Most tech content is bullshit

https://www.aleksandra.codes/tech-content-consumer

by velmu • 6 years ago

709 458 6 years ago

aleksandra.codes

sesuximo2• 6 years ago

this blog may be bullshit as well

Maybe all blogs should say this lol

Koshkin3• 6 years ago

Or you could just assume the possibility regardless.

sesuximo2• 6 years ago

Sure but I appreciate humility in an author

enriquto• 6 years ago

To be fair, any writing that is labeled "content" is indeed bullshit.

ch_sm• 6 years ago

Weirdly, the word "content" for articles or other media seems to actually devalue the content of the piece in lieu of its marketing value. Great stuff. They’ll have to come up with a new word for this practice pretty soon, as more people realize that they’re reading fancy ads instead of actual content.

tuyguntn2• 6 years ago

I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit.

I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on.

Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and modifying a little and trying to get lots back links. I remember when Quora had quality content, now everything is sales pitch. I feel like people are not trying to create quality content, they are trying to sell and to sell you need more back links.

toomuchtodo• 6 years ago

“Content marketing”

behnamoh• 6 years ago

"bullshit marketing"

layoutIfNeeded• 6 years ago

Everything goes to shit when marketing is involved. Or more like, everything goes to shit when money is involved.

nlitened• 6 years ago

Google incentivizes this. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Koshkin3• 6 years ago

That's true, of course, but consider this: if there is no money, there may be nothing to go to shit; that which does not live, does not die, etc.

anthony_romeo• 6 years ago

Or those fake how-to tutorial pages. Often when I’m looking up, say, error codes in Windows, I need to wade through pages of “Step 1: Download the MyNewFreeComputerCleaner.biz app”

tuyguntn2• 6 years ago

after working at couple of startups, I also noticed worrying trend.

* 21 years old marketer writing about life crisis in 40s

* fashion blogger explaining is Teflon harmful or not (come on, fashion and chemistry?)

* 18 years old student who never immigrated to another country or studied abroad writing about how difficult is immigrant life and what to look for in different country and many more similar content.

hashberry• 6 years ago

And social media (including LinkedIn). There are many tech firms who hire marketers to write tech content for other marketers and potential clients as an advertising and brand-building strategy.

aledalgrande6• 6 years ago

It is an even bigger problem when searching for advanced/niche concepts: try searching for Redis and Cloudwatch (not Elasticache, plain Redis) and you will get generic AWS docs and "How to get started with Redis" posts.

PragmaticPulp2• 6 years ago

Personal brand building is another major contributor to search engine content dilution.

Whenever I Google for something in hot new languages or frameworks, I have to sift through 10s of Medium articles from beginner developers who are trying to establish themselves as industry experts.

I don't want to read some junior developer's Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial that is really just entire source code files embedded as GitHub gists one file at a time. I just want to skip to the documentation and get to work.

Jorge1o1• 6 years ago

The truly worrying development is when those same Medium posts start circling HN.

I’m not trying to be elitist, but what I enjoy about HN is seeing truly novel and interesting content, and every “crappy” article on the front page bumps an interesting one downwards into oblivion.

ryan29• 6 years ago

There's so many bad examples online that I can't imagine trying to learn development from scratch these days.

hn_check4• 6 years ago

That's an interesting, albeit selfish, perspective.

Experienced developers usually aren't busy writing blog posts. Nor are they engaged on HN. As the old saying goes, those who can are out doing, those who can't `teach'.

This touched a nerve, but sorry it's spot on. The more faltering the career, the less certain the skills, the more likely the person has a vigorous social media and blog presence.

Swizec3• 6 years ago

As a programmer with some 20 years of experience who likes to write tutorials on original research and techniques — you can pry my animated gifs out of my cold dead fingers! All my life I waited for broadband to be widespread enough to write articles with rich embedded animations.

And yes, sometimes they only serve the purpose of entertainment or emotional tone setting. Other times they’re actual part of the content.

Gifs are great

Edit: you downvote and yet I often get comments appreaciating how the gifs make my 2000 word emails feel like a quick short read.

airstrike• 6 years ago

some junior developer's Medium post full of animated GIFs

Don't forget emojis! Such a waste of time! ⌛⌛⌛

cjonas• 6 years ago

This drives me crazy! I hate searching for documentation and the top results are blogs containing outdated copy and paste of the official docs with some witty text and gifs.

oefrha• 6 years ago

In my experience this is particularly egregious when trying to compare frameworks and libraries in the JS ecosystem. The posts usually boil down to “I wrote a hello world with X and Y, here are my thoughts”, or worse, “I wrote a hello world with X, didn’t even bother to write it with Y, here are my thoughts on why X is awesome and Y sucks”, or worse still, “I wrote a hello world with X, didn’t even bother to write it with Y, here are my thoughts on why X is awesome and Y sucks, and I’ll pretend I have ten years of experience with each.”

ragnese3• 6 years ago

Ugh. I cringe every time I have an actual, non-trivial, issue or fairly technical question about whatever I'm working on lately.

I remember feeling it while I was working with Swift (50 articles titled: "What is a Protocol?" Give me a break!) and lately I keep running into all kinds of bizarre, complicated behaviors with Jackson in my Kotlin project. It's a new kind of hell to sift through every article that describes the "hello, world" of writing a single data class and having Jackson magically turn it into JSON.

P.S., if you can avoid mixing Jackson with Kotlin, save yourself the trouble.

itronitron• 6 years ago

The Medium articles are a lot more entertaining if you read them out loud with a strong 'Valley' accent.

AlexCoventry• 6 years ago

Yes, this is happening even at the code level, resulting in a flood of modules/packages with shallow capabilities.

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little.

...

There is no greater mistake than to suppose that the last work is always the more correct; that what is written later on is in every case an improvement on what was written before; and that change always means progress....

