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Comment by sockaddr | Hacker News Reader

I think things are more competitive and fast-paced nowadays than when we entered this space and so history and all of the details that come along with it aren't necessarily their first priority. I don't blame them.

For example,

When I was first getting into computers I felt like I had all the time in the world to perfect writing batch files and I could pour over a single magazine at a leisurely pace for weeks until the next one came out.

Nowadays every time you use your face to unlock your magic pane of glass there's a language, a new framework, a new more impressive AI you can build your business on or some creepy guy trying to scan everyone's eyeballs, it's just different.

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I think there's also an aspect of computer programming having become more of a fashion than a craft, in many cases. game development used to be very difficult and people who worked in that field pushed the limits of what hardware and software could do. nowadays, free-to-download general-purpose engines make getting into "game development" extremely easy. web development became its own whole thing by means of frameworks and so forth, where now to get into it, you're more learning how specific frameworks and such work, rather than underlying engineering principles.

how many people who program computers professionally for big tech companies are "hackers", these days, compared to one decade ago? two? three? surely the ratio has only decreased over time, as more and more people get into the field for purely pragmatic reasons (income, clout, etc.) than taking part in/engaging with "the hacker spirit". for better or worse, gates have not been kept, and now things are completely different than they once were.

30+ years ago I was programming for companies doing business software - ERP etc, and there were very few 'hackers' in the ranks. These guys and gals must have enjoyed programming at some point but I guess the software was so boring it just leached the joy out of it.

Certainly by the mid-late 80s there were far more day job programmers around than hackers.

In one company I managed to find a few fellow hackers, but the next one I worked at - nothing. It was awful.

Luckily after that I managed to get more interesting work for a while, but then I spent too long in the wrong part of Oracle and again, I just couldn't find fun in the coding we were doing and no-one else could either.

I think true hackers or enthusiasts have always been in the minority, at least since the late 70s I'd guess.

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