Original: Simon Willison · 25/02/2026
Summary
Kellan Elliott-McCrea reflects on the emotional complexities of entering the tech industry, contrasting motivations of past and present generations.Key Insights
“That feeling of loss though can be hard to understand emotionally for people my age.” — Discussing the differing motivations for entering the tech industry across generations.
“The web was objectively awful as a technology, and genuinely amazing.” — Reflecting on the paradoxical nature of early web development experiences.
Topics
Full Article
25th February 2026 It’s also reasonable for people who entered technology in the last couple of decades because it was good job, or because they enjoyed coding to look at this moment with a real feeling of loss. That feeling of loss though can be hard to understand emotionally for people my age who entered tech because we were addicted to feeling of agency it gave us. The web was objectively awful as a technology, and genuinely amazing, and nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful. — Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Code has always been the easy partRelated Articles
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Originally published at https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/25/kellan-elliott-mccrea/#atom-everything.