"The ultimate point of Masters of Doom is that today you no longer need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to achieve success, and John Carmack himself will be the first to tell you that. Where John was sitting in a cubicle by himself in Mesquite, Texas for 80 hours a week painstakingly inventing all this stuff from first principles, on hardware that was barely capable, you have a supercomputer in your pocket, another supercomputer on your desk, and two dozen open source frameworks and libraries that can do 90% of the work for you. You have GitHub, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and the whole of the Internet."
Which is bad news if your strength is that you are a good programmer, because in this kind of environment games become a commodity, so you have to compete with hundreds of thousands of other game developers who also don't have to be as briliant as Carmack. See the app market; it has a winner take all characteristic, so even if you don't have to be as brilliant as Carmack in programming, you have to be very strong in something or lucky to achieve success.
As I remember Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky took venture capital to take off stack overflow. (And also they had a huge following even before starting that venture.)
I kind of don't really buy these kind of 'motivational' posts. Achieving success is always possible but always hard.
Every generation faces different challenges, but the value of the internet cannot be understated. It's a resource that answers any question you may have about programming, about PC internals, or about the business and marketing parts you have to get right. You can easily reach out to hundreds or thousands of people who have already accomplished what you're trying to do and who blog earnestly about their experiences. You can test whether a game or app has merit with a fraction of the effort required in the 90s. And now you have millions of hours worth of open source code to build on top on.
"If you build it they will come" doesn't quite work on the internet. Except maybe if your product is extraordinary. But before the internet, when it's just you in your parents' basement? Then you need a real marketing channel otherwise you stand no chance. Even the Id guys had to write shareware games for an established distributor before they figured out how to do the shareware thing.
Today you can bootstrap a business worth millions based on a $8 a month VPS. As far as I can tell this hasn't been true in any other part of history or in any other field. There is still so much low-hanging fruit in software - it's crazy.
Everything you say is absolutely right, but your parent's point still stands: everybody has all those same advantages, which means that the bar for both ordinary and extraordinary is much higher. DOOM would be ordinary (even sub-ordinary) if it were released now, precisely because you no longer need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to make it.
The bar should be much higher, but it isn't. You'd expect there to be thousands of startups in every space imaginable, because writing software has never been easier and there are more software programmers today than at any point in history. You'd expect the competition to be fierce, but it isn't.
This is why mediocre products with mediocre marketing make bank. The games industry is very competitive, and so is the iOS app market. But that's only a tiny percentage of the software market (measured in dollars). Where are the thousands of Gmail competitors? Word processing and spreadsheet competitors? Where is a better DabbleDB? Nothing has changed in the past 5 years, and in any of these markets you can simply win with a better product and half-decent marketing. And if you make a product for a specific vertical it's even easier.
It's not like Patio11 is the first guy to ever make Appointment Reminder software. Or the 20th. But with half-decent execution and half-decent marketing he's still making a ton of money. And is he afraid that by posting on HN people here are going to start competing AR software? Of course not. Because there are so many better opportunities out there that there is no need to fight for the same customers.
How many startups do we see coming from Spain, or India, or Brazil? Very few. How many from Milwaukee? I don't know of any. But the software engineers exist. The opportunities are right here for the taking. But people just don't take them.
> It's not like Patio11 is the first guy to ever make Appointment Reminder software. Or the 20th. But with half-decent execution and half-decent marketing he's still making a ton of money. And is he afraid that by posting on HN people here are going to start competing AR software? Of course not. Because there are so many better opportunities out there that there is no need to fight for the same customers.
"Half-decent marketing"? I think you are selling Patrick short. Based on his vague hints about what people pay him to consult on their marketing, I don't think "half-decent" quite covers it. I'm halfway to decent, and empirically people don't pay me a quarter of that.
> How many startups do we see coming from Spain, or India, or Brazil? Very few. How many from Milwaukee? I don't know of any. But the software engineers exist. The opportunities are right here for the taking. But people just don't take them.
Doesn't it seem implausible that these people take all the other opportunities that are offered to them, but just not these ones? Isn't the more likely explanation that you have an exaggerated idea of how accessible this stuff is to most people?
I agree in that there is an opportunity window until the market is semi-arbitrage-free. People around virtual communities like HN are in an advantage now.
But you are underestimating by a lot the costs and risks of software development, for example, a spreadsheet competitor. Not only from the software development side but also from the marketing/sales perspective. If you analyze an established software company the work force in software development and marketing/sales are evenly distributed and this is not because companies love to make advertisements, events, etc but because is how (currently) the business world works: you compete in an attention economy and this costs millions.
Another thing that you are underestimating is that Internet makes much easier things that were impossible or time consuming just a decade ago but "everyone" is competing in a new league and that advantage will be capitalized by "everyone".
1. In a competitive world you'd expect startups to pop up everywhere, and especially in areas with low cost of living. Reality: opposite.
2. Building a spreadsheet program is a ton of work, but it's also a multi-billion dollar market. And a proof of concept can be built by a couple of smart hackers -- but it needs a good hook of course. Reality: very few people even try.
3. When a ton of money is spent on marketing then that is strong evidence for lack of competition. After all, all money spent on marketing would otherwise go directly to the bottom line. This is why restaurants (fierce competition) spend almost nothing on marketing. They can't afford to. Fierce competition => low margins => no marketing budget. Reality: mediocre products and tons of marketing.
4. The advantages of the internet are not capitalized on by everybody, as I've been saying. The opportunity is there, but people still have to take it.
> Building a spreadsheet program is a ton of work, but it's also a multi-billion dollar market. And a proof of concept can be built by a couple of smart hackers -- but it needs a good hook of course. Reality: very few people even try.
This is because it's a sucker's game. You can build the best spreadsheet in the world and Microsoft will still eat your lunch. The expected returns on a goldfish-selling business are higher. LibreOffice can't even manage to give away a tenth as many as Microsoft sells. Like, yes, building a spreadsheet program is something people could do, but it is not an idea with even the remotest possibility of making good money.
