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by shermantanktop 23 days ago
This is what non-commercial tech looked like back before the gold rush and vulture capital. Geeks and nerds in basements doing weird stuff that would be laughed at by most people on the street. Most STEM professions were middle class, not lottery tickets.
2 comments
theamk 22 days ago
What do you mean? Things like those still happen, and probably will for a long time. They did end up being slightly nicer looking though, cheap 3D printers and CNC machines really increased a baseline of what hobbyist in the garage can do.

Go to website like https://hackaday.com and there will be plenty of projects like those. (Although this one is more complex than usual, so you might have to lookover a few months' worth of history to find something on that level)

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shermantanktop 22 days ago
My neighborhood had a guy in his twenties, a hippie burnout, who attached a chainsaw motor to his banana board skateboard with a throttle cable going to a handheld lever.

Did people appreciate the amazing hack? See him as a cool maker? DIY wizard? No, he was seen as a freak who hadn’t grown up. And this was Seattle, a university town with professional engineers at Boeing.

This was the 1970s but it was about the same world as Freaks & Geeks. The nerds were not cool, they were pariahs who hung out with each other because nobody else would have them. People doing this stuff were not finding Hackaday fans.

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everforward 22 days ago
I don't think the pay is really what changed all that much. Median pay for SWEs according to ZipRecruiter is $118k, which is $40k in 1987 USD (the year the person in the article started). BLS data from 1987 puts that at mid-way through the 4th income quintile, which is middle clash-ish.

Levels.fyi slants towards the higher end of pay and they say $192k, which is $65.4k in 1987 or right at the bottom of the top quintile.

Part of what changed is that software abstracted enough for hardware and software to become separate fields, so a much smaller portion of software folks are able to wire together batteries and motors and what not to go with their software.

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tzs 22 days ago
> Median pay for SWEs according to ZipRecruiter is $118k, which is $40k in 1987 USD (the year the person in the article started).

That's using CPI inflation to compare pay across years. I've heard it suggested that for comparing pay across years it is better to use the method the Social Security Administration uses. Using their tables [1] it would be $31k.

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