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Comment by saschajustin | Hacker News Reader

So to summarize... a man born into privilege is annoyed by poor people.

The guy equates working for a paycheck with entitlement... how out of touch can you be?

Working for a paycheck is something you do out of economic neccessity--for survival, NOT entitlement.

Getting paid to work on your hobbies in the tech industry in 1995 is basically winning the lottery. Most people would kill to have this chance. This guy is completely blind to his privilege.

But instead of recognizing how neoliberal economics have destroyed the middle class and churned out a new "Depression-Era" generation that are forced to "chase the money" in order to eat... he is going to whine about how kids these days suck and are entitled.

Fucking amazing. Gen Y has the worst economic prospects since the actual great depression, how the fuck can we be spoiled?

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Holy shit, settle down for a second.

The guy equates working for a paycheck with entitlement... how out of touch can you be?

I didn't read any of what you said in the author's blog. He even mentions, at the end, about "waxing nostalgic". So his argument going to be a bit one-sided but then, it is his argument after all.

I agree with the overall sentiment of the author's rant. I miss some of the geeking out that was done in the tech industry, because it now seems to be filled with people looking to get rich quick with barely-working MVPs, or building services that have no revenue stream. The industry has turned very "business-y", IMO, but maybe it is just the natural cycle of every industry.

UPDATE: Adding a bit of substance to my comment.

Young people, new programmers, and other groups who have no power are not responsible for the nature of a field.

Old people control the nature of every field. Old greybeards are the ones who made computer science this way--it's just those greybeards that this man disaproves of.

This man isn't a billionaire VC, a tenured Comp Sci professor, an author of programming books, or a CEO hiring and training the kinds of employees he wants.

This guy isn't in charge, so he blames young people and assumes they are in charge. Ridiculous. Young people are just followers. They follow the money, they do what they're told, they adopt fashions in order to SURVIVE, not out of some kind of "strange entitlement."

One young guy named Linus Torvalds upset a whole pile of holy applecarts, as a student, no less, a guy called Mark Zuckerberg built one of the most visited websites on the planet, two other guys built the most frequented search engine while still in college and so on.

He doesn't care at all about not being in charge. He cares about people not wanting nor caring about getting some deeper levels of knowledge required to do their jobs properly and as a cause he sees that they are money oriented first, and tech oriented second.

Linus is 45 years old. He's not a millenial, he's a greybeard.

Zuckerberg never made any technological advances. His company was a market success but it was based on LAMP... nothing technologically novel about it. Not even the concept was novel--it was a direct myspace rip off.

I'm sure there will be millenials who have an influence on the technology and direction of software. But they certainly aren't the people in charge TODAY and they certainly are not responsible for the state of tech today.

If you think 45 years old is a greybeard then I think I've lost you, and Linus made most of his impact before he even had a beard.

Facebook was anything but a Myspace rip-off, Myspace was to Facebook as Geocities was to Digital Ocean or Altavista to Google.

Linus' beard maybe isn't yet long enough to count as "grey" but, in any case, he's not a millenial. He entered the field circa 1990, whereas this self-proclaimed greybeard author started in 1995.

So for the discussion of this article Linus is even older/greyer than the self-proclaimed "get off my lawn" author.

Zuck is a millenial but he's far more of a businessman than he is a programmer.

Zuck hasn't really programmed since Facebook took off. He's a business owner/operator, not an engineer. Writing an MVP LAMP webapp that is then fixed up by others is NOT the same as having an influence on the processes and procedures used in the construction of software--which is what the OP is complaining about.

Facebook was a business success not a technology success.

You're missing the point. He's talking about the passion for learning about computers. When was the last time you reversed engineered a binary that had self modifying code, just for the fun of it and to learn how it works? Play same code golf games or war games, purely for the challenge? There's nothing wrong with people making money. It's the fact that people are doing it just for the money. I think there is a video called the bbs documentary. Check it out. The culture surrounding computers has changed, a lot.

> This guy isn't in charge, so he blames young people and assumes they are in charge.

What makes you think he's not "in charge"?

> Young people are just followers. They follow the money, they do what they're told, they adopt fashions in order to SURVIVE, not out of some kind of "strange entitlement."

If you are young and believe this, I am sad for you.

"Youth" (those in their 20's, for example) have some of the best kind of power - the unfettered kind. As a generalization/simplification, those in their 20's have fewer dedicated costs in their lives (rent and food at the least; car payment perhaps). That gives them the freedom to CHOOSE. That's the power of youth - choice. In youth, a person can choose to lift up and move. Can choose to quit - or stay at - a job because of principals. Can choose to change careers, become an expert in one field or a generalist in many. I won't go so far as to say all things are possible, but there are certainly many paths that could be traveled with relative (key part there - relative) ease. As we get older, the dedicated costs (generally - there are certainly exceptions) go up. House payments. Kids. Medical expenses (personal and family). Income may (or may not) go up, but it's almost certain that key life options will decline. There are still choices to make and control of life to be had for sure, but they are not so numerous; the road does not web outward as it did in youth so much as it forks in minor directional changes.

