sounds to me like classic "good old days" thinking¹
That's a cheap dismisal. There's nothing wrong with "good old days" thinking if old days were actually better.
>Meanwhile the idea that there's a dearth of cool new stuff seems quite quaint to me. There's a whole bunch of cool things that pop up almost daily right here on Hacker News²
Hardly of the breadth and ambition of the 1998-2012 or so period.
>As to corporate power? They ebb and flow and eat each other (Data General, Compaq, DEC ... remember them? Remember when Microsoft was the major enemy? Or IBM?)
Yes, and also remember then players like Sun did cool stuff in the UNIX space. Or when FOSS wasn't basically billion dollar corporate owned wholesale, with mere corporate employees buying the majority of contributors and IBM, Oracle, Google and co running the show. Even RedHat was considered too corporate and now it's IBM...
When I was doing job interviews during my last year of college, I was able to chat with all my interviewers about the morning's Slashdot headlines. Everyone had checked the /. front page that morning and I was able to have a nice ice breaker about the day's stories.
That isn't the case anymore. That sort of monoculture where everyone is reading the same stories, discussing the same topics, and reading about shared values and principles, is long gone.
I'd say "good old days" thinking is probably involved, but not the full explanation. Over the past few decades, software has gone from a fairly obscure profession to being seen as a great way (maybe the best way) to make a lot of money. In absolute numbers, there are probably at least as many engaged, curious engineers as before. There are almost certainly drastically more uninterested engineers who are there partially or fully because of the money, though.
edit: I hadn't scrolled down to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303388 when I wrote this
Dunno. I’ve been at this since the late ‘80’s, and have run into precious few developers who were interested in software and programming for its own sake. For most of them it was just a job.
I was a the kind of person who was happy as a pig in mud to be paid to do my hobby of programming computers! Was ecstatic that people would pay money to a young kid to do that!
But most of the people I went to uni to study computer science with at the end of the nineties were there for the money. Even back then it was all about money for most programmers.
There is a generation of programmers that became interested in computers only because they felt that computers were cool. Mostly useless, except for playing games, but cool. Only later the knowledge also turned out to be a source of money.
And then there is a generation that grew up knowing that there was money in computers, so many of them learned to use them even if they didn't care about them per se. This generation also contains many hackers, but they are surrounded by at least 10x more people who only do it for money.
Twenty years ago, most programmers were nerds. These days, nerds are a minority among the programmers. Talking about programming during an IT department teambuilding event is now a serious faux pas.
The only tangible difference between then and now is that many more problems have already been solved. This certainly leaves fewer holes where an enthusiastic developer can flex their muscle.
Then again, I did spend some time in e.g. lisp and Haskell just for the heck of it. And there ate still plenty more unsolved problems outside of the mainstream today.
There are still a ton of vertical markets that have crap for technology stacks, e.g. public transit. There is tons of opportunity out there to improve processes and optimize work.
I mention this when this comes up - my personal view is that it has to do with saturation. At some point being in computers became a 'good job' once that happens a field still has its curious people, but they're not as visible as they're in a sea of people who were just looking for a steady check.
I blame the dotcom boom. Yes, the business-records jobs were always part of the field, but they didn't seem so dominant. We're all writing COBOL now.
Old man yells at cloud services
Ironically, LLMs are exactly what drives a lot of curiosity and learning without a purpose. I see it all the time on twitter — people getting chatbots into weird mental states, toying around with different systems on top of them, jailbreaking. More for the fun of the game than anything else.
You can't keep that curiosity and at the same time see one of the most wonderful and awe-inspiring technologies of the last decades as something threatening.
The technology itself isn't threatening. The fact that it's currently concentrated in the hands of a very few large US corporations is what's ... less than stellar from my point of view.
I'm still here, curious as ever. And for the truly curious, it's just gotten better. The ocean we swim in has gotten bigger and deeper.
I lamented when my career first started (2000 or so) that there were devs I worked with who didn't even own computers at home. While my bookshelves were full of books I aspired to learn and my hard drive was full of half-baked projects, they clocked out and their thinking was done.
I still know a few of those now 25 years after the fact. Some of them have made a career out of software. But they never got curious. It was a means to an end. I don't begrudge them that. But as someone who is internally driven to learn and improve and produce, I can't relate.
My primary fustration today is how many of my software peers are satisfied with updating a Jira status and not seeking to build excellent software. I've seen it at all levels - engineers, managers, and executives. I'm actualized by shipping good, useful software. They seem to be actualized by appearing busy. They don't appear to deliver much value, but their calendars are full. It has me at my professional wits end.
Truth be told, the phenomenon of appearing productive without being productive is an epidemic across multiple industries. I've had conversations with people in manufacturing and agriculture and academia and they all echo something similar. Eventually, Stein's law indicates that the productivity charade will end. And I fear it will be ugly.
>My primary fustration today is how many of my software peers are satisfied with updating a Jira status and not seeking to build excellent software. Truth be told, the phenomenon of appearing productive without being productive is an epidemic across multiple industries.
This is hardly a new phenomenon. Dilbert and its ilk have been lampooning this since the 80s.
Based on the title, I was expecting the article to be a lamentation on Jira and Scrum.
> The ocean we swim in has gotten bigger and deeper.
IMO this is the part that the author is missing. Back in the 2000's, software development was a much smaller field and your main focus was the "curiosity pond" where all the developers went to tinker.
Now software dev has expanded into an ocean. That pond is still there but the author missed the pond for the ocean.
Somewhat related, the partial-illusion of "where did all the old developers go, they seem way too rare, something is happening to them." While attrition and ageism do exist, there's a bigger factor.
The total workforce has expanded dramatically over time, so even if everybody in the started-40-years-ago cohort remained alive and employed, those (now much older) people would still be a tiny minority among the bigger and bigger cohorts that kept joining since then.
this doesn't make sense to me. early on in my career I was permitted, even asked, to make operating systems, languages, and distributed protocols. in todays world I'm lucky if I'm allowed to write a dashboard.
where is this ocean? that I have all these big pre-cooked components I can use to make saas spaghetti?
I've been in that situation where I was coding by day and didn't have a computer at home. Or at least, I didn't have one that was the same platform as the one I was using at work. Growing up there was at one point a Commodore 64, some kind of Tandy, and a UNIX workstation, but at work I was developing on Windows NT, Solarix, and HP/UX.
In another case, I had recently moved to a new city and we were targeting an internal proprietary platform (again with Windows NT) and also targeting Solaris.
There was a time when you would go to work and you would be working with header files and libraries that were proprietary and for which your company was paying an exorbitant per-head license fee.
> it's just gotten better.
Couldn't agree more. Like many, I've had my honeymoon phase with AI and have now learned what it is good for and what it is not. What it has truly been good for is satisfying the nauseating number of topics I want to learn about. I can spend $20 a month and drill down into any topic I like for as long as I like in an incredibly efficient way. What a time to be alive.
By the time I got my first job in 1996, I had been a hobbyist for 10 years and graduated from college. The last thing I was thinking about doing as a single 22 year old who had just moved to the big city and had free cash flow was sit down at a computer after work.
I have never in 30 years written a single line of code that I didn’t get paid for except a little work I did for charity.
There's respectable musicians who are like this too.
And plenty who are not, it takes all kinds.
It's a matter of taste and still all tastes may not be satisfied anyway :)
That’s completely different. One of my good friends is a bartender. But his passion is his music. He’s practicing with friends, performing in front of people, etc. It is a social event - not sitting at a computer all day.
For years I was a part time fitness instructor and runner. I loved hanging out with friends, being in front of people, meeting them at races and us training together. It’s completely different than being at a computer at home - after working all day on one.
You're missing the point. Your good friend has to work on his music outside of his paid profession. It's a hobby that is not financially viable for him as a career.
You expect someone who writes software for 8+ hours a day professionally to go home and do more of it for fun?
Those who are interested in doing that are free to do so, but most people have more than 1 interest or would like to be compensated for the additional hours they are effectively working in their profession.
Rereading I can't edit now, but I meant there are plenty of respectable musicians who are not like this as well as plenty of great talents that only perform professionally.
Not that one or the other is a less-respectable approach.
Sorry if my text can be misinterpreted so easily.
That’s heartbreaking. :-(
It’s heartbreaking for a 22 year old to want to enjoy life outside of computers?
On Hacker News, it is.
I resonate with your message entirely. Have you been able to find a company/position where you are able to satisfy this drive?
I relate 100%; there are still a lot of people like us :)
Do we work at the same company? It's tough out there.
What "hackers" don't understand is that at certain scale, social cohesion is extremely important. A huge army of socially cohesive morons will achieve greater things than a small group of dedicated geniuses. This means that for any entity that grows beyond certain scale, socially cohesive morons are actually preferable over dedicated geniuses. The fact that your coworkers are unmotivated lazy stupid fucks is not a bug, it's a feature. They're not there to be smart, they're there to be socially cohesive.
I agree overall, but to push back: 20 years ago, we HAD to be more curious. If you wanted a way to store your code and there wasn't anything that worked for you out there, you had to go and invent Git over a long weekend. Now, there's so many great tools (thanks to thousands or millions of curious devs) that 0-to-1 improvements aren't nearly as possible to discover.
There's still people taking on new frontiers... even if you don't love crypto (and I don't!), a lot of very curious developers found a home there. AI is tougher (due to the upstart costs of building a model), but still discovery is happening there.
I don't think curious developers are gone... there's just an increase of un-curious developers looking for a paycheck. You just have to look harder now (although I think it only seems like we had a cohort of curious devs because we're looking at it in hindsight, where the outcomes are obvious).
This is very much a romanticism. 20 years ago there was definitely source control, modern tooling, etc.
TFS was introduced in 2005 for Microsoft shops for instance.
I was a bit glib, I agree everything built on top of each other. But there were bigger gaps back then than there are now.
The biggest gap was information - though I think you have to go back a bit further really. Until the late 90s if you wanted to know about a topic you generally depended upon printed material or direct transfer of knowledge.
I'm rather envious of kids today who have access to Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and (with caveats) ChatGPT when they're truly interested in a topic. They can dive a lot deeper than I had the opportunity to without bringing in adult assistance.
Sure, but look at the average person. The average person has all the world's knowledge at their fingertips. The access is there. But do people use it? Or do they use it in that way? How many people just scan a wiki article looking to mic drop on someone else instead of trying to understand what they meant or what the material is actually about? Has something similar to that occurred in this thread?
"Can" is a critical word in your comment.
Sure, but most people just want to go to the pub and watch TV. It's still exciting that for the ones who want to do something the horizon has expanded.
Okay? But what's that have to do with what you previously said? So you're agreeing with me now? Great?
I'm not sure, were you contradicting me in the first place? I just thought your point was a bit cynical and I'm giving you my more positive spin on it.
