There are always opportunities, at least in the USA.
I started programming in 1985 and thought I was very likely too late. I was the same age as Chris Espinosa, who was Apple's head of documentation at age 14. At that time it was still not perfectly clear that PCs would be regarded as essential to business. I had no one to talk to about computers and programming. I was in a very rough spot in my life and had to teach myself everything, while not being sure I'd have a job in 5 years.
A decade later in 1996 I started at Microsoft, which virtually all of my peers thought had run its course. They were selling stock like crazy. By the time I left 4 years later the stock had gone up 1300%. Last I checked it's gone up yet another 2500% or so--I kept my 1,000 ESPP shares mostly out of nostalgia and thanks to a company that was so good to me.
I bought a website after the first dot com bust of 2001, monetized it by hiring well, and it provided a very good living for well over two decades after that.
This is an incredible time to start a web-based business because there's a surfeit of free and almost free tools for development all the way to deployment.
Give an example in 1985 to show there are opportunities today is not convincing.
I like people with your attitude! Leaves more for people willing to work and to learn things. I upvoted your comment out of pity.
That era represented the collapse of 8 bit microcomputers. They were huge, then nothing. Silicon Valley had boomed, then gone bust. No one had much use for computers except brave financial analysts willing to use the toylike Apple ][ for primitive spreadsheets. No one took the Mac seriously until Postscript and laser printers happened.
In October 1987 Black Monday hit, causing the worst market crash since the Depression. I hit up a bunch of angel investors—a term that didn’t even exist—to raise money for a batch file compiler. A compiler! That supported me and several employees for years.
Point is that you can always make opportunities happen even in hard times.
Always?
I work harder than anybody I know personally. I am constantly learning new things. People ask me all the time how I "know this stuff", and that has been true since I was a kid in a desert town in the middle of nowhere that only had a library to learn from.
I have tried many, many ideas and failed. I'm halfway through life now. I've missed many opportunities in hindsight, likely due to my narrow fixation on details. This is an aspect of HFA, which is something I've only recently learned about myself.
I think what you've said is factually correct. But not everyone is equipped to exploit the opportunities that may exist, and may struggle to be aware of their limitations. Furthermore, life doesnt guarantee you anything - luck is always an element.
Even the hardest working people can luck out and become frustrated. That doesn't change the fact that their best stategy is probably not to give up, but maybe be a bit more empathetic?
Thanks for a thought-provoking response. I was careful not to say one can always succeed in hard times. And I certainly didn’t talk about guarantees. But yes, one can make opportunities happen in the States. Sometimes or even most of the times we fail. I spent $1.4 million of my retirement money trying to beat Craigslist. The wife sure wasn’t thrilled. Nor when I tried to take on Gmail.
I was sure lucky, but I put myself in luck’s way as often as possible. That’s after I got away from home in my teens after years of neglect, beatings, depression, suicidal ideation, and sexual abuse.
Be more empathetic to someone being snide after I made a sincere post trying to offer up some hope in hard times? Fuck that noise.
Fair enough! Sharing your story will no doubt help somebody experiencing self doubt, and that could be exactly what somebody out there needs right now.
Dude, I wrote the book on self-doubt! The only thing that ever kept me going before a certain level of success was my observation that although I’m never the smartest guy around, I always know people dumber than I am who succeeded in similar areas by just showing up and grinding. I still overthink and sabotage myself.
I'm not nearly as successful as you but agree wholeheartedly - there's 8 billion humans on the planet with constantly refreshing interests, and it's absolutely preposterous to think this doesn't provide a recurring, increasing source of opportunity
Meh, be careful with the word successful. You have no idea how successful I am. I’m way better off than most people, way poorer than many folks on HN, but I could be a complete jerk, or someone who pissed it all away, or someone who abandoned his family. Those things and so many others would disqualify me as successful in my book.
To me if you’re living in alignment with your values and aren’t too much of a drain on society most of the time, you’re successful.
No need to be patronizing. Pointing out that an argument is not a good one doesn't necessarily mean one holds the opposite view.
Just because people though once that situation A was the case while it was actually situation B, and now it seems again that situation A is the case doesn't mean it is necessarily again situation B, only that it might be situation B. It also actually might be situation A. But if it is actually situation B, extrapolating from the past is not a good argument. Doesn't mean that there are no other good arguments.
I was patronizing in response to someone being patronizing to me.
No regrets at all.
You seem really unpleasant. It's nice that you were successful and all, but I'm not sure why you need to rub it in the face of people who are still trying to be successful.
Things obviously change over time. It's not non sequitur to claim that opportunities have shrunk over time. Bringing up counter-examples of opportunities that existed 40 years ago is not an argument.