I think I have figured out the fundamental disconnect here. You are talking about how easy it is to build stuff these days, while other people are talking about how easy it is to make a living off stuff. It is easy to build things. But building something alone is pure cost, no profit. Then the hard part comes. The difficulty has just shifted around, not disappeared.
2) Again, you are underestimating the effort to build a competitive spreadsheet and overestimating what intelligence or smart people are capable of achieving. First, you can take a look at the spreadsheet history and see that there was a lot of competition in computer history stages with more opportunity windows: how many developers were in the Apple/DOS era? Another important thing that you are not taking into account is the ecosystem for spreadsheets like Excel. It's not only Excel, but the whole Microsoft Office and Legacy Applications. Do you think that a Fortune 1000 company will take the risk of moving outside Excel?
3) No, just the contrary. Try yourself to gain traction with a free open source software and see how difficult it is.
4) That's what I said but it's being capitalized by a lot of people
1) Startups and small business are popping up everywhere and the majority die.
The spreadsheet example is an interesting one. I'm aware of several domain-specific products that target very niche markets, particularly in the scientific space, that are essentially little more than glorified spreadsheets. However companies still pay hundreds to thousands of dollars a license for these products because they bolt on enough domain-specific features to their spreadsheet that make it easier for people who are domain experts, but not necessarily Excel experts, to do their job. In a lot of cases these products are developed by small teams.
So maybe launching a general Excel competitor is a pretty daunting task because you're going up against the gorilla of the market. Targeting a specific subset of its user base can still make for a viable business.
You make the case that a low bar exists in myriads of markets, but your examples don't support the argument.
Where are the thousands of Gmail competitors?
The reason they don't exist (or they do exist but you never hear about them) is that you'll have to pry Gmail from people's cold dead hands. Firstly, Gmail is an amazing product, and it would be really, really, really hard to do better. Very few teams can attempt such a thing, certainly not thousands. Secondly, even if you build a better product, it's extremely unclear how it would be enough better to get enough people to leave Gmail.
Word processing and spreadsheet competitors?
Exactly the same reason. Microsoft Office is an amazing piece of software, and it would be immensely difficult to do better. Furthermore the barrier to entry is huge -- word processing and spreadsheet software that can effectively compete with MS Office would take decades to build.
There is something to be said for competing with Google's online office offerings (and I know some really smart people who are doing just that), but again, it's not as easy as it seems.
Where is a better DabbleDB?
DabbleDB didn't work as a business. That's why there is no better DabbleDB -- there is no market for it.
I don't think it's so much that there's no market for it as that the market is very hard to reach and we had no good channel. Intuit's Quickbase is a very healthy business, because they have a channel to millions of SMBs. We didn't, and didn't know how to build one, so we grew much more slowly (though I should say that by most sane, non-valley standards we were doing just fine, thanks ;)
I learned a lot of things at Dabble, but I think the biggest lesson was that the three most important things in B2B software are distribution, distribution, and distribution.
The Internet brought value but also competition. Frankly, we live in the age of hyper competition, and I don't see us ever going back.
There is saying, if you can make it in NY, you can make it anywhere. That quip is related to competition, and in my opinion anywhere is becoming just like NY.
"but the value of the internet cannot be understated. It's a resource that answers any question you may have about programming, about PC internals, or about the business and marketing parts you have to get right."
This
It was not difficult to program in the 80s, 90s. But to get the information you needed, oh wow, that was tough.
In the US it was certainly easier, but unfortunately it's not as easy in some other countries. And yes, there were magazines, etc. Still, some information were very hard to find.
I came here to say almost exactly the same thing, that is, doing impressive looking things nowadays is so relatively easy that doing something that genuinely stands out is as hard as ever.
Back in the day, it was more a problem of resources than ability or ideas, because hardware was expensive, open source was less prevalent, etc, but now almost everyone has the resources so now you need to be creatively and mentally on top of your game to compete instead. Being persuasive and able to get your work seen is also more important than ever. Lots of great work gets produced that never breaks out.
All that said, when things become more about talent than resources, it reduces the privilege needed to make an impact, so it certainly has its plus points.
Unless you make some sort of lucky viral, now what you need is massive resources for marketing... as I continue with my startup this become more and more obvious, there is no decent success in the game industry without massive marketing, from AAA (Activision expends on its main games around 250 million in marketing budget only), to Indie (many small successful indie games had big marketing budgets, or had others with those budgets doing the marketing for them, successful indies either are close friends of other successful ones or are rich or are close to the media industry, for example was journalist or worked for CMP Media)
It doesn't have to be that way. We started Path of Exile with a low budget, no following, no connections.
When we wanted to announce we phoned up journalists, made appointments. We flew to the US, we went to PAX (with no booth) and tried to approach journalists cold to give a demo on a laptop in the corner.
We got a bunch of small articles, and bugger all web traffic. I think on announcement day we got articles on most of the major internet gaming news sites, but we still only got like 7000 visits to our website. This was in 2010.
But we kept on going. We kept on banging the drum. We kept making announcements. We kept making trips to America to talk to journalists in person. We kept grinding up the popularity and by the time we were ready to go in to open beta in January this year, we were a notable enough thing that on that day we got a million visits.
It wasn't an instant success. We didn't spend money beyond travel expenses. We didn't have prior connections. It was just a cold, hard slog from nothing to something.
Where I live, having money to make international trips (or actually, any airplane trip) puts you into "rich" territory, and by "rich" I mean "rich" not upper middle class.
Yes. And I don't own any console since my uncle gave me a used NES clone 20 years ago. When I was kid my parents thought they were too expensive, and now in my adulthood I don't own TV and still think it is expensive... By the way, PS3 at launch here was 3000 USD
I would not say that games become a commodity because anyone can make them now.
