Losing the Plot That Was Never There
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Somewhere along the way, we've lost the "fun" part of "for fun and profit".
I have this temptation to act like a hipster and complain about people just being in it for the money now, but then I'd be making the exact same mistake that gradually drove Silicon Valley's culture insane: treating technology-as-a-craft and technology-as-a-job as one and the same.
Silicon Valley (and the tech industry as a whole) used to have a silly catchphrase about "making the world a better place" with tech. It was all lies, of course, but it was an interesting sign of lingering naive optimism held by a sizable enough portion of technologists still drunk on dreams of cyberspace independence.
Being passionate—being a nerd—used to be an indicator of skill. Skilled programmers used to be in demand. To succeed as a tech company, you needed to sell an idea to the nerds. A "don't be evil" for the altruistic, a Tolkien allusion for those who above all else desired power—"passion" is not equal to "ethics", after all.
And so, passionate, well-fed programmers practiced tech as a craft at the same time as they practiced tech as a means to get paid. From all the open source projects to breaking into Apple offices to work on a graphing calculator, it was an interesting time.
For the majority of programmers out there, though, the noble pursuit of putting food on the table is much more important than tech-as-a-craft.
But passion for the craft never stopped being a signal for skill. And signals get gamed.
Perversion
Imagine getting inspired by a low-tech artist collective to ruin your sleep schedule to... work on a B2B SaaS project? What the fuck?
This is the cursed version of that graphing calculator story, with love for the craft sucked out and replaced with love for getting that MRR.
I seek love for the craft, and find perversion instead.
And that's my real problem—not somebody losing sleep to get paid—but them dressing that up as passion for technology. My problem is going to tech meetups and getting told to just make a web app when I try to talk about learning AppKit on an old PowerBook. My problem is that I have the misfortune of loving tech as a craft and as a hobby.
The hit rage-bait blog post of June 2025 had an entire section about the craft that pissed me off.
Professional software developers are in the business of solving practical problems for people with code. We are not, in our day jobs, artisans. Steve Jobs was wrong: we do not need to carve the unseen feet in the sculpture. Nobody cares if the logic board traces are pleasingly routed. If anything we build endures, it won’t be because the codebase was beautiful.
In our day jobs, we are not artisans. And that's fine! But when work and play bleed into each other so much, when "hacker" is synonymous with "entrepreneur", when the hell do we find the time for art?
Do you like fine Japanese woodworking? All hand tools and sashimono joinery? Me too. Do it on your own time.
When the hell do I get to talk about my Japanese woodworking, if the local crafts circle just fucking talks about leasing out IKEA furniture?
For Fun and Profit
Now that we no longer pretend that technology is a force for good, now that we've struck out the fun from "for fun and profit", can we drop the charade? Can we let people who see technology as a job just do their job in peace? Can we let people who see technology as a craft just do their artisan projects in peace?
I don't want a yet another better computing manifesto. I don't want to claim that real artists starve or that making money is or isn't evil. But can't we have a way to signal that we are doing something for fun or out of love for the craft? Can't we have a space to discuss creating home-cooked software without having to deflect monetization questions? To talk about generative art without getting NFTs involved? To talk about homelabs without getting told to migrate to the cloud?
I mean, it's not like tech communities that prioritize the craft don't exist. The aforementioned low-tech arts collective, Hundred Rabbits, all the incredibly skilled retrocomputing enthusiasts, research laboratories like Ink & Switch, the open source community, all the decentralized protocol hackers. There's tons and tons of interesting people out there.
It's just too bad that their voices get drowned out by an entirely different community with an entirely different set of priorities.