If the reader wishes to study any subject, let him beware of rushing to the newest books upon it, and confining his attention to them alone, under the notion that science is always advancing, and that the old books have been drawn upon in the writing of the new. They have been drawn upon, it is true; but how? The writer of the new book often does not understand the old books thoroughly, and yet he is unwilling to take their exact words; so he bungles them, and says in his own bad way that which has been said very much better and more clearly by the old writers, who wrote from their own lively knowledge of the subject....

It often happens that an old and excellent book is ousted by new and bad ones, which, written for money, appear with an air of great pretension and much puffing on the part of friends. In science a man tries to make his mark by bringing out something fresh. This often means nothing more than that he attacks some received theory which is quite correct, in order to make room for his own false notions. Sometimes the effort is successful for a time; and then a return is made to the old and true theory. These innovators are serious about nothing but their own precious self: it is this that they want to put forward, and the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to start a paradox. ... Hence it frequently happens that the course of science is retrogressive.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10714/10714-h/10714-h.htm#li...

magnetowasright• 6 years ago

Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial...

It's almost like trying to find recipes on the internet in the age of SEO and 'personal brand building'.

To get to the content you want (ingredients and method), you have to scroll through a mess of unrelated, low quality, insincere blog-like content with pictures etc..

When you actually find the recipe, half the method (always the bits you don't bloody know) is interwoven into the irritating blog content or on a separate 'blog' entry page entirely.

By the time you realise there's nothing of value and decide to turn back, it's too late; they've already won. You've given them a page view, interacted with the site, and maybe their ads have loaded, too.

At least you can find good cookbooks in op shops! Tech books are great, but they're not always the best resource when you're curious about a tool and want something like an implementation or configuration guide, or a post-implementation review.

I have random blogs to thank for clear guides with great explanations on implementing and configuring loads of things, like early versions of webpack. It seems that in only a few years, quality content has rapidly become so much harder to find amidst the mass of low quality SEO bait.

umvi2• 6 years ago

Or when you want to compare two products and the top result(s) are just auto-generated pages that dump the stats/spec of each product side by side. I hate that so much. I want to read what a human who has tried both thinks.

abacadaba• 6 years ago

the worst

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

It's surprising Google doesn't downrank such pages.

weinzierl3• 6 years ago

There was a time when searching for "A vs B" produced useful results. Nowadays a search like this is completely useless. I wish those auto-generated sites would completely disappear from the search results.

devit2• 6 years ago

Appending "reddit" to the query or doing it on Reddit directly can often return usable information.

dgellow• 6 years ago

IMHO the worst is that lot of young people actually consume, like and share that SEO/marketing stuff and spread it around without much thoughts. That’s the most popular dev content you will find on dev.to, medium, YouTube (for some reasons dev related videos became huge last year), and other publishing platforms. They don’t just generate useless content, they in fact have a public for it, thus little reason to stop.

disgruntledphd23• 6 years ago

My life became a lot better when I stopped reading towards data science (on Medium). It was just so much terrible tutorial content which was not only wrong, but actively misleading.

arp242• 6 years ago

The internet is a big bucket where everyone drops all sorts of stuff in. Some people drop in gold nuggets, sometimes even diamonds, many other people drop in less valuable materials, and some dump in a torrent of bodily fluids.

Our current solution is to rely on magical black box algorithms to give us the diamonds, but it's been creaking for a while.

I'm not sure how to make this better: one person's turd is another person's diamond, and people trying to game the system will always be a problem.

vbezhenar2• 6 years ago

Old school links might be a solution. I remember back in the day those blog websites which contained "links" page to the websites that owner likes and recommends. It's true P2P solution and does not require anything to invent. If you own a website and know some rare but valuable gems, just share them. Someone will find them. I think that's how Internet should really work.

As a side effect, it should really help Google and other search engines to rank those websites. External links of good quality still the best SEO.

monadic23• 6 years ago

Honestly, I wish I could just remove commercial results from google as part of the query. Some terms are essentially now useless because the first N pages are just ecom sites. Google definitely knows which sites are commercial because they’ve been pushing product metadata for about a decade now and serve ads for the same clients....

chrisweekly• 6 years ago

I think the solution (or at least a big part of it) is the resurgence of real blogs. When real developers write deeply technical posts about their experiences, on their own sites, everybody wins. Discovery is an issue, but there have been a number of HN threads recently on ways to mitigate this. Webrings, blogrolls, RSS... there was never going to be a super-convenient or efficient way to generate a high-quality, high signal-to-noise ratio set of sources. But curating your own preferred set of such sites, and making a habit of taking and publishing dev notes on your projects, and participating in the blog revival, is a step in the right direction.

zepto• 6 years ago

It’s fair to say that a Google has completely failed at its mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.

MattGaiser6• 6 years ago

No, they organize the world's information. It is just that the information changed to be more easily organized by Google.

hinkley3• 6 years ago

It feels like if you changed the nouns we could be talking about movies. We are, some of us at least, on our guard when a movie has a huge advertising spend because we have been burned by movies where, "all the best parts were in the preview".

Do you think it would be possible for us to have any transparency into how hard a web page has been 'advertised' and use that to inform our decision processes? I've no idea what that would even look like.

staycoolboy• 6 years ago

To paraphrase Gary Larson, "We know it is bullshit, but what kind of bullshit?"[1]

Marketing is fact mixed with coercion.

But this is about plagiarism.

The author of the article, in just under 800 words, is addressing the "copypasta" nature of a specific discipline: programming. I like the author's characterization of lazy or necessary plagiarism as "consumer" mentality. That's an interesting twist.

Was this not the 1970's American Auto Industry attempting to implement Japan's earliest implementation of lean manufacturing? Is the same to be said of any "ripoff" product that cheaply imitates the original: e.g., an off-brand version of an Eames Lounger, or cheaply made webcam off Amazon which is a faulty copy of a Logitech?