You still need to make a game that is playable, has replay value, engages the person and is fun to play. That is no easy task at all.
Some have the gift for it and for those this is an incredible opportunity. I look at Temple Run and Ting Wings on iOS. Two games that stand out for their uniqueness and that were developed by 1 or 2 people.
No one is getting anywhere making another Tetris clone or a match 3 game unless there is really unique twist to the game.
At the end of the day, the tools are much much better but you still need that gift to know what will click with people.
Each is special in their own sub-(sub-)genre niche. You can't expect making a quality Angry Birds clone and be hugely successful. Now cross it with some other game and you might be on to something.
What has changed isn't the opportunities of good programmer - they can still have very solid careers. I am not convinced that a developer could successfully build a game as good as Quake just on the strength of being a good programmer. He would also need to be a good game designer.
What has changed is the opportunities of good game designers, and tons of other fields that can much easier leverage the awesome power of computing to achieve success.
EDIT:
> As I remember Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky took venture capital to take off stack overflow. (And also they had a huge following even before starting that venture.)
I don't think his point was that StackOverflow was an example of something that was easy to build, I think he meant is as a example of a resource that didn't exist when Carmack wrote DOOM.
The thing to remember is that everyone has these advantages, so really they aren't advantages.
All they have done is raise the standards, you can't just knock out something of the W3D standard and make millions, these days people expect quality that cost upwards of 100M to make a top hit.
Disagree. What they have done is reduced the amount of effort that needs to be invested in the technical aspect, thus increasing the amount of time that can be invested in the creative aspect. In other words, they have changed the field on which contenders compete.
IMHO there's another factor at play. Back in the Commodore days very low percentage of population had computers, and the average computer user IQ was very high. So back then games were targeting a smarter user, hence a better gameplay.
The arrow of time with respect to computers splits into two two distinctions:
BC ( before Carmack): circa 1993
and AC (after Carmack).
It is a simply game but it changed the course of history in terms of what direction gaming went, thus the heavy hardware designs to support that type of games.
Quake was basically the only reason to get a 486DX--floating point support.
The crazy GPU push--later culminating in CUDA and all that other nonsense--is completely due to the Quake OpenGL and 3dfx support.
High-speed internet at home was mostly useful for playing on QuakeWorld, and later derivatives Half-Life, and the Unreal series (not a derivative, but you get the idea).
So, yeah.
EDIT:
One might also point out that the death of the great workstation companies (SGI, HP, etc.) happened because they were no longer competitive in the CAD space, specifically because consumer-level graphics cards were improving driven by the demands of gaming.
I understand what you're getting at, but how exactly does the book make Romero look bad? Sure he certainly made more mistakes than Carmack, but does that make him look bad? At worst the book makes Romero look a little arrogant. But the book is also filled with accounts of Romero doing great work and notes that when the two Johns met it was Carmack that admired Romero for having more impressive programming knowledge. Clearly things changed but implying that the book makes Romero look bad is a stretch.
In the book he comes off as an overly confident showman. Carmack was everything behind ID software (and to Romero's credit he pretty much admits that).
That said Romero's wild-side/recklessness provided the spark that ignited ID software, almost literally if I recall correctly. Basically Carmack had developed a new technology that allowed PC's at the time to handle scrolling. When he showed Romero it at work, Romero basically said "Fuck this company (softdisk), we're starting our own company right now." So starting that weekend they "borrowed" (pretty much stole, but would bring them back each Sunday night) all their workstations and began making a remake of the original Mario game for PC.
So basically, ID software = John Carmack's genius/technology + Romero's recklessness = DOOM.
Highly recommend this book, I don't read as many books as I like but I just couldn't put this one down.
Romero and Jobs both get slammed on HN consistently. One of the things people like to point out about Jobs is that he couldn't program and never did any real engineering.
To be fair to Romero, he could actually program, make games, and design levels. It's really hard for me to accept the claim that he contributed nothing to id:
>He designed most of the first episode of Doom, most of the levels in Quake, half the levels in the Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D;Spear of Destiny. He wrote many of the tools used at id Software to create their games, including DoomEd (level editor), QuakeEd (level editor), DM (for deathmatch launching), DWANGO client (to connect the game to DWANGO's servers), TED5 (level editor for the Commander Keen series, Wolfenstein 3D; Spear of Destiny), IGRAB (for grabbing assets and putting them in WAD files), the installers for all the games up to and including Quake, the SETUP program used to configure the games, and several others.
He might have made some really poor decisions, but the guy has legitimately been developing games for 30 years. Just look at how many projects he has been involved in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Romero#Games
Somehow I came out of Masters of Doom with a lot less negative opinion of Romero than others did. Carmack, while clearly a genius, actually seemed like a real jerk at points.
At the time of the troubles, Romero was portrayed as the 'indispensable one' (protip, everyone can be replaced) and threw down a very public gauntlet with Daikatana. It was not well received. Which for many proved that Romero wasn't the secret sauce Carmack was. But like Jobs/Wozniak, Lennon/McCartney, Simon/Garfunkel and any of a doze pairs who often did things together that were often better than what either could do alone.
I think Jobs was more extraordinary as a businessman than Wozniak was as a programmer.
I don't think Carmack is a jerk so much as he's just, well, different. More like a machine than a human. I guess that could cause him to be heartless at times but he came off as fair.
Romero was important for ID's success, but as the story played out, Carmack was able to find success without Romero but Romero was not able to be successful without Carmack. Read into that as you will.
Over his life, Jobs has had a greater impact. But at the time Apple was formed, Wozniak singlehandedly designed and engineered a machine that was simply peerless. The Apple ][ made every other system on the market look like a toy for years while costing less to build. Jobs' contribution at the beginning was modest in comparison. (BTW Woz was never much of a programmer, just a killer electrical engineer.)
carmack sells middleware to other studios. id hasn't had a good game since quake 3 which is largely just a technology update of quake -- a game romero was integral to. he's a gifted programmer and i admire his work with armadillo aerospace but his post-quake accomplishments aren't much better than romero's. his biggest edge over romero is his humility. if romero had quietly released daiktana instead of endlessly promising how great it would be his reputation would be much the same as carmack's
From the book I got that Romero had the vision. He had kind of an epic vision of what games could be, and would do everything with his money to achieve that vision. Sometimes he failed, and other times he succeeded massively.
