[volkadav]

<3

it's good to see a little person having fun with all this technocrap that us grognards have gotten so bitter about over the years/decades. :) i hope she continues to have a blast!

(from the dedication page in SICP:)

“I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.” ~Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990)

[dkarl]

I miss the fun in software development in the workplace. Something has changed. When I started 20+ years ago, people would get excited about something new they learned and rush to tell other people about it. Now everybody is grim, too busy grinding and "managing their visibility" to show any pleasure.

If it was just me and my friends who were joyless now, I'd chalk it up to us getting old, but my coworkers who are the same age as I was 20 years ago are just as grim if not more so. They're at a point in their career where so much cool stuff is new to them, and they're completely dry and professional about it.

For example, I was in a huddle with a coworker, and we needed something from a parquet file. My coworker said he might have time later to write a script to extract the information, and I was like, "No, check this out!" and I started up duckdb and had the answer in under a minute. My coworker's response was just a monotone, "I've never seen that before. It looks useful." Not "whoa, cool!" or even a simple "nice." It was almost like he felt worse for knowing it existed.

It makes me look around at my coworkers and wonder if everybody could possibly be as miserable as they look and sound? And if so, why?

[altdataseller]

I would not assume they’re miserable because I probably would have the same reaction if I was them.

We have just been bombarded with so much technology and advancements in the past two decades that it really takes a lot to impress us. We’ve had ppl conputing, smartphones, electric cars, semi-autonomous driving, VR and ChatGPT. A tool that parses Parquet is very very low in the totem pole, compared to all the new tech everyone has been exposed to.

Add that to the fact that we’ve also been overpromised new shiny things that turn out to he disappointments (Google Wave, metaverse, blockchain, a lot of AI products) and its not surprising most people aren’t that impressed by lots of tech these days.

In comparison, 25 years ago, just seeing a webpage load in less than a second led to a Wow moment

[Grimblewald]

It doesnt help that current quality of life is pretty grim, downright terrible if youre young, heck even if youre pushing into middle age. Possibly beyond but I dont have as much perspective for that demographic.

things that give you the mental resources to take the time to have fun with things are simply not avaliable to most of us these days. As a simple example, young folks have near no chance of ever owning a home, and it is sold as a personal failure. As it being a failure to grind sufficently. Natural human urges and desires, like having a family, are increasingly out of reach and are again sold as personal failures.

Everyone is grim, because the situation is grim. If we dont take the time to recognize how grim it really is, we will be in no position to start fixing it.

[galdosdi]

I don't know. It's not hard to buy a home if you're an American software engineer though, and aren't tied to the bay area or NYC. There are even places commuting distance from NYC where you can get a $250k single family freestanding home.

A few years ago I lived for a while in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was pretty easy to find a $110k software job that was pretty chill and well, not so exciting or conducive for the ambitious. Numerically pay isn't what faang might pay in SF. But faang workers in SF claim they can't buy a house, yet this lower salary easily could have bought a mansion in Tulsa. They could have even cut my salary in half and it still would afford a nice average house.

Probably not a coincidence I saw a lot more families with children across all social classes there than in my prior NYC life. Hm.

So I don't think America has a cost of living problem, I think the bay area, core NYC and a few other major metros have a cost of living problem. That's bad, but those are two different things.

[doublepg23]

I'm in Pittsburgh right now and struggling to buy a house. Everything on the market are estates and get bought within a week of listing. This past one I put an offer on was sold in less than 24hrs of posting...

[galdosdi]

I'm surprised to hear this, I would never think to lump Pittsburgh in with big metros. Are you being picky or something? Do you have kids and thus school district is a major consideration? Do you have a specific neighborhood you want?

Really, Pittsburgh of all places? I know a quick search from someone from out of town is kind of shaky and there's a lot of local knowledge you have, but are houses like https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4411-Gladstone-St-Pittsbu... at $170k or https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1404-Marlboro-Ave-Pittsbu... at $154k or https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/107-Lilac-Ave-Pittsburgh-... at $160k not good enough for you or something? Zillow shows hundreds and hundreds of decent looking houses under $200k within Pittsburgh city limits.

These are incredibly affordable even on a 5 figure household income. You are very lucky to live in a place with such a reasonable CoL. I've known people to move there from eastern PA for the sake of that.

If I'm missing something, I'd love to hear it, but I'm pretty sure what I'm gonna hear is that you're filtering out a lot of the affordable stuff due to some interesting self imposed restrictions.

[Aeolun]

I mean, if I’m going to buy a house, I’d want to buy it in my hometown, but that’s very nearly impossible even at software developer salaries.

I’m now living overseas, where housing is also expensive, but at least within reach due to low interest rates and just plain building more smaller houses.

[robertlagrant]

Low interest rates increase house prices.

