I don’t think hacker culture is dead. Rather, computing entered its Eternal September; a career in software engineering, especially in the United States, now carries a similar cachet to being a doctor or lawyer, and the startup world has attracted those who want to make a fortune. The geeks, nerds, scholars, artists, and other varied misfits who once dominated the field have been outnumbered by those looking for money.
This is the price of computing’s success. It’s not all bad or all good, it just is a natural consequence of computing becoming an integral part of modern society.
It’s not just money they made so much money they actually dislodged and eliminated the conditions and opportunities that created hacker culture in the first place
As a researcher, I concur. I’m a 80s/90s kid who got into computing through seeing the technological changes around me and who got inspired by the stories of Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Alan Kay, and other pioneers. I wanted to pursue a career where I was given the freedom to explore and to create technologies that made an impact.
Unfortunately what I’ve found in the past decade of working in the field is that we are no longer in the exploration era of computing. There is still much to explore, but the problem is that the metaphorical frontier has been largely bought up by large corporations and funding agencies, and thus exploration has been restricted. The days of unfettered research at places like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs are long-gone; it’s all about quickly delivering results in areas that promise to have a direct, immediate impact on the bottom line. Academia is no better with its “publish-or-perish” demands. Even working as a software engineer has less exploration today than it did in the past. The developed world is jeopardizing its future by relentlessly pursuing short-term gains at the expense of the long term.
It’s disappointing to see computing “colonized” by business interests who have no love for computing and who don’t understand that research and software engineering are creative endeavors that cannot be treated like an assembly line, but I’ve come to terms with this recently and started rethinking my career. I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to separate my passion for computing with making a living; trying to make money from research leads to pressure from funders. I need to pursue my true research callings the way an artist pursues art.
But a thought just occurred to me when typing all of this. In a way, though, hackers and artists are back to the days of the Homebrew Computer Club of the 1970s, where hobbyists pursued their craft and showed off their work without any expectation of monetary reward. These hackers were distinct from the stereotypical IBMer. The rise of Apple and Microsoft changed this, but something interesting happened in the past decade; working for Apple, Microsoft, and other Big Tech companies today is akin to working for IBM in 1974. What was once the counterculture has become “the man.”
It’s not a perfect analogy; AT&T and Xerox were definitely “the man” 50 years ago, yet they ran research labs that offer levels of freedom that cannot be found today. But I believe that us hacker/artist types should take inspiration from the hobbyist communities of old. I’m unqualified to take on modern capitalism and its effects on research and the software industry, but if I could make a lasting contribution to society by doing great “artistic” computing, then I could die satisfied.
Although at the same time, with the plateuing of computer hardware, you don't need to be a Bell Labs or PARC in order to do research. People are doing cutting-edge AI research on their gaming graphics cards. On a developer salary you can command a massive cluster on AWS (for a few minutes to run tests).
This is true; consumer hardware is crazy capable these days. Even less powerful hardware such as the Raspberry Pi enables various sorts of projects that can be done inexpensively. While it’s hard to find a Xerox PARC- or Bell Labs type of job these days, we have hardware that Dennis Ritchie could only dream of, not to mention a vast ecosystem of open source software to build off of that didn’t exist 50 years ago.
Thanks for giving a positive counterpoint; while there’s much to lament about modern computing, there’s also much to praise.
I read HN almost daily and comment here often, but I don't like the name. I wish they'd chosen to call it something more like "startup news" instead, as that feels like a more accurate representation of the site and its community and standards.
I liked it. I also think he sounds like a dick and a tiring man to know, and I'm confused by the people who themselves confuse dislike for the person with dislike for the writing.
What makes it seem like, from this piece anyway, that he is from an affluent family? (I don’t know the author/artist whatsoever.) Describe to me the phone call you think ought to take place.
Meh. I think it's just endemic of online gatherings of programmers that the discussions seep with a strong sense of intellectual and moral superiority. We are the type to feel like we have life and the world figured out.
This is the price of computing’s success. It’s not all bad or all good, it just is a natural consequence of computing becoming an integral part of modern society.