He also, like Jobs, had a sense of what could be insanely great. In the book, when you read about the offices that he wanted for Ion Storm, you get a feeling of Jobs' perfection and micro-management. Romero, like Jobs, wanted to take things to the next level.
I feel compelled to do that, too. Sometimes I think it's a curse.
Right now, I'm working on the same engineering problems that Twitter and Facebook have already solved[1] for a tiny, underfunded startup in San Diego, and I can't just do what Twitter or Facebook did and get paid for it. I have to do it better, "take it to the next level".
I feel absolutely compelled to do something that would make my engineering buddies go: how the fuck did you do that? Oh well—at least I still get paid either way. :)
[1] Or did they? Now that I've spent time in that space, I've developed a taxonomy of how social networks are constructed and grow, and it's obvious (at least to me) that what we've got today is like the Altavista of search engines, just waiting for a Google to come along and apply superior algorithms and data center design and kick some ass. We'll see.
HN has come full circle for me. I'm pretty sure that I actually heard about this book through a recommendation in a comment on HN a year or so ago. First book I purchased since the last harry potter book too.
It's a great book. I'm not a gamer and was only mildly familiar with the majority of the games mentioned in the book but I'd highly recommend it to anyone who finds HN interesting.
There is a lot of learning by asking questions, which works well guy to guy but there are serious barriers if you are female. I have repeatedly run into the fact that most men either do not want to talk to me at all or, if they do, it is usually in hopes of getting into my pants. Neither scenario leads to professional development. They are both equally poisonous, just in different ways. It is rare for me to run into a man who will converse with me at length about something other than whether or not I might sleep with him, in essence. That is a huge barrier to networking and professional development.
Lol, How many times does one (me in particular) need to read inspirational stories about hard work, dedication, pizza, and soda pop to actually do something about it?
Small anecdote: I was working on software for my site yesterday and thought about Carmack and the Fez guy (Phil Fish) and how they did amazing things on a computer. And then I thought about how tough it was for me to build a software for the web. Yes, its some complex software, but we have more tools now than those before us. There's really no excuse to not get things done (if you really want it done).
What I need to realize is that these guys didn't just think their way to success. They built their way to success. They had the idea, and then executed. You have to be moving and building. No one can see inside your mind. So, to show how amazing your idea really is, you'd need to literally "show" them the idea.
So yes, hopefully this is my last awe inspiring story. Hopefully (not hopefully, it will be...) the next time I chime in, I'll have something to show instead of an idea baking in my head.
In the words of Jobs "Real artists ship"! And I feel like I'm there.
> Lol, How many times does one (me in particular) need to read inspirational stories about hard work, dedication, pizza, and soda pop to actually do something about it?
If you want a good source of motivation, you might try getting a horrible job for a while.
Really. I did door to door sales when I was a girl. Hours upon hours of walking around seeing people who want nothing more in their heart of hearts than for you to fuck off and die. Nothing motivated me more to put in the hours at uni - even though I didn't like what I was studying - than the prospect of going back to that soul-crushing job, nothing's motivated me more to put in the hours at things that don't really please me than that either.
These days, when people tell me that something's hard, or that they have a shit job, I really have to step on my tongue to stop myself turning around and going - You don't know what a horrible job is, not really. You've been on easy street all your life.
I have to second this. I made the best progress learning and building when I was stocking shelves at Target for $8 an hour in a rich neighborhood. I've experienced many of these sentiments.
Unfortunately, I took this position after graduating.
In the sense I think you mean, sometimes it's an advantage because if you're chirpy and infantilise yourself a bit some people take pity on you more than they would a man. (If it's raining generally people are in a really bad mood, few people want to open their door and get cold and see grey. But if it's snowing - I always had really good leads when it was snowing. There were like two weeks of snow where I was getting three leads (around £100) a day. In either case though you don't want to mention it to people, you want to let them mention it and make a bit of a joke about it.)
On the negative side, there are some areas you really don't want to work as a girl. At the very least you want to be paired with a man, preferably an older man, when you're doing them. A lot of people in those areas are going to tend to look at you as being... owned pretty much... by the man you're with. That's not a nice feeling but it's still preferable to the alternative. I never had anyone grab me but this old guy stroked my hair once and god that was SO creepy.
It's not a job I was well suited to. I was good at it but emotionally you need a certain degree of detachment or it's going to mess you up. A lot of the girls in my team were really cold deep down, covered over with a sort of brittle humour. When you hear someone joking all the time, blustering about how tough they are, it's generally been my experience that it's a sign of severe insecurity. Almost like they're reassuring themselves. Some very rough backgrounds getting by on their wits there. Don't get me wrong, they really were tough, they weren't lying about that. But unfortunately when you go into things with the short-term idea that you can get yourself out of them because, "hey, wits," you'll almost inevitably end up getting yourself into situations where you're obliged to get yourself out of them. To a large extent a pride in your wits seems to arise from a lack of a plan.
Some girls let other girls stay with them when they were having particularly bad times at home, and I saw that end poorly a couple of times. Some of those people are predators, that's the thing you've got to remember. When you invite a predator into your home; put your arm in their mouth; you can't be that surprised when you get bitten.
So, yeah. I think there are things about being a girl that make the job slightly different in some respects. Not hugely so but noticeably.
Also wear flats, the extra height can be nice but walking in heels for six hours isn't fun. ^_^
Carmack wasn't the only one behind ID (and therefore his own) success. Sure, he was the technical genius behind the game engines but he also was working with incredibly talented level designers, artists, and gameplay tweakers. Even other programmers like the legendary Michael Abrash. 'Hire the best...'
