I'll give an opposite impression. I thought the first season was sort of a paint by numbers Mad Men rip off focused on tech rather than adverting. S2 gets its own story that is very enjoyable.
You're pretty much spot on, by the writers own admission.
At first, "What matters?" was a question the show's creators themselves couldn't answer. When Cantwell and Chris Rogers wrote the pilot for Halt and Catch Fire, they had little in mind but jumping on board one of the shows they already liked. "We're both in our early 30s, so the shows that made us wanna do this were the great 'difficult men' shows: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire," Rogers says. "We wrote the pilot in a way that was set up to ape them: Joe McMillan is a traditional antihero, and the world is organized around him in that way." But when the pilot was bought by AMC for production, rather than simply used as a staffing script to land "The Chrises" (as Halt's cast and crew universally call them) in a writers' room for a preexisting series, things changed. "As we got in there and started doing it, we had a writers' groove. We figured out what was our voice, as opposed to the voice that felt like it was emulating the shows we liked."
In many ways it's the opposite of what I feel like happens to most shows where they have extensively planned and worked on their first season because it's a multi-year effort in the making and then when they get renewed (if they get renewed) they have to figure out where to take it in a fraction of a time that they'd never really planned for.
Honestly, I read the entire first season as a self aware meta-commentary on how the show was supposed to take Mad Men's place in the AMC lineup but was merely a shallow facsimile.
In addition, I see Mad Men's episode "The Monolith", about a computer being installed in the office, as a comment on the (at that point) upcoming Halt and Catch Fire series.