I remember being a kid in the 80s and fascinated by the SDI "Star Wars" project for missile defense. I wanted to learn everything I possibly could about how lasers and particle beams worked, how they were built, how much power they could project, how far, what targeting capabilities were realistic, where you might actually have to place ground stations to fully cover the sky, some raw basics of how spherical geometry and orbital mechanics worked. Most weekends, and definitely every summer for several years, I rode my bike down to the LA County Public Library and checked out the maximum number of books they allowed you to check out, and I did just this. I learned everything I possibly could. I barely remember any of it cause I was like 8 years old, but still, enormous amounts of information have been available to anyone, at least in the US, for a long time. I don't think "printed material" should be a barrier. It takes longer to get to the library than it does to open your laptop or unlock your phone, but the flip side of that is getting outside and riding your bike around incidental to gathering information has quite a few ancillary health benefits you'll never realize if you're tied to a computer all the time.
Ok, but the equivalent for me was in the very early 1980s and I lived in an English village outside a small market town. Their library certainly didn't have any current in-depth book on the computing topics I was interested in. I recall coming across the term "cybernetics" in some tome from the 1950s that was about all they had and being completely unable to connect it to the microcomputers that I was fascinated by.
Probably it would have been possible to get something via inter-library loan, but I would have been 9 or 10, didn't know this was possible and didn't think to ask. The handful of topical books I obtained from parents and schoolfriends was a far cry from just scrolling on your phone to the information you want.
It's not better in every way. But it is better in some ways.
Even my small town in south GA had the latest magazines or you could go the bookstore. Like you said the inter library loan was a thing if you knew about it.
I was on Usenet in the various comp.* groups in the mid 90s. Dejanews could be used to search news groups then.
Sure, but the volume of information was tiny compared to what was available in printed form - whereas it's the reverse now.
If I wanted to know everything about my first computer - an Apple //e - i needed two books. I needed Apple’s official Applesoft Basic manual and another book I checked out from the library about programming in 65C02 assembly on the Apple //e.
What were those “gaps”? There were decent compilers and IDEs at least in the mid 90s.
MySQL was available for free in 2000 and anyone could download any number of language runtimes for free like Perl and Java. If your corporate overlords weren’t cheap (or you were in college) an MSDN subscription was amazing.
Sure, things existed. mySQL is a great database, but so is Mongo and so is Clickhouse and so is Firebase, etc. Those alternatives all filled a gap MySQL couldn't, and now the bar for creating a new type of database is significantly higher because there's fewer gaps (schema-less, good for logs, good for fulltext search, realtime, etc).
JavaScript has been around for decades. But jQuery made it so much easier, and then React built on top of that even more. And jQuery wasn't the first DOM library, nor was React the first framework – but both were where it seemingly clicked between ideas, usability and whatever else made them successful.
(I will agree that Microsoft had a run of things where anyone who bought in to their ecosystem had a lot of things that worked well together.)
Exactly, the web as an app platform didn’t really take off until 2008. If you were a pure Microsoft shop from top to bottom, all you needed was an MSDN subscription provided by your employer.
Those IDEs sucked compared to what you can download in 5 minutes for free today. The number of libraries available (and where you could find them) was miniscule, and most had very bad documentation for beginners.
People here talking like we've made no progress in the last few decades... which we're that true then that'd also contradict their point and only agree with you... I'm really confused looking at all these replies
The “free IDEs” even today aren’t as good as the paid products by Microsoft and JetBrains.
Especially today while the IDEs are free, people are paying for LLM coding assistants.
Did you ever use the Turbo series IDEs or whatever that IBM Java based IDE was? Visual Studio was quite good in 1999.
What’s the point of having a 0-1 mindset in a corporate environment? A majority of the time it’s wasted. It gets shelved and never used again. Maybe some upstart in the company picks up the effort again 5-6 years.
We (ie, people that do not have a safety net) do not have this luxury you people did in the 1990s of experimentation and curiosity. Boomers and leaders using shitty Reaganomic economic policies have decimated our safety nets by so much that it makes experimentation a luxury for the rich and powerful.
Cost of living is higher than ever. Inflation is higher than ever. We are handcuffed to this shitty system in America called “private health insurance.” Get sick? No job? You are fucked m8.
The risks of "curiousity" are much much higher than it was during your time buddy
There's also more devs who are only curious about fashionable topics (e.g. AI).
I don't think that the curious developer is gone, very much like I don't think that the organic, non-corporate Web is not gone. But the curious and passionate developer is hard to notice in the crowd of developers who learned the craft just for the money it was bringing. Similarly, an indie Web site built as a passion project is hard to come by among the numerous Web sites built to extract money.
There was time when being a software developer was not a particularly prestigious or well-paying job in corporations, or maybe a weird hobby of developing games for the toy 8-bit entertainment computers of the day. It was mostly attracting people who enjoyed interacting with computers, were highly curious, etc.
Then there was a glorious time when the profession of software engineering was growing in importance by the day, hackers became heroes, some made fortunes (see e.g. Carmack or, well, Zuckerberg). But this very wave was the harbinger of the demise: the field became a magnet for people who primarily wanted money. These people definitely can be competent engineers! But the structure of their motivation is different, so the culture was shifting, too. Now programming is a well-paid skilled trade, like being a carpenter or a nurse.
If you want hacker ethos again, look for an obscure field which is considered weird, is not particularly well-paid, but attracts you.
Yes, the author reveals implicitly that he is a web developer. As far as I am concerned, not having a new JS framework innovation neither impacts innovation nor creativity.
If you don't own the company you work at, you shouldn't be curious, at least not for their benefit if they don't compensate you accordingly.
In the past I did many mistakes like pulling all nighters to because I found a way to make checkout experience more pleasant. That resulted in massive increase of revenue and none of that benefitted me. Or unblocked other team, they couldn't find a reason why their app would randomly crash. Board was panicking as client was going to pull out. I saved the day. Multi-million contract gone through. "Thank yous" didn't help me pay off debts.
Only be curious for your own stuff. For corporations? Do bare minimum.
You should be curious if you wan to progress within the company, or when changing jobs. Knowing significantly more than a job requires was propelling me quite effectively when I was younger. This slowed down when I started to spend less time on lateral research (aka "curiosity").
Look at the leveling guidelines of every major tech company. You don’t get promoted based on “knowing more”. You get promoted based on your ability to handle a larger scope of work, your “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”. Different companies state it differently. But it all boils down to this.
As far as knowing more, the best way to get promotions raises and job opportunities is via networking, the ability to market yourself inside and outside of the company and soft skills.
Well the best way to make more money is to work for companies that pay more money - ie BigTech and adjacent [1] - and then learn the politics of promotions.
[1] Yes “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions)
You can be curious and learn without gifting your energy to an uncaring entity
I weep for a world that is increasingly dominated by corporations, filled with people who are insistent (probably correctly) that they are being taken advantage of, doing the bare minimum, all resulting in an awful experience for everyone. Behind every support ticket that you just can't seem to get resolved, every horrible experience trying to use some product seemingly designed to drive you insane, behind every hare-brained decision that makes your life miserable for seemingly no reason, there's an apathetic worker who's taken your mindset. The impact of your efforts doesn't just affect your employer. We all work together to create the world. What kind of world do you want to live in?
I would hope there to be a healthy medium between "pulling all nighters" and "Do bare minimum" -- perhaps somewhere where we all try to do our best, but don't push ourselves too hard for no reason? I mean, that's more reasonable than imagining we'll one day overthrow our corporate overlords. Probably, I'm naive and idealistic. But I can't help but feel like the result of apathy is not satisfaction.
Eh idk, there are certainly wage-labor jobs I’ve seen that I could get really excited for and fall for it all.
Luckily though, none of those places would ever even look at my resume.
This author saw a few examples of the metric chasing phenomenon, promptly forgot how many counter-examples exist, and wrote this lovely article for you to latch on to with matching outrage.
But it is simply untrue.
Just the other day a single engineer completed a 25 year project to emulate VideoDisc games. There’s a new JS framework or a new static site generator every day of the week. And with LLMs it’s never been easier to be curious about something and go tinker.
I agree with the author but I think a key driver of this is overall loss of psychological safety in the world.
People play and tinker when they feel that they are in a secure enough environment to fritter away time without feeling like they've incurred risk by doing so.
Given the state of the climate, economy and politics today, I think a whole lot of people feel a whole lot less secure. When I look back at recent US history when there seemed to be the most innovation going on, it was the 90s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before 9/11. That was probably the "OK-est" a lot of folks in the US felt in their lives.
You might rightly point out that people are wasting lots of time these days, staring at screens, binging TV shows, re-reading giant sci-fi and fantasy series. That's true. But there's a big difference between wasting time escaping the world versus "wasting" time creatively engaging with it.
Deflating that theory is the tsunami of innovation in computing in the '60s-'80s in spite of the even worse state of the economy and politics in that era. (Indirectly the climate too if you count the widespread air and water pollution back then.)
The 90s was just the crest of the momentum of the tech enthusiasm built up during the 70s and 80s. You know, the Vietnam War, petroleum crisis 70s and the culmination of Cold War, Reagan and Thatcher, oh God we're all going to die 80s.
You do not own it, you only rent it is the crucial point, but it's buried inside a distracting outer point.
The distracting outer point is "Build what you Can’t Ship", which has limits, and is just another iteration of the old don't sell out idea about art. It's like saying "be an outsider artist". That's not a good goal. It's all very well spending years writing a book in secret - supposedly without a thought for the audience - but if you accidentally wrote it in a private language that nobody can ever read, or made it unrelatable or incoherent, then that's not creative brilliance, it just isn't any good. Without pandering to popularity, you should still write for some audience, and if you're making art at all, imagining an audience is inherent to that. Similarly if your software only runs on your own machine, or (referencing a recent HN post) you perhaps spent years writing an adventure game in QBasic for the love of it, but accidently made it 64-bit so nobody can run it on DosBox, well, that's suboptimal.
So another point is that writing for a niche market is a fine attitude. On the other hand all this you only rent it stuff makes the niches smaller and more obscure, and that's a bad thing. You want a comfortably-sized niche where there's a medium-sized audience, so you get some attention in return for being subject to only some pressure to perform and conform.
Interestingly, I feel the opposite for myself, as an experienced senior engineer.
I am doing more side projects, and finishing more projects, and feel a much greater level of confidence in starting new projects since I feel more confident that I will get at least an MVP working. These are not commercial efforts, I am just tinkering and scratching my own itches.
I attribute 3 reasons to this change:
- Vibe coding helps me do parts of the tech stack that I used to procrastinate on (UI, css)
- Gemini helps me solve all the inscrutable devops issues that used to block me in the past.
- A great open source tech stack that just works (Postgres, docker, node, ollama....)
AI helping me with the above has allowed me to focus on the "fun" parts of the side projects that I do. And the UIs also end up being much prettier than what I could create myself, which gives me the confidence to share my creations with friends and family.
I very much agree with this. I'm sure that dev culture as a whole has gotten less curious as it has gotten more mainstream. However, I think that the absolute number of curious devs has grown. There are ways to convert that advantage to replace what is lost, but it does take effort. Although, I suspect that it took effort to be in tech 20 years ago---people just forget that (or had more effort to spare when they were younger).
