In real life, hacking (in terms of breaking into secure systems you aren’t supposed to) has a lower skill ceiling than you might expect, and it’s not all that great to begin with. Real-world hacking is all about problem-solving skills, and using bugs and exploits which are already there, so to speak; you can only get so good before “even better” stops making a difference. I mean, yeah there’s no such thing as bug-free software once you go above a given level of complexity, but a hacker needs to know what the bugs are, or find out through trial and error without the system ejecting them completely. Even if you’re the best hacker in the world, you can’t just break into a server with even just okay security if it’s properly configured and there aren’t any known exploits.
If you’re really really lucky, then maybe you can pull off some kind of social engineering shenanigans and hoodwink someone on the inside into helping you. But in that case, you’re up against people whose literal job description involves not being dumb enough to fall for that kind of thing, and even if you succeed at tricking someone, there still needs to be something exploitable you can do with it.
However, all that is boring to show in a movie or novel.
As a result, hacking in popular culture is usually depicted like the target system’s firewall is like a bank vault, and the hacker has superhuman strength, except with a shitty laptop. It’s a heist, mostly from the comfort of your own home. Henry Case can go full cowboy in Virtual Reality in Cyberspace (in the book which popularized the word “cyberspace”), and it’s literally depicted as being like an airplane-dogfight. Precisely none of the hacking in “Hackers” makes the slightest bit of sense.
