alt Hacker News>The market is penalizing them for it.
I don't like this framing. Does the market penalize people for going to see a movie or going skiing? The most effective way for someone to make money and someone's hobbies usually do not overlap and when they do turning a hobby into a job often results in one growing to hate the hobby.
Replies
abracadaniel • today at 2:08 AM
If you were to want to do it between 8am and 5pm, yeah I’d say it does. Lots of places demand much longer hours as well, and would pass over people who want to make use of their free time.
lmorchard • today at 2:08 AM
No, but it's increasingly penalizing folks for focusing on well-crafted code on company time.
My take is that there used to be a significant overlap between hobbyist-style exploration/coding and what industry wanted, especially during the PC revolution where companies like Apple and Microsoft were started by hobbyists selling their creations to other people. This continued through the 1990s and the 2000s; we know the story of how Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook from his Harvard dorm room. I am a 90s kid who was inspired by the stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to pursue a computing career. I was also inspired by Bell Labs and Xerox PARC researchers.
The “hacker-friendliness” of software industry employment has been eroding in the past decade or so, and generative AI is another factor that strengthens the position of business owners and managers. Perhaps this is the maturing of the software development field. Back when computers were new and when there were few people skilled in computing, employment was more favorable for hobbyists. Over time the frontiers of computing have been settled, which reduced the need for explorers, and thus explorers have been sidelined in favor of different types of workers. LLMs are another step; while I’m not sure that LLMs could do academic research in computer science, they are already capable of doing software engineering tasks that undergraduates and interns could do.
I think what some of us are mourning is the closing of a frontier, of our figurative pastures being turned into suburban subdivisions. It’s bigger than generative AI; it’s a field that is less dependent on hobbyists for its future.
There will always be other frontiers, and even in computing there are still interesting areas of research and areas where hobbyists can contribute. But I think much of the software industry has moved in a direction where its ethos is different from the ethos of enthusiasts.