-- a 28 year old
Friend of mine just got laid off from 15 years at google, he's in his mid/late 40s. He's started to learn about embedded systems, hardware controllers, he's playing with haskell and erlang and doing work he's never done before, actually very far from webscale DB architecture, he's the most happy i've seen him in his life, he's following his curiosity and he's like a pig in mud.
That more than likely because after 15 years at Google, you’re probably financially well off enough to retire and do whatever you want.
Play and curiosity has always required some level of privilege and a sense of safety.
After 15 years at Google he’s most likely at a point where he doesn’t have to work for a living anymore, and still afford a comfortable life for his family. I imagine that’s a big part of his happiness.
It’s maybe the best time ever, in the history of software engineering, to tinker.
In the last 50 years, software has morphed from a hobbyist pursuit, to a nerdy subculture, to a trillion+ dollars industry. This has caused a pretty significant mix shift in the software developer community: the reason driving the mean developer into this field in 2025 is very different from that of the 2015 developer, and that of the 2005 developer.
Arguably there might be more curious tinkerers nowadays, but they might represent a smaller slice of the pie.
And before software became a hobbyist pursuit (with the advent of the PC and the home computer) it was entirely the world of large enterprises and governments. Think large main frames and minicomputers: IBM or Burroughs or DEC. It was also a different age.
>software became a hobbyist pursuit
Maybe only possible once you could finally own a whole "system" single-handedly and do whatever you wanted, for the first time ever.
Perhaps the fundamental concepts of "owning" your own and doing whatever you want with it have been allowed to dwindle so badly it seems like no comparison.
Okay lol. The curious tinkerer developer is still very curious, but the culture around his or her job is probably wringing the enthusiasm of the field out of them.
Cause the median developer is now someone who went into it for the money. It's what happens when there's no other comparable growth careers/opportunities available.
I love computers, but I'm tired. I spend all day doing stand-ups and scrum and SAFE and then trying to build microservices that talk to other microservices that other teams have built and I just want to get it done with the minimal amount of explosions and call it a day. I can't afford to tinker at my job, and I have no energy at night. I made my hobby my job and it killed it.
Yes I think your experience sums up about >95% of all dev experience. I am doing about same thing as you for last 8-10 years or so. I guess it is about same time where Agile took hold of IT/Software industry.
Apart from may be few core infrastructure primitives at public Cloud providers most of IT stuff today is API calling API calling API and so on.
It will be the case until Human is Out Of Loop from most of the IT work.
I agree. My enjoyment of my career as a software developer dropped dramatically about 10-15 years ago when "agile" started taking off. Even in some of the companies I worked at that didn't actually use it, it was mentioned in pitches by sales to show how modern we were and then used as an excuse to shoehorn in all kinds of random features that made no sense.
I very much doubt more than a low 10s % of companies do scrum or safe.
And it's unlikely that more than a low 1s% of companies do agile as originally conceived. "Agile" has become everything it was originally opposed to: tons of process, specialized roles that have nothing to do with development (scrum masters), little to no direct communication with customers (at least in the places where I've worked). The dominant tool for doing "Agile" (Jira) says it all - a slow, heavy, bug tracking system with everything and the kitchen sink in terms of features often imposed on teams from the top down. Very "agile" indeed.
I can 100% guarantee you my SAFe company still thinks of themselves as Agile. Sure, we just planned out what were doing in every sprint for the next quarter, but we still do the ceremonies, and that's what's important, right?
I have no metrics on this, but I've been seeing/hearing of scrum popping up in all sorts of places, not just in software but in other firms where it doesn't belong. For example, my relative works in a chemical engineering firm and they use scrum. A friend of mine is in another flavor of engineering field and they use scrum as well. The sad truth is agile/scrum has really lost the plot in most places and is mostly used as a way to justify micromanagement of developers (or other roles) and lack of proper long term planning.
I would bet that the majority of companies with more than couple of devs do some sort of "agile" for dev work.
I mean computerization has always been about automation. There are a massive number of tasks of humanity that have been automated or mechanized away and more will continue to do so in the future.
> stand-ups and scrum and SAFE
Honestly some of my best jobs were at places that had a nicely balanced practice in place and the backbone to remind execs that if they interrupt makers daily with new shiny asks they will in effect get nothing (because nothing would ever be completed)...
But obviously we can both have worked at places with those labels with vastly different implementations and thus experiences :)
I was at the same place you are for a while until I realized my obsession with doing everything "right" was killing my enjoyment of programming. I read through Let Over Lambda a couple of months ago and was blown away at how deeply unmaintainable some of his code examples are, but I got inspired to start letting myself do weird unmaintainable shit while programming instead of constantly acting like my code has to pass a code review and I've found its a lot more fun.
This is a feature, not a bug.
Any non-small company has plenty of people that need to justify their salaries.
Meetings is one of the most effective ways to actually pretend to be working.
This right here is how I feel about this too.
I used to have a lot more mental bandwidth and energy to be "curious" and to tinker once upon a time. But now the world is so literally and figuratively on fire and every executive is so rabidly frothing at the mouth over AI that now I just want things to "just work" with the least amount of bullshit so I can just go home on time and forget about work until the next business day.
I just want this fucked decade to be over already.
While I want that too, I have no illusions that the next decade will be better.
While I do agree things can always be worse (and seem to want to continue to be worse), I think there has to be a rock bottom of sorts past which the unwashed masses will simply not tolerate. Maybe that's what's left of my optimism talking.
Interesting.
for me it feels like I have to spend all day fighting with folks who are constantly “holding it wrong” and using libraries and frameworks in really weird/buggy ways who then seem completely uninterested in learning.
In my free time I love working on my own projects because I don’t have to deal with this bullshit and I can just craft things finely without any external pressure.
At least you're not sitting there patching Y2K bugs
To be candid, even though my jobs have time to tinker, I don’t want to fight with Product or Management to get improvements into prod.
Took me half a year to get them to value Sentry, lol.
I’ll just collect my check and go do something else.
Exactly the situation in pretty much every company I worked at in the last 10 years.
Fighting the Product Manager, fighting the Designer, sometimes even fighting some micromanaging stakeholder that won't leave you alone.
It's definitely fights I can win, but do I even have the energy anymore? Development work involves more than meets the eye. While there are some folks who understand the technical intricacies, it's tiring having to join discussions you know won't go anywhere.
I wish it was 2000-2010 again, when my biggest problems were Sales promising features we don't have and then having fun with the other devs coding it.
Exactly the same sentiment here.
If you don't have energy, then you are doing too much. Pace yourself. If you think something can be delivered in 5 days, say it needs 10 days. Otherwise this is just a road to burnout and exploitation.
World will not end if project is delayed by few weeks. You get time for your own tinkering (never tinker on company stuff, even if that would improve things, unless you are shareholder).
This so much. When there’s a real urgency, you will know it (aka the whole team will be brought in). A good pace (as in not ruining your mental health) is feasible.
The larger the environment, the more brain power it takes. Microservices didn't help with that
damn this was me for a few years. I hate corporate work environments so much. Then they hire bottom of the barrel contractors and expect you to get them up to speed in less than a week or so.
Final straw for me was RTO. Silently quitting and getting my ticket punched (laid off) was the best thing for me.
Housing inflation also really cuts down on everyone's ability to not be mercenary
Oh, I am so here for "housing theory of everything" comments! That is, in my other comment on this post, precisely my "interest in local politics".
Working on fixing our housing shortage has felt extremely meaningful to me.
I'd like to find some of that idealism in software again.
There are current efforts along these lines! For example, permitting is a huge bottleneck - software could be part of the solution (carefully and thoughtfully integrated, of course).
Disclosure: I work at govstream.ai - we work in this space [we're hiring!]
This is the root of it all. 8-10 years of experience with an above average pay rate means you can just start to afford a starter home in any of the tech hubs.
Rent a shoebox in a tech hub, save enough for a house in flyover country, then become a plumber there or something if remote is dead.
That sounds dystopian. If you are a chicken with 5 years of experience laying eggs, you can just start to afford your own cage on the farm.
It is super bleak: yeah, as a software person, you can think about what it would take to afford a home.
As a teacher or many other professions? Forget about it. You need to either marry someone with a more lucrative career, or move somewhere more affordable.
Yes exactly. There is a huge amount of people going into software development so they can have the basic security of owning their own dwelling. Prices have gone up even in non tech hubs. Home pricing vs what people earn is the reason for so much destitution in this country, and so many people are locked in its a complete non-issue for them, or a benefit.
The single biggest determinant of people's cost of living, and the single biggest driver of backsliding living standards in many of the most productive cities in the US.
When math starts falling from the sky, generated by AI of course and proved with theorem provers, then everything will start falling from the sky. There will be a way to have more houses than anyone would ever need, for every person on the planet.
It's not just housing. Imagine you want to start a business. There is not much commercial property available and if there is something, it is too expensive and wildly taxed.
I was once told a story by an Argentinian.
They have a business tax rate above 106% of profit[]. That is it is illegal for a business to make a profit.
Yet there is apparently a video out there of a black market cart seller selling wares right in front of the Argentine tax office, totally unbothered.
It made me wonder if this was just an allegory of what's in store for us.
[] https://archive.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/...
That number is not tax as a percent of profit like corporation Tax, but includes all contributions. For example 23.5 from that number is just social security paid by the company. In other developed countries like the UK we also have those sort of taxes (at 15% of pay in the UK). It is misleading of the report to give this number as a % of profit since then if a company makes no profit, it technically has an infinite tax rate, despite the fact the tax owed does not depend on the profit.
Agree, the money is the key here.
I got started in the 1980s, and super-curious and technical people were the norm. We were incredibly strongly attracted to computers.
The first real growth in computers in that kind of era was Wall Street and banks. Wall Street in particular started paying huge bonuses to developers because it was clear that software could make huge piles of money. Then we started seeing more people joining in for the money who were not necessarily passionate about technology.
Then came the dot com era and bust, and then the rise of social media, FAANG, and absurd corporate valuations allowing ridiculous total comp to developers, and the needle moved even more towards money.
The net result is the curious and the passionate are still here, but our numbers are massively diluted.
I come places like here to find that passionate niche.
In defence, it's not just the developer. Every tech company seems to be copying the FAANG template of constantly having to prove your value and looking over your shoulder. There's no more "tenure" if you want to call it that. We've gone like academia where it's publish or perish and now everyone games the system to keep their luxury jobs.
> It's what happens when there's no other comparable growth careers/opportunities available.
That's not entirely true. We (society, definitely US) pushed going to college HARD for the last 3-4 decades and glamorizing how much money you'll make. Now, we have an overabundance of people with college degrees and thousands of dollars in debt to those degrees.
There's plenty of career paths where you could make decent money that don't require a college degree.
We should have been pushing people to figure out what they wanted to do, not "Make lots of money", and figure out the path that gets them there.
