Ask HN: Any tech enthusiast feel like apps or software is not for you anymore?

That’s been going on a long time. In 1978 in Byte Magazine you would read about kids who were trading their soldering iron for hand-coding machine language. The beautiful people started showing up in the 1990s boom and have come in in waves ever since.

I was amused at how quickly the ignorant and indolent dropped NFTs like a hot potato when they realized that (1) ChatGPT could write their pitch deck and (2) ChatGPT’s pitch deck was more likely to be funded than theirs. (Not because ChatGPT’s pitch deck is good but because theirs is bad.). The blockheads are still doing their blockhead things, somebody is still buying BTC, but few outside a hard core could care at all.

Short answer: Yes I feel that definitely, not really for me anymore. We took things way too far and it's pulling us apart at the seams.

Longer answer: We're leaving the early(ish) days of the industry. Tech is well established and solidly mainstream now, and it's even viewed as a prestigious path for young, intelligent people who have it together to pursue. Apps and sites are targeted at the average non-power user. I suppose you can say software has shifted from a creative medium to a mostly consumptive medium.

I do miss some of the old hacker style crowd. People that didn't care where you were from or if you went to school or where you worked, just that you cared to write code and do cool stuff for the sake of it. The feeling of exploring new ideas and doing things just because they were interesting. I feel like if you are caught using vim or emacs now people will raise eyebrows that it's not Intellij lol. Text interfaces are great, the command line is great, love that stuff.

You can also attribute some of this feeling to the centralization of the internet, mass adoption via smartphones, and shift from textual media to image/video media.

It's a different era for sure, but don't lose hope. The barrier to entry for making things is still super low, and there are tons of people out there doing weird experimental stuff. You can also contribute to this too, or not. The old net and community is still around just harder to find. Many of them are also just "logging off" as they raise families or pursue offline hobbies.

I remember my last job I had in 2018, when a girl from marketing went past my desk and commented how weird it was I used winamp and streaming from my own shoutcast server from my mp3 library :P

5-10 years ago before that, that was like the norm. I also have paid Spotify, but even there you can't find everything

and yes, good point about videos. I personally really hate youtube videos about setting up a Kafka cluster or stuff like that, sometimes you want to have the documentation on one scren and the terminal on the other. you can't really stop and scroll a video

I have returned to managing a local music library, and I enjoy the tidying up aspect of it. Feels kind of nice to go visit a folder and see the small collection of things you like.

Short answer: No I feel that programs and programming are definitely for me. I am a programming enthusiast.

Longer answer: I won't be discouraged by the dumpster fire. I've been burned enough in the past to know that vendor lock-in is not for me. Don't waste time on flamewars.

Someone once asked me "There is a book called Computers for Dummies. Why isn't there a book called Computers for Smart people?"

Dig a little deeper. Dream big. Create your own platform that you control, on your own terms, the way you would want it. Don't get lost in the weeds.

The one who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The one who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one else has ever been.

— Albert Einstein

What I mean is mostly - before everyone almost had their own platform and style. Now everything is so streamlined

I am not sure I follow. Do you have an example?

I could say "Everyone is a consumer on $big_tech_social_media_site" and that is simply not true. "Everything" is not streamlined. Standards certainly help. There are a lot of problems that are solved, thankfully. There are other areas to explore and maybe even work on. I have lots of questions. I learn new things everyday. Today I learned the term overton window perhaps apt for this conversation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

if you went to any software forum some years ago, most people hosted their own servers or did their own projects just for the sake of it.

Now it's a lot of making some project to get into company A or solving some leetcode problems. Or learning AWS/Heroku/Azure or taking the certificates to getting more employable

On the other hand I had friends in like 2005 running their own clusters of Sun Sparc servers just for fun and try it out. This type of nerdiness I didn't see in a while

Yep, and from the looks of it, I’ll be out of it sooner or later whether I want to or not. I came to the realization not too long ago that this is not the field for me.

Not that I’ll miss it, it’s just that there’s no where else to go.

Well let me clarify, I didn't want to make the post too long :) I work at a great company working with different server cloud and monitoring solutions, and I rarely have a dull day. I meet customers and plan projects, now with almost 15 years experience I feel very comfortable

but it's all the stuff around I just don't enjoy anymore. For example the last year of AI hype didn't interest me at all, for some reason. But stuff like setting up Docker clusters or reading about scaling MySQL I can spend hours on, because its more like "hands on"

I probably want to work with software and servers until I die in my chair of age :)

> For example the last year of AI hype didn't interest me at all, for some reason.

I’ve felt the same, and similarly I can’t put my finger on the why. I’ve mostly burnt out on the technical side of things too, not sure why either. Last bit of “passion” I had there died with my last side project a couple years ago.

I frankly think it was just a mistake to turn what was originally a hobby for me into a career.

I am not really burnt out either, I just feel I want to focus on the real software part of things. Some big VC funded company creating a half-secret AI solution that also has some content filter policies feels so anti open software and programming in general.

> But stuff like setting up Docker clusters or reading about scaling MySQL I can spend hours on, because its more like "hands on"

Man, and that's the stuff that makes me gag. I've used Docker and like it, but it seems like gimmicky webvaporware to me that won't be around in 7 years. MySQL scaling is a big business IT problem I can't relate to since I'm just a tiny mortal.

But the AI stuff also didn't interest me much since it's black box tech leveraging how much spaghetti modern GPUs can throw at the wall, which no one understands, made and controlled by giant corporations. More proprietary magic than democratic science

Linux, new filesystems, writing cool/powerful code -- only stuff I can personally do at home and has the convincing illusion of being on a firm, long lasting foundation gets my brain invested enough to be "interesting". :p

Sure, that's totally fine and I guess you are the type of person I mean i miss :) You have a strong opinion about something and is open for debate. But the "new" programmers just take the easy path and accept what some random influencer is saying

I just gave Docker as an example, could be anything you like from CUDA clusters to having some cool iptables scripts

"But the AI stuff also didn't interest me much since it's black box tech leveraging how much spaghetti modern GPUs can throw at the wall, which no one understands, made and controlled by giant corporations. More proprietary magic than democratic science"

Exactly How I feel!

With enough time off, the desire to do something will return. At least the money helps you choose what to do next. I think it'll be better for society at large if a lot of people in tech choose to do something else. We've got too many smart people locked up in one place.

I'm with you on this feeling. There was always a component of this, IBM certainly pitched programming as a trade (COBOL) since the 50s, MS targeted managers and C-levels with promises of 5x developer productivity to sell Windows NT over Unix, and then there's the concept of "business logic", which relegates programming for its own sake to the nether regions.

The retro computing scene may have some of what you're looking for.

Computers should be for everyone not just a few tech elite people. I find this attitude that things should be complicated silly.

Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer.

It's overoptimized for profits, and the tech sphere has become subject to that overoptimization.

Nerdiness used to be uncool, but now it's cool because it's profitable, which means "normification". In the meantime, you're now the product, and advertisers are the customers on all the platforms you engage with (except perhaps here and 4chan).