[eastbayjake]

tl;dr: People are suddenly interested in something I'm passionate about, they're all poseur johnny-come-latelys, I'm the authentic hacker

This is maybe the tenth HN post I've read that's some iteration of this gut feeling by people who entered tech after a life-long obsession with computers. It's really cool that you're passionate about CS -- there are also a lot of people who are rational actors making rational decisions when presented with market signals, and they're not bad people for doing that. They're just acting in rational self-interest. Sorry it upsets you. Almost every industry is full of people who toil at jobs they're not passionate about, and it doesn't make their employers bad companies. It's okay to work a job and define your life satisfaction by raising a family, making art, enjoying the outdoors, etc.

There's a legitimate complaint here about poor craftsmanship, but: (1) Poor craftsmen often wash out in the interview process or torpedo the companies sloppy enough to hire them, and (2) Everyone starts off as a poor craftsman, and it would be cool if people like OP asked themselves "How can I help more people become excellent craftsmen?" than "AGHHH MORE PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO BECOME SUCCESSFUL AT THIS THING I LOVE, IT'S SO OVER"

[larrys]

This is also another version of "last man over the bridge" which oddly enough I can't seem to find a link to define it. I thought it was a fairly well know concept. In other words it's similar in a way to old timers on an island and how they react when a flux of newcomers arrive with their new ideas and different motivations. And they aren't "authentic". Same as in a way hazing newbies in the marines, fire department etc. The newcomers then do it to further newcomers. Hence "last man over the bridge" is the place in line you are at. (I'd like to hear other definitions but that's the way I see it.)

As someone who is somewhat of an old timer in a few things that are popular now (flying RC helicopters (gas) since the 80's, photography (70's) (had a darkroom) 70's, and "computers" (70's) (I can do programming somewhat but am not a programmer) and lastly "entrepreneur" (right out of college and things in high school). Also I was in the entrepreneurial program at b school and it was so long ago that people frowned upon it (and I was at Wharton) here's the thing: I'm actually glad there is so much attention paid to things that very few people cared about years ago when it seemed that only I did.

Edit: Oh yeah Unix in the 80's as well as macintosh and Apple as well.

[astrodust]

It's more than that, it's more like having pride in being an early adopter only to find yourself standing in the middle of a crowd.

Those who seek the frontier must keep moving or they'll end up surrounded by a community they might not be able to tolerate. To stand your ground, shotgun in hand, yelling at kids to get off your lawn is not helping anyone.

Let's face it: Kids are holding hardware in their hands that researchers in the 1980s would kill for, an iPhone 6 has a CPU so powerful it would easily crush the most powerful computers in the world in 1993 (http://www.top500.org/list/1993/06/) but they use it to take selfies.

[TheOtherHobbes]

'Rational Self Interest' is a myth. For self interest to be truly rational you'd have to be able to model long term consequences of short term decisions extremely well.

This would be a useful way to make sure you wouldn't do something incredibly stupid and ultimately self-defeating just so you could to make a quick buck in the next quarter, if the ultimately consequence was that the same 'rational decision' was going to kill you - financially or literally - a year or ten later. (Or at least you'd be fully aware that it was likely to kill you, and were just fine with that.)

If you try to model long term wide area consequences you eventually have to accept that rational actors work within some very irrational belief systems, and long term modelling is very much a minority interest.

This is partly because you get as much useful information about the future from 'market signals' as you get from any stampeding herd, flock or school of animals - which is not much.

This has been covered over and over in the literature (e.g. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, etc).

>Almost every industry is full of people who toil at jobs they're not passionate about, and it doesn't make their employers bad companies.

Maybe not. But it certainly makes them extremely dull and horribly inefficient, economically and politically.

>There's a legitimate complaint here about poor craftsmanship,

I don't think it's a complaint about poor craftsmanship. I think it's a complaint about questionable cultural ethics.

[eastbayjake]

This is a strawman of my argument. If you can make $40k in one job or $85k in another by completing a 12-week course, it is a purely rational decision. (You may be passionate enough about your $40k job to turn down more money in other areas, but only you are capable of weighing that trade-off. It's still a rational process.) I'm not making the claim that all humans are purely rational all the time.

[norseboar]

Rational self interest might be a myth when applied to the extent that some economic models apply it, but at a basic level holds up. I know /tons/ of people that have taken one job over another because it pays more, even if it's one that they're less interested in.

Not everybody has the luxury of being passionate about something lucrative -- that's not something you really have control over (maybe some, but I don't think much. This is another issue entirely, though). I get that it might be lamentable that an industry isn't full of the most passionate people anymore, but the tradeoff is that it became a large-scale industry. If the original author wants the kind of deep, nerdy devotion he used to have, he can find it! There are plenty of research institutes and startups investing in long-term big bets that need this kind of thing. But being mad that /everybody/ isn't that way anymore seems childish.