I was young and didn't have many responsibilities then, and lots of free time. Now I'm a dad with a mortgage and an interest in local politics because I want to 'leave it better than I found it'.

All that said... I do think there have been some shifts over time. I grew up in the era of open source taking off, and it was pretty great in a lot of ways. We changed the world! It felt like over time, software became mainstream, and well-intentioned ideas like PG's writing about startups also signaled a shift towards money. In theory, having F U money is great for a hacker in that they don't have to worry about doing corporate work, but can really dig into satisfying their curiosity. But the reality is that most of us never achieve that kind of wealth.

Now we find ourselves in a time with too much concentrated corporate power, and the possibility that that gets even worse if LLM's become an integral part of developer productivity, as there are only a handful of big ones.

Perhaps it's time for a new direction. At my age I'm not sure I'll be leading that charge, but I'll be cheering on those who are.

I lamented when my career first started (2000 or so) that there were devs I worked with who didn't even own computers at home. While my bookshelves were full of books I aspired to learn and my hard drive was full of half-baked projects, they clocked out and their thinking was done.

I still know a few of those now 25 years after the fact. Some of them have made a career out of software. But they never got curious. It was a means to an end. I don't begrudge them that. But as someone who is internally driven to learn and improve and produce, I can't relate.

My primary fustration today is how many of my software peers are satisfied with updating a Jira status and not seeking to build excellent software. I've seen it at all levels - engineers, managers, and executives. I'm actualized by shipping good, useful software. They seem to be actualized by appearing busy. They don't appear to deliver much value, but their calendars are full. It has me at my professional wits end.

Truth be told, the phenomenon of appearing productive without being productive is an epidemic across multiple industries. I've had conversations with people in manufacturing and agriculture and academia and they all echo something similar. Eventually, Stein's law indicates that the productivity charade will end. And I fear it will be ugly.

There was time when being a software developer was not a particularly prestigious or well-paying job in corporations, or maybe a weird hobby of developing games for the toy 8-bit entertainment computers of the day. It was mostly attracting people who enjoyed interacting with computers, were highly curious, etc.

Then there was a glorious time when the profession of software engineering was growing in importance by the day, hackers became heroes, some made fortunes (see e.g. Carmack or, well, Zuckerberg). But this very wave was the harbinger of the demise: the field became a magnet for people who primarily wanted money. These people definitely can be competent engineers! But the structure of their motivation is different, so the culture was shifting, too. Now programming is a well-paid skilled trade, like being a carpenter or a nurse.

If you want hacker ethos again, look for an obscure field which is considered weird, is not particularly well-paid, but attracts you.

There's still people taking on new frontiers... even if you don't love crypto (and I don't!), a lot of very curious developers found a home there. AI is tougher (due to the upstart costs of building a model), but still discovery is happening there.

I don't think curious developers are gone... there's just an increase of un-curious developers looking for a paycheck. You just have to look harder now (although I think it only seems like we had a cohort of curious devs because we're looking at it in hindsight, where the outcomes are obvious).

People play and tinker when they feel that they are in a secure enough environment to fritter away time without feeling like they've incurred risk by doing so.

Given the state of the climate, economy and politics today, I think a whole lot of people feel a whole lot less secure. When I look back at recent US history when there seemed to be the most innovation going on, it was the 90s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before 9/11. That was probably the "OK-est" a lot of folks in the US felt in their lives.

You might rightly point out that people are wasting lots of time these days, staring at screens, binging TV shows, re-reading giant sci-fi and fantasy series. That's true. But there's a big difference between wasting time escaping the world versus "wasting" time creatively engaging with it.

I am doing more side projects, and finishing more projects, and feel a much greater level of confidence in starting new projects since I feel more confident that I will get at least an MVP working. These are not commercial efforts, I am just tinkering and scratching my own itches.

I attribute 3 reasons to this change:

- Vibe coding helps me do parts of the tech stack that I used to procrastinate on (UI, css)

- Gemini helps me solve all the inscrutable devops issues that used to block me in the past.

- A great open source tech stack that just works (Postgres, docker, node, ollama....)