The other big part of their success was the direct marketing. Even if Doom was as successful as it was, they'd have made only 1/4 of the money if they used a traditional publisher.
Abrash books are very funny, they look like the thing you won't read in less than 2 weeks, and 48 hours later you're sweaty for not stopping reading. What a joy.
If you haven't read this book, go get it. It's the ultimate start-up story.
They start out as the most rag-tag group of developers. They took their computers home on the weekends from their day jobs at SoftDisk to work on their own games. These weren't MacBook Airs, they were full-tower 386 desktops with CRT monitors!
They packed into an apartment for their first 'real' offices. The story about them re-creating Super Mario pixel by pixel using a VHS recorder and TV is great.
Then these guys spent a small fortune on NeXT workstations to create Doom/Quake! Who doesn't dream about using the most high-end tools you can get your hands on.
And in the end, they all end up as famous 'rock star' millionaires driving Ferraris.
It's a much more down-to-earth story about some good Texas boys kicking ass than you'll find with the people scrambling over themselves on the coasts to catch as much as they can from VCs making it rain.
I find it ridiculous how IT, the industry with lowest entry barrier that ever existed, is often marked as sexist and elitist. Wanna program? Here is computer and manual, see you in 10 000 hours.
Sigh. Sexism and elitism are two characteristics of the culture. When people apply those labels, they are criticizing the participation in the culture, not just the learning of requisite skills.
Let's take apart your conjoining of sexism and elitism.
I don't think of the IT industry as elitist. There's certainly plenty of people in IT who think very highly of themselves, but that's just pride.
Sexism, however, is clearly present in the culture of IT. How big of a problem and the proper response to it is debated, but it's presence cannot be.
It is impossible to argue with such generalization. Culture is sexist, ergo industry is sexist. I would only say that LA startup has very different culture from big corporation which still uses mainframes and Cobol.
This is what I always notice. I think it might just be that because there is such a low barrier to entry in IT and SE, that people notice more the sex bias. However, it happens in every industry - imagine trying to have a girl passionate for cars get into an auto mechanic shop gig. It would be constant harassment in 99% of places, regardless of their capabilities or skillset.
Likewise, stick a guy in a fashion designers shop, or as a nurse (rather than licensed doctor), or a secretary. You get the inverse sexual harassment for not filling your "role".
That is why I always see a lot of these attempts in the macro-IT space to try to correct sexism as doomed to fail, because they act like the rest of the world is fair but they are just being immature when the real problem is bigger than they are, it is just obscured by excuses like women are weaker so they shouldn't work in a mechanics shop, or men don't have the empathy to teach 2ed grade, when it is just an inherent long running cultural prejudice I think is evaporating from the collective psyche but it is taking centuries rather than decades.
Men in fashion design shops are far more tolerated than women in auto-mechanic shops. Same with male nurses.
20+ years ago, I started out as a secretary, mainly because I knew how to use MS Word and Excel and nobody else had computers on their desks. I didn't see much inverse sex harassment, mainly because everyone needed me to get their work out.
Meanwhile, my female co-workers were being chased around the desk.
> Likewise, stick a guy in a fashion designers shop, or as a nurse (rather than licensed doctor), or a secretary. You get the inverse sexual harassment for not filling your "role".
Men are not outsiders in the fashion industry at all, its quite the opposite. Moreover, men have get better latitude for moving into job roles where workers are traditionally or majority women (the history of computer workers is an example of this). Finally, there is no such thing as inverse sexual harassment, there is just sexual harassment and we know that men in general experience sexual harassment less in the workplace than women.
The issue in IT [1] is treating women as human beings rather than sexual objects. Too many women in technology have stories of men acting inappropriately, creepy, or occasionally intimidating. This can range from constantly commenting on their clothes or appearance, to making jokes or conversation about sex, to showing inappropriate images or video, to repeated asking out, to inappropriate touching (backrubs, butt pats, "accidentally" brushing up against them).
[1] IT is obviously not the only industry with this problem.
Women talk about sex in the workplace all the time. I've worked at a few all-women companies. If I used your list as examples of sexual harassment, they would have been sued out of existence years ago.
Harassment to me is singling someone out and making them feel uncomfortable. Talking privately with my co-workers about something sexual while may be inappropriate in the workplace, should not be considered "sexual harassment".
I also have to laugh because if you asked a woman out and they are attracted to you, it suddenly becomes a date rather than sexual harassment...which in my mind invalidates it entirely. If someone continues to ask a girl out and they are not interested, it's harassment. Not sexual harassment.
It takes just a single brave woman to build second "Doom" or something like that. Somehow they figured out how to get education and voting rights. It's all about motivation.
Freedom becomes a very big problem, when you are not ready to handle it. Because remember the moment you are free to do anything, you also own up the consequences and failures of your actions. Most people are uncomfortable to be in these situations.
People blame their school, teacher, parents, siblings, country, company and what not their current state. But if they were to sit down and ponder, even if the hurdles they state were actually(Most of the times they are not) something they couldn't overcome themselves- A scary scenario emerges where you are left staring at your deeper self. You know deep down inside you haven't done your part, and you are actually in search of something to blame to justify your own short comings.
Beyond all, there is great benefit in victim mindset. Our society shows far more empathy towards victims(Who are presumed innocent and exploited) than failures(Who are considered losers).
They don't realize how independent they can be. When you're a child, your parents tell you what you're supposed to do. Then, you're in school, and you're part of this institution that tells you what to do. Then, you go work for some company, and the company tells you what to do. So people come in like baby birds in the nest and open their mouths, as if they're expecting us to drop food in. We have to tell them, "We're not your bosses. You're in charge now." Some of them are freaked out by that. Some people are meant to be employees. Other people discover they have wings and start flapping them. There's nothing like being thrown off a cliff to make you discover that you have wings.