His observation is a reflection of complex constraints, and while I completely agree individuals should strive for a deep understanding and mastery of what they spend their lives doing, as it benefits us all directly or indirectly by making us conscious citizens (my opinion), I think this is a largely metaphysical reflection lacking contextual nuance rather than a call to action: we've all been in the shoes of his hypothetical individual committing the sin of programmer consumerism, and for good reason.

However, I do appreciate the clarity his transformation applies to a scenario we are all intimately engaged in.

[1] "We know they are idiots, the question is, 'What kind of idiots?'"

rdiddly3• 6 years ago

Of all the people who got all excited that the internet would "democratize information," most seemed to be thinking on the demand side. And it did come to pass, but very few seem to have anticipated that it would democratize the supply side too. Turns out the much-maligned elitism and gatekeeping of the past were actually performing (with imperfect fairness perhaps) the quality-control function they always purported to be performing.

monadic23• 6 years ago

Turns out the much-maligned elitism and gatekeeping of the past were actually performing (with imperfect fairness perhaps) the quality-control function they always purported to be performing.

Do you have an example? I’m getting strong “century of the self” vibes from this post.

If you’re referring to “fake news”, you should also acknowledge that the current protests across the nation would not exist at all without social media. People who want to characterize the effects as monolithically positive or negative leave me scratching my head, and I certainly don’t want to return to getting all my news via AP.

paulcole• 6 years ago

You do realize it was tech bros and not marketers who invented Google SEO right?

ozim2• 6 years ago

My solution for this problem: 1) stop trying to learn from random blogs, get a book. Books are still out there and you can learn just as good from them now as 20 years ago.

2) Get a subset of blogs to follow and stick to it. If you want to search in specific sites google has "site:" operator, you can search on specific sites.

3) by following 1 and 2 you can easily stop visiting shitty blogs made only for SEO, when they won't see any traffic they will fold because they will see no one is caring about what they write.

I am in process of implementing that. Got some books from humble bundle in topic that I am interested in, so no browsing crap until I get through those.

mdoms• 6 years ago

Unfortunately today a lot of the good content is hosted on the same domains as the terrible content. This is one of the many great downsides to content centralization.

If I read a really great piece of tech content it's not going to help me to use that domain in a site: query later when it's so often going to be medium.com or dev.to (which is starting to fill up with this same kind of bullshit content in the article).

user00012-ab• 6 years ago

The main reason books are better is because they are harder to write and produce. The person making the book actually has to invest a lot of their time in making it happen, unlike a blog post.

I've seen lots of articles on hacker news (and other places) that is "PART 1 of..." which does the introduction to what they plan on teaching, and then it just dies right there in the land of "PART 1's"

With a book, if you stop at part 1, no one is going to publish your book.

Another thing about books/web, is books go MUCH deeper into topics. It seems like 99% of the content on the web is "INTRO to xyz" but never "Advanced xyz"

Books are also broken into logical section so you have a learning path you can progress through; not just random content that you are to piece together yourself.

So, yes, very good advice; if you want to learn something, read the book.

blog posts are more just advertisements for buying an actual book.

weinzierl3• 6 years ago

"1) stop trying to learn from random blogs, get a book. Books are still out there and you can learn just as good from them now as 20 years ago."

Many books are not much better. While blog posts are bloated for SEO purposes, books are bloated to reach their target page count.

alibarber2• 6 years ago

Uggh - this!

Maybe I'm so used to it for programming queries, but I've gotten back into electronics and ham radio after a long time, and have always dreamed of owning a decent oscilloscope. Googling 'good digital hobbyist oscilloscope' just now was a frustrating waste of time. It's just pages and pages of regurgitated specs and affiliate links, no useful _actual_ reviews or anything...

Take this top 10 result. It's on Medium which is new and hip and nice so must be of high quality...

https://medium.com/@Amyperlman/best-buying-oscilloscope-for-...

Oh cool, hmm ok - what else does the author write about? "Things to consider before buying a camera for hunting" - "Drug Rehab for Married Couples" - <<Several>> Reviews for a particular line of vaccum cleaner, Baltimore Security Cameras and Interior Design in India. I mean sure they could genuinely have diverse interests and a chaotic and international personal life - but these articles are just keyword stuffing for another bunch of 'content' that will helpfully let you 'check the price on Amazon' for just about anything...

gregmac2• 6 years ago

Even though I generally prefer reading to watching, I've found in the past few years that YouTube is better for reviews, and I think it's actually because of this.

If you don't actually recognize the channel, you can usually tell if it's worthwhile by subscriber count, the other (types of) videos they've posted, and usually just by watching for tens of seconds. Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs), and you can judge their bias appropriately. Plus for many things, seeing it in action is much, much better than written descriptions or (carefully chosen) pictures.

For example, it's hard to disguise a crappy oscilloscope UI in a video (and if the reviewer doesn't show that, be suspicious!)

monocularvision• 6 years ago

The first paragraph:

Best Oscilloscopes are not a common field where people would choose to spend their spare time relaxing. However, analyzing and measuring signals might be an interesting fact for most engineers or people looking for complexity, isn’t it? That’s what we actually thought about before doing our research.

Reads like it went through Google translate twice.

mindslight• 6 years ago

Some search hits are deeper than others. Specifically, forums. EEVblog comes to mind. Figure out the spectrum of specific brands/models, then read and watch some reviews.

devit2• 6 years ago

Google should ban all sites with Amazon affiliate links from its search engine.

Stratoscope• 6 years ago

That Medium page on is hilarious! I recommend it if you are into oscilloscopes and want a laugh. My favorite parts are the opening paragraphs and the list of Key Points for each scope, which include:

• Available only in Grey. [Rigol]

• The color available is Grey. [Siglent]

• The devices comes only in blue. [LIUMY]

Yes, one of the main things I look for in a scope is what color it comes in!

• Works with both laptop and desktop PC. [Hantek]

Uh, why would any USB device not work with both a laptop and desktop PC?

bartread3• 6 years ago

I believe part of problem is Google SEO.

