There's hackers on the one side, but for the vast majority of developers (myself inclusive) it's just a job. FAANG is some of the best pay you'll ever get, and you're guaranteed for work and minimal income if you have that on your CV.

"Hackerdom" whatever that means is separate from "working for a living".

> It used to be that everyone would dream of making a startup that big tech would acquihire.

Prior to that the dream was to just make a successful business. Consider Sun Microsystems.

But let's be real and invoke NoTrueScotsman: "hackers" are supposed to be more like Bill Joy at UCB than Bill Joy at Sun.

I doubt Bill Joy was thinking about business and financial success while hacking on BSD at UCB. Hacking was the end, not a means to an end.

True “hackers” don’t give a fuck about startups. Hackers are interested in how things work and how they can be exploited to do things or grant access to forbidden data. Real hackers back in the late 90s early 00s casually did things that would make a lot of today’s “hackers” blanche in the face and wet themselves at the thought of computer crime, or at least grope around for a downvote button. It was a thrilling era for freaks and geeks. Ever found yourself scrolling down a stolen CSV full of credit card numbers and full billing info? It’s like snorting a line of coke. As a teen I once stole $22k, spent several years looking over my shoulder expecting to be shot or cuffed.

At some point the term “hacker” was co-opted to mean anyone writing code. These Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs aren’t really “hackers”: they’re businessmen with some software engineering skills. But that doesn’t sound nearly as edgy or cool as calling yourself a hacker.

Ok, grandma, let's get you to bed.

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Computer criminals calling themselves "hackers" is fairly recent, only the past few decades. And that's as unwarranted as calling anyone who codes as "hackers" as you mention.

Originally hackers were the people actually creating new innovations, typically with no financial gain desired either criminal or legitimate. People at places like MIT or Stanford in the 1970s and the like.

Even if true, still a far cry from the typical Silicon Valley brogrammers making pitch decks.

Probably because it has become increasingly apparent that an aquihire isn’t all what it’s cracked up to be.

By the same line of logic, doesn't that also implicate full-time work there?

Or do people not think about it that much?

You can bust your ass and maybe get a job there after a few years suffering.

Or you can just go there directly without the suffering.

That was the time when credit and finance flowed like water. Not anymore.

> It used to be that everyone would dream of making a startup that big tech would acquihire.

This really goes to show how pathetic the tech industry has been for the past ~2 decades. People don't aspire to build the next Google, just to get a job with Google. That's like saying the Matrix inspired you to land a job where you get your own cubicle.

When I was a kid dreaming of the future, I never thought that "success" meant being acquihired by a tech giant. That seems stupid, why wouldn't I just apply like a normal person? Building something like eBay or YouTube and turning it into a massive success to rival the giants was the dream. All you needed was a keyboard and luck.

I don't know if I'm alone in that, or if this is a generational thing? I'm currently under 30, so if it is, then it's probably a relatively recent phenomenon. I guess programmers born in the mid 00s probably grew up in a world already dominated by the same few tech giants, and missed the part where they were growing and fighting for dominance.

Of course, I would say that's probably the most reasonable dream to have considering the circumstances. If you do manage to build an innovative and sustainable business, it's unlikely you'll survive once the tech giants attack you with anticompetitive tactics that they know they can get away with.

...that doesn't make it any less lame though.

Don't think it's generational. I'm 41 and had the same take.

I think the core of it is that I internalized a (supposedly) fundamental hacker aesthetic of autonomy, and it seems the culture traded that away for a needy, zero sum, external-validation-needing void.

Now we're told that we really should be working on our brands, amassing our GitHub stars, and other bullshit that is wholly orthogonal to actually building cool stuff. Cause who wants to do that when the rewards are uncertain? Follower counts are what really matters, this is the attention economy, and you can't be left behind!

I think the amount of people in it for the sake of building hasn’t really changed. It’s just that the domain has been absolutely flooded by people in it for the money.