AI helping me with the above has allowed me to focus on the "fun" parts of the side projects that I do. And the UIs also end up being much prettier than what I could create myself, which gives me the confidence to share my creations with friends and family.

Arguably there might be more curious tinkerers nowadays, but they might represent a smaller slice of the pie.

In 2000, at my very first job, was when I first met a developer who got into it for the money and not for the love. When he told us he picked computer science in college because it seemed like it was a good way to make a living, and a lot easier than law or medicine, the rest of us programmers looked at him like he had sprouted a second head. By 2010, people like him were the norm.

Who cares, though?

If you're a "curious" developer, the existence of a massive preponderance of incurious engineers who are in it for the money doesn't change who you are. It doesn't have to change how you see yourself.

Socially, there are more "curious" developers to connect with and learn from than ever before.

The downside is that people outside of the industry will draw conclusions about you based on their perception of engineers as a whole. Boring and mercenary.

But let's face it, in the eyes of most of the population, boring and mercenary is a step up from how we were perceived when it was just us nerds who were weird enough to enjoy it.

This parallels another creative domain: cooking.

If you've ever wondered what's worth making yourself, it really comes down to the goal of building skills, or obtaining the unobtainable.

The latter is all over cuisine. There are lots of dishes and ingredients that are not economically viable as products. Factors like shelf-life, seasonal availability, cost of production, complexity of preparation - all that stuff is absolutely worth taking on yourself. We never see a huge portion of the world's cuisine at the supermarket for those reasons. Restaurants are better since they cook meals, but they're limited by similar economics and making money at volume & scale. The only way to go deeper is to DIY.

Just like with cooking, there is a huge range of possibilities outside economic viability that applies to any technology. Build a kit car that can't be manufactured on an assembly line. Make stuff out of wood that you'll never see at a craft fair. Build electronics and software with insane BoMs that no entrepreneur would touch with a 10-foot pole. Renovate a room in your house to taste in a way that no contractor would dare take on. If this stuff scratches an itch or enriches your life in some way, learn, explore, and go do it.

SWE culture was very different in a low interest rate environment. Teams were over staffed. No new tech came around for a long time so everyone was focused inward on how to improve the quality of the craft. At my big tech company some teams had 2-3 people dedicated to purely writing tests, maintainability, documentation, and this was for a <1m MAU product.

Then boom free money gone. Endless layoffs year over year. Companies pushing “AI” to try and get SWEs to deprecate themselves. It’s basically just trying to survive now.

That wizard that used to nag everyone about obscure C++ semantics or extremely rare race conditions at distributed scale has disappeared. There’s no time for any of that stuff.

Like all cultures, this was all performative. People astutely observed how to say and care about the things that they saw, the people above them, saying and caring about, and mimicked them to promotions. That doesn’t work anymore, so that wizard culture is long gone.

That isn't reality, however, and so most of that energy is consumed by my day job, and it feels wasteful to put what little remains into projects that have little chance of any practical return. Any time I start settling into work taken up out of pure personal interest, the "responsible adult" part of my personality starts stratching at the back of my mind and pushing me to go do something more productive.

Such is life.

Omarchy Bitchat Ghostty Crush

None of those are chasing metrics. And that’s just off the top of my head.

Lack of profit motive (mostly). Sadly gone are the days of making a killer app and getting fame and fortune. So it is harder to justify spending years of all your free time to build something new.

Through the early 2000's most people entering the IT fields did so for paychecks. There are far fewer pure geeks (as a percentage) than there used to be. My first job out of college as a programmer paid about a dollar an hour over minimum wage. I did not go into this field to compete with the finance bro's financially. I went for the love of technology. That changed so more people started doing this as a job not a lifestyle. These people are not nearly as interested in the experimentation that leads to new innovations.

The industry has flooded with money motivated people, rising the income of the curious (but not exactly marketable) engineer. Yes those people who flooded in might be uninspired, loathsome, buffoons (in the eyes of elite nerds). But also it's the opportunity for your hobby to be mainstream, encountered by those who likely never would have, to not be denigrated for your skill with technology etc.