[doublepg23]

I'm mid-20s and while it's not all shiny I'd hesitate to call it grim. Maybe it's naivety but my current lodging isn't at risk of being bombed.

[jimjimjim]

For a lot of technology you know it's just a hype bubble that very loud people keep chanting about because they have money in it and you have to wait for it to go away, Blockchain I'm looking in your direction. But there are still small tech wonders to be found, it's just difficult keeping abreast of all the changes in the wider tech ecosystem.

[galdosdi]

> new shiny things that turn out to he disappointments (Google Wave, metaverse, blockchain, a lot of AI produc

To be fair, the more seasoned observers among us were not affected by most of those disappointments due to ha ing recognized the signs from the beginning they'd peter out.

Other than Google wave. We all thought that was cool at the time. But I think failure has more to do with Google's poor as usual execution. See also how they had near total domination of the chat market back when Gmail Chat was the most popular chat briefly and pissed it all away with constant reorgs and rebrands and refractors that went in a circle until facebook won.

[dkarl]

> Add that to the fact that we’ve also been overpromised new shiny things that turn out to he disappointments

I was a young developer when Enterprise Java was the future, and the way you knew it was the future was that it used XML for _everything_, so I'm not sure things are so different in that respect.

I don't remember getting excited about the hyped new stuff that VCs were excited about. I remember getting excited about simple stuff, almost dumb stuff. I remember getting my mind blown by powerful programming concepts, but I also remember getting my mind blown that I could select text in emacs and run a shell command on it with a few keystrokes.

I guess when I learned these things I didn't automatically crush my excitement with thoughts like "you can't make a business out of this" or "other people already know this" or "there are bigger, higher-leverage ideas I also need to be pursuing" or "I might get laid off from this job and never be able to get a software development job again." I did have those thoughts -- after the dot-com bust, nobody was sure the programming job market would recover again -- but I had them separately. I didn't feel like I needed to crush the pleasure I took in small things to make room for the big things.

P.S. If you're burned out by grandiose promises, a tool like DuckDB is a refreshing change. It was probably built to solve a really hard problem for somebody, but for me it's a humble little tool that scales down nicely to annoying file munging problems that feel like they should be easier. If you have a CSV file and want to run a SQL query on it, or you want to write a query that joins a CSV file with a JSON file, it'll have you there in no time, no need to write a script or fire up a Jupyter session.

[pjerem]

I’m pretty sure that fun never really disappeared but rather than developers team are now full of non "computer people", like, people who never cared about computers from the start.

I don’t say it like an insult, it’s just that for most people developing things is and have always been a career like any other. We shouldn’t blame people to not be passionate about their jobs. Everyone have to eat and if you are able to perform in this job without passion, you would be stupid not to.

But I agree that for passionate people, it’s pretty depressing.

And even for people who love this, writing SaaS apps 9 to 5 for years can easily shatter the joy of knowing cool things.

[pantulis]

> I’m pretty sure that fun never really disappeared but rather than developers team are now full of non "computer people", like, people who never cared about computers from the start.

I think there is something simply due to aging. I grew up writing BASIC and machine code on a Commodore Vic20. Programming was inherently playing. Fast forward 4 decades, I do not write code for a living any more but I can see how senior coders I work with do not have that sense of joy. But it's not like the industry has became this or that way, it's that our lives have changed and we became old enough to understand that work is work, and playing is playing. As the lyric goes we have traded the maybe for the sure, we have filled our pockets with keys and responsibilities.

I still write code from time to time just to be slightly informed of trends, but my corollary would be: if your programming job makes you feel like you are playing, do not be afraid to enjoy it at all costs because that too shall pass.

[brewdad]

Certainly not everyone, but a lot of the people who have entered the field in the past decade are chasing the money. The never had the passion for it but they were and are good at it, so here they are.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

The last remaining field is game dev. The pay is low and react kiddies cannot learn it in a week. I wish the pay was higher buy the passion remains there.

[CM30]

And if that ever feels too corporate/safe, there's also fan game development/modding. The lack of legal ways to monetise your work there means that everyone who'd only be interested in the field for money is quickly filtered out, leaving only those willing to plow a decade or so of their life into something for no financial benefit.

Plus if you go back far enough, you can work on something where there's no room to abstract out anything and your code has to be optimised for the bare hardware itself, which is always an interesting challenge.

[onemandevteam]

Yes, game dev and developing software for personal projects. Corporate world is insufferable.

[llm_trw]

This is what impostor syndrome looks like at an industrial scale.

I find the best antidote to that is live streams of people like geohot, a man at the top of his game who is an idiot more than half the time when coding - "No! You're missing a coma, this won't run!"

[wegfawefgawefg]

For me the joy of programming is thinking and making the simplest thing which accomplishes my need, and the regular intervals of satisfaction from a sequence of jobs well done.

