Jamie Zawinski: And then, when the money came in, let’s just call it July ’94, the industry exploded. Suddenly, there’s another quarter-million people in this industry who are nineteen years old, twenty years old, and haven’t met these old hacker guys, and their experience with computing is completely different. These new people who got into the computer industry? If it was 1982, they would’ve been traders. They would’ve gone into finance because “Oh, that’s challenging work. And man, you can make a lot of money doing that if you get hired by the right firm.” It’s that attitude. Programming is the safe job. It’s the safe job for smart people.
silicon valley the ATM machine. and really, who can blame them? the desire to make a lot of money is not an individual aberration but rather culturally produced (dare i say hegemonic)