Hackers shows the career guys as lame and high strung, but the hobbyists (or as Razor and Blade put it, those hacking as a survival trait) as cool and having fun. It's easy for something fun to have the fun sucked out of it when it becomes a career.

I think a part of the hacker sub-culture that Hackers touches on lightly is that you have to make your own space. It's not going to exist for you in some prepackaged easy to consume way and certainly not in a corporation. Cyberdelia was for & by hackers, not a club run by some guy who has a bunch of cookie cutter clubs all over downtown. I don't think this is unique to the hacker sub culture, either.

Today at lunch I dyed my hair orange and then went back to my SAP consulting engagement.

I'm surprised your SAP admin approved that change request.

What you fail to realize, is that you will soon re-dye your hair to fit into the approved SAP workflow. Silly non-German with your thoughts of non-conformity.

> Hackers shows the career guys as lame and high strung, but the hobbyists (or as Razor and Blade put it, those hacking as a survival trait) as cool and having fun.

I think The Plague was having fun.

He was only having fun when he was playing cat and mouse with the hackers (or just playing with Lorraine Bracco). When he was in his office being a boring IT guy, he was not enjoying it, nor was Penn Jillette when the Gibson was under attack and his boss was breathing down his neck. The Plague was having fun, but Eugene Belford was not.

Yes, the whole plot of the movie is his plan to ransom money and get out of the rat race.

the fastest way to make something UNfun, is to get paid for it. Do this excercise. think of any fun activity. then imagine getting paid for it. If you're honest and you know what those jobs are like then you'll quickly find that getting paid for something sucks nearly ALL the fun out it.

Very well put.

The author of American Psycho said this:

> I think that if I had written the book in the past decade, perhaps Bateman would have been working in Silicon Valley, living in Cupertino with excursions into San Francisco or down to Big Sur to the Post Ranch Inn and palling around with Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder.

I'm surprised he said that as Glamorama would seem an almost perfect fit. Perhaps too perfect.

>Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be.

I think it comes down to the fact that our industry has become rigid and beholden to the university education system. John Carmack and John Romero were both college dropouts. Their stories would probably be impossible today. What we have now is a world of people coloring between the lines and going straight from one set of rules to another. There truly is no more punk rock left in tech.

I think it's because most tech jobs are not in tech. If you work for a bank, you work for bank. If you work for a fashion retailer, you work for a fashion retailer.

I've worked for a big pension fund and it was exactly like one imagines. Many meetings, a quiet office, slow and boring. I've also worked for small tech-focussed companies with technical nerds as founders; they were rather different, with music, dogs, vodka and late nights.

Oh and age matters too: after I had a kid, the late nights and vodka were not something I had the energy for.

I used to think that, too, but be warned: SaaS companies quickly become beholden to the sales org, and all of a sudden, working for a "tech" company becomes working for all the industries you serve. Very few tech companies are pure tech anymore. Basically only the private ones like Valve.

The meeting:work ratio is a decent proxy.

If it's too high, you're not in a technology company in the sense we're idolizing here.

... And I'm also not sure "that" sort of tech company can exist above a certain size. No corporate silo firewall is strong enough to keep the business bullshit at bay.

Considering Valve's game output I'd say they too have become drunk on easy money being a storefront. (Which isn't all bad, though I'd rather have HL3.)

HL3 = IRL

What part of their story are you referring to? There are lots of indie devs that appear to be having great fun making games and doing well to boot. Valheim, Black Rock Galactic, Celeste, Dead Cells, Papers Please, Stardew Valley, Enter the Gungeon, Don't Starve, Undertale, etc. were all pretty bit hits, certainly made their developers millions of dollars, and AFAIK the developers were having fun making them.

> There are lots of indie devs that appear to be having great fun making games and doing well to boot.

See: the other posters comment about small profitable bootstrapped businesses being the only way to do this now. Successful indie devs are an anomaly. But my point was more that companies are far more risk averse these days than to let a group like Romero et. al. run loose on a new product idea without strict controls in place, and that the types of people selected for by these companies now ensures that.

I guess I'm not aware of their history. I thought they (Carmack and Romero) were indie bootstrapped business. Their success is being repeated today by 10x to 20x the indie teams, or so it seems to me.