This and the fact that Google search is actually as dumb as a sackful of hammers.

Don't get me wrong, for the longest time Google's results were "good enough", but Google has no real concept of the quality of a result (they've tried and it worked for a while - e.g., PageRank). Still, fundamentally their algorithms aren't smart enough to figure out whether any given piece of content is intrinsically worthwhile.

That's really important in a world where most content is, regardless of Google's guidelines, primarily written for the benefit of GoogleBot, to harvest clicks or drive traffic.

Unfortunately Google has literally zero incentive to change this situation (because they're making an insane amount of money off the back of the status quo), so they won't[1].

Logically then, the time is ripe for a new search engine to disrupt but the problem - that of determining intrinsic worth - is really hard to solve, so as yet nobody has, and Google still reigns supreme as the most popular search engine.

[1] It is also possible that I'm being too harsh here: they might be trying to change it - perhaps because they're worried about eventually being disrupted - but, as noted in the following paragraph, the problem is REALLY hard.

tomxor• 6 years ago

What I don't get is how SEO isn't countered by unvisiting... By which I mean navigating back to the google search, I always assumed that would be a clear indicator to google that it's not what the user was looking for.

Maybe this does happen but it not weighted highly enough against SEO.

jacobobryant5• 6 years ago

Logically then, the time is ripe for a new search engine to disrupt but the problem - that of determining intrinsic worth - is really hard to solve, so as yet nobody has

I'm sort-of trying to solve this with a recommender system approach.[1] Search isn't my primary objective; I'm mainly focusing on the case where you want to be made aware of relevant information on an ongoing basis but you aren't necessarily looking for something specific.

But that involves building up a ratings database of lots of different URLs. If it becomes really popular, I'd like to experiment with search. It could start with a "normal" search algorithm but then adjust the results based on rating data. E.g. "the top result for this query is X, but people with similar rating data to you always down vote that link, so we'll move that result down".

I've heard people complain about how Google gives you personalized search results sometimes, but I'm not sure if the approach is actually bad. Perhaps it could work if it was focused on from the start instead of bolted on.

[1] https://findka.com

aledalgrande6• 6 years ago

I think this problem expands to tech meetups. It is very difficult to find a quality meetup. Most people never used the tech and the presenters make gross errors. Most recent I remember was a person trying to explain why GraphQL is good for APIs, while showing code with crazy N+1s. Certainly didn't convince me.

I'm not saying everyone should be an expert, but I would want the whole spectrum of experience represented. Now I don't invest time in meetups any more.

watwut6• 6 years ago

Meetups cater almost exclusively to younger people who want to learn something and socialize.

I don't think it is particularly wrong, but more experienced people tend to be older and less likely to have inclination or time to prepare talk or go to pub every week or so.

PopeDotNinja• 6 years ago

Confluent's marketing content for Kafka does an amazing job of making Kafka sound like the solution for every problem. I have a hard to understanding what it can actually do because the content is stuffed with so much selling and adjectives.

Animats• 6 years ago

"Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and modifying a little and trying to get lots (of) back links."

That's the real problem. There is a market for short-form clickbait crap. One can make a living writing that. There is not much of a market for long-form accurate technical material.

jugg1es• 6 years ago

"Those who can't do, teach". While I think this is usually a pretty offensive statement, I think it is an apt one in the world of tech blogs. The people who really know what they are doing are not writing blogs. That's why the content that the Netflix team releases really sticks out. If only they broke their 1h-long presentations into 500 word tech blogs.

salawat• 6 years ago

Those who are doing, also teach, but are constrained in their audience and time with which they can disseminate their know-how by employment contracts.

This is a feature; not a bug given the way our quasi-free-market founded on protection of trade secrets over actual marketwide innovation that lifts everyone else.

I try guiding anyone who'll listen how to do things I'm well versed in; but there is only so much one can do in a day.

Veen• 6 years ago

Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Tech content is no exception. As the article points out, the corollary is that you have to think for yourself, assessing every piece of content you come across.

andersco2• 6 years ago

Ha, I just posted something similar almost at the same time, but you said it better.

hinkley3• 6 years ago

There are dozens of us who would have stepped up if you two didn't.

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

Since we're arguing by aphorism, Brandolini's law a/k/a bullshit asymmetry principle: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417790

The value of a healthy established pedagogy, curriculum, and canon is that these distribute the bullshit-sifting role and guard and promote the jems.

quickthrower22• 6 years ago

2 orders of it’s your boss!

But seriously I hate working with non self critical developers because it’s exhausting trying to refute what they say. Although “asking questions” can help.

_alex_2• 6 years ago

I think Sturgeon was being generous

ternaryoperator• 6 years ago

Well, part of the problem is that there are few detailed book reviews anymore. The Jolt Awards for books were at one time a good guide. Nonetheless, one place that has fairly in-depth Java book reviews of all places is Oracle's Java Magazine. [0]

[0] https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/book-review-archive

jason05972• 6 years ago

It's a shame that it's now cool to hate on Java nowadays. It's still a great language to design web applications in, especially now with the newer releases and all the amazing features they put in. I will never understand why things like JavaScript are being used in the back end...

m463• 6 years ago

I think a surprising refined "meta" solution has come up in the last decade or so.

You can read an article, and figure out if it is crap for yourself.

But then you can check your work by reading the discussion around it (like HN comments). Look at the top (and bottom) comments. Match your thoughts against the opinions and comments of other critical thinkers.

A lot of critical thinking has already been done for you.

This doesn't always work, but a good comment/upvote/moderation system can be a surprising bullshit filter.

