Cause the median developer is now someone who went into it for the money. It's what happens when there's no other comparable growth careers/opportunities available.
Remember when OpenSSL had the Heartbleed bug and there were something like two guys running the project in their spare time with $50k/year in donations (if memory recalls correctly). Well, we are living through a great affordability crisis. Not many people can spend time on a hobby like that to support billionaires anymore. Let the 400 people with half of the wealth in America figure it out. Everyone should monetize their time and explore unionization to counter the new realities of the modern economy.
Okay lol. The curious tinkerer developer is still very curious, but the culture around his or her job is probably wringing the enthusiasm of the field out of them.
Nah. Most humans are curious, and devs tend to be more curious than average in my experience.
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 …
As a professional musician, every very few years you sit down and you write new songs and record an album. But then you have to go on tour to make money and engage your fanbase and demonstrate what you've learned and finessed in a way that delivers immediate value to your customers. Touring is not fundamentally creative, but it is enjoyable in it's own right. Or you can be a hobbyist composer (pure creativity). Or a session musician (pure craft). Or play in a covers band (pure work). I don't see this as any different.
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.
A side effect of the maturation of the industry, sadly. It comes in waves though. I remember when I first started out as a developer (circa 2003 I think?) things felt pretty boring. I ended up doing C# WinForms/WebForms work because that's what people were doing. Then the iPhone and Android came out and a whole new world exploded. There was so much interesting stuff to learn and, crucially, money to be made doing it.
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.
Yeah I’ve noticed the sage/wizard archetype has been pushed out.
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.
I agree overall, but to push back: 20 years ago, we HAD to be more curious. If you wanted a way to store your code and there wasn't anything that worked for you out there, you had to go and invent Git over a long weekend. Now, there's so many great tools (thanks to thousands or millions of curious devs) that 0-to-1 improvements aren't nearly as possible to discover.
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).
This speaks to me, but I'm also reflective enough to wonder about whether I'm just observing from a different place in life than I was in the 1990ies when all this stuff started happening.
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.
Friend of mine just got laid off from 15 years at google, he's in his mid/late 40s. He's started to learn about embedded systems, hardware controllers, he's playing with haskell and erlang and doing work he's never done before, actually very far from webscale DB architecture, he's the most happy i've seen him in his life, he's following his curiosity and he's like a pig in mud.
I'm still here, curious as ever. And for the truly curious, it's just gotten better. The ocean we swim in has gotten bigger and deeper.
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.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the software we write tends to reflect our beliefs about the world. For example one of the best developers I’ve worked with had this unshakable belief that software could solve a lot of the worlds little problems. He was constantly coming up with these little programs that would solve some nit that he had in his day to day life.
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 believe the curious developers are now almost all poking hardware, to greater or lesser degrees. The two big projects of Meshtastic and Home Assistant absorb a huge amount of that side of the ecosystem, but also things like OpenWrt.
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.
Interestingly, I feel the opposite for myself, as an experienced senior engineer.
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.
This feels less like a dev-specific crisis and more like a timeless human pattern. We romanticize the past and nostalgia makes us believe what we loved is “dying.” In reality it’s not gone, just changed and harder to recognize from our old vantage point because of our own bias.
I still do this all of the time. I'm constantly exploring some new concept. Sometimes it requires programming, other times it doesn't, but either way... I just don't really have a pipeline setup to publish anything I look into. It's just so I can experience it. I feel bad for how much of the world is so focused on increasing metrics. Life is interesting and none of us will die wishing we had spent more of our lives working.
I don't think that the curious developer is gone, very much like I don't think that the organic, non-corporate Web is not gone. But the curious and passionate developer is hard to notice in the crowd of developers who learned the craft just for the money it was bringing. Similarly, an indie Web site built as a passion project is hard to come by among the numerous Web sites built to extract money.
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.
For me, it's simple. If I didn't need to earn a paycheck I'd be tinkering day in, day out, chasing anything and everything that piqued my interest even a little. That's what I did when I was young with no responsibilities and no worries about the future, and it's my natural state.
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] threadWhat 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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Omarchy Bitchat Ghostty Crush
None of those are chasing metrics. And that’s just off the top of my head.
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.
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.
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.