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Comment by fmax30 | Hacker News Reader

It would be very interesting to see when the millennials, people born particularly in the 90's get to their 40s.

One of the reasons for the lack of diversity is that people born before 1975 haven't really experienced the internet revolution like those of us born in the 80s and 90s have.

Sure there are exceptions, those exceptions are people who were directly working on technology. An alarming trend in our industry (at least in my part of the world) is that a lot of people stop directly working on technology by the time they are 30-35 and start going towards the managerial end of thing.

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> One of the reason for the lack of diversity is that people born before 1975 haven't really experienced the internet revolution like those of us born in the 80s and 90s have.

What does that even mean? We lived through the Internet revolution. And even we can't claim to have invented it, because that was the generation before us (Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, etc).

It's exactly because of this kind of mindset that it's becoming increasingly hard for 40-somethings to find decent employment in development, and (along with corporate culture) a strong factor in the trend toward becoming managers once we hit mid-30s.

You're going to find the next 20 years enlightening, that's for sure.

> What does that even mean? We lived through the Internet revolution.

I was born after 1975 (barely - the Internet revolution happened when I was in high school and college) so I'm not just sticking up from myself here when I say that a lot of people born before 1975 really do "get it."

Almost anybody who spent ten minutes using BBSs in the 1980s knew that some kind of connected thing was going to be the future. It was nearly inevitable. Maybe it would have been a bunch of closed CompuServes and Prodigies, maybe it would have been a BBS in everybody's home, maybe it would have been something global and semi-mostly-kinda open like the Internet. Whatever the form, that generation knew that connectedness was the next logical step. You can see it in sci-fi of the era (Neuromancer, etc) ...they weren't sure what form or forms it was going to take, but everybody knew (hoped) we were going to be connecting to other people using our computers.

So a lot of people from that generation were right at home once the Internet became an everyday thing. And a lot of them weren't, obviously, but a lot of them were totally primed for it.

"One of the reason for the lack of diversity is that people born before 1975 haven't really experienced the internet revolution like those of us born in the 80s and 90s have."

One reason for the lack of diversity is that people make generic assumptions like this.

and some of us will have seen precursors to the internet do the same things eg Prestel/Videotext :-)

I can remember reading the original news posting about NCSA Mosaic and wondering "that sounds great - but what's the fascination with loading documents over a network?" :-)

I can recall finding a text mode www on the ITU's gopher server and thinking interesting :-)

And I can remember when you could quickly skim the whats interesting on the www today.

Actually we experienced the internet revolution. You just had it presented to you on a plate.

> One of the reason for the lack of diversity is that people born before 1975 haven't really experienced the internet revolution like those of us born in the 80s and 90s have.

Speak for yourself. I saw an IMP get installed in 1986. And converted a business and it's products from SNA to TCP/IP. And worked at one of the first profitable SAAS companies when they were called Application Service Providers.

I'd suggest that there's the possibility that computer programming and computer networking technologies will be just as different from now in the future as they are now from the past. That is to say: although things are smaller, and there's more room for code and data, only the appearance and presentation (e.g. Vocabulary) has really changed.

In in my early 30's & on a knife edge, balancing between management and development (from a development background) - I'm now in a quite senior role for a product at a medium sized software company.

I'm finding it incredibly fun - being be effective on both sides - I really do feel it is a false dichotomy.

If you were born in the 80s or 90s the internet revolution was already over by the time you started using it.

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