I don't know why you think opportunity must be constant. I don't think you would have had much success with your .com startup mentality in 300BC.
Can you tell me where I was trying to rub anything in anyone’s face other than responding to direct insults? The original point of my post was that you’re never too late, and there are tons of opportunities here in the USA. The last thing I want to do is rub anything in anyone’s face, especially considering financial success is highly relative, and has almost no bearing on who you are as a person.
Disagree? I’m a survivor. I would have looked around and tried to figure out the best ways not to die and to keep my family safe using what resources I had. Most people are less paranoid than I am and are willing to just get along. My instinct is to get a little ahead so I have a buffer.
Older people cannot fathom this logic for some reason.
Spell it out, what logic specifically?
People say "There don't seem to be as many opportunities nowadays compared to my parents' generation..." and the response from some older quite successful person who has not had to hunt for opportunities in the current regime is always "You fool! There's opportunity everywhere! Just get a paper route and in 5 years you'll be able to buy a mansion!"
Is it your thought that I called someone a fool?
I find it interesting how the older person who hasn't had to hunt for opportunities in the current regime is wrong, but it's taken for granted that the younger person who hasn't had to hunt for opportunities in the old regime is right.
I doubt that people 50 years ago were all rich.
Fine.
Give up.
Don’t chase a dream.
Just go find some drudgery for a paycheck. Don’t bother saving. You won’t need it.
You never had a shot anyway. Your ideas are stupid. Any time you think of a thing, someone else has thought of it first.
There’s no point in trying to make anything better. It’s all as good as it can possibly be.
Such a perfect world doesn’t need your contribution; can’t be changed by the likes of you; won’t care, even if you do manage to come up with something novel.
You’re too young to be taken seriously, and too late for everything, so why bother?
So get out there and fulfill your failure, and don’t worry about dreaming.
All the dreamers woke up ages ago.
Also even all the little things are already invented. Even locally. Everything, done.
A pig. In a cage. On antibiotics.
Might just be the other way around
I think the point is that he thought it was too late in 1985, then people thought the same ten years later (1996), then the original article (from 2014) tries to explain how 2014 is not too late either (“the best time is now”).
In other words, it is always easy to think it is too late when looking back. But it is never too late if we try to look forward and imagine the things that have not invented yet and which will be around in 10-20 years time.
There will always be winners, bu they're obvious only in hindsight.
Nope. It was obvious to me then, though not my coworkers. Microsoft had already done creditably against Oracle and IBM in come-from-behind situations. The press decided it was time to put Microsoft in its place.
Marc Andreesen said glibly that Windows was nothing more than a poorly debugged set of device drivers. The technical press parroted it without any follow-through. When Microsoft came out with Internet Explorer, new versions of Excel, Word, and IIS, I knew they would win. Because device drivers are hard, nobody wrote them better, and Windows was good enough for millions of customers.
I think Microsofties low-key regarded me as a bit dull, because they believed the media had no agenda. I simply looked at the (public) accomplishments of my much younger coworkers and trusted my own observations.
In the late 90s it was also "obvious" that Apple was about to go bankrupt. The entire dot-com bubble was people who thought it was "obvious" that the early internet was already a winner… and most of those companies failed. When that bubble popped, some people thought it was "obvious" that Amazon would be one of the losers in part thanks to their investment in the (failed) pets.com (not to be confused with the current owners of the same domain).
To me, it's been "obvious" for the last US$2 trillion of market capitalisation growth that Apple's going to face monopoly investigations; it's "obvious" that Facebook is, in a deep fundamental sense, not even capable of being compatible with GDPR; and it was "obvious" to me in 2009 that the first true self-driving car sold to the general public (by the quality standard "doesn't come with a steering wheel and that's fine") would be around 2019 or so.
There's been a few places I've worked with young energetic co-workers (and I have been a young and energetic coder myself), and… in many cases those groups failed to make enough money and disbanded.
One result of a lifetime of not being able to predict the markets is the realisation, a decade ago, that my preferences in many areas are almost anti-correlated with the modal buyer: I like what normal people dislike or even loathe, and dislike or even hate what they prefer.
It's also "obvious" to many at the time that the huge names would continue to dominate; names that don't even really exist anymore.
Predictions of how it will be are always worth writing down, to see how correct they are.
Microsoft and Apple are huge today, but it's entirely conceivable that both are shells of themselves in a decade's time.
The point was people thought it was too late then. And again at microsoft ten years later. I thought it was convincing.
Don't worry, I thought it was.