Things felt nicer when we were all still just building.

Such is life.

Tech boomed because: the economy was "good" (people could afford to go after creative and speculative pursuits) and there was technology that hadn't been utilized in creative ways yet (computers, phones, the internet, GPUs, etc.). This allowed "hackers"/"geeks"/"creatives"/"entrepreneurs" to work on stuff that most likely wouldn't make any money, but would be more interesting and fulfilling than doing a job or going after a career.

Then once the money started coming in, and others started hitting home-runs, the "sociopaths"/"prestige hounds"/"MBAs"/"money lovers" came in to formalize and formulize, so the gravy train would be more sustainable and predictable -- and that they could get theirs.

Now we're here. Something cool is no longer cool.

In another vein, what is there left to do? The economy needs to improve and there needs to be new -- actually ground-breaking and revolutionary -- technology brought to the world, so others may use it in novel and creative ways. Then we repeat the cycle.

LLMs seem to be the only contender for "ground-breaking" tech right now. Otherwise, I can't think of anything else.

solar power, wind power, grid-scale battery storage, heat pumps, ev cars, ev aircraft, mRNA vaccines, cures for very specific kinds of cancer, spaceX... maybe it's just me, but there's a ton of intesting tech happening outside of computers

mRNA vaccines is the only one that really "pops" for me. The rest are just iterations on what we've already had, but more efficient/less costly/etc. Nothing really revolutionary, only the same old but better.

In that vein, CRISPR, and how it enables individuals to pursue genetic modification and xenobiology/botany, is one that's being utilized right now to make a lot of very cool stuff (one that comes to mind is the S. Mutans strain that doesn't produce lactic acid). But it's still a very involved and very chaotic process that doesn't allow innovations to rocket off.

Most things are iterations on what you already had. Transistors were just an iteration on tubes, but give it 50 years and…

I think the most world changing tech of the last 20 years is the smartphone.

I think of the smartphone as a culmination of many technologies. Efficient broadband wireless radio, efficient and powerful microchips, GPS systems, camera technology, display technology, battery technology, etc, and of course the software to make it all work.

All of those come together to make a powerful, easy to use, portable computer that enables its user to do so many things in so many places there were not possible before.

I would argue that tech boomed because the (broader) economy was bad. The Fed interest rate was ~0% from 2009 through 2016, due to the long shadow of the Great Recession, and then again from March 2020 to early 2022. That made investors look for unlikely bets on long time horizons, which fueled VCs and big tech, which created the industry we know today.

The people you're talking about are still out there, maybe there's just less of them proportionally as the industry grows. In absolutes there are probably a lot more tech entrepreneurs at every scale.

I think this is missing a really, really important observation- it's only in the past two decades that the Internet (specifically, the World Wide Web) has become such a dominant medium of culture at large. Our view of "what tech culture was like" is very much skewed by the fact that relatively few people were participating in the early "online" culture, and the folks that were, were very much the ones taking risks that turned out to be the major companies of these latter years. We don't talk about all the programmers that ended up at (for example) Sun, or IBM, of one of the many other major tech companies that have since fallen from grace.

Hacker culture and entrepreneurship are orthogonal.

Agree. That point was muddled by me. The aim should be in building things, not being seen as successful.

Does this need a /s at the end? Your lament is that we’ve abandoned the dream of getting acquihired by big tech for… the same thing but with fewer steps?

It has to be sarcasm.

It’s simple - Most people work for money. If someone offers me compensation that allows me to be financially independent in 10 years that’s a deal that is smart to take no?

> It used to be that everyone would dream of making a startup that big tech would acquihire.

> It’s so tame, so complicit. Hackerdom is now mostly about obscene levels of money and status?

The goal of many who make a startup that big tech would acquihire _is_ about achieving obscene levels of money and status. If they're acquihiring you then by definition you no longer have full say about what the business does. If it really was about making something, the best something you can, then you would resist being acquihired.

You move to get acquihired to get paid.