I've been talking about entrepreneurship with some people, and realized how true the "Some people are meant to be employees" part is. Most people are so afraid of failing they aren't even willing to try for fear they might not be able to do something.
That would be effective if programming was a solo activity. I suppose there are niches where that is so (eg: the majority of solo web-designers I know are female.)
But most programming jobs happen in companies (even if that "company" is virtual, like an open source project.) Look around your office. What's the prevalent culture? How accepting are you of people of other races, nationalities, sexes, sexual orientation? Which colleges and universities are represented?
Now, it's okay if you're successful and have a limited culture, but at least own up to your lack of diversity.
(and by "you" I mean the generic you, not "you" specifically altero.)
I was in a dev shop for the last 6 years -- we had everything from no degree to PhD's. Eurpoeans, Eurasians, Indians, Caribbean and Americans. 20-30% women, and from 23 to 45 years old.
I know a lot of places that look like this.
I have no doubt the "bro culture" exists, but I think its prevalence is
1. In older (employee age wise) shops where, in those age groups, women simply hadn't been studying CS.
2. in very young startup environments where a team is likely to be a group of friends, vs. an externally sourced, interviewed workforce.
I don't think that the demographics of SV / SF are necessarily demonstrative of the industry as a whole.
My cofounder is women, no employees yet. My last team had 40% woman, some developers, one manager, two sysops. Team was distributed so most people in Europe, some in Southern America, about 30% in India. Questions about sexual orientation are not appropriated at my workplace.
"Questions about sexual orientation are not appropriated at my workplace."
Really? Do you fire me if I say 'my wife really likes that show, but I haven't gotten in to it"?
If someone wants to keep their sexual orientation private, that is absolutely their right, but people do talk about their lives. If you say "don't talk about sexual orientation" you're effectively saying "straight people get to be out, but gay folks stay in the closet."
I hope and kinda suspect that what you really mean is that if someone doesn't say something that indicates their orientation, it's no one else's business. That's certainly a necessary attitude.
But you also need to understand that most straight people are "out" by default, without ever thinking about it. And it needs to be understand that gay and lesbian employees are equally free to be open about their significant others (not sex itself--that's a different topic).
> my wife really likes that show, but I haven't gotten in to it
It is not a question.
In many countries it is illegal to ask question about sexual orientation, religion, marital status, age or even race. Assumption is that such information could be only used for discrimination. If someone would be compiling list of gays at my old workplace, I would probably call the police.
Disclosing sexual orientation to close colleagues after couple of weeks is fine. Scarfs and other sings are also fine. Proactive disclosure at inappropriate moment (job interview) would be probably interpreted as harassment (hitting on someone), same way as saying to woman "I am straight". People who organize gay parades etc.. are perceived as extremists who milk public budget.
I hope I explained it well without sounding homophobic.
I'm not talking about asking questions. Surely you shouldn't ask questions that could be perceived as discriminatory.
My point is that since ordinary human conduct in a professional environment lets straight people reveal their orientation, the same treatment should be expected for gay and lesbian folks, and the expected reaction should be complete understanding and professionalism.
You're right that it will normally not come up in a job interview.
"People who organize gay parades etc.. are perceived as extremists who milk public budget." Not quite sure what this means, but it sounds suspect.
> I hope and kinda suspect that what you really mean is that if someone doesn't say something that indicates their orientation, it's no one else's business. That's certainly a necessary attitude.
Here is computer and manual, see you in 10 000 hours.
Isn't this exactly why it is sexist? [1]
[1] This (being tone deaf to social cues) wouldn't work to attract women in a social setting, so why would it work in a professional one? You're basically offering up a scenario that is more likely to create anxiety for women, and as a result they will (statistcally) self-select into a different activity.
If it is called sexist for that reason, then the person using the term 'sexist' to describe the situation is comically misunderstanding the term. Sexism is basing one's beliefs about another on the basis of their sex, even if those beliefs don't actually relate to sex in any meaningful way. For instance, saying "The IT industry requires you to work hard, so women won't like it, because y'know, women can't stomach hard work" would be incredibly sexist. Conversely, saying anyone is free to join the IT industry is the exact opposite of sexist.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding around what sexism actually is: it's not sexist for something to simply not be favourable to some sample of a given sex. In order for something to be sexist it either has to make assumptions about the qualities of a given sex based only upon their gender, or be discriminatory toward a given sex based solely upon their gender. Discriminating on the basis of hours worked is the opposite of both of these.
I'm suggesting that you are inviting selection bias. That does not provide any grounds to question the median aptitude of the population. It just says that anything you infer from your sample data is most-likely skewed.
Now, a skew is discriminantory (by definition it is bias). Whether or not it is <sexist> is simply a question of distribution of the mechanism responsible.
Is a program of 3.5 years of self-study (lets assume, in social isolation) an equally attractive proposition? Probably not, given that women consider doing anything in isolation to somewhat socially demeaning. We know that women, for example, self-select mates based on quite the opposite: high social standing. A long self-enforced period of social isolation is thus <rationally> counter-productive from the perspective of evolutionary biology. So, if we use this as a gating function, yes we will get biased results.
Fairness is a question of expected value. A fair bet is one where the ratio of cost/benefit is equal. So, in this case where there is an asymmetric cost, the result is uneven fairness (in this sense).
Whether or not it is right or wrong depends upon your criterion for value. By one standard - maximizing the potential peformance - it would be inefficient. This is beacaus you have mean XY and below mean XX performance represented (~regardless of proportionality -- as XX is biased down in both quality and quantity). Whether or not this inefficiency is wrong or acceptable is on the whole, just re-phrasing whether or not gender bias is (or is not) wrong.
The original recommendation was phrased in a somewhat harsh manner. And while I could be wrong, I really don't think it was meant to be taken completely literally.
