[hammyhavoc]

I think it's further back than 5 years, beginning prior to even The Social Network movie. I would argue that Apple probably made tech cool for normies, despite not being a modern-day Apple user.

The iPod happened. Smartphones went mainstream, gaming stopped being just for kids and men in basements. A lot changed with the adoption of tech.

The Social Network movie was indicative of a big shift in how the public felt about nerds in tech. It might not have shown Zuck in a particularly positive light, but the fascination was there. Same goes for the passing of Steve Jobs.

Felt like everybody had an idea for an app about 12 years ago, even though most of them were bad or already done! Also seemed like a lot of teens were going to college to "learn to develop apps".

The seeming accessibility of consumer technology brought down the perceived barrier of admission to doing things with tech.

[Clubber]

When I first got into tech, it wasn't cool, it was nerd stuff (as a pajorative). I remember it first started being cool when the internet went commercial. It became really cool when the iPhone was released.

I think tech is currently undergoing a long overdue culling period. I recall one in 2001ish and in 2008ish. All the people who got into it because of the money and don't particularly care for it will move on. Some people who do care for it will also get culled. It's not pretty.

[coolbreezetft22]

I got into it for the money and became very disillusioned with the tech industry long ago. I don't plan on going anywhere though, just gonna continue coasting in my high-pay+easy job and stay focused on family and hobbies.

One of the things that annoyed me about this field is the obsession with ones career and over-the-top manufactured enthusiasm for very mundane projects. Sometimes a job is just a job.

[jacurtis]

It flipped for me at 35. I went from obsessed with the grind/culture/career garbage and just had an aha moment where I said, "hey i have an easy job, with hours that are so flexible it feels illegal, and my pay is double what most of my friends' dual-incomes are". I started to just focus on hobbies and family and less on work.

I don't live to work anymore, I work to live.

I still get stellar marks at work, i know my shit and i'm good at it. But the illusion has worn off for me. It's just a job. I meet deadlines, but I also push back on deadlines that require crunch time or weekend work. I push back on weekend or late time work completely now. I'm not embarrassed anymore to say "I don't want to work on the weekend, and its unreasonable for you to expect me to, so that project will get done next week".

My job is a means for providing for a comfortable retirement, and a comfortable life. I enjoy tech, but I enjoy my hobbies more. My hobbies keep me healthy and happy, work doesn't do either of those two things. Work is work, that's fine. But let's call it what it is. Let's not forget to live too.

[JustLurking2022]

Honestly, this is the sort I'm rooting to be culled out. I'm all for a healthy work-life balance but have no sympathy for the "rest and vest" folks - there are absolutely people getting paid in the top 1% who work ~25 hours a week and do absolutely nothing useful. Meanwhile, there are plenty of critical teams drowning in work that can't get additional headcount because of layoffs and the fact they don't have the right buzzword in their team name. If you're taking up a seat and coasting, someone else is paying the price.

Unfortunately FAANG rating systems aren't great and often reward vanity projects going nowhere over the work keeping the company afloat, so I entirely believe that's possible even while having good ratings.

[the_overseer]

Agreed with the culling part. I write code for the job and also after hours as my hobby. I wait for the weekend to work on harder/more experimental stuff. I remember the days when I was surrounded by people like me. These days all I hear is 'it's just a job that provides for my hobbies'. And the decline in the work quality is so obvious. And the level of bullshittery and invented office language is through the roof.

There is no way these two things aren't connected.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Any industry that can't sustain itself with a majority of workers who are "just doing it as a job" is doomed to fail.

I say this after doing SW development for a few decades. You can't count on "passion," "rockstars" or "10x developers." You can only count on the slogs who show up, do a good job and go home.

[pb7]

Cool, the rest of us have other hobbies. You’re not better than us, you’re just one dimensional. That’s a drag on work quality in an entirely different way.

[tangjurine]

But for the person above, it's not like them working harder will help the teams that actually do need more people but aren't getting it.

[JustLurking2022]

Individually, perhaps not. In aggregate, there definitely could be more resources made available for critical services if you could make the org 20% more efficient just by getting rid of people who think they're entitled to a huge paycheck for chilling.

[yamtaddle]

Those all read like great reasons to cull and replace a great deal of tech management.

[hammyhavoc]

> "I don't want to work on the weekend, and its unreasonable for you to expect me to, so that project will get done next week"

Balls the size of spacehoppers. I love it.