We should have figured out how that get some of the benefits of productivity gains to go to workers. We were promised a rising tide lifts all ships, but now that the tide rose and is started to go back out, those that promised didn't deliver but keeping hoping we won't notice.
You're acting like it's something we don't have a solution for... that's not the issue, it's about insuring the investor class from winning capitalism and owning everything.
Do you honestly believe that workers received 0% of the productivity gains over the last 40+ years?
It's wild how this site has turned into reddit over the last couple years.
We did push people into what they wanted to do: make money.
The sad reality is that "everyone learn to code" was by and large a marketing distraction from the severe structural unemployment the fast and loose economy is in. No a coal miner can't just learn to code and get a job in WV, certainly not 1,000's of other miner sin the same position, not can the millions of people that corporate laid off over those same decades.
Coding was a way out of poverty, but for most people it was just a distraction to keep them from seeing how bad the economy is.
Americans are poor: PNC Bank's annual Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report shows that 67 percent of workers now say they are living paycheck to paycheck, up from 63 percent in 2024. https://www.newsweek.com/2025-rise-americans-living-paycheck...
You say this as if it is a negative connotation and it seems to be ignoring realities of the modern world.
My first trip through college I studied business and then the economy collapsed. Most people my age eeked their way through menial jobs (like me) and survived, found a way to break through, or, (like me) went back to school years later when the economy improved to try to find another opportunity. For me the choices were CS or nursing at that time, and I have always been good at math and with computers, so I chose that.
I wouldn't say I ever "loved" development, especially not the current corporate flavor of it. I've had some side projects when I get time and energy. But there's never really been a point in my life where I could ever have afforded getting the level of expertise I possess now just for the "curiosity" of it. Not everyone has a trust fund or safety nets.
This so much.
I interviewed many people from top universities and they absolutely scream "I couldn't care less about the field, I'm just here to maximize the compensation".
At the same time I get 19 year old self taught kids who are miles better at programming, learning and are genuinely passionate.
The people who hated thinking about and writing code think everyone else does (or should) too. Unfortunately these folks manipulated their way into management.
I would often say that learning to code is a shortcut to six-figure salaries and a middle-class lifestyle.
Unfortunately this is the consequence.
So if only you could have kept your mouth shut, this would have never happened.. Burn the witch!
And it's all a consequence of the dollar being so worthless by now that you need a six-figure income and still may not be able to afford a middle-class lifestyle in a growing number of places any more :\
Exactly what the OP is saying....
This has been happening since the 2008 financial crash when a lot of people would have normally gone into careers on Wall Street, but the shrinking Wall Street job market led people into tech as a high-performant, decent paying career..... (U.S. biased opinion, of course)
While that is true, there is more to it than that. Some people _really_ do like coding and want to build cool shit.
Just the bar is so high now, so much competition, so many cargo culting startups that only do bad leetcode interviewing.
It's very hard to both find and get hired at places that want more than a coding monkey to just blindly move Jira tickets.
Don't know about other countries, but here in the UK there is no longer money in the development.
Subsequent governments turned the profession into the captive market, where you can only realistically work for corporations who fix the wages by following so called "market rates" and you cannot create your own job if you disagree with the rates.
I was always under the impression that high level UK engineers tend to become freelance consultants so as to get paid an appropriate amount - is this not true (anymore)?
This used to be the case, but now with IR35 rules you are generally treated as an employee for tax purposes not a business, which heavily complicates the situation. This in turn brought down expected rates to the point where most would rather the employment option since the risk of being self employed no longer came with a substantial reward.
This is becoming less true due to the current and incoming taxes that are going to rise in the UK.
Many consultant friends I know and business owners have moved away from the UK to low tax areas in Portugal or UAE.
Tons of high paying jobs in FAANG and similar in London. What are you even talking about?
Median pay for a dev in London is about £60-65k(a out $87,000). This isn't that high given the cost of living in the city, with your average shared flat with a few roommates going at about £1k a month nowadays. Add in that you'll be hitting the marginal tax rate of 40% plus 9% student loan tax and about 8% national insurance (ok income under 4k a month) and you don't end up with that much to live on.
The average university grad would be better off in law/finance/medicine by income in London. This isn't to stay the top software Devs don't get paid a lot, but it's a minority compared to the legions of high paid people in finance in London and the surrounding industries.
This is the very very small minority.
Jobs in London pay less than peanuts and if you earn six figures in the UK, income tax takes half of it anyway even if you go to FAANG.
I think it's more the MBA-fication of the industry. There's no time for exploring and tinkering, it's all just chasing after the next ticket/okr.
Funny thing being is that doing that exploring and tinkering is what makes them more money. Otherwise you're just stuck with trying to make a thinner iPhone and that doesn't seem to be going all that well...
The best model I've seen is the 3M-style "10% Time"
Under that model, 10% of your time is completely up to you (within reason) to work on things that aren't your main project or scope.
Works out well for R&D or more open ended positions, since you can have the flexibility to explore hunches without having to justify a whole project around it.
It always makes me groan when I see this sentiment like back in the olden times, people got into development for “passion”.
Sure I was a hobbyist in the 80s programming in assembly language on four separate architectures by the time I graduated college in 1996 in CS. But absolutely no one in my graduating class did it for the “passion” we all did it because we needed to exchange money for food and shelter.
The people jumping into tech during the first tech boom were definitely doing it for the money and the old heads I met back then programming on Dec Vax and Stratus VOS mainframes, clocked in, did their job and clocked out.
People doing it now for money aren't the same as you likely doing it for the money in the old day.
When I went into comp-sci, it wasn't the cool path to riches it's been marketed as for the past 15 years.
EDIT: you graduated around the same time as me. Sure everyone wanted jobs. But there were easier paths to getting a good job in '95/96 that cramming late night comp-sci work. Almost everyone in my class had grown up in the age of hacking around on Apple IIs, their first PCs, etc. No one just randomly ended up in the Comp Sci part of the university because they just wanted a job to make money.
It wasn’t for the “riches” and there has never been a time where 90% of the developers working weren’t doing boring old enterprise dev making middle class wages.
And most of the people in my class had their first exposure to computer programming at my state school in south GA was in college.
Your experience is localized and perhaps more anecdotal than you admit. I also graduated and started my career in '96. But, I grew up in the SF Bay Area and did my CS major at UC Berkeley. I saw a lot more of the idealist types being described by others in these comments. It's not that we didn't expect to need jobs, but there was more passion-driven interest. Back then, it seemed like people "just in it for money" or to meet family expectations were more often going to pre-law or pre-med.
I had a focus on programming languages in my undergrad studies and went into an academic R&D programming job, basically making tools for computational sciences. I've basically spent my whole career using and writing open source software.
I've definitely seen a kind of culture shift where the frontier nature of our old R&D culture is getting drowned out by boring process. To me, it is largely the influx of cybersecurity compliance that is killing the old culture. The bureaucratic compliance overhead is antithetical to the small team prototyping approach that drove progress during most of my career. It inspires a sort of cargo cult risk-management process that seems more about appearances and plausible deniability than actual secure systems.
You think most developers in the US were located “in the Bay Area”, went to Berkeley , and spent a career doing open source work in computational science and you call my experience “anecdotal”?
Most developers from the beginning worked at banks, government, defense etc doing boring enterprise work. That has always been the case.
They weren’t doing “research” writing COBOL for banks and the government.
In 30 years, I’ve worked at 10 jobs for startups, boring big enterprise companies, BigTech and I’ve been working in consulting (3 of those were working full time in AWS’s consulting department) for five years working with developers from startups, enterprises and government.
I think my exposure to a wide swath of the industry is a little bit more than working in California for 30 years…
Even when I was younger and single, all of us would hang out after work - males and females and go to the bar, the club, the strip club (yes the women too - it was their idea they were mostly BAs and one programmer), and just really enjoy the money we were making. We were all making $50K-$80K back when you could easily get a house built in the burbs for $150k-$170K.
Even as I got older, and change jobs in my mid 30s, by then my coworkers were mostly involved with other hobbies and our families. We weren’t even thinking about computers after work.
Sorry, I didn't mean to discount your experience so much as add another microcosm to the mix. I think we're all anecdotal...
But, I do think HN has a cultural fixation on the fabled Silicon Valley experience. This includes an attachment to (nostalia for?) the old university/startup axis. This used to be a more fluid exchange, rather than just the regular enterprise hiring pipeline.
That’s just the thing - it never was on the meta level.
The tech startup scene was a thing between the mid 90s and 2000 with the first dot com boom and even most of them outside of the hardware companies like Sun, Cisco, Intel and software at Netscape were not doing cutting edge for the time development. The startups were throwing dumb (or some premature) things at the wall with no business plan backed by VC money. The people at startups were definitely there for the money. No one had a “passion” to deliver pet food or groceries (Webvan) or early web advertising.
Tech before the mid 90s were programmers building software on mainframes mostly doing boring things.
You had the dark days between 2001-2008 before mobile, web apps, SaaS and high speed internet took off where all most people really could find were boring enterprise jobs. Back then, I was living in Atlanta and the dot com bust didn’t affect the local market at all. The banks, the airlines, the credit card processing companies were hiring boring Microsoft devs and Java devs like crazy.
I’ve just seen too often where 90% of the devs who spend their career at boring old enterprises don’t have any idea what it’s like for those who are in the top 10% working at BigTech and adjacent while at the same time those 10% can’t fathom the fact that there are “Dark Matter developers” living their lives in tier 2 cities with their big houses in the burbs treating a job as just a job and most people always have.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
I’ve been on both sides (and now in the middle doing strategy cloud consulting). I had my first house built in 2003 for $170K and even my second house built in the “good school system” in the burbs of Atlanta in 2016 for $335K. We moved and downsized three years ago.
[dead]
Did the author miss it when this happened twenty years ago?
In 2000, at my very first job, was when I first met a developer who got into it for the money and not for the love. When he told us he picked computer science in college because it seemed like it was a good way to make a living, and a lot easier than law or medicine, the rest of us programmers looked at him like he had sprouted a second head. By 2010, people like him were the norm.
Who cares, though?
If you're a "curious" developer, the existence of a massive preponderance of incurious engineers who are in it for the money doesn't change who you are. It doesn't have to change how you see yourself.
Socially, there are more "curious" developers to connect with and learn from than ever before.
The downside is that people outside of the industry will draw conclusions about you based on their perception of engineers as a whole. Boring and mercenary.
But let's face it, in the eyes of most of the population, boring and mercenary is a step up from how we were perceived when it was just us nerds who were weird enough to enjoy it.
There's a funny correlation with UC Berkeley comp sci requirements. Dot com bubble pushed the minimum GPA to declare up. Bubble burst, GPA requirement went down. 2014-2018 it crept up again.
I could've been annoyed that everyone was doing it for the money while I really cared, but you know what, most people cannot afford to go to college for a low paying career. And I took a high paying job in the end when I could've easily done research or tinkering instead, so can't complain.
