Ask HN: How to support old hackers?

16 points

9 years ago

Hi HN. Over the past few years I've seen several instances where historically significant members of the software, hacker, or open source community have fallen on hard times enough to be reduced to fundraising for medical assistance, and/or being forced to abandon their open source efforts due to inability to survive doing it. Latest in long line of examples is Captain Crunch (John Draper), one of the fathers of phone phreaking [0]. In fact, he got Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs into phreaking, and their first business before building Apple I was building and selling blue boxes [1]. In a way, without their meeting, there may not have been an Apple.

In this case, a massive part of the blame is of course with the US health care system, which basically makes it extremely difficult to survive old age unless you have a retirement plan and insurance - things that many self-employed developers never had.

The question I'd like to raise, however, is not "what is the root cause", but rather "what can we as a community do about it". Some trade professions take care of their elder members by forming a union and contributing to a common pension plan, but it seems that there aren't many unions for software engineers. We have the good fortune of being members of one of the best-paid professions in the world, and I find it very sad that we still end up with our members and elders falling through the cracks and struggling to survive.

[0]: https://www.gofundme.com/crunch-medical-fund/

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/the-definitive-story-of-steve-wozniak-steve-jobs-and-phone-phreaking/273331/

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