My comment does NOT apply to automated systems, or systems were money/seo/gaming have a payoff for someone. So please ignore this for facebook, for anything with sponsored results, for product reviews, or for wikipedia pages of wealthy or prominent individuals.

gallerdude• 6 years ago

Has anyone else faced the raw existential horror of how many programming tutorials there are online for a single question? Look up how to concatenate arrays in JS, and there are just so many sites that it almost makes my head hurt. I guess complexity and competition are necessary tenets of capitalism, but I feel some sort of terror at people just churning these articles out when there are so many already.

w1nter• 6 years ago

What’s more, I think the incentives are not aligned. People who write content nowadays don’t usually have the reader in mind, but instead focus on promoting something (a tech, a tool, or their personal brand): https://angryscript.home.blog/2020/05/08/in-2020-all-content...

delaynomore• 6 years ago

...personal brand... This. Unfortunately it appears that these days if you want to get ahead in your career is to publish content and develop that "personal brand".

dgb234• 6 years ago

If it creates new opportunities why not?

Of course your work can speak for itself, but who can hear it? Advertising through technical writing seems to be a very good thing as long as its valuable and honest. Because if it isn’t we filter it out.

itsspring• 6 years ago

This resonates with me. I use caution now, as much security (and cryptography) advice on StackOverflow is wrong and Perpetuates harmful patterns, yet is never taken down. What’s worse? It often shows up at the top of Google. Many devs don’t show the same level of caution until something blows up

andersco2• 6 years ago

This is true for all types of content - the art is to develop a sense of smell for quality content. And to do that you have to first have been exposed to a lot of bullshit.

Nextgrid5• 6 years ago

Filtering out Medium, HackerNoon and possibly FreeCodeCamp sounds like a good first step.

johnvega• 6 years ago

The word "most" is mostly used between 60% and 90%, or more precisely greater than 50% and less than 100%

fizixer• 6 years ago

Sturgeon's law.

_bxg14• 6 years ago

From personal experience, including reading a lot of HN, I think programmers as a species are especially biased towards putting forth opinions in the hopes of being validated for our experience or intelligence, even when we know we don't know much about the subject. The fact that IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) [but...] is a common enough statement in these circles to deserve its own acronym is telling. We often throw out unchecked opinions in hopes they may be right, because that would feel really good, and just let others tell us if they're wrong. When those opinions take the form of a blog post, rebuttal often doesn't exist in the same place as the content, making it seem more authoritative than it often deserves to be.

drewcoo• 6 years ago

It's not just programmers. It's social activity on the web today. And to stand out, you need to say something edgier or something contrary to popular opinion.

We're also all driven to correct the things we see that aren't quite right.

This comment has been a little of column A and a little of column B.

nitrogen3• 6 years ago

The Letters to the Editor section of newspapers may be a useful example of aspects of this opinion-expressing behavior over time. At least in the US, we are taught that we have an obligation to participate in the public discourse.

exolymph• 6 years ago

To be fair, IANAL is common across the entire know-it-all internet, which is basically everyone who can read at a college level and plenty who can't.

_bxg14• 6 years ago

I've never seen it outside of HN personally

aspenmayer• 6 years ago

Everyone was an expert online as far back as 20 years ago. Now look where we find ourselves. Time isn’t a flat circle; it’s a merry go round.

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/03/technology/suddenly-every...

https://web.archive.org/web/20181018000000/https://www.nytim...

goalieca• 6 years ago

When I first came across reddit (14 years ago?), it was almost a website for functional programming enthusiasts. Haskell was all the hype over there the way that rust seems to be all the hype over here. It felt more like a community of grad students with pseudo-academic blog posts hyping the latest ideas and research. At least that's how i remember it.

There was also a strong politics subreddit full of group-think but that wasn't what most people went there for I'd say. It was one of three subreddits if i recall.

The site definitely changed when users could create their own subreddits as that opened the board to just about every kind of person or group on the internet.

I believe sites would do best to specialize even at the cost of growth. I'm happy when hackernews sticks mostly to tech and doesn't silo us into specialized and moderated subreddits.

dgb234• 6 years ago

I’m not a psychologist but...

No, in all seriousness I think this is one true factor. But I feel like this isn’t a bad thing on its own. The issue arises when authors don’t disclose their knowledge or competence. Saying stuff like: this is what I assume, this us what I don’t know etc. or just posing plain questions.

_bxg14• 6 years ago

Right, but nobody's going to say any of those in a blog post. If you're going to the trouble to write a blog post you're probably making a statement. Even if it's ill-informed.

There's another dimension to this too, which is that writing blog posts and coming off as knowledgeable can directly translate into career opportunities. As long as you aren't too wrong, there's a material incentive to putting stuff out there.

elgfare• 6 years ago

I personally love discussions where I can throw out opinions, and get shot down without too much fuss when appropriate. I find that throwing opinions out helps discussion. This only works if people qualify their opinion, and there's an opportunity to actually shoot things down.

reaperducer2• 6 years ago

It depends on the forum and the context.

In some places, throwing out opinions to stimulate discussion is perfectly reasonable. In others, it's simply noise and misinformation.

chunky1994• 6 years ago

I don't think that's true of most people. People use IANAL defensively in an attempt to avoid embarrassment from being shown to be wrong in an ensuing discussion as opposed to a "free to present my opinion without scrutiny" statement. Most scientists have this too amongst a group of their peers (in conferences for example), they offer a lot of caveats in contributing to discussions that even though are primarily their realm of expertise, they may be out of their depth in the room.

If seeking validation is the prime motivation to contribute to a discussion, at the very least I think HN is the least guilty of this amongst most forums.

stared2• 6 years ago

I am not a sociologist, but I think it's not only programmers. A lot of my FB friends suddenly became COVID-19 experts, or experts on US police violence (or lack of thereof).

In programming, at least the code needs to work. Maybe it is a bad pattern or anything - but the barrier of entry is non-trivial. For anything else (e.g. politics), a lot of people have opinions, with their strength being not much correlated with their knowledge of the subject.

umvi2• 6 years ago

The main thing I learned with covid-19 is that you can put too much faith in science/experts. Or put another way, we should not forget to apply skepticism to science just because the situation seems "urgent". And people should not be browbeaten for expressing skepticism of hot-off-the-press science. Science will arrive at the truth, but it takes much more time and rigor than people generally acknowledge.