I'm grateful for how software has progressed from IQ 160, to 140, to 100, to 95 segments of the populace. It means we're winning culture over. It means we're solving problems (including how difficult it used to be to engage with). We've made previously wildly difficult things be table stakes for todays app. (one trite example: long polling became websocket pushes)

We should be celebrating how mainstream we've become.

Since then devs got squeezed more and more so that nobody has any time for trying out stuff. Tech debt accumulates and nothing improves. When you have an idea, you have to submit a proposal to a review board which approves requests from politically connected people and rejects other requests because other deadlines.

This development has taken out everything that made me enjoy about the job and I am good at. Thankfully I am reaching retirement so I am happy to leave.

I think there needs to be a distinction between artist and artisan. Art exists for its own sake, code exists because its useful. I don't want code that reads like poetry, I want code that works so I read actual poetry later.

> Have a project in mind that you’ve always wanted to tackle but it never made sense to you to do it because it would never be used by anyone else or it would never make you any money?

I appreciate the tinker's and hobbyists, software is endlessly interesting as a career, and I'm thankful to be here. But I only want to build code that is useful.

I think a lot of people have lost faith that technology can improve the things that they care about. Even open source doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference in preventing, well anything bad in the last few years.

If we want to have a better dev culture there has to be a reason for people to believe that the software they make is actually going to improve people’s lives and not just accelerate the profits of multi billion dollar corporations.

I understand the author, and if these days the developers are on it for the money and deliver, but don't bring up stupid shit like this, I don't care much. Not everybody is on it for any kind of creativity relief. Spending hours on their Lottie animations or shaving off miliseconds out of request is not really for everybody either. We are lucky to cross paths with people that care.

Theres a layer of pessimism to engineers and hacker news that has been steadily growing (as I assume the average age increases).

To me it's hit a critical level and I have to disregard most negative comments here by default because I can no longer trust the average commenter to have a productive balance of optimism and curiousity.

----

On a different note, the point the author is trying to make is massively undercut by the ad spam all over their page.

It was so grotesque (and out of character for a dev blog) that my first assumption was that I had a malicious extension somewhere.

Now it's on github, and if you don't get enough followers or forks or it's not in a popular language or framework or you haven't updated it recently enough it's seen as a "dead project" or a failure. A project can never be "done" because then it's dead. That's demotivating.

Social media damages everything it touches.

Imposter roles are jobs that are created working backwards from "job at company" to something that an individual can realistically claim they do at the company. They became prominent in the last tech bubble when there was a lot of wealth being created and people wanted to go work at places like software companies, where they could not realistically contribute.

"Product Manager" and "SCRUM Master" are just some of the imposter roles that you've probably encountered. When you scrutinize the existence of these roles, there is a swift and immediate backlash from people who's lifestyle and livelihood is at stake. Product managers will point to famous people at Apple called "product managers" to distract from the fact that the median product manager does not add value.

When an organization creates a role that subsumes all of the creative control, and fills it from a pool of entirely unqualified people, the product gets worse, and the industry gets less innovative. You're either an avid user of the software, or an avid builder of it, and if you don't fit into one of those groups, it's unlikely that you can make a software product better.

I think it depends on the circles you're in. For example, I see a lot of interest in the "Handmade" way of doing things, largely inspired by Handmade Hero. Almost feels like a comeback of what you consider to be dying. There are people who are interested, but one needs to look for them. I recommend it.

Most of my curiosity is tempered by how it can make me money.

I do appreciate that 50-70% of the boring work can be done with AI agents now. As long as you know enough to have opinions and guide the process along, it can be helpful.

Expertise and learning don't seem to be AS important with the upcoming gen of developers. However, there is also so much out there now that it would be much harder to start from zero as opposed to being there from the beginning.

But I think gen X and Millenials were probably peak interest and curiosity, now it's just a job for the later generations.

Web and the whole cloud/backend scene has become toxic because of the work culture around them. I know of a therapist on the west coast that has become completely snowed under by a surge of software developers claiming mental problems on account of their working environments, and she was in such disbelief that she was asking around if what she was hearing was possibly real. Other professionals simply would not accept what has been going on.

