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Comment by tonteldoos | Hacker News Reader

I can agree/sympathise/empathise with almost every single comment you've made, and I'm also mostly none the wiser on how to overcome it. I'd be quite happy to b!tch about it with you over IM or email tho!

I'm roughly your age, and started programming around 10, doing my first paid work around 18 on a part-time-while-studying basis. I truly miss the days where one person could know a lot about a lot. Nowadays, it's a struggle to either know a reasonable amount (not even a lot) about some niche area, or even just be barely competent in a wider spectrum of things.

Where are you based? I was starting to think the problem might be limited to areas or regions (since almost everyone I know elsewhere seems so content/fulfilled).

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I'm in London. There are plenty of jobs around here and I don't feel that it's a place thing. It just feels like a state of the affairs in the whole industry. I always give example of VisiCalc being written by two people from scratch. On one hand, they didn't had the modern tooling, on the other hand, imagine doing a similar project today — no way it would be pulled off by just two guys.

It's not so much the amount of jobs on offer...it's what the jobs themselves offer, I think.

A friend of mine used to refer to it as cowboy engineering - where a problem needs to be solved yesterday, and everyone does anything necessary to solve it. Nowadays, even on side projects, the overhead kills you - issue tracking, version management, module management, change tracking, support. Precious little time ends up being spent on the core problem in most jobs.

Go was created by three programmers, Ruby by one, D by one ... sure, those projects all grew as they took on a life of their own, but small-team or single founders can still accomplish a great deal.

VisiCalc was incredibly primitive by modern software standards. You could write a web-based version with equivalent functionality in a week or so (in fact, I think that's how Google Spreadsheets got started).

Small popular programs get extended, grow, are improved by large teams of paid programmers, and then eventually the category becomes so advanced that you need to have that large team to make progress. I can (and have) written Tetris in 3-4 hours, but there's no way I could write Starcraft 2. But that doesn't mean that small programs have become impossible to write; it just means that you have to start looking where other people are not. Look at the success of 2048 or Flappy Bird. There's probably another category-killer out there for small-business apps, but if someone's found it they aren't going to advertise it.

> no way it would be pulled off by just two guys.

> it just feels like one programmer can't make any impact any more

Can you explain in more detail what makes you believe this?

Some of the most creative solutions redefine the problem. What you need to do to make an impact can often be less work than you imagine, like work that removes unnecessary layers.

If you can name a few project ideas where you feel it'd be impossible to make an impact, we can try to provide examples of how to attack them.

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