Looking back, it seems Feburary/March/April covid-19 experts' expertise had the same (or worse) predictive power as random programmers on HN.

andrewflnr• 6 years ago

I am not a sociologist, but...

Please tell me you did this on purpose.

skrebbel• 6 years ago

I don't know, talking about what is allowed and what isn't is pretty normal in most circles.

I think IANAL is a popular term on HN because HN originated in a country with a terribly litigious culture, and because HN is primarily populated by people who can at least afford lawyers.

If I'd "talk to a lawyer" as often as HN comments recommend people do then I'd have no money (or time) left to eat. The whole thing is about covering your ass.

CM302• 6 years ago

I thought the IANAL thing was because people didn't want to get dragged into a potential court case, or (wrongly)* thought giving any form of legal advice as a non lawyer was illegal.

So less about being validated for our experience, more about trying to avoid being dragged into court/relied on for evidence in a future court case.

metrokoi2• 6 years ago

Speaking from my experience, I write about my opinions not for validation, but because you must write about your opinions to be seen as a "real" programmer. People who quietly do their work and create things generally do not flourish. You must sell yourself and your ideas.

I suppose that is validation in a way, but not to feed my ego.

twic3• 6 years ago

I would say this is not unique to programmers, because i did it before i became a programmer. But then, i did eventually become a programmer, so maybe it is.

hn_throwaway_99• 6 years ago

I disliked a lot of this article, as "there is bullshit everywhere" seems like something that should just be an axiom at this point.

However, I will expand on a specific pattern of bullshit that is common in the tech world: over-complication for the sake of some sort of "theoretical purity". I think Redux is a good example of this. I think Redux can be used well, but it became the "recommended way to do global state in React" and IMO way many more code bases have become an incomprehensible nightmare because of Redux than have been helped by it.

Similarly, and I'm probably dating myself, but anyone remember the original Enterprise Java Bean specs, and the laughably bad "Pet Store" demo app from the early 00s? It was as if you took a collection of "architects" with no real world experience, and certainly no regard for performance, and had them create the most elaborate Rube Goldberg machine possible.

acemarke2• 6 years ago

Ironically, Dan and I have spent more time trying to convince people to _not_ use Redux all the time than we have trying to actually market it :( [0] [1]

We specifically have info in our docs on when it actually makes sense to use Redux [2] [3], but that doesn't change the flood of Medium blog posts out there.

I created the Redux Style Guide docs page [4] to try to give some clarification on our actual current recommended patterns and usage practices, and our Redux Toolkit package to simplify common Redux use cases [5]. Unfortunately, there's only so much we can do - a lot of people never even look at the actual docs.

[0] https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/you-might-not-need-redux-be4...

[1] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/05/idiomatic-redux-ta...

[2] https://redux.js.org/introduction/getting-started#should-you...

[3] https://redux.js.org/faq/general#when-should-i-use-redux

[4] https://redux.js.org/style-guide/style-guide

[5] https://redux-toolkit.js.org

ng12• 6 years ago

Just like to chime in and say I'm really appreciative of these efforts. I get devs at my firm who are learning to do web dev for the first time and ask why we're not using Redux by default. I link them to Dan's article and the Redux FAQ as part of my explanation that Redux is a life-saver when you need it and aggressive overengineering when you don't.

wonderlg• 6 years ago

Yes.

On one side there are blogs that just post content to keep momentum, say csstricks.com, and don’t care to fix their errors even after you report them.

On the other side there are absolute noobs that post unresearched content just because some VIP tweeted that you don’t need to be an expert to blog.

Well, that’s what you get: Bullshit everywhere.

Then of course you get awful StackOverflow “top” solutions that are straight up “worst practice”

Brozilean• 6 years ago

I basically realized this when I was at an internship talking to a buddy about a compilers course I could be taking and his language he was making for fun. He was talking about a couple topics I'd probably go over in the course.

Then a more senior coworker came over to join the convo and mentioned a few similar words that were clearly jargon related to compilers etc. He spoke with such confidence that I didn't want to admit I didn't know about them, but figured I shouldn't be ashamed at not knowing stuff. I asked him what it meant and he said he didn't really know and wasn't entirely sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

laurentdc• 6 years ago

I've noticed that "I have no idea" as an answer is one of the boldest statements you can make in the workplace.

Most people are playing fake it till you make it most of the time (until shit hits the fan, then incompetence becomes dangerous and you get to see who's been swimming naked)

thevirtuoso1973• 6 years ago

You and your senior coworker are allowed to not know things, and furthermore, allowed to talk about things that you don't know much about.

Was your role or the senior person's role related to compilers? You don't have to authoritatively know something to talk about it, and I never assume anyone knows anything authoritatively if they talk about it nonchalantly.

hinkley3• 6 years ago

I once mentioned off-hand that I was a SIGPLAN member so that I could get the proceedings and learn about future tech in compilers and JITs and GC.

One person did a double-take, looked at me, and said, "You can understand those?" I knew exactly what he meant, and consoled him by saying "only about 2/3rds," at which point all of the tension drained out of his shoulders. I had communicated that yes, some of it is just bullshit not fit for consumption, and that he was not an idiot.

As a Feynman dilettante, if you can't have a human conversation about a subject (note: conversation, not 'curing cancer'/winning the Nobel) then you don't really know the subject. Or perhaps more generously: It doesn't matter if you know it because you can't pass that knowledge on. You are dead end as far as human progress is concerned.

I suspect Tech people feel this more than pure researchers, because we know that in a couple years we will be focusing on something else, and 5 years at most we will be gone. If we haven't passed on our knowledge, then there will be consequences that are readily apparent. In academia you get so many opportunities to connect and if you connect with 5 people, you probably feel like your work is done, and you forget about people like me who regret ever encountering certain teachers because they set me back or in one case, put me off a course I believed I would stay to the end.