Now if anything, I'm pissed off at the few coworkers who also care a lot and act superior doing stuff the "real coder" ways, actually don't get very much done, and hold others back.
As a professional musician, every very few years you sit down and you write new songs and record an album. But then you have to go on tour to make money and engage your fanbase and demonstrate what you've learned and finessed in a way that delivers immediate value to your customers. Touring is not fundamentally creative, but it is enjoyable in it's own right. Or you can be a hobbyist composer (pure creativity). Or a session musician (pure craft). Or play in a covers band (pure work). I don't see this as any different.
Your analogy has a flaw. Do you just tour the rest of your life writing no new songs? Or very few?
You won't tour for long as a one hit wonder and I think what's being said by the OP is quite similar
Yeah I’ve noticed the sage/wizard archetype has been pushed out.
SWE culture was very different in a low interest rate environment. Teams were over staffed. No new tech came around for a long time so everyone was focused inward on how to improve the quality of the craft. At my big tech company some teams had 2-3 people dedicated to purely writing tests, maintainability, documentation, and this was for a <1m MAU product.
Then boom free money gone. Endless layoffs year over year. Companies pushing “AI” to try and get SWEs to deprecate themselves. It’s basically just trying to survive now.
That wizard that used to nag everyone about obscure C++ semantics or extremely rare race conditions at distributed scale has disappeared. There’s no time for any of that stuff.
Like all cultures, this was all performative. People astutely observed how to say and care about the things that they saw, the people above them, saying and caring about, and mimicked them to promotions. That doesn’t work anymore, so that wizard culture is long gone.
> Build what you Can’t Ship
This parallels another creative domain: cooking.
If you've ever wondered what's worth making yourself, it really comes down to the goal of building skills, or obtaining the unobtainable.
The latter is all over cuisine. There are lots of dishes and ingredients that are not economically viable as products. Factors like shelf-life, seasonal availability, cost of production, complexity of preparation - all that stuff is absolutely worth taking on yourself. We never see a huge portion of the world's cuisine at the supermarket for those reasons. Restaurants are better since they cook meals, but they're limited by similar economics and making money at volume & scale. The only way to go deeper is to DIY.
Just like with cooking, there is a huge range of possibilities outside economic viability that applies to any technology. Build a kit car that can't be manufactured on an assembly line. Make stuff out of wood that you'll never see at a craft fair. Build electronics and software with insane BoMs that no entrepreneur would touch with a 10-foot pole. Renovate a room in your house to taste in a way that no contractor would dare take on. If this stuff scratches an itch or enriches your life in some way, learn, explore, and go do it.
I'm a new grad/junior dev and my observation/experience, for what it's worth, is that most of my peers just want to keep their heads down and get employed. I can think of 2 people that are genuinely super into exploratory dev stuff and tinker with projects (as opposed to hey, I need to make a side project for my resume) out of the very large amount of CS students I know.
For me, it's simple. If I didn't need to earn a paycheck I'd be tinkering day in, day out, chasing anything and everything that piqued my interest even a little. That's what I did when I was young with no responsibilities and no worries about the future, and it's my natural state.
That isn't reality, however, and so most of that energy is consumed by my day job, and it feels wasteful to put what little remains into projects that have little chance of any practical return. Any time I start settling into work taken up out of pure personal interest, the "responsible adult" part of my personality starts stratching at the back of my mind and pushing me to go do something more productive.
Such is life.
Pedantic pet peeve: the past tense of “lead” as in “leader” is "led". NOT "LEAD". Lead is a metal. “When Curiosity Lead the Way” is a nonsensical phrase.
There were also mistakes in using “it’s” instead of “its”.
But these things are ignored by most people anyway. I guess my problem with the article is that it’s a bit confusing. It started talking about people not being curious and using tech they hate, then later he’s annoyed that people like to experiment and tinker with new frameworks. Then later it’s talking about some other thing, and there doesn’t seem to be anything tying all of the author’s complaints. As if it’s just a freestyle rambling instead of trying to get to a point.
This drives me crazy, too, but it seems like the misspelled version is now more common than the correct one. I imagine the dictionaries will eventually cave to common usage and say both versions are correct, and I'll remain bitter about it for the rest of my days.
I keep hearing this complaint so much. I feel we are living in different realities. Fix your algorithm.
Omarchy Bitchat Ghostty Crush
None of those are chasing metrics. And that’s just off the top of my head.
Omarchy is by DHH, Bitchat is by Jack Dorsey, Ghostty is by Mitchell Hashimoto. These aren't examples of individual hackers moved by curiosity. These are examples of people who have won their escape from capitalism and get to be free doing as they please.
Ugh. Just build man, stop with the excuses.
I’ve been there, looking for pennies in the couch to be able to afford a burger while I waited for my next contract gig deposit. Even if your project doesn’t become the next big thing, you’ll end up with something to show in your resume. That will open tons of doors.
Not really. Hiring processes seem to no longer even take a look at repositories and projects. I have tons of projects, some even finished and described on my website. Have yet to take part in any interview, in which someone wants to talk about my projects or ask me anything about it. They are all just unaware and clueless.
I have been with my company now for 13 years. Back then we had plenty of slack time which we used to try stuff. We introduced git, spent months on figuring out if UI automation works, invented a distributed test runner, spent weeks on building shielding enclosures so our tests that use RF communication won't fail in the crowded test lab. All of these resulted in huge leaps forward and improved productivity enormously.
Since then devs got squeezed more and more so that nobody has any time for trying out stuff. Tech debt accumulates and nothing improves. When you have an idea, you have to submit a proposal to a review board which approves requests from politically connected people and rejects other requests because other deadlines.
This development has taken out everything that made me enjoy about the job and I am good at. Thankfully I am reaching retirement so I am happy to leave.
What you wrote sounds like a good description of processes at my previous job, which I left after 7y. At the beginning I saw a problem, I solved it, got my hands in everything that needed a solution. I basically built the whole initial platform.
Later it was just all scrum wannabe agile and task after task, while experimentation was phased out and engineers were even forbidden to explore other topics than the team lead wanted, because according to him those topics were not close enough to the job. Guess what, all good engineers left. Now that team lead left as well, and if they didn't learn anything from that experience, I am sure they will wreak havoc somewhere else.
This feels like a careful what you wish for scenario.
The industry has flooded with money motivated people, rising the income of the curious (but not exactly marketable) engineer. Yes those people who flooded in might be uninspired, loathsome, buffoons (in the eyes of elite nerds). But also it's the opportunity for your hobby to be mainstream, encountered by those who likely never would have, to not be denigrated for your skill with technology etc.
I'm grateful for how software has progressed from IQ 160, to 140, to 100, to 95 segments of the populace. It means we're winning culture over. It means we're solving problems (including how difficult it used to be to engage with). We've made previously wildly difficult things be table stakes for todays app. (one trite example: long polling became websocket pushes)
We should be celebrating how mainstream we've become.
Taking a contrarian point here, I went into software to make money doing a craft I can enjoy. I love software because its *useful*. Useful enough I can finance a lifestyle I enjoy for myself and my family, while still feeling moments of creativity and autonomy.
I think there needs to be a distinction between artist and artisan. Art exists for its own sake, code exists because its useful. I don't want code that reads like poetry, I want code that works so I read actual poetry later.
> Have a project in mind that you’ve always wanted to tackle but it never made sense to you to do it because it would never be used by anyone else or it would never make you any money?
I appreciate the tinker's and hobbyists, software is endlessly interesting as a career, and I'm thankful to be here. But I only want to build code that is useful.
That may be so, but the thing you are paid for depends on a colossal mountain of unpaid labor by tinkerers. There’s no job for you if people with real curiosity weren’t interested in installation and packaging, fixing bugs, Rust, CSS expressiveness, authorization expressiveness, virtual machines, standard library algorithms, etc. Something tells me the $250/mo you might spend on some GitHub sponsorships and Patreons - if even that - is not paying for anyone’s kids’ private schools.
And anyway, how useful is your code, really? I will not generalize or make assumptions, but you’re also not going to tell me what it is, right? So scrutiny for thee, but not for me?
And if it’s like, “I make Dagger wrapped implementations 17 layers deep in a Google product you’ve heard of”: by now you should know that the thing sincere people say about insincere people, “We watch what Hollywood says is good,” applies to shit that Google, Apple, Amazon and all these super high paying job companies do too. If you are conflating many users with useful, that’s the problem. Facebook, TikTok and Instagram could vanish tomorrow, and literally nothing meaningful would be lost.
Is “useful” to you, “everything that I do is useful, and everything I don’t do, maybe”? You don’t get to decide if your POVs are reductive. They just are.
I appreciate exposing yourself for a contrarian point of view, noble if fatally flawed.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the software we write tends to reflect our beliefs about the world. For example one of the best developers I’ve worked with had this unshakable belief that software could solve a lot of the worlds little problems. He was constantly coming up with these little programs that would solve some nit that he had in his day to day life.
I think a lot of people have lost faith that technology can improve the things that they care about. Even open source doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference in preventing, well anything bad in the last few years.
If we want to have a better dev culture there has to be a reason for people to believe that the software they make is actually going to improve people’s lives and not just accelerate the profits of multi billion dollar corporations.
I love the message, and generally agree.
Theres a layer of pessimism to engineers and hacker news that has been steadily growing (as I assume the average age increases).
To me it's hit a critical level and I have to disregard most negative comments here by default because I can no longer trust the average commenter to have a productive balance of optimism and curiousity.
----
On a different note, the point the author is trying to make is massively undercut by the ad spam all over their page.
It was so grotesque (and out of character for a dev blog) that my first assumption was that I had a malicious extension somewhere.
Just recently we got an e-mail from a consulting company we work with, their devs are 100% allocated to the client. The letter was something along the lines: "We hear you guys are using Github Copilot, and we would appreciate if from now on you could provide the number of lines from each developer that was created with AI, that was helped by AI (they are distinct metrics), and how many the developer created on their own. Per month". We, the paying client, that work with several consulting companies, got that e-mail.
I understand the author, and if these days the developers are on it for the money and deliver, but don't bring up stupid shit like this, I don't care much. Not everybody is on it for any kind of creativity relief. Spending hours on their Lottie animations or shaving off miliseconds out of request is not really for everybody either. We are lucky to cross paths with people that care.
I don't even understand the email.. . The consulting firm that you hired is asking you how many LOC their devs are generating in your company?
Exactly. It's a 1000+ people consulting firm, with a few dozens allocated with us
I think it's github and "social" coding. You used to be able to build something out of curiosity or for your own use and be happy with that.
Now it's on github, and if you don't get enough followers or forks or it's not in a popular language or framework or you haven't updated it recently enough it's seen as a "dead project" or a failure. A project can never be "done" because then it's dead. That's demotivating.
Social media damages everything it touches.
Who says it's dead, people opening issues? Guess I've never made a popular enough repo to even get there.