[Clubber]

>I got into it for the money

I got into it for the passion, but I don't have it as much as I did. I can't imagine doing something else like marketing or accounting though.

>obsession with ones career and over-the-top manufactured enthusiasm for very mundane projects.

That's most corporate places, especially in sales. One of the funniest takes is Step Brothers, "it's the Catalina wine mixer!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ9HcYuGVgU

[jacurtis]

Yeah I got into it for the passion and stayed for the money.

I really loved tech. For about a decade I truly loved every day of work. Then I got really worn out and it took me almost 5 years to work through it. Part of this low point was a point of terrible health (mostly caused by my job and stress). When I came back out of it, I considered leaving the field, but stayed in it for the money.

I was in a management position at this point. I could go into a different field and start over, but I'd probably end up working my way up to management eventually too and its really all the same at that point. You are managing people and processes. So I might as well do that with the tech spin on it.

The obsession with over-manufactured enthusiasm is one I really laugh at now that I look back on my career. I realized that most of us in tech will work on boring stuff. I can't even tell what I am working on anymore, to the point that it is almost comical. I could be building self-driving cars or cloud billing portals. At the end of the day, you are fixing bugs or improving performance or polishing my tiny grain of sand in the huge sculpture that these platforms have become. When you are working on large-scale complex platforms nobody really understands how it all works. There is no magic, even when working on "sexy" projects. I've worked on exciting projects and boring projects and the day-to-day experience is exactly the same.

Pro Tip: "Boring" projects tend to pay better, and since its the same work and same day-to-day experience, take the boring projects. You also tend to find fewer sensationalized colleagues on those projects.

[Braini]

You are probably right but man, isn't this so very disillusioning? I am a bit in such a hole you mentioned and thinking about how to get out of it best - one of my ideas/hopes was to find more "sexy" projects at some point. Oh well.

[thunky]

> You are probably right but man, isn't this so very disillusioning?

Look at it this way:

Your boring, cushy tech job only exists because the industry as a whole is grossly inefficient.

That's why so many people are doing nearly the same thing, over and over and over, day after day.

If it wasn't for that inefficiency you would need to find other work, and it would probably be a lot more difficult than your current job.

So, glass half full.

[jhanschoo]

The flip (up)side of a boring job is that you don't get crises that you must deal with but have to do so at great cost or just impossible. Leave the sexy for stuff that you're allowed to fail in.

[mejutoco]

Definitely. I remember showing Google to a colleague at my first internship, when Altavista was the best search engine, and he discarded it automatically as some nerd thing. Oh well.

[mountainofdeath]

In my youth, console gamers were considered basement dwelling weirdos by normal people and PC gamers were considered weirdos by console gamers. Such was the hierarchy.

[treeman79]

I think World of Warcraft change that somewhat. I joined one company and was shocked, discover that practically everyone and every department had an account and played at least casually.

I made sure not to mention that I was in a top tier guild getting server firsts. I didn’t want to come off as to weird. I mean I have three computers and seven monitors on my desk, but one have to know when to draw the line.

[hammyhavoc]

I think WoW also significantly grew the female demographic in terms of gaming, but we saw that with RPGs even prior to WoW too, especially Final Fantasy.

[deepzn]

We could go even further back to the late 90's and the official launch of the Internet, where you see the more people believing in this. When Bill Gates was officially the richest man in the world. But, I think with every cycle, you got more believers. Google in 2003-06, along with Facebook. In 2007-09 with the iPhone disrupting the phone industry, that became a big thing. And early 2010's with the rise of the apps - Airbnb, Uber, etc.

I feel we hit a crescendo with the post pandemic bubble and fed pumping money, that's when tech usage globally was of course at it's highest, but also like the sheer number of people using it everyday was massive(maybe 50-75%+ of the world). And it arguably "ate" or saved the world during the pandemic. It's fascinating, and now we're entering another cycle maybe after a brief respite, with LLMs.

[FooBarBizBazz]

The 2008 financial crisis. Before that it was less FAANG, more Goldman and McKinsey.

[2devnull]

“Apple probably made tech cool for normies”

It felt like that, but I suspect it’s not really true.

[hammyhavoc]

What do you feel the truth is? It was certainly well-marketed, and felt like there were way more normies with Apple stuff than nerds in the UK.