That wave feels definitively over now, making mobile apps in 2025 is much like doing WinForms in 2003. Hopefully something new will come along that shakes things up. In theory that's AI but as a developer I find AI tremendously unsatisfying. It can do interesting things but it's a black box.

For me personally... I'm older and married with kids. My free time is so much more valuable than it was back in the day. I still try to be a curious developer but at the end of the day I need to get my work done and spend time with my family. There's enough of a financial squeeze that if I did find myself with an excess of free time I'd probably try to spend it doing freelance work. So whenever this next wave does arrive I might not be catching it.

What dampens the Spirit is same as everyone - a treadmill you cannot get off, punishment for independnat thinking.

Dev culture is not one thing that is found in dozens of companies - dozens of companies have their own culture - and if that is a curious and empowering culture you have curious and empowered devs, and salespeople and operations and chemists and …

Culture is what we make it

It’s fundamental, if you want to find that pioneering spirit again you have to leave your comfort zone and go exploring somewhere off the map.

It is very impressive (in a disheartening way) how easy it was for The System to convince us to constantly spy on each other “for our own good”.

This may be hitting developer culture hard but it's much broader than that.

I personally love the craft, but battle the entrepreneur in my brain telling me not to waste time learning things that won't bring tangible value.

That was not sustainable, the industry needs predictable employees. Even if that means many more of them. "Industrialization" of a process consists of nothing more than splitting that process into smaller, simpler tasks: Front end / back end / system ops / architecture, each split again by technologies, frameworks, languages, etc etc. Gone are the days where you could and needed to know everything.

The workforce increases massively, but since workers no longer need 10 years of intensive practice before being useful they are also cheaper, and most importantly, again : the whole process becomes predictable. You can replace a worker without jeopardizing your business.

The same process happened to many crafts during the industrial revolution, and that spawned similar culture wars between the old gard of craftsmen lamenting the poor quality of the industrial output. Maybe Stallman will be remembered as the Proudhon of our times?

Our times may be a bit more epic, because we were not only craftmen, we were building a new society, or so we though. Computers being machines of logic would help us become more rational, being accessible universal means of production they would blur the distinction between consumers and producers by making everyone a producer, and worldwide networks would turn our divided societies into a global village. Well, in just a few years the oposite happened: the machines locked consumers into walled gardens, greatly reinforced the power structure in place, and made us more divided than ever.

In 20 years from now, very few people will remember how free and powerful we have been.

The curiosity hasn't disappeared from the culture, but it might not be brought in to a workplace anymore.

I think a lot of us have stopped bringing the tinkerer itch to work.

Outside of the workplace, there's an entire parade of tinkering by folks who at best post it on Youtube, not here (I watch "Stuff Made Here" for the code).

Of all the events of the past decade, the worst hit to the tinkering visibility has been Github making personal repos private by default.

Mostly the folks who were like me still have pet projects, most of them will share their code but only if you ask because it is "Well, not as nice as it should be".

I've got hundreds of repos in my github, but there's a sharp fall-off in what's public (there's ~113 public and 180 private) right when that happened and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

The tinkering is more active than ever now with vibe coding tools, where I can draw an svg out and then ask it to "I want to use manim.py to animate this" to get something which is a neat presentation tool to describe how data moves between systems.

But is it worth showing you when all the fun there was in making?

What if all I am likely to get "So what?" as the only response. Wouldn't that it make it less fun?

It's gotten significantly harder now that I have a toddler and my S.O. works, but I can't help myself from stealing time for it.

For those with ears, the old men always say the world is getting worse.

On the other hand, if that can cheer someone up... * https://ladybird.org/ * https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock * Zig rebuilt a C compiler from scratch https://ziggit.dev/t/zig-as-a-c-and-c-compiler/10963 * Rust rebuilt the core nix utilities from scratch https://github.com/uutils/coreutils I've heard a bunch of people making their own OS from scratch just to see how it works, heck there are guides online (https://github.com/cfenollosa/os-tutorial ... 30k stars...)