When I started by career ten years ago that was how it worked. Around 2019 I noticed a change.

At some point coding was replaced with "HERE LEARN AND USE THIS NEW TOOL" fourty times a week. It is all kitbashing now. Software development has been completely replaced with devops. Low level devops does not require brain usage. It requires bashing your brains against the wall for hours trying to figure out what about your yaml file is wrong. Your boss and your coworkers are forcing you to use this and ten other antitools despite you already knowing how to adequately and quickly solve the problem with the tools you have. They advocate for the tools despite having never used them because the tools have a fancy (disgusting) react website. I have extreme new tool jadedness. Usually I hate when poeple show me new software tech, because they will demand I use it and I have to pay the price. I will never become an expert of these tools. They will be replaced in six months. Only 3-5 of our 50 microservices will use each one. Many of them will be redundant.

Joined a new startup a few months ago. The ceo had would take me asside five times a week and tell me we had to use this new tool. Kubernetes, helm, and 100 other tools appeared. At first I enjoyed the experimentation but it never ended. Work never got done.

At some point I told him "This is just a basic crud app. what the fuck are we doing. Can we stop playing around and get this done?" He didnt listen. I quit. Fuck it.

[BigJono]

This is exactly it. You could show me the best, simplest, most elegant tool ever and my first reaction is going to be to throw up in my mouth as soon as you say "hey, check out...", because the last 50 things shown to me have all traded 100 lines of code for 500 pages of bad documentation while everyone around me fucking gaslights me into thinking I'm an idiot because I find bad APIs and documentation harder to work with than code.

I still have loads of fun when someone introduces me to a problem and lets me actually write code to solve it. That just doesn't happen in 2024 workplaces though. If you want programming work to be fun again, you need to start there.

[Publius_Enigma]

This spoke to me. I see it as putting tools before ideas.

[calvinmorrison]

My funnest one was a big flaming GIF at the top of our admin page that said "production". I believe it was from "cooltext.com"

last i checked it was still there 10+ years later

[JansjoFromIkea]

We have access to too much information about how to do things better and the tools to do those things, so the focus winds up on retraining and optimising rather than just dumping something out there and abandoning it.

Flash sucked but everyone knew it sucked and that you could kind of force it to do a lot of things.

[Aeolun]

I’d say it’s because there is so much (free/open) code around these days that it’s not surprising there’s something that parses the file out there.

[HaZeust]

Kind of reminds me of the quote from the Steve Jobs movie:

"The most efficient animal on the planet is a condor. The most inefficient animals on the planet are humans. But a human with a bicycle becomes the most efficient animal. And the right computer -- a friendly, easy computer that isn’t an eyesore but rather sits on your desk with the beauty of a tensor lamp -- the right computer will be a bicycle for the mind. A beautiful object -- perfect geometry, perfect finish, something you want to look at and have in your home. Flawless. And then a personal computer becomes an interpersonal computer. And what if instead of it being in the right hands, it was in everyone’s hands?"

[ketzo]

I’ve never seen the full quote, and I really love that last sentence.

Reminds me of Ratatouille: “Anyone can cook.”

We make software so that someone else can do something new with it that we ourselves never imagined.

So important to remember that someone could be… anyone!

[HaZeust]

Yup! Not everyone can be a great artist, but a great artist CAN come from anywhere

[jstanley]

We were promised bicycles for the mind, but what we got was public transport for the mind.

[azinman2]

Well what we really ended up with is TV.

[HaZeust]

“Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television – you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television.” - Andy Warhol

Life is a quote or song cue.

[LoganDark]

This sounds a bit like they're suffering from derealization, honestly.

[Grimblewald]

In many cases id say the grindwheel of the mind. Inefficient and has the sole purpose of inflicting suffering. Perhaps not by 'design' but certainly through effect.

[sabhiram]

Muni style. People crapping all over it from time to time.

[lamp_book]

We had locomotives before bicycles, too. I think the industry can still get there.

[bostik]

In true South Park style.

Mr Garrison would be proud.

[throwaway14356]

the internet use to be a series of tubes, now it is a series of buckets.

[rpozarickij]

I haven't see the movie (only a few clips), but I enjoyed hearing this analogy from Steve Jobs himself in many of his interviews [0].

Just checked the part [1] of the movie where Michael Fassbender talks about the bicycle of the mind. He is a very good actor but it's hard to match the energy and the electric focus of Steve Jobs.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmuP8gsgWb8

[1] https://youtu.be/BZYZlzIMVw8?si=u8X_mc4BX62ypRZw&t=98

[hbn]

The YouTube video for Vulfpeck's track, Barbara, is interspersed with the interview where he said that quote -- as well as the first take of it where he stumbled through it and then asked to restart from the beginning to reword it better!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npqD602G90o

[karolist]

Internet tells me that human is not the most inefficient, but pretty much down on the list. Sorry to be that guy, but to me a joke or quote needs to be true to impact :(

https://ghijklmno.net/a-bicycle-for-the-mind/

[cm11]

Funny, another commenter posted both videos, Steve Jobs saying it and Steve Jobs the film. Steve Jobs says what you say. Hollywood says it the other way. I suppose it also wouldn't be surprising if Jobs rehearsed this Hollywood-style for his interview.