I agree that this is a weak argument. I think a stronger argument is simply to say: every year we see people start independent, bootstrapped businesses. There's no reason to believe the potential here has changed. The only way to include yourself in that set is to try, and never give up.
EDIT: I will say, it may be a powerful story for anybody experiencing self doubt. Different people need different kinds of motivation.
It's interesting to hear your experience at this point in time. Mine was later but noticeably different.
I started coding in the 90's as a teen releasing shareware, with my first gig at Adobe in 2001, where they paid me $14/hr as an intern. Even though this was rough times for tech, me and my CS peers at UW felt a lot of optimism and enthusiasm about what could be built because the framework still supported idealists and we cared less about the economy (and we were definitely naive). Both the researchers and entrepreneurial types were very curious about inventing new paradigms.
When I talk to younger people now in CS, the enthusiasm seems to be split for 'pure researcher' types and 'entrepreneurial/builder types', with the latter having interest concentrated on what is booming (like AI), and more about what can be built but what will be able to raise large sums or attract more users. I'll caveat this with I don't know to what extent the people I talk to do have a bias, but I do wonder if there are less people willing to explore new frontiers now.
One major difference between now and then is that the fraction of US market cap that is tech, and to a lesser extent, tech's importance in the economy. I wonder if this established leader position somehow could make people less optimistic and willing to explore?
In my view the pure research types who land jobs have always been maybe 1%? UW is research heavy, don’t forget. And at the time I was at Microsoft almost no one had plans to quit and start their own company. Before I started there in 1996 I figured about 80% would—-an early indicator of how distorted my view was from press reports and my own biases. It seems to me that these days the vast majority are happy to be drones. Or am I way off?
In my time most of the employees were very smart students who just kind of fell into programming and were hooked in by Microsoft’s pioneering efforts at sending recruiters to colleges (rare at the time) and especially less-obvious choices such as Waterloo and Harvard.
What kind of shareware did you publish?
It makes sense. I should say I'd estimate 70-90% of the class didn't want to work their own ideas, but would be happy to work at a big company forever, and this was the mindset going into the CS program. A fair number of people within my circle of folks that hung out at the CS lab and lounge and discussed ideas eventually launched successful companies, and I'm probably overindexing on these types with survivorship plus hindsight bias, since they were the most memorable to talk to.
I interned at Microsoft in 2005, and it felt like most people there were just looking for something stable, with a side of Office Space-esque exit thoughts. The culture and scale was different in ways that seem weird to me today - One example is that Bill Gates invited all of the interns to have dinner at his house, which is something that is probably reserved only for startups nowadays, if even.
Re: shareware, I released a crappy checkers twist game for Mac, which was also very educational, and I was proud to have it on the MacAddict Magazine CD. [1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5196-checkerwarz
By contrast, in 2009 the several hundred interns were bussed in a police escorted motorcade along the closed down highway from Redmond to the Pacific Science Center for a special showing of some Harry Potter film and catered dinner, after which complimentary Xbox 360s were distributed. It felt like pretty big business.
Everything has a cost, and if the hiring budget is available, things like bussing several hundred interns around may be cheaper than you'd expect, certainly cheaper (even with free Xboxes) than flying hundreds of candidates out for interviews.
Using "today" prices - something like $25-50 per person for the bus, $20 per for the film, $100 for the dinner, $400 for the Xbox - less than $1k all concerned.
Thanks for putting it like this, the numbers took me by surprise. During my university years (a bit over a decade ago), I actually applied for an internship at Microsoft, and they definitely spent more than $1k flying me from Poland to UK and back for an on-site interview. I wasn't that good, my university isn't that good either, surely they could've used that money to incentivize a few local candidates with free Xboxes and come out ahead. Makes me wonder why they bothered with interns from distant lands in the first place. Tech recruitment never made sense to me (though I enjoyed benefiting from its peculiarities).
I think it is because the geeks "won". A lot of geeks found each other during the early web days. Nowadays it's not a stigma to be a geek. Everything is more mature and commercially integrated, including mopping up geek-ly minded people into commercial ventures. It's harder today to have an outsized impact from a bedroom and no budget. (Not in absolute numbers, how often this happens, but in relative terms! Many more people are at it nowadays, so some slip through with a run-away success from nothing.)
So, in other words, people today are late.
Not at all. As someone who lived through that: there was much less enthusiasm and acceptance around starting a business. It was seen as harder and the Internet was perceived as less of a sure thing.
You could argue there was more low-hanging fruit in terms of opportunity, but to anyone who was a product of the age, they weren't primed to see it. So the absolute amount of opportunity wasn't substantially different than it was before. Our mind plays tricks on us when we look into the past: "If I had known X, I could've done that." But, you didn't. And business is rife with survivor bias.