The most social coding I've ever experienced was Bukkit, the old Minecraft server thing. I was noob in high school, made plugins for little things I wanted, people installed them, they gave good/critical feedback, I learned, it was great.
In many ways I'd argue that a popular project is worse, as you end up dealing with a bunch of social factors that take time away from actually making or improving things.
100% it is. there is a whole mix of why innovation and creativity are lacking in tech today. The industry has matured, so the code written is cleaner, safer, and in most cases more organized. Projects are done in a more methodical way with less try something until you make it work experimentation. Companies have more people at management levels who understand the structured process of software development, even if they do not know how to code. This allows them to put in more requirements for reporting and monitoring the process and more oversight of unstructured process development. Most of the people working as coders are more professional than they used to be. They spend their time writing good proposals, better documentation, good pull requests, unit tests, e2e tests, structured design documents etc. This time spent on bookkeeping is not being spent on experimentation.
Lack of profit motive (mostly). Sadly gone are the days of making a killer app and getting fame and fortune. So it is harder to justify spending years of all your free time to build something new.
Through the early 2000's most people entering the IT fields did so for paychecks. There are far fewer pure geeks (as a percentage) than there used to be. My first job out of college as a programmer paid about a dollar an hour over minimum wage. I did not go into this field to compete with the finance bro's financially. I went for the love of technology. That changed so more people started doing this as a job not a lifestyle. These people are not nearly as interested in the experimentation that leads to new innovations.
For me, the push to single page applications and the unnecessary complexity that brought with it made me just sick of fooling around with web things- we had solved the problem and they invented nonsense that made it harder. There has been so much to explore over the past 7 years in machine learning though- it just requires a lot more compute than most people have available on their desktop.
> you chase every new shiny thing and you write a product or service in that shiny thing
That is a choice you make. Software development doesn't have to be that way.
In fact, it's saner for your productivity, ease of maintenance and onboarding new team members, and ultimately for your users, that you choose boring technology over the shiny new thing that just launched, or that is currently trending. Sure, you won't be able to add yet another buzzword to your CV, but you will deepen your knowledge of the stable technology, won't have to keep track of a constant stream of updates that may or may not break your application, and will have a much better chance of finding developers familiar with the boring tech. Most importantly, you will subject your users to fewer risks, since the product will be built on stable ground.
Developers often forget that the reason we write software is to solve a problem, and not to serve our own nerdy desire to play with tech. Enjoying your work is important, and the choice of tech plays a role in that, but the main motivation should come from solving a problem first, not from the tech itself.
This reminds me of a heated debate I had recently[1] about a popular project that was rewritten multiple times for little reason beyond the developer "felt like it". This is insane to me, yet for some reason, many people don't mind.
The criteria I prefer to use when choosing a tech stack is:
1. Pick the right tool for the job. Depending on your requirements, narrow down your options to those that would be most helpful for building the product, whatever "helpful" means in your context. I.e. if you need it done fast, learning how to use it wouldn't be a good idea.
2. Pick the boring, battle-tested, and proven tool. Discriminate. Do you really need all the features of tool A? Err on the side of simplicity.
3. And other things like: what does the company/environment already use, what is the team most comfortable with, and so on. Consistency and familiarity are important.
But I agree with others here. As much as I lament the current state of the software industry, a lot of it has to do with the sheer explosion in popularity of the field, not with us losing anything. The same people who were building awesome stuff decades ago, are still doing it today. They just have to deal with a lot more bullshit now.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45251375#45254607
This isn't true. There's still plenty of curious developers building things just because they want to using technologies that aren't flavor of the month. I wouldn't be surprised if there's more than ever. What has changed is the absolute number of developers and the percentage that are just in it for the money.
"more and more push back"
I think it depends on the circles you're in. For example, I see a lot of interest in the "Handmade" way of doing things, largely inspired by Handmade Hero. Almost feels like a comeback of what you consider to be dying. There are people who are interested, but one needs to look for them. I recommend it.
My theory is that imposter roles have basically taken over the industry. These are job roles which replicate inside an organization, and transfer between organizations laterally through VC, consulting, and management culture. They accumulate power and influence, and impede the organization's ability to function.
Imposter roles are jobs that are created working backwards from "job at company" to something that an individual can realistically claim they do at the company. They became prominent in the last tech bubble when there was a lot of wealth being created and people wanted to go work at places like software companies, where they could not realistically contribute.
"Product Manager" and "SCRUM Master" are just some of the imposter roles that you've probably encountered. When you scrutinize the existence of these roles, there is a swift and immediate backlash from people who's lifestyle and livelihood is at stake. Product managers will point to famous people at Apple called "product managers" to distract from the fact that the median product manager does not add value.
When an organization creates a role that subsumes all of the creative control, and fills it from a pool of entirely unqualified people, the product gets worse, and the industry gets less innovative. You're either an avid user of the software, or an avid builder of it, and if you don't fit into one of those groups, it's unlikely that you can make a software product better.
Product manager is an extremely important role. Too bad almost no place out there has anybody filling it, but that doesn't mean it's made-up.
But then we get into another problem, just because somebody as a job title it doesn't mean they fill the role that title implies. And if they do, it doesn't mean they do it competently.
> Product manager is an extremely important role.
> just because somebody as a job title it doesn't mean they fill the role that title implies.
This is the exact problem. When more people subscribing to the title "product manager" are incompetent than competent, then it's not really a legitimate role.
It might be true that there are talented people out there, who when given creative control over a product, add value which pays for their salary many times over. The grift is the widespread belief that they can be found and hired with a job listing. It's difficult to tell who these people are, unless you know one through your network you are more likely to be conned by hiring a product manager from the market than not.
A good comparison is to hedge fund managers. There are some people who can consistently perform better than the market, they exist. But it costs a lot to invest with them, and unless you know of one specifically, just searching for people willing to invest your money for you will not turn out well.
Most companies are better off just listening to their engineers and users, some of them will have a knack for product direction, and leadership can weight their decision that way.
This is honestly a great point, but it does get obscured a bit because it comes off as hackers being cranky that they have to answer to a business in order to get paid. There is an analogy in government tech where my wife works. They have a role called "systems engineer," but it isn't what that normally means in software. It's supposed to be a person with intricate domain knowledge of multiple components of interacting defense and intelligence systems, something like understanding at least a bit of the software used to task satellites, perform ground processing of images, some knowledge of the satellites themselves, the crypto hardware at the ground stations. Think of being a member of the IETF or something where you're supposed to have some idea of how the entire Internet works, not just how to write software.
But somewhere along the way it became just a job title and they somehow manage to hire people fresh out of college to do this thing, which makes no sense and leaves them totally out of their depth, but forces them to do something to attempt to demonstrate to higher management there's a point to keeping them there so they can still have jobs. I don't blame the people in these positions at all. It's the blind leadership that has no understanding of what the role is supposed to be, that realistically you can't just put out a job req for this, it has to be someone who has actually worked already as part of these projects.
At least I think this is what you're saying, that ideally product managers should be people who were engineers at some point and understands how the product they're managing works, as well as the customer needs, not because they majored in business but because they've actually worked with that customer and have some experience meeting those needs.
> I think this is what you're saying, that ideally product managers should be people who were engineers at some point and understands how the product they're managing works, as well as the customer needs.
It takes knowledge of the problem and solution domain to maintain a vision and lead a team. But in this case, the scarcity is with the problem domain. People who really understand what problem the product solves, and the best way to think about it, especially when their view leads the industry, are very hard to find. Too hard to build an organization around the implicit assumption of finding them.
My advice for organization building is not to have product managers, or even allow the term into your company. There are people with good product taste, they occur at some rate, and when you find them doing other things like writing software or supporting users you nudge them in the direction of curating a product vision and controlling resources to execute on it. Framed that way, the importance and hardness of the problem are very clear.
I'm tired. I've been at it since '89' when I was 15. Everything being on fire all the time (in the world and in my current robot project) is just burning me out.
Most of my curiosity is tempered by how it can make me money.
I do appreciate that 50-70% of the boring work can be done with AI agents now. As long as you know enough to have opinions and guide the process along, it can be helpful.
Expertise and learning don't seem to be AS important with the upcoming gen of developers. However, there is also so much out there now that it would be much harder to start from zero as opposed to being there from the beginning.
But I think gen X and Millenials were probably peak interest and curiosity, now it's just a job for the later generations.
I agree with nothing in this post. I see a lot of curiosity I don't reject OP's claim that they are one of the ones "that remember". There is more active development of truly interesting ideas going on now than ever before.
I don't doubt the concern or the observation of the author. I'm not sure if the phenomena observed by the author is any different, statistically, from before. If I look back, it was always a small percentage of people, driven by their innate curiosity, who moonlighted their way to great discoveries. If anything is different, we have more people working in the tech industry, and naturally the concentration of curious and driven people gets diluted. Consequently, one may not observe the same intensity or prevalence of curiosity in her daily life.
I believe the curious developers are now almost all poking hardware, to greater or lesser degrees. The two big projects of Meshtastic and Home Assistant absorb a huge amount of that side of the ecosystem, but also things like OpenWrt.
Web and the whole cloud/backend scene has become toxic because of the work culture around them. I know of a therapist on the west coast that has become completely snowed under by a surge of software developers claiming mental problems on account of their working environments, and she was in such disbelief that she was asking around if what she was hearing was possibly real. Other professionals simply would not accept what has been going on.
I've seen the same and it seems due to people moving down the stack in response to LLMs being able to code at a junior-ish level and everything that entails.
Hardware unfortunately proved to be my limit. I tried getting into various things like FPGAs and various RF/telephony/networking projects, but my math ability is just too weak and decrepit.
I am actually re-writing a service now go run minimally on my OpenWRT home router :)
I’d rather have bunch of corporate drones building their next failed startup than reading about yet another tinkerer who burned out because big corporations are using his code without paying him anything.
I am coming to believe that I am part of the workers displaced by LLMs. Been looking for a job for a year now and even slashing my salary expectations by half doesn't help. I am curious and still tinker on things I am interested about, but having an actual paying job seems so far from my reality now that I am more inclined on giving up. People here complain while having a job, but please think about us who are struggling and be mindful.
> Been looking for a job for a year now and even slashing my salary expectations by half doesn't help.
Are you still trying for remote? A few years ago when I was down bad and RTO was starting, I found that remote was near impossible to negotiate for “normal” devs even with such extreme concessions.
A side effect of the maturation of the industry, sadly. It comes in waves though. I remember when I first started out as a developer (circa 2003 I think?) things felt pretty boring. I ended up doing C# WinForms/WebForms work because that's what people were doing. Then the iPhone and Android came out and a whole new world exploded. There was so much interesting stuff to learn and, crucially, money to be made doing it.
That wave feels definitively over now, making mobile apps in 2025 is much like doing WinForms in 2003. Hopefully something new will come along that shakes things up. In theory that's AI but as a developer I find AI tremendously unsatisfying. It can do interesting things but it's a black box.