I think the literal intention of it was: "if you want to join this field, all you need to do is put in the time and effort to get really good at it". Not that you should literally lock yourself away in social isolation and speak to no other human beings for several years.
"Put in the time and effort" could also involve networking with other hackers, finding collaborators for open source project or startups, communicating on IRC channels, and learning from peers in person. Yes, there will be hours of solo grinding out code and debugging - but that's not the only thing that a programmer does.
Actually, look at what is written..."go read the book"...and "don't talk to me until its done", are both clearly implied. It is a dick attitude, sorry.
Some people may respond to this, and some may not. Statistically, without question you will get adverse selection. So, yeah you can now start to make assumptions on how to avoid this fate, or not, but otherwise people with real options will do other things.
Sorry, I don't understand what the problem is exactly.
There are plenty of other professions, like say music, surgery, law, athletics, performance and endurance sports, teaching and many more that require a person to go outside the normal hours and work to practice, to achieve any sign of mastery. The fact that these professions demand such an work setting is not because they inherently like to discriminate against a minority, but that standards of quality are held at such a high bar you inevitable have to work that way to make a living there.
10 000 hours is about 3.5 years study. No need to take mortgage for university, no need to work for free 'to prove yourself'. Hell you can even babysit while doing it (as I am doing now while learning Scala)
Yeah 10,000 hours is not a lot of time. I got my first computer in 1982. If you ignore all the time I spent as a hobbyist learning BASIC, Assembly, C, etc and only count my professional work time then I am still way over 40,000 hours of focused and methodical practice in IT.
What you're describing is the ability to program in isolation.
That's different to the ability to thrive in an industry where basic ability (which is what you'd develop with the manual, computer and time) is just one factor.
"Here is computer". Well, for one out of four households, no one has ever said to them "here is computer".
I used to volunteer at a hackerspace/ISP which gave away very old, cobbled together PCs to black kids in the nearby housing projects. For most of them, these cobbled together PCs from old DIMMs, hard drives, motherboards, etc. they were given were the only computer in their apartments. They lucked out being located near us. Some of their parents migrated from a southern state where their family couldn't vote, ride in the front of city buses, own property in certain areas, take a leak in certain bathrooms, drink from certain bathrooms, go to decent schools etc. In 1963. Which I guess must be ancient history to all the 18 year olds here who were not alive yet when Pulp Fiction was in movie theaters...
Silicon Valley is full of people born on third base thinking they hit a triple. Look at YC founder Robert Morris. He wrote a virus and crashed the Internet, did zero jail time, then went to an Ivy League school, started a company and sold it for millions. Now he's pointed to in HN circles as an example - some smart, hard-working guy who had the personality to hack the system and win. But the guys I knew who hacked into systems with much less damage at the exact same time went to real federal prisons. The spark in their eye was seen as a threat to the system, they should be "made an example of" as the judge said. They were just "spics, niggers and white trash" as a security consultant said at the time. Not a Brahmin WASP whose father had high connections in the government and intelligence establishment. My point is that I learned these lessons of how the world works long ago. People can go on for a long time oblivious, decades, but at some point in time, the real world comes crashing into the palaces of the Louis the Sixteenths and Czar Nicholas's of the world...or the Pentagons...
Of course none of this happened, the system is fair, everyone is born on a level playing field in this American system of Horatio Alger stories where anyone with gumption and a work ethic can be rich...
If Robert Morris was jailed for life, would it make the world a better place?
People in the developed countries wont crash anywhere any day soon. Modern bread and circus - junk food, celebrities, TV shows and professional sports will take care of that.
Computer is for 'elite' is getting old. I learned programming on XT for $20, my current laptop is worth $120. Cheap programmable calculators are available over 35 years.
I think work as a garbage man also has pretty low entry barrier, but it is still sexist, by HN's definition.
Same goes for plumbers, though here entry barrier is higher.
work as a garbage man also has pretty low entry barrier
What makes you think that? There is very little ad hoc freelance work in the business and contracts to collect refuse are very tightly controlled. I imagine that winning those contacts as a newly started one man garbage collection company is almost unheard of. As such the barriers to entry as a plumber are much much lower.
Sexist assholes exist in technology but are rare. I don't think I'm one, and I've only worked at one company where they were common, and that was a VC-funded company with MBA culture, and that's why there was so much sexism (among management). Plenty of these tech companies have the old, sexist MBA culture where women exist to make powerful men feel important, young, manly, etc.; but plenty more don't have that culture.
There's very little explicit classism. However, there is much indirect classism as a result of the severe ageism. If you age-grade peoples' careers harshly and discount accomplishments after 35, you're favoring people who had a head start (rich kids) while downgrading the people who worked hard for decades. That's a real problem but it doesn't exist because people explicitly favor the privileged. They don't. They're just prone to the same biases as everyone else, and thus are influenced by precociousness and pedigree. This is amplified by the groupthink in the VC community, and would be substantially less of a problem if there were more independent thought.
Why are many VCs ageist? (That's where the general "bro" culture comes from; it trickles down.) Because MBA culture (which is different from tech, the latter being far more evolved) is sexist and ageist, and also because a lot of these gatekeepers are middle-aged private-equity guys who did their 20s completely wrong (90-hour weeks) and are trying to live vicariously through young sociopaths whose careers they can make, in exchange for juicy tidbits about what their proteges did on the weekend ("chickenhawking"; see Michael Scott and Ryan Howard in The Office). Most VCs aren't that pathetic, but the groupthink favors the chickenhawk compliant (privileged, young, somewhat sociopathic, party-friendly) at the expense of the true technologists.
The real problem is the lack of fighters in tech, which leads to conformity and groupthink among the crowd that matters (VCs, top founders). Groupthink magnifies the biases of the defective few.
The real problem is that true technologists have done a poor job of protecting the culture; the real technology culture is far more meritocratic than the bastardized version the MBAs and private equity guys came up with. If we want fairness and a return to a maker-centric culture in the Valley and in the software industry in general, we can have it; but we have to get better at fighting for our own interests.
