Yes of course there have always been people who clock in and clock out and don't have a ton of passion for what they do. I don't begrudge that, but personally I need some of the curiosity and joy in hacking on stuff. And I enjoy the camaraderie of being around others who feel that way too.

It just feels like "it's a job" is more of the zeitgeist these days.

And yes, I'm also well aware of what came before 'my time' - mainframes and such were definitely an era where the power was more with the large companies. One of the reasons Linux (and *BSD) was so cool is that finally regular people could get their hands on this powerful OS that previously was the exclusive purview of corporations or, at best, universities.

As to cool projects, sure. They're fun, interesting and creative, but perhaps not part of (a very vague, admittedly) "something bigger", like "the open source movement" was back in the day.

>I'm very skeptical of the article - it sounds to me like classic "good old days" thinking¹

That's a cheap dismisal. There's nothing wrong with "good old days" thinking if old days were actually better.

>Meanwhile the idea that there's a dearth of cool new stuff seems quite quaint to me. There's a whole bunch of cool things that pop up almost daily right here on Hacker News²

Hardly of the breadth and ambition of the 1998-2012 or so period.

>As to corporate power? They ebb and flow and eat each other (Data General, Compaq, DEC ... remember them? Remember when Microsoft was the major enemy? Or IBM?)

Yes, and also remember then players like Sun did cool stuff in the UNIX space. Or when FOSS wasn't basically billion dollar corporate owned wholesale, with mere corporate employees buying the majority of contributors and IBM, Oracle, Google and co running the show. Even RedHat was considered too corporate and now it's IBM...

I'd say "good old days" thinking is probably involved, but not the full explanation. Over the past few decades, software has gone from a fairly obscure profession to being seen as a great way (maybe the best way) to make a lot of money. In absolute numbers, there are probably at least as many engaged, curious engineers as before. There are almost certainly drastically more uninterested engineers who are there partially or fully because of the money, though.

edit: I hadn't scrolled down to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303388 when I wrote this

When I was doing job interviews during my last year of college, I was able to chat with all my interviewers about the morning's Slashdot headlines. Everyone had checked the /. front page that morning and I was able to have a nice ice breaker about the day's stories.

That isn't the case anymore. That sort of monoculture where everyone is reading the same stories, discussing the same topics, and reading about shared values and principles, is long gone.

Requisite "Good old days" clip from The Office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gvk0_6p_-s

Hits so much harder as a middle aged adult than when I saw it on tv ~2 decades ago.

There is a generation of programmers that became interested in computers only because they felt that computers were cool. Mostly useless, except for playing games, but cool. Only later the knowledge also turned out to be a source of money.

And then there is a generation that grew up knowing that there was money in computers, so many of them learned to use them even if they didn't care about them per se. This generation also contains many hackers, but they are surrounded by at least 10x more people who only do it for money.

Twenty years ago, most programmers were nerds. These days, nerds are a minority among the programmers. Talking about programming during an IT department teambuilding event is now a serious faux pas.

There are still a ton of vertical markets that have crap for technology stacks, e.g. public transit. There is tons of opportunity out there to improve processes and optimize work.

I blame the dotcom boom. Yes, the business-records jobs were always part of the field, but they didn't seem so dominant. We're all writing COBOL now.

Old man yells at cloud services

The technology itself isn't threatening. The fact that it's currently concentrated in the hands of a very few large US corporations is what's ... less than stellar from my point of view.