[cjohnson318]

Dude really hit it out of the park with the "bicycle for the mind".

[kilna]

This "bicycle for the mind" guy died way sooner because of woo-woo bullshit magical thinking. He was an overprivileged marketer who had a better than average sense of what people would like, combined a shameless capacity to crib others' notes. Like most venerated billionaires, his main genius was his capacity to exploit.

[endofreach]

While i do not share the opinion that jobs was such a genius at all, reducing him to be just a marketer seems very narrow-minded.

Sometimes it's about bundling potential rather than exploitation. I have read many stories of the people who worked for jobs, not many of the "first ones" seem to tell stories of being exploited. But many seem to be proud of how much work they put into their work guided by a guy who seems to be there mostly for saying yey or ney. Which seems to be crucial.

Think about all the dysfunctional organizations you have seen or worked with. In my experience, most of them were lacking clarity, responsibility, personal investment & decisions.

The potential to end all wars, end hunger, free societies etc is there. I mean just on HN, the potential to transform the world by tomorrow is there. There is enough people with good will, enough people in key positions, enough people who are the best in their field, enough people who love to hack away as a side project, enough people who enjoy debating etc... here on HN.

All that is missing is the right approach to get a few of these people together with the right goal and by tomorrow we could take out / stop a lot of evil. This person must be able to "market", to bundle potential. But this person must also be able to identify potential & make hard decisions & do the things others would call "insensitive". Otherwise the people would quickly lose interest or be lost in chaos.

Focusing potential seems to be the most crucial part. Having a lot of potential but high entropy seems to be irrelevant in most cases.

Anyway, had to type it out because i just realized that partially i am doing the same mistake with my startup. Too stuck fiddling on the tech while knowing that i should be focusing on bundling potential. Currently i am just contributing to a entropic potential, which serves no one. Bundling it might serve the right people, at the right time with the right people.

Which infects my mind with the question i have been struggling with: is there any way someone like jobs could have been more than just a marketer in your eyes?

I do feel like i am looking down upon people like jobs who seem to be happy with just talking and never trying to really do the things themselves. On the other hand having this opinion of potential entropy... what do you think?

Edit: just wanted to add the after thought that people most likely call these people geniuses, whose way of achieving results they can't quite comprehend. And usually for people too attached from the problematic domain, the same geniuses could appear like idiots or sharlatans.

[globalnode]

Focusing potential as you eloquently put it is an entirely different skill to coding or engineering. I've been around people that do it and its like magic. Sharing a vision, presenting it in a way that sounds meaningful, and getting the 'buy-in' of others is all about managing others' expectations and trust. You really have to deliver and not just promise.

[jackbravo]

very nice comment! Both put in perspective the importance of Steve Jobs, while not aggrandizing him too much and instead shifting the focus to what we could do instead. Bookmarked!

[xenadu02]

When some people were proposing Swift remove the ability to use Emoji in variable names this was my reply:

> It’s hella presumptuous to decide that I’m not allowed to express whimsy, frustration, humor, or any other emotions in my code. Or to tell an 8 year old using Playgrounds on the iPad that he/she can’t name a variable :pig: purely because they find it funny. We don’t have to squash the joy out of everything.

[vladxyz]

As soon as I realized I could have emoji in bash function names I did a thing[0] with it. It breaks shellcheck, annoys people who I try to convince to use it, but it makes me very happy.

[0] https://code.ofvlad.xyz/v/lightning-runner

[globular-toast]

I hope we can keep it alive. The latest volume of Knuth is full of puzzles, which is wonderful. But then I see the other top thread on HN where people are whining that they aren't getting paid more than 99.9% of the population for sitting at a desk solving problems all day. Sometimes I think those people don't deserve to be doing this job.

[nonrandomstring]

Nice quote. Lost it now but I used to have a desktop wallpaper with the old Kraftwerk cover with "ITS MORE FUN TO COMPUTE". We need regular reminders. FWIW my little one is mastering the command line after a year of having to type to get things. Even if she turns out not into computers I won't grieve because if nothing else she learned to type, which is a useful skill itself.

[amelius]

For me what takes the fun out of computing is that package management is severely broken. I simply haven't been able to run the latest in DL because of driver issues, compile issues, issues with containers, etc. Sure I can get it to work if I spend 1+ days on it, but it just isn't fun anymore to try out something new.