Old school coders/hackers, what are you up to now?

[acljkn123]

Howdy ya'll,

Probably a long shot that people will see this but I was just having a trip down memory land and wondering how everyone else is doing.

I started getting into programing/coding in 2008 when I was playing MapleStory. Ended up going to school for compsci and landing an engineer job at a big tech/faang company.

Looking back though, I'm nowhere as good as the people that were writing ASM/C++ code and coming up with new exploits and hacks. And the way I remember it, $1000-$4000 was considered a lot of money for a project, which now seems like peanuts considered engineers are clearing like $500k+ these days working on things that aren't nearly as challenging...

I was friends with one of the people who wrote hacks for shooter games like Combat Arms/Operation 7/CrossFire. Was probably one of the most talented people I knew, but he ended up homeless and I've lost touch with him since. Really tragic because every other tech company is paying out the ass for anyone who can code these days, but yet it seems a lot of the people I knew online never ended up pursuing coding as a career and some are struggling.

Anyways, if you were one of those coders from way back then would love to hear what you are up to now. Have you guys continued your programmer careers? If not, what made you choose not to? Would love to hear from everyone!

Cheers

[dr.watkins9]

I started coding about the same time as you @ 12ish years old. My first big project was a backpack.tf clone in PHP.
ATM I'm trying to rewrite Minecraft in Golang. I want a working Golang MC server with terrain generation and third-party account authentication for MC 1.16.5
Also still trying to finish my Bachelor's but my school is built around Java which is my least favorite language of all.

[Cosmo_]

I think it boils down to the way the industry has shifted. Most everything is moving towards web development and subscription models. From my experience, these developers don't tend to understand the intricacies involved with reverse engineering binaries and interfacing with the Windows API. If you aren't up-to-date on the latest JavaScript framework, then you're inexperienced and under-qualified.

Again. this has just been my experience and is in no way a reflection of the industry as a whole.