"The barriers are self-imposed. If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don’t need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on, and the dedication to go through with it. We slept on floors. We waded across rivers."
> today you no longer need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to achieve success
That is a lie. To achieve anything similar to what Quake and Doom were at their time, one must possess raw undiluted talent and no amount of tools, libraries or online resources are going to help.
If it was that easy, we'd see masterpieces pop up every few months. But instead the market is flooded with mediocrity. Which really should come as no surprise, because we know that 90% of everything is crap. That includes people: most people (including myself), unfortunately, aren't half as smart and talented as they think they are. Which is why we struggle to create things that could be considered merely "good", and "great" is completely outside of our reach.
In that case his point is moot. Of course you don't need to be as bright as Carmack to achieve some definition of success. You can be a furniture salesman and achieve success that way. But it's like saying that water is wet.
His argument only makes sense if he implies that you don't need to be as smart to repeat id software's success these days, which I think is incorrect.
BS. You do not need "raw undiluted talent" to create stuff like Instagram. Most successful games today are light years behind 20 years old counterparts.
> To achieve anything similar to what Quake and Doom were at their time...
Most of the games are by no means as important as Wolfenstein/Doom/Quake were when they first came out. id software laid the foundation for the modern FPS genre and defined the way the industry evolved for years to come.
Instagram is just a dumbed-down flickr with a mobile app.
As others have mentioned in the past, I believe this is one of the best "business" books I've ever read. Not in the traditional sense, but that only furthers my point. Absolutely phenomenal read.
I strongly recommend the book to anyone who's at all curious in game history, Carmack, or game development. I read it as a teenager, and it really inspired me to become a programmer.
You do need millions of dollars. Building a Game today is not what it was when Wolf 3d was made. The number of textures the depth of the story, the voice acting, the quality of physics that players expect to day is very different.
You can't write a Portal, or a Half Life, or a Quake, or a Halo, in you spare time between classes at school, or even by yourself living in your mom's basement over a year. The speed at which game tech advances is such that a one to 5 man shop can't create a game worth million in the time it takes to be obsolete.
Yes, there will be exceptions like Angry Birds. But most people aren't going to be that company that just nails game play at the right time. And most those won't be as much developers as designers.
Portal might not be a good example to use here. It's essentially version 1.0 of Narbacular Drop, which was made by a small team of students at DigiPen. Valve picked up the team and the retail version of the game never had more than 10 people working on it at a time.
Just to the point, I am located in Russia where print copy of this book would appear in 6months to year if at all. Technology allowed me purchase this book and read it right away.
It is all about focus and determination nowadays, just like it always was. And way back it took some real patience and a highly structured approach to achieve any kind of success. And now you can the cake and eat it too - compared to effort you needed to expend in nineties to create something. Information wasn't just everywhere, tracing compiler bugs could make you go down one or other rabbit hole for days if not week or two.
They don't make programmers like Carmack any more. When he was around, Carmack and his comrades were making the rules and paving new paths doing things that were considered impossible. These days, finding the answers is all too easy thanks to Stack Overflow and Github. I also feel as though the limits of computing in a gaming sense like Quake and Doom were will never happen ever again.
One of the best game i ever play in my childhood and complete it with in 3 days, still remember the stage 3 when i have to touch space bar for open the gate and simultaneous monster came. it was scary for me.
Mainly i like to target the oil drums :). Mine favorite weapon was the machine gun which was available in the middle chamber with a protected suit
Carmack and Woz, without Romereo and Jobs to truly see the potential of their work, would probably still be sitting deep in the R&D department of some large engineering company.
Working with Jobs was probably better for Woz than working with Carmack ever could have been.
Jobs had a sense of how what Woz's talent could change the world. Woz may have enjoyed showing off his projects to Carmack, but I doubt Carmack could have gotten to leave his job at HP.
Shareware seems more like Kickstarter to me, in terms of sentiment. You get niche, hobbyist communities excited about your product, and pool up money through grassroots efforts. Though perhaps shareware's most direct descendent today is when creators release albums or ebooks and add a tip jar for suggested donations.
Carmack's story continues at Oculus. He might be famous among the gaming world (might not), but it won't be long until he's famous throughout the world. VR's coming.
"You know how game companies spent the last 5 years figuring out that free games with 100% in-app purchases are the optimum (and maybe, only) business model for games today? "
Damnit, after reading that I simply had to buy myself a copy of that book. These two guys were my childhood heros. Although my mom hated them thanks to all the hours I spent playing Keen or Doom and "not doing my homework"
The story is great but the writing was pretty marginal. There were scene jumps that the author didn't give any sort of hint or clue about. There we're complete misattributions of who was saying what.
I almost gave up on the book in the first few chapters.
As much as I admire John Carmack's bootstrapped success (and on this axis the guy is just awesome), given how he handled the poor health of his cat, I don't think I'd ever work with or for him. It just doesn't sit right with me.
Here's what really puzzles me. John Carmack was a legend by the time of the Mitzi incident. Instead of dumping the poor creature at the animal shelter like he did, he could have auctioned off "John Carmack's frickin' cat" to his legion of admirers, giving it a new home.
Or he could have taken it to a vet and probably found out it had bladder stones which could have been removed by a ~$1,000 procedure, but I digress.
And that I think is part of why I'm not rich like he is...
Which is bad news if your strength is that you are a good programmer, because in this kind of environment games become a commodity, so you have to compete with hundreds of thousands of other game developers who also don't have to be as briliant as Carmack. See the app market; it has a winner take all characteristic, so even if you don't have to be as brilliant as Carmack in programming, you have to be very strong in something or lucky to achieve success.
As I remember Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky took venture capital to take off stack overflow. (And also they had a huge following even before starting that venture.)
I kind of don't really buy these kind of 'motivational' posts. Achieving success is always possible but always hard.