For me personally... I'm older and married with kids. My free time is so much more valuable than it was back in the day. I still try to be a curious developer but at the end of the day I need to get my work done and spend time with my family. There's enough of a financial squeeze that if I did find myself with an excess of free time I'd probably try to spend it doing freelance work. So whenever this next wave does arrive I might not be catching it.
Nah. Most humans are curious, and devs tend to be more curious than average in my experience.
What dampens the Spirit is same as everyone - a treadmill you cannot get off, punishment for independnat thinking.
Dev culture is not one thing that is found in dozens of companies - dozens of companies have their own culture - and if that is a curious and empowering culture you have curious and empowered devs, and salespeople and operations and chemists and …
Culture is what we make it
I find I'm not very curious. I often vaguely wonder why that is, and then stop.
Every new thing or place is first settled by pioneers who necessarily have the associated personality. But once it is settled, the hordes come in and that changes completely.
It’s fundamental, if you want to find that pioneering spirit again you have to leave your comfort zone and go exploring somewhere off the map.
> It seems to me that the focus has shifted from curiosity, learning and a joy for creating cool things to a focus on metrics, observables, problem solving for your niche audience.
It is very impressive (in a disheartening way) how easy it was for The System to convince us to constantly spy on each other “for our own good”.
I'm regretting turning off my Ad Blocker. Do not click on the ads, folks -- especially if you're at work.
It's bizarre that a personal blog has ads. Makes the whole thing lose credibility
Honestly I didn't even read the article because of the number of ads. I'm curious (though not enough to go look at the moment) if the author added the ads just because of it hitting HN.
We invented a summarization/shortcut machine and we're training people off the fundamental behavior and mindset of reading an original source or developing a skill that they could press a button to have an algorithm do.
This may be hitting developer culture hard but it's much broader than that.
Do you have any recommendations for younger devs like myself, who have been surrounded by hustle culture & everyone being a founder?
I personally love the craft, but battle the entrepreneur in my brain telling me not to waste time learning things that won't bring tangible value.
Possibly related: "Ask HN: Do people not have hobbies anymore?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33343603 (177 points, October 2022)
This post reeks of a person who either has no other hobbies or responsibilities.
This feels less like a dev-specific crisis and more like a timeless human pattern. We romanticize the past and nostalgia makes us believe what we loved is “dying.” In reality it’s not gone, just changed and harder to recognize from our old vantage point because of our own bias.
The Mathematician's lament, developer-style.
> I wrote this article to lament the loss of the curious spark in our developer culture
The curiosity hasn't disappeared from the culture, but it might not be brought in to a workplace anymore.
I think a lot of us have stopped bringing the tinkerer itch to work.
Outside of the workplace, there's an entire parade of tinkering by folks who at best post it on Youtube, not here (I watch "Stuff Made Here" for the code).
Of all the events of the past decade, the worst hit to the tinkering visibility has been Github making personal repos private by default.
Mostly the folks who were like me still have pet projects, most of them will share their code but only if you ask because it is "Well, not as nice as it should be".
I've got hundreds of repos in my github, but there's a sharp fall-off in what's public (there's ~113 public and 180 private) right when that happened and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
The tinkering is more active than ever now with vibe coding tools, where I can draw an svg out and then ask it to "I want to use manim.py to animate this" to get something which is a neat presentation tool to describe how data moves between systems.
But is it worth showing you when all the fun there was in making?
What if all I am likely to get "So what?" as the only response. Wouldn't that it make it less fun?
At the end of the day, what we have been experienting since the early 2000s is just the industrialisation of software development. 20 years ago it was still a craft and it has become a job. 20 years ago if you needed to do something serious with computers your best bet was to hire a self taught amateur who started working in the video game industry while still in highschool, had build his own 8bits computer and programmed his own operating system as a past-time.
That was not sustainable, the industry needs predictable employees. Even if that means many more of them. "Industrialization" of a process consists of nothing more than splitting that process into smaller, simpler tasks: Front end / back end / system ops / architecture, each split again by technologies, frameworks, languages, etc etc. Gone are the days where you could and needed to know everything.
The workforce increases massively, but since workers no longer need 10 years of intensive practice before being useful they are also cheaper, and most importantly, again : the whole process becomes predictable. You can replace a worker without jeopardizing your business.
The same process happened to many crafts during the industrial revolution, and that spawned similar culture wars between the old gard of craftsmen lamenting the poor quality of the industrial output. Maybe Stallman will be remembered as the Proudhon of our times?
Our times may be a bit more epic, because we were not only craftmen, we were building a new society, or so we though. Computers being machines of logic would help us become more rational, being accessible universal means of production they would blur the distinction between consumers and producers by making everyone a producer, and worldwide networks would turn our divided societies into a global village. Well, in just a few years the oposite happened: the machines locked consumers into walled gardens, greatly reinforced the power structure in place, and made us more divided than ever.
In 20 years from now, very few people will remember how free and powerful we have been.
I'm still a tinkerer.
It's gotten significantly harder now that I have a toddler and my S.O. works, but I can't help myself from stealing time for it.
People at work doing what they are told to do in order to not get fired. Who would have thunk it.
Yeah, that's what they said back then too.
For those with ears, the old men always say the world is getting worse.
> Don’t get me wrong we have occasional bright sparks of innovation and creativity HTMX, Bun, Astro, Zig and many other come to mind.
I'm far more interested in the "many others" this guy had in mind.
No one is forced to follow the herd down the drain, it's natural selection in action.
I still do this all of the time. I'm constantly exploring some new concept. Sometimes it requires programming, other times it doesn't, but either way... I just don't really have a pipeline setup to publish anything I look into. It's just so I can experience it. I feel bad for how much of the world is so focused on increasing metrics. Life is interesting and none of us will die wishing we had spent more of our lives working.
I mean... on the one hand, more people getting in the field may (or may not, I didn't measure) mean less people whose vocation is software.
On the other hand, if that can cheer someone up... * https://ladybird.org/ * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock * Zig rebuilt a C compiler from scratch https://ziggit.dev/t/zig-as-a-c-and-c-compiler/10963 * Rust rebuilt the core nix utilities from scratch https://github.com/uutils/coreutils I've heard a bunch of people making their own OS from scratch just to see how it works, heck there are guides online (https://github.com/cfenollosa/os-tutorial ... 30k stars...)
So... Cheer up ! If people are building all that, I'm sure innovation and creativity are at least not dead everywhere.
Is anyone interested in starting a community software development system?
Ownership, royalties, voting would be embedded in a block chain. Proof of work would be by vote. And votes given for proof of work. Or something like that. In music they have "royalties" and it seems like that could be used for contributors.
If you would like to be part of a discussion send an email to my firefox relay 3tdm026f9@mozmail.com
Feel free to use a relaly.
I'm pretty skeptical about peer-based remuneration not devolving into unfair (if not toxic) remuneration in practice. "Proof of work by vote" etc seems very much in that direction.
I've already seen how people scratch other's backs in peer feedback during performance reviews, and I've heard plenty of description of negative aspects about promotion-oriented behaviors driving what people work on at companies notorious for that kind of stuff. Not to mention all the actual biases pervasive to the "meritocracy" crowd.
Because this is what companies want, and they pay us. So that's what we do.
When it comes to me, I'm not privileged enough to be creative or innovative: shipping fast (thing that mattered in my previous and does matter in my current work) requires me to do specific tasks and I simply cannot deviate from that or I will get fired. I read a lot about software and try to be creative, but at the end of the day, what matters the most is to make money so I can take care of my family, it saddens me that I can be looked down upon because more often than not, I treat my job as it is: a job.
Hard disagree. With ChatGPT it’s never been easy to learn about new tech
One wonders if they even held an exec meeting before deciding to deny.
I would be curious if I wasn't so far beyond burnt out.
What has really changed is in the knowledge of the average developer: once upon a time, they knew something, there were code monkeys, of course, but there were also many with solid knowledge. Today, most have very limited knowledge, if that, and no longer know how to work at a system, hardware, local level, etc., so development is entering a phase described long ago by Lisanne Bainbridge: https://ckrybus.com/static/papers/Bainbridge_1983_Automatica...
I'm still curious, I'm still here
OpenAI: "we don’t program anymore we just yell at codex agents".
Note that the author of the article is doing webdev, which by now ought to be as routine as using PowerPoint. It's rather embarrassing that it's not.
[1] https://x.com/tszzl/status/1967821096545382858
Take a look at the maker community if you want to see people doing stuff just for the heck of it, with bits or matter. The article from the other day about a guy who put a web server on a vape, for instance.
I do agree that there has been a significant shift in developer culture because of business bros and hustle culture, but it's not nearly gone.
It's not just dev culture - it's *EVERYTHING* culture.
In modern society, if you're not trying to monetize all of your hobbies and every little thing you do you are seen as doing something wrong. Everything has to be a hustle these days. You're not allowed to do things simply because you enjoy it.
a lot of the low hanging fruit is picked now, that’s what happens in a maturing industry ask the wright brothers how tinkering is going these days
Remember when OpenSSL had the Heartbleed bug and there were something like two guys running the project in their spare time with $50k/year in donations (if memory recalls correctly). Well, we are living through a great affordability crisis. Not many people can spend time on a hobby like that to support billionaires anymore. Let the 400 people with half of the wealth in America figure it out. Everyone should monetize their time and explore unionization to counter the new realities of the modern economy.
> Let the 400 people with half of the wealth in America figure it out.
That's off by large factor.
What I could find quickly was an estimate that the top 400 own a little over 4%, not 50%.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
It's real weird to say curiosity is gone when this site is full of fanboys for the technology that killed it
I think it’s less about culture and more about the world around us.
Who has time to work on free open source projects when your bills and groceries cost far more than they did 10 years ago? The kind of money that being a developer made me in 2015 was enough to pay all my bills, save money and buy cool stuff to experiment on for my hobbies. Now I make twice that much but I’m delaying paying my medical bills until they start leaving voicemails.
My spare time that I used to spend hacking and making things that other people could use is now spent trying to earn a little more, or away from work of any kind dealing with the stress.
The web used to be so much more DIY. Everyone used jQuery but it wasn't prescriptive, it was just a holistic tool (to use Ursala Franklin's framing) to enable us to do whatever. There weren't established practices, there weren't big toolkits/frameworks/libraries under-feet.
The maturation & industrialization of development means that developers no longer are puzzling out the world from first principles. We aren't evaluating each library that comes along to figure out how it might fit into our bespoke apps.
> You become a Next.js developer, a React developer, a Rust developer etc
React in particular is such a distinction of development. It is it's own Terra Firma, solid ground, upon which developers stand, only barely coupled to the underlying platform. Knowing the web itself is still enormously good and helpful, but there is such a huge engine at your back, doing so much work, that is extremely hard to take as more than a black box. Even if you know the web very well, there is still a huge opaque engine between the code you write and the web actual that's targetted.
We don't have the raw experience anymore to be broader developers. Vs React, I think it's more ok to consider oneself a Rust developer, where one is still quite close to the metal, where the only focus-narrowing is to a general purpose language that's good for anything (especially with Rust being such a fore-runner at WebAssembly!).