John Carmack was also constantly working on the cutting edge. I think that makes a big difference. IIRC from reading MoD, he was the first person to get true side-scrolling working on an x86 chip, before it was thought to not be powerful enough vs the chips used in consoles at the time. Problem is that most of us just don't get to work on the cutting edge usually. A lot of the software that needs building often doesn't need much in the way of creativity.

Is John Carmack also a genius? Sometimes I can’t tell, but I suspect so.

If you’re going by IQ I’d bet he’s at least in the 145-159 highly gifted range.

I'd comfortably add 30 points to that, at least.

There are all kinds of people in tech who are self taught without CS degrees though. I don't think it's that beholden to the universities...at least not like other professions. I think it's simply that people took notice that all the money was being funneled into tech. The MBAs all followed.

Industry, for the most part, needs predictability and scale for it to function well. It's very difficult to accomplish that without at least some rigidity.

Punk rock is small by definition. Once it becomes large it changes to mainstream.

Are startups the closest you can still get to "punk rock in tech"? I would love for the dream of the 90s to still be alive somewhere...

Startups are the least punk rock thing in tech. Follow patterns and rules to match the expectations of VCs so they give you money... and then they drive what you do.

I'm not saying people should not work in startups - they have their place in the industry. But there is nothing "punk rock" about them.

If you want to break rules and work outside the lines, we have come full circle to the 90s - bootstrapped small businesses are the way to go.

Angel / friends / family was always more punk than VC, because VCs literally distill the funding transaction down to a business science.

Unfortunately... because most of the world has taken their eyes off keeping markets competitive, it's less viable now than it once was, because the table stakes capital requirements are larger.

The more expensive the Bay Area is to live in, the more the VC approach becomes the only game in town

It very much does exist. Just look for places trying to change the very basics of how the world works by hacking on new technology. You know, the places that naturally attract cypherpunks, people distrustful of 'the system' and the like.

You can also find people with that ethos in corporate places, but they get swarmed out by suits and people who went to coding school because it pays well.

Aside from crypto startups, could you share an example?

The presenters in Defcon seem like they enjoy what they do, for example.

Amen to that. The reality though seems to be that being a really good hacker/reverser, is still a relatively lonely endeavor. Don't get me wrong, high level stuff is absolutely a team endeavor, but it requires hours and hours and hours of extraordinary concentration and effort done mostly by yourself. It's tough (but not impossible) to do that and conventional things like raise a family and maintain a relationship with your spouse or friends.

crypto startups are infested with people desperately attempting to be the system, but they’ve convinced themselves (and each other) that adopting a different aesthetic somehow means their motivations are totally not the same.

A Linux kernel developer ? A lot of those people seem like hackers in every sense of the word. They might not be hacking the Gibson but they are hackers.

I've always felt that an industry or research field goes through multiple stages:

Discovery that it exists -> Fumbling -> Golden Age -> Mechanization

Mechanization is where the bean counters and optimizers get into it and make it into something boring. I'm not a software engineer but I feel like my own field is in the "Mechanization" stage. My solution is I'm just about to leave and never look back because I stopped caring. I still like the original stuff I learned but I don't care about what's become of it.

Honestly, I think who you are as a person is often going to be misaligned with what capitalism and industry does with what looks like your passions, and it's healthy to recognize that and leave while you can. You may be doing software engineering but you're not a software engineer; you're a person and you can reinvent yourself any time you want.

I think many of us believed that for sure we are going to be the cool ones but we actually turned out more like Office Space people. Not everyone is Crash Override.

A lot of us are crash override when we are 16 years old. Life beats it out of us though.

A sequel/followup to Hackers today could be awesome. The characters all got the override beaten out of them by life. Rallied back together for one last mission.

I would liken the portrayal of computer science in Hackers to the portrayal of criminology in Batman Forever

People miss the trees for the forest when complaining about Hackers.

https://www.amazon.com/Peter-Norton-Programmers-Guide-IBM/dp...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NYNEX

I wish I could code in the time when there were no deadlines and you could gradually plod away at incredibly complex assembly code while hanging out with some like minded folk. That probably stopped being a thing in the 70s though.

See if there's a local makerspace in your town.

It might not be your exact thing, but you're likely to meet people who know about everything going on in the area.

I imagine there’s still cool gigs. It’s just not with The Enterprise doing Webscale.

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