Me, I have 10-15 people not of my choosing and I have to connect with 2 and 1/2 of them. It's a tempest in a teapot.

Koshkin3• 6 years ago

As a saying that used to be popular back in the day goes, Nobody has been fired for buying (from) IBM. This in my view is what explains much of the problem.

djmips2• 6 years ago

so... "Choose boring technology"

mopsi• 6 years ago

I'd go even one step further: doubt what you think you already know.

I often check documentation of even well-known functions like printf() to remind me of details that I might have forgotten or remember inaccurately.

unnouinceput• 6 years ago

If tech is kinda full of bullshit, which on better or worse kinda need to rely on math, and most of the time can be reviewed - then wait until you go to socio science, like psychology. You need to see there how much bullshit it is, you won't believe it. But, just like tech, it's better with it rather then without it.

mrosett• 6 years ago

This is pretty good, but I had to chuckle when the author threw in a suitably impressive quote from Sagan about the dangers of appeals to authority.

huffmsa• 6 years ago

If most of it is bullshit, then the harm of bullshit mustn't be that high.

If it were, then none of this would exist.

But that there are some many tech companies taking so many different approaches (the majority bullshit) stands as evidence that there must be some acceptable amount of bullshit an organization can handle.

Textbook code is nice, but shipping and improving product is nicer.

leetrout• 6 years ago

I’ve said this for a long time:

The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work.

Of course there are exceptions but I’m extremely skeptical of a lot of stuff I read.

Also that the HN bubble will always make readers feel behind when in reality 90% of the industry hasn’t even begun to catch-up. I felt behind with K8S in 2016, for example, not realizing we were just seeing the wave form when I felt like it was cresting.

aledalgrande6• 6 years ago

Thumbs up for this. It is just a physical limitation of time, if you're writing you're not coding. I love when Aaron Patterson writes a post once in a blue moon, because they are so interesting.

jedberg12• 6 years ago

if you're writing you're not coding

Do you code 16 hours every day? Or do you do other things with your time in addition to coding? It's possible to spend your "free time" writing about coding instead of writing code. Humans can do both well if they choose to.

PragmaticPulp2• 6 years ago

The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work.

Not only this, but the most accurate business advice tends to be too boring to attract views and clicks anyway.

Link-sharing sites favor controversial opinions and stances that make the reader feel superior to their peers, so that's what the content producers deliver.

enraged_camel2• 6 years ago

> The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work.

I can't really agree with this. I think it's worth noting that writing about something you have just learned is a really good way to solidify that knowledge, especially if you are able to get feedback from others. So a lot of people deliberately set aside the time to do it, even if it comes at the expense of greater levels of productivity.

fxtentacle6• 6 years ago

I wouldn't want to read a tutorial by someone who has just learned it. I want a tutorial by someone who has ample experience.

How would you feel if I write a cookbook the first time my bread rolls didn't catch fire? ... to solicit feedback?

dgb234• 6 years ago

This might be true for some, but certainly not all.

There are plenty talented, productive people also writing articles and giving talks. Hell, most of what I watch/read (not just skim) is content either from the main drivers of a given tech or people who are experts.

It isn’t that hard to differentiate.

blub• 6 years ago

I suspect those on the other hand might not have much of a life outside tech.

softwaredoug2• 6 years ago

Disagree. When I do work, I’m super excited and can’t help but want to share. I know lots of people that have a similar outlook to work that brings them joy. It lights you up and you want others to share in that light.

Paradoxically when NOT doing work I share less

mberning• 6 years ago

In the last couple years I worked on migrating some teams from CVS to Git. That is the reality of a lot of projects in the industry.

thosewhoteach• 6 years ago

>The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work.

This is one of the most poisonous attitudes I have ever seen when it comes to tech content, and unfortunately it is really prevalent in the largest tech companies.

No wonder nearly all the documentation created by the tech giants is complete garbage and often out of date, with almost zero regard for people who actually read the documentation.

MattGaiser6• 6 years ago

No wonder nearly all the documentation created by the tech giants is complete garbage and often out of date, with almost zero regard for people who actually read the documentation.

A natural consequence of documentation being a "good beginner task" in open source or being assigned to whoever cannot get out of it on the project team.

Bahamut• 6 years ago

This is definitely true - I have been told by many respected people over the years that I should start a blog since I have a lot of interesting thoughts on subjects, but a lot of the issue to me is that I have a tendency to want to shape the tech the way I want for a blog, which leads to endless bikeshedding, and it's not as rewarding for me for the effort compared to doing more higher value things for work such as creating unplanned projects to solve work pains, planning other projects, figuring out new solutions to problems encountered at work, or mentoring other developers.

I have a tendency to drop my nuggets of wisdom/analysis in chatrooms in Discord and Slack (and IRC prior) and let others adopt/evangelize them on their own if it makes sense for them to. I'm ok being in the background while my true value is appreciated by those who matter for my own career.

jedberg12• 6 years ago

The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work.

I think that's a really sad and cynical view. I assume you don't spend 16 hours a day writing code. I assume you have hobbies and other interests. For some people, educating others about their favorite topics is their hobby. Writing about their projects is their hobby.

Here are entire blogs by people who are "doing":

http://www.brendangregg.com

https://perspectives.mvdirona.com

https://netflixtechblog.com

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com

https://airbnb.io

https://engineering.fb.com

Those are just a few I can think of in one minute. If I went through my RSS feeds and bookmarks I could find more.

azeirah2• 6 years ago

I would actually really like it if you would share some more high quality tech blogs!

twic3• 6 years ago

I think that's a really sad and cynical view.

It doesn't matter if it's sad and cynical, it matters if it's true.

pizza2342• 6 years ago

What's the point, exactly?

