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Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

This is just a result of people having finite time and resources. There are thousands of possible hobbies, and making home-cooked software from scratch is just one obscure one.

For instance, can you make a literal home-cooked meal, without acting as a passive mass-market consumer (no grocery stores or supermarkets)? After all, you're living in the richest part of the richest part of the richest time of the world! Can you raise and butcher your own pig, grind your own flour, grow your own vegetables in your backyard, distill your own spirits, and chop your own wood to build your own fire? Cooking has always been a much more popular hobby than anything technical, and likely always will be, and yet almost all its aspects have been outsourced. Why expect software to turn out any other way?

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Yes, but... in my childhood in the 80s, simple carpentry (for example) and other "handyman" type skills was a very popular "hobby" among men (yeah it was gendered) across the nation. Because it wasn't just about what "hobby" seemed "fun" (although it may have been enjoyable for people who did it), it was about control over your environment, being able to make the things you needed instead of relying on having to pay someone else to, being able to customize them to your needs, etc.

Software in today's world is similar. But does not occupy a similar place as a prevalent "hobby" that can produce useful things for your daily life.

Now it's true that such skills even "hands-on" are much less prevalent in younger generations. What the reasons are, I' not sure we have totally identified.

But I'm sure it's not just about considering them as "hobbies", if that means recreational activities people might do because they are "fun", like bird-watching or drawing, divorced from their utility. Carpentry/handyman skills were not so popular because people found them more "enjoyable" than other "hobbies".

This is absolutely a false dichotomy. A home-cooked meal is not one conventionally thought of as being from items hyperlocally sourced. At least, not in the last 70-100 years. We’ve had Sears Roebuck and the like for quite some time.

> A home-cooked meal is not one conventionally thought of as being from items hyperlocally sourced.

Exactly. To allow the category of "home-cooked meal" to exist at all, beyond professionals and a few dedicated hobbyists, we have to loosen the criteria. Similarly, "home-cooked apps" don't exist in the strict sense, but do exist with looser criteria, where we allow people to work with standardized, mass-market tools (e.g. drag-and-drop website and form builders). Expecting lots of people to start from raw source code is like expecting home barbecue to start from the pig.

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