So - if anyone out there is still in their youth (which is more a state of mind than physical being, mind), I suggest you try different things. Experiment with life. Follow your true passions and see where they lead. The author of this blog (and myself; and others) did that and it turned out that our passions would become an industry that would change the world. I only hope your passions (if you have the heart to chase them) will yield the same so that we can share in that. We can use this thing that we were around to see birthed to do so. Or something better if you prefer; but you'll need to make that happen because we're tired and just want to enjoy our time with our communal child as long as we can, please.

Thank you. I rolled my eyes so hard when he started droning on about brogrammers not bothering to learn below their layers of abstraction.

We live in a world where job postings are looking for RoR developers, job interviews test you on FizzBuzz, UML, and vague logic problems, and managers encourage developers to move fast and churn out releases. When exactly was anybody supposed to learn compilers, assembly, or low-level internet routing infrastructure? It was in a CS classroom years ago, and without any practical reason to refresh that knowledge ever since.

Furthermore, the "applications" produced by this "golden age" of the internet were complete shit by today's standards. If they were so wonderful, why do we like to laugh at their miserable UX, ugly design, and lack of functionality?

As if in 1995 they needed to think about javascript frameworks, CSS frameworks, responsive design, mobile anything, (quality) animations, asset servers, enormous databases, application and user analytics, clustered applications with message-passing, advanced caching strategies, an enormous variety of user input, or any of the other multitudinous things I forgot to mention.

In 1995 they thought of everything up to the point where a static HTML document gets sent to the user, and that's where they stopped thinking. In 2015 we have a lot more to think about after that initial transfer. In 2015 we have to, y'know, make applications.

I read your comment before the article, and was all set to agree. But then I read the article.

The people who come here looking for riches and playing at entrepreneurship are not "working for a paycheck". They are people who crave social standing, who crave money. They don't want to be comfortably middle class; they want to be elite. There was a giant wave of them during Bubble 1.0, but come 2001 most of them went back to wherever they were before. In the last few years they are thick on the ground again. They are very different than the people who came to make a difference, who came to create for the joy of it.

I don't see the current crop of them as any worse than the 1990s invasion. But they're sure not any better.

I also think this guy definitely does recognize how lucky he was. He opens talking about "more than I ever could have dreamed" and ends with feeling like he was lucky enough to witness "the very birth of rock and roll".

Millenials do not have a choice between "elite social status" and "comfortable middle class". They have a choice between middle class and lower class. What you are calling elite is actually just middle class.

Millenials are at the bottom of a pyramid in a stagnating economy that doesn't offer the same choice that was offered to their parents. We are a depression generation. Programming is one of the few lower middle class career paths still available. Most new jobs in this new economy (that are available to millenials) are working class as part of the service economy.

Jobs that do provide a middle class living are either dissapearing as the boomers retire from them, or require a lot of competition to win.

The amount of money you need to live a middle class life is much harder to achieve in 2015 than it was 40 years ago in 1975.

That you are calling programmer salaries "lower middle class" makes me think you have no idea what you're talking about.

What I'm calling elite is indeed elite. Your insistence on telling me I'm wrong about what I've actually seen makes me think there's no point in talking to you further.

I'm not contradicting your observations.

I'm pointing out a sociological fact.

You do not know the definition of lower middle class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_middle_class

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer_%2...

The median income for a programmer is $69,708. This falls into the lower middle class.

When Silicon Valley salaries are adjusted to account for cost of living, programmers making over $100,000 still fall into the LOWER middle class.

People who get into software chasing money and elite status are ignorant of the fact that programmers are not elite and do not have high social status. They have lower middle class status and pay--which is better than working class at least.

You're conflating household income and individual salary, and you're also using a technical definition in a a colloquial context. Entertaining for you, I'm sure, but again it doesn't make this look like a serious discussion.

Household income is not the metric being used. It is income associated with a particular occupation that is used to class order those occupations.

I guess you're right about failing to conform to colloquial myths and falsehoods. I tend to want to align my observations with facts and research rather than pop culture misunderstandings and ignorance.

Better summary: A man (who has enjoyed his career for the challenges it brings regardless of the pay level) is frustrated that the majority of his current peers don't seem to share the same passion for the work that he has.

It's possible to interpret these types of past vs. today articles many different ways, but they often have a similar slant...

1. A rose-tinted view of the past (in case the author forgot, the technical challenges didn't prevent a whole lot of dross on the 90's internet).

2. A less than balanced view of today (is it really that hard to think of encouraging aspects of the modern web?)

3. A yearning for days gone by.

The way I see it, these types of articles are less about criticising the present, and more about glorifying the past, a past that the author had some extra connection to by having lived through it. We're meant to marvel at the hardships that were faced, and recognise that the knowledge they accumulated isn't obsolete, so they still have a thing or two to teach us. Every generation will go through this, the generation before this guy did, the generation after will too. The truth is, some knowledge is only truly pertinent to its era. I wouldn't expect to read a book on starting an ISP in the 90s and then think I knew how best to do it now, even if the book might be interesting to read.

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