So... Cheer up ! If people are building all that, I'm sure innovation and creativity are at least not dead everywhere.

Ownership, royalties, voting would be embedded in a block chain. Proof of work would be by vote. And votes given for proof of work. Or something like that. In music they have "royalties" and it seems like that could be used for contributors.

If you would like to be part of a discussion send an email to my firefox relay 3tdm026f9@mozmail.com

Feel free to use a relaly.

Note that the author of the article is doing webdev, which by now ought to be as routine as using PowerPoint. It's rather embarrassing that it's not.

[1] https://x.com/tszzl/status/1967821096545382858

I do agree that there has been a significant shift in developer culture because of business bros and hustle culture, but it's not nearly gone.

In modern society, if you're not trying to monetize all of your hobbies and every little thing you do you are seen as doing something wrong. Everything has to be a hustle these days. You're not allowed to do things simply because you enjoy it.

Who has time to work on free open source projects when your bills and groceries cost far more than they did 10 years ago? The kind of money that being a developer made me in 2015 was enough to pay all my bills, save money and buy cool stuff to experiment on for my hobbies. Now I make twice that much but I’m delaying paying my medical bills until they start leaving voicemails.

My spare time that I used to spend hacking and making things that other people could use is now spent trying to earn a little more, or away from work of any kind dealing with the stress.

The maturation & industrialization of development means that developers no longer are puzzling out the world from first principles. We aren't evaluating each library that comes along to figure out how it might fit into our bespoke apps.

> You become a Next.js developer, a React developer, a Rust developer etc

React in particular is such a distinction of development. It is it's own Terra Firma, solid ground, upon which developers stand, only barely coupled to the underlying platform. Knowing the web itself is still enormously good and helpful, but there is such a huge engine at your back, doing so much work, that is extremely hard to take as more than a black box. Even if you know the web very well, there is still a huge opaque engine between the code you write and the web actual that's targetted.

We don't have the raw experience anymore to be broader developers. Vs React, I think it's more ok to consider oneself a Rust developer, where one is still quite close to the metal, where the only focus-narrowing is to a general purpose language that's good for anything (especially with Rust being such a fore-runner at WebAssembly!).

It seems like big companies are doing some great things with WebComponents, but there's still so little broader attention, and little cultural energy for them. The lack is cyclical: there's scant developer culture around webcomponents, and so scant webcomponent acceptance & knowledge. It feels like such an opportunity for shared knowledge, for excitement, for figuring things out & making patterns, for a more grounded closer to the firm earth potential, and one that obviously needs the curiosity and excitement. But it's React Uber Alles, React on and on.

Millions of people entered the field, many of them explicitly because they saw it is a good job opportunity. The average software developer is now a completely different person than they were ten or twenty years ago. Importantly there has been a major shift towards people in India and other Asian countries, where development has been outsourced or where developers are hired from as well as differences in college graduates. This is clearly reflected in the job market, which is getting more competitive.

We used to have to hack things together because nothing worked. There was no consistency, standards were all over the map, software solutions for most things didn't exist, and running software on the major vendor ecosystems was heavily silo'd.

Dozens and dozens of technologies changed that. Web protocols and virtual machines broke siloing. Search engines and community forums made discoverability much, much easier. We passed the tipping point where hardware was only valuable if it could be connected to an ecosystem, so engineers started building standards like USB, wifi, bluetooth, and a TCP-accessible interface into everything. And an army of open-source hobbyists wrote hundreds of thousands of libraries to "X but in Y."

So hacking itself has moved away from problems like "get a telephone multiplexer to translate a bitstream to colors on an anlog TV" and towards "What nine libraries and five gadgets will you glue together to" (for example) "let your refrigerator track your shopping list," or "How can you make setting up email not feel like hacking your left arm off for the average non-computer person?" Because those are the kinds of problems that are still unsolved.

It's a different kind of hacking requiring curiosity at a different level and sometimes a different problem-solving skillset (less experimentation, more curation and cataloguing).