It seems like big companies are doing some great things with WebComponents, but there's still so little broader attention, and little cultural energy for them. The lack is cyclical: there's scant developer culture around webcomponents, and so scant webcomponent acceptance & knowledge. It feels like such an opportunity for shared knowledge, for excitement, for figuring things out & making patterns, for a more grounded closer to the firm earth potential, and one that obviously needs the curiosity and excitement. But it's React Uber Alles, React on and on.
People completely underestimate how drastically SW development has changed in demographics over the last two decades.
Millions of people entered the field, many of them explicitly because they saw it is a good job opportunity. The average software developer is now a completely different person than they were ten or twenty years ago. Importantly there has been a major shift towards people in India and other Asian countries, where development has been outsourced or where developers are hired from as well as differences in college graduates. This is clearly reflected in the job market, which is getting more competitive.
why the title change
Learning and exploring has been my whole life and it’s not without its costs.
As Tony Soprano once said, "Alright but you gotta get over it"
Part of it (and I think this goes to what the other says about metrics and building for the masses) is a lot of the problems we were solving two or three decades ago are solved.
We used to have to hack things together because nothing worked. There was no consistency, standards were all over the map, software solutions for most things didn't exist, and running software on the major vendor ecosystems was heavily silo'd.
Dozens and dozens of technologies changed that. Web protocols and virtual machines broke siloing. Search engines and community forums made discoverability much, much easier. We passed the tipping point where hardware was only valuable if it could be connected to an ecosystem, so engineers started building standards like USB, wifi, bluetooth, and a TCP-accessible interface into everything. And an army of open-source hobbyists wrote hundreds of thousands of libraries to "X but in Y."
So hacking itself has moved away from problems like "get a telephone multiplexer to translate a bitstream to colors on an anlog TV" and towards "What nine libraries and five gadgets will you glue together to" (for example) "let your refrigerator track your shopping list," or "How can you make setting up email not feel like hacking your left arm off for the average non-computer person?" Because those are the kinds of problems that are still unsolved.
It's a different kind of hacking requiring curiosity at a different level and sometimes a different problem-solving skillset (less experimentation, more curation and cataloguing).
I notice that people often get older and assume their path through life is the same thing as what is going on in the world. It's not.
"Prolonged contact with the computer turns mathematicians into clerks and vice versa." -Perlis
What does vice versa mean here? Clerks are turned into mathematicians by using a computer?
A clerk who once used a physical filing system but now uses a computer may naturally begin to bring the filing system to a higher level of abstraction. Think filing clerk -> database administrator -> relational algebra...
E.g. there would be enormous difficulty in replacing the Dewey Decimal System with something else, if only due to its physical inertia, but with a computer system a curious clerk can invent an alternative categorization and retrieval system which inevitably touches on mathematical topics.
I feel the opposite. Old enough to remember when SE was not an attractive career path but something people stumbled into after hacking around with electronics. The last 10-20 years have felt like an endless September situation starting with the "tech bros" culture and the ever widening firehose of CS majors who seemed to choose CS with as much enthusiasm as most finance majors.
Personally, I am excited that AI is steering people away from tech that aren't actually interested in it. Reverting to the mean a bit. And like the downvoted comment below, I actually think a swath of "vibe coders" are much more inline with the hacker mindset than most developers. A lot of them are the "make a quick buck" types but there is also a ton of insane tinkering going on, which is awesome.
But maybe we are talking about two different things. There is a distinction between "I want to hack on this to see how it works" and "I want to hack on this to see if this IDEA works". So product hackers are ascending while engineering hackers are starting to dwindle.
It reminds me of the shift in car culture when car computers meant you couldn't just rebuild a rusty car over a summer but a new culture of car hackers bubbled up mostly around modding cars for drifting or whatever. The people were different, the work was different, but the curiosity, excitement and subculture grew into something very similar.
That's exactly why I'm here today, after 40 years of passion, penniless, or with very little money, not rich. Disenchanted by the professional aspect of what was initially just a simple obsession with “how it works,” right down to my gut. Then a passion for machine code. Then a megalomaniacal delusion of creating, of bringing ideas to fruition. Not necessarily very elaborate ones. Simple stuff, and sometimes a little less so. Reinventing the wheel, often without even knowing it.
Like my algorithm for drawing lines as fast as possible in 68000 on my ST. Then a few years later, I learned that someone else had invented it almost 30 years before me, and I was able to put a name to my algorithm: Bresenham. Dammit! The Amiga had it natively too. Dammit again!
Again, I invented preemptive multitasking on my 68000. Interrupt, little beast. Vector branch to my task switcher, thanks... save registers, including SP... restore registers from another previously interrupted routine, including SP... write the PC to switch and off we go. A fucking idea, a simple idea. That was cool to see it work, to see the 0 index color changed by each task every 10 scanlines or so. Made me smile. And then a few years later, I learned the word preemptive, and the concept of multitasking that goes with it. And I learned that the Amiga OS (that bastard rival again!) already did it natively. And other machines long before it. DAM-DAM-DAMMIT! I was born too late!
And my email reader on PC, running DOS, in 1991 or 1992, I can't quite remember. It was my first relatively big project in C, because for more than 10 years before that, I swore only by assembler, and I wasn't about to do that in x86, yuck. I didn't know curses or ncurses, but I still made a small TUI with windows and buttons. I was the only one using it for months, for email, mailing lists, newsgroups maybe too, I don't remember... Then one day, a conscientious sysop sent me an email asking me the name of the email reader I was using, because the machine he was administering had flagged a header that wasn't quite right, and he wanted to let the author know :-) My first bug report... under those circumstances, it's not something you forget. “Thanks for the feedback, buddy, but it doesn't have a name, I'm the author, and I'll fix that crap!”
I'm sure you have some fond memories like that too.
These are just examples. There have been others. Maybe even things that no one has ever done before, but that doesn't matter. Because it's still fun, whether we're reinventing the wheel or not. Especially when we don't know anything. It's rewarding when it works. Lots of little moments of pride that we keep to ourselves. Pride in having invented something without anyone's help, when all we had were “XXX Bible” to glean technical informations from, or BBS.
So don't listen to them. They have nothing interesting to say. They never loved programming, they always pretended. And today they tell you that finally, we no longer need to code, that we are finally relieved of this thankless task, that we can finally focus on what really matters.
Bullshit. Either die with your mouth open or let me die in peace! What matters is what we love. The rest is just survival. So if I have to die from my obsession, so be it.
By all means, OP, don't implore them. They've choosen their path, and we've choosen ours. Whatever you say about that won't change anything.
I did not share anything. Am I selfish? Not sure. I did not think it could be fun to others, or worth it. Especially when you consider stuff that already existed since ages, and undoubtedly much more elaborate. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain” :-)
It was always bound to change. We live in a society that doesn’t value _merit_ anymore. We are in a grifter economy that lives by the quarter.
> Does Mark Zuckerberg own Facebook and care about Facebook?
Mark Zuckerberg is a metric, given human form. He smokes meats because statistics show human males engage in meat-smoking behavior.
Ultimately I think it boils down to normie influx, people with no love for the craft getting in it for the money. That said I've seen grown "normies" approaching middle age catch "the bug" and get really into programming for its own sake. They rapidly develop tastes that align with my own.
And computing has always had its share of people whose interest in the technology was entirely in using it to meet business objectives, nothing more. Here's a video from 1975 that shows exactly what I mean. It's about the time-sharing facility recently added to IBM mainframes. Note the utter lack of imagination. Nothing is mentioned about the new things one could do with their mainframe with time-sharing. It's strictly about how much faster you can do the things you're already doing. Time and money saved. Numbers on a balance sheet. Seems stodgy to us, but that's how IT professionals thought in 1975.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo2q7d5dJgg
Vibe coders are the new Curious Developers
It's both. Lot of people vibe coding purely from financial motivations, lot of people vibe coding to rapidly prototype and explore ideas. The latter camp certainly will be the ones to carry the torch forward, now that the cat is out of the bag.
Carry what torch forward where? Vibe coders aren't going to learn more about the languages or techniques the LLM uses, or how to write that code themselves. They aren't going to exercise curiosity about anything beyond the LLMs API and prompts. They aren't going to pursue deep knowledge. By definition they only want to get a viable end product with the least amount of creative or cognitive effort on their part. That seems like the opposite of the "curious developer" archetype the article is talking about.
What the developer learns from the experience of AI programming is more down to the attitude of the individual than that.
Here's an example from my perspective.
Recently while developing a way to output a PAL video signal from two digital lines(an endeavour obviously driven by curoiosity more than utility). I learned a great deal about far more than I would have if I had not have used AI. I wasn't blind to what the AI was emitting, It helped me decide upon shifting one output to 0.285v and the other to .715v. Write a program to use pytorch to learn a a few resistors/capacitors to smooth out the signal and a sample of 2-bit data that when emitted though the filters produced a close sine wave for the color burst. AI enabled me to automatically emit Spice code to test the waveform. I had never used spice before, now I know the pains of creating a piecewise linear voltage source in it.
Yesterday I used an AI to make a JavaScript function that takes a Float32Array of voltage level samples and emits a list of timings for all parts of a scanline along with the min and max voltage levels, calculates the position and frequency of the color burst and uses the measured color burst to perform the quadrature decoding to produce a list of YUV values at a lower sample rate.
This should let me verify the simulated waveform so that I can compare the difference between what I intend to emit, and what should be a correct signal. If there turns out to be a discrepancy between what I am emitting and what I think I am emitting, this will come in quite handy.
Perhaps I might learn more if I did all of this myself unaided by an AI, but it would also take much longer, and likely not get done at all. The time I save writing tests, wrangling libraries and software is not stored in the bank. I used that time too, doing other things, learning about those as I did so.
Exactly, if you are interested in what you are doing, you will learn no matter what tool you use, be it AI or vim without syntax highlighting. A person that's trying to get rich quick, and sees software as a means to that end (and nothing more) will learn pretty much nothing vibe coding.
God help us.
It's just different, it is more about the product than the technology.
Luckily, vibe coders have yet to see ACTUAL success, just hyping up CLAIMS of success on social media.
They want to produce something without having the skills to produce it. Which, you know, probably isn't uncommon. I'd love to be able to rock out the guitar solo in Avenged Sevenfold's "Bat Country" [0] or "Afterlife" [1] or the first solo in Judas Priest's "Painkiller" [2], but to get to that skill level takes years of practice, which I'm quite frankly not willing to put in.
The difference is the honesty. A vibe coder produces something barely more than "Hello world" and brags about being able to produce software without learning to code. Nobody grabs a guitar, learns two chords, then claims to be a guitarist.
[0] (mildly nsfw) https://youtu.be/IHS3qJdxefY?t=137
[1] https://youtu.be/HIRNdveLnJI?t=168
[2] https://youtu.be/nM__lPTWThU?t=129