Yes and no!
Today one is probably late to
"make a random open source project and see it become a pillar of industry",
- but today is the perfect time for
"start a software business and make great money"
In the terms of too late to invent the wheel, sure, we can opine about not being that person all day and you'll always be correct. Unfortunately for you, there's more than that which makes the world we live in today and tomorrow.
I'm 16 and I want to grow up and revive the concept of a fixed-function graphics card to make graphics cards cheaper and more focused on gaming. I might even look into acquiring the 3dfx brand and reviving it with that goal. AI and crypto whatever might be the buzzwords but they don't interest me.
GPUs are already relatively fixed-function though - they're already designed with only graphics goals in mind, which is why they're so efficient at them. The reason why they were so suitable for AI was kind of a happy coincidence, because the way they work as processors and their high memory bandwidth (both required for good graphics performance) was also perfect for AI.
“An array of programmable CPUs with instruction sets tailored towards vector operations” might be specialised but it isn’t fixed function. “Insert vertices, indices, and 2-4 textures. Receive image on screen.” DX7 style is fixed function.
Hence "relatively". Specialized is the more succinct way of describing it though, yes.
The market seems like a bad fit for pro-humanity technology—researchers at least have that (albeit fading) potential in their back pocket.
> A decade later in 1996 I started at Microsoft, which virtually all of my peers thought had run its course.
People thought Microsoft had run its course, one year after the release of Windows 95?
Just as MS Word was dominating WordPerfect? And the likes of AutoCAD were dropping support for AIX, Solaris etc? When Photoshop had just released for Windows, and Apple's market share had dropped to about 3% ?
Wow! I know they were kinda late to online stuff, but still - strange how these things turn out, in hindsight!
There were rumours that the following year would be the year of Linux on the desktop. It had just taken, and was taking, the server world by storm.
Windows 2000 was really important for MS staying relevant in anything outside consumer. It really set up the next two decades.
Next year is totally the year of Linux on the desktop!
Not sure if I made this clear, but I am referring to industry publications, and to what seemed to be a vast majority of my colleagues at Microsoft. Experienced business watchers who could read an SEC filing, and who had a mature grasp of business, knew better, but it wasn’t sexy to keep printing opinions like that.
I’m sure Department of Justice problems weren’t helping either. So these kids were exercising stock options like crazy because of the bad press.
These were people in their mid 20s who had entered these amazing jobs just out of college, and who had experienced several years of astonishing growth. They were both internally and externally very good at taking criticism. I think they just overcorrected at the first sign of trouble. I was a decade older, and had been studying business on my own for about 20 years by that point.
I had also worked for many companies that were nowhere near as well put together as Microsoft. Microsoft makes its share of mistakes, but never in ways that jeopardize the company’s existence. That may sound trivial, but if you’ve ever run a company, you’ll understand that it’s a surprisingly rare trait. Just managing not to fuck up too badly is exceedingly rare in the business world, and I think they didn’t quite understand that. Because they were open to criticism, they really couldn’t understand how special the company was at that time. Since they came in fresh from college, they had nothing to compare their jobs to. To them it was what any job should be.
If you lived through it, at a young age, you were on Slashdot or similar places, and Linux was riding high on the server (it was absolutely massacring Unix, and for kids at college, Linux + Samba was a quite powerful combination compared to even a few years before (think: Novell Netware).
Few college kids have experience with really massive enterprise setups and solutions, and so those were just entirely discounted out of hand.
Damn, I better buy some tech stock if it’s gonna go up 13x in 4 years.
Actually if everyone just does that, nobody will need to work!
NVidia's gone up 13x in the last 4 years.
Bitcoin's up 10x in the last 4 years.
Broadcom's up 6x in the last 4 years, 21x in 10 years.
Facebook/META's up 5x in the last 2 years, 20x in 11 years.
Uber's up 3.5x in 2 years.
Tesla was up 11x between 2019 and 2021.
Microsoft's up 10x in the last 9 years.
Amazon's up 11x in the last 10 years.
Apple's up 10x in the last 10 years.
Oracle's up 3x in the last 10 years.
I’m buying some Google stock right now. I have a good feeling about it :) How do I pick the perfect moment to buy and sell?
Oh, that's simple, just predict the future with 100% accuracy.
Lots of skilled programmers started coding when they were kids. But that does not mean starting to learn coding when you are 30 years old won't make you an excellent programmer: actually, you can learn even faster at that age because concepts like logic, dividing an issue into several small ones, and iterating step by step until the final solution are more intuitive to you than to a kid.