Personally, I am excited that AI is steering people away from tech that aren't actually interested in it. Reverting to the mean a bit. And like the downvoted comment below, I actually think a swath of "vibe coders" are much more inline with the hacker mindset than most developers. A lot of them are the "make a quick buck" types but there is also a ton of insane tinkering going on, which is awesome.

But maybe we are talking about two different things. There is a distinction between "I want to hack on this to see how it works" and "I want to hack on this to see if this IDEA works". So product hackers are ascending while engineering hackers are starting to dwindle.

It reminds me of the shift in car culture when car computers meant you couldn't just rebuild a rusty car over a summer but a new culture of car hackers bubbled up mostly around modding cars for drifting or whatever. The people were different, the work was different, but the curiosity, excitement and subculture grew into something very similar.

Like my algorithm for drawing lines as fast as possible in 68000 on my ST. Then a few years later, I learned that someone else had invented it almost 30 years before me, and I was able to put a name to my algorithm: Bresenham. Dammit! The Amiga had it natively too. Dammit again!

Again, I invented preemptive multitasking on my 68000. Interrupt, little beast. Vector branch to my task switcher, thanks... save registers, including SP... restore registers from another previously interrupted routine, including SP... write the PC to switch and off we go. A fucking idea, a simple idea. That was cool to see it work, to see the 0 index color changed by each task every 10 scanlines or so. Made me smile. And then a few years later, I learned the word preemptive, and the concept of multitasking that goes with it. And I learned that the Amiga OS (that bastard rival again!) already did it natively. And other machines long before it. DAM-DAM-DAMMIT! I was born too late!

And my email reader on PC, running DOS, in 1991 or 1992, I can't quite remember. It was my first relatively big project in C, because for more than 10 years before that, I swore only by assembler, and I wasn't about to do that in x86, yuck. I didn't know curses or ncurses, but I still made a small TUI with windows and buttons. I was the only one using it for months, for email, mailing lists, newsgroups maybe too, I don't remember... Then one day, a conscientious sysop sent me an email asking me the name of the email reader I was using, because the machine he was administering had flagged a header that wasn't quite right, and he wanted to let the author know :-) My first bug report... under those circumstances, it's not something you forget. “Thanks for the feedback, buddy, but it doesn't have a name, I'm the author, and I'll fix that crap!”

I'm sure you have some fond memories like that too.

These are just examples. There have been others. Maybe even things that no one has ever done before, but that doesn't matter. Because it's still fun, whether we're reinventing the wheel or not. Especially when we don't know anything. It's rewarding when it works. Lots of little moments of pride that we keep to ourselves. Pride in having invented something without anyone's help, when all we had were “XXX Bible” to glean technical informations from, or BBS.

So don't listen to them. They have nothing interesting to say. They never loved programming, they always pretended. And today they tell you that finally, we no longer need to code, that we are finally relieved of this thankless task, that we can finally focus on what really matters.

Bullshit. Either die with your mouth open or let me die in peace! What matters is what we love. The rest is just survival. So if I have to die from my obsession, so be it.

By all means, OP, don't implore them. They've choosen their path, and we've choosen ours. Whatever you say about that won't change anything.

I did not share anything. Am I selfish? Not sure. I did not think it could be fun to others, or worth it. Especially when you consider stuff that already existed since ages, and undoubtedly much more elaborate. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain” :-)

Mark Zuckerberg is a metric, given human form. He smokes meats because statistics show human males engage in meat-smoking behavior.

Ultimately I think it boils down to normie influx, people with no love for the craft getting in it for the money. That said I've seen grown "normies" approaching middle age catch "the bug" and get really into programming for its own sake. They rapidly develop tastes that align with my own.

And computing has always had its share of people whose interest in the technology was entirely in using it to meet business objectives, nothing more. Here's a video from 1975 that shows exactly what I mean. It's about the time-sharing facility recently added to IBM mainframes. Note the utter lack of imagination. Nothing is mentioned about the new things one could do with their mainframe with time-sharing. It's strictly about how much faster you can do the things you're already doing. Time and money saved. Numbers on a balance sheet. Seems stodgy to us, but that's how IT professionals thought in 1975.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo2q7d5dJgg