That there is a certain number of engineers who have a mix of talent and resources (=time), so that they can exercise software engineering and high quality technical writing?

They are an exception. Almost all the engineers I know (with one exception), who also have a regular life (roughly 40 hours engineering/week), have little time to dedicate to technical writing. As a consequence, it's not unreasonable to state that, in general and in practice, software engineering and (regular) technical writing are mutually exclusive.

bdcravens3• 6 years ago

I assume company blogs have a process where you have approval over what you write, both before and after the article is written. To this end (more so if the author has "evangelist" in their job title) the writing is a function of their job, and not a hobby.

timwaagh2• 6 years ago

Obviously the people who write for fb or airbnb or netflix might well be professional tech bloggers or people in tech-leadership positions that tell other people how to do the work. Or even researchers (I see the last one appear in ms tech blogs a lot). Or it might have been heavily edited. Brendan Gregg is a professional tech author. Not a hobbyist. Mr Vogels is a CTO, far from a programmer. That's not to disrespect any of their content. In fact i think its great that companies bother with it and that we have so many tech authors willing to put in the hours it takes to come up with something sellable. Arguably the people writing such things put their companies rep on the line so should be more trusted than the average grunt programmer who is still on the implementation level. But if these are the best counterexamples we can find, then I'd say OP has a point. That's not to say coders don't write blogs, I've written a few technical blogs myself and I am very much on the implementation level. But that's not something people will actually read because it's pretty low effort and not about work stuff (every work contract has a secrecy clause these days).

city412• 6 years ago

Not sure if the blogs from tech companies can really count here. Those articles are made with the company's interest in mind, typically to boost recruiting. In my experience, they are always written on company time.

twic3• 6 years ago

This is absolutely true, and it's fascinating to see the strength of visceral reaction against it.

habosa2• 6 years ago

I know many people who do great work and talk about it. The work is hard and getting to speak about it at a conference or write a well-received blog post is their preferred kind of reward.

ActsJuvenile• 6 years ago

Software libraries, APIs, tools, dependencies have exploded exponentially since the early days of C language and a handful of Berkley/Bell libraries. I often use a dozen different things for my projects and the next project invariable needs a different roster.

Thus I want to voice my contrary opinion that it is okay to "consume" and not "create" for non-core parts of your project. Need to do dump an arcane data structure to a remote logging tool? Go ahead and copy paste that StackExchange snippet kings!

cortesoft• 6 years ago

Sure, most tech articles are bullshit... but the question is, is the average developer going to do better figuring it out on their own? Are articles worse than the average developer?

carapace• 6 years ago

I forget the exact numbers but half of all programmers have been doing it less than five years, and this has been true the whole time. Exponential growth, eh?

Also, IT is fashion-driven and largely ahistorical. I have worked with people who don't know who Alan Kay is, for example, or have never heard of Prolog.

I think we are in an alchemical phase and (hopefully) transitioning to a chemical phase of knowledge. (Alchemy was mostly bullshit too, but there was a hellofa bull in there, eh?)

msiafterburner• 6 years ago

Agreed

omniscient_oce2• 6 years ago

I think it has something to do with this current culture of 'personal branding', wherein a lot of content online aimed at beginners says you should be blogging, writing articles, basically telling people how to do the thing you learnt that day on dev.to, blogs, Twitter, Medium, etc. I don't think it is necessarily bad per se, but it all seems a bit useless? I think there is good value in writing a personal blog, a log of what you've learnt coming from the perspective of a learner, rather than a teacher.

runawaybottle5• 6 years ago

I’ve thought about this. If I had to paint a metaphor, it’s akin to a tech selfie. Hi, I was here, using X technology (holds up blog post camera, points it at self standing next to the location/celebrity). Rinse and repeat, document your travels, it’s part of the modern melancholy, the extension of the self in a variety of superficial virtual forms.

What’s the main problem with this in the tech community? We need a lot of credible content that is downright technical. It hurts our community if we let the modern condition permeate into this domain too much.

peterkos• 6 years ago

Yep. I've read a lot of medium articles that have zero actual substance and are just pharaphrasing a different article. Or, they are advocating for an objectively bad principle that the first SO result says is not optimal...

me_smith• 6 years ago

Do you have any suggestions for blogs that come from a perspective of a learner, rather than a teacher? I feel like DevLogs in the game dev corner could be an example of that.

omniscient_oce2• 6 years ago

That's pretty much what I was thinking of haha. I like watching game devlogs too.

None come immediately to mind but I've definitely come across some before on the web. Basically they kind of go "here is my problem, here's what I tried first, that didn't quite work so I tried that, but then I learnt about super_mega_amazing_tech and I wrote my code like this and it seems to work."

I find those kind of things quite interesting to at least skim through if not read in full if it's well-written.

RNCTX3• 6 years ago

Speaking of how much of it is bullshit, it's also amazing how much of a language, frameowrk, insert multi-year project involving dozens of people, are willing to cede their entire knowledge base to... a google group? Blogs? Stackoverflow?

If your documentation sucks, your thing sucks. And as time goes on whether you like it or not, the collective record of community supporting itself IS part of the documentation.

What happens when Google or Microsoft buys Stackoverflow and drives everyone away from it, and it eventually goes dark? What happens when all of those blogs start to disappear as people move on to the next thing (Ruby/Rails...), what happens when google just wakes up one morning and declares that they're tired of groups and are going to delete them all like they've done with a dozen other failed projects?

raspyberr• 6 years ago

As are recipes. I don't understand why recipe blog writers want to be seen so much that they're willing to compromise their content. It's just a bunch of bullshit to pad out for SEO and then at the end the actual recipe.

dageshi• 6 years ago

The "padding" is for their existing followers who actually do want to read the padding (life stories,whatever) irrespective of the recipe itself. The recipe is advertisement to gain new followers from Google traffic. Merging both together works better than separating them out from the point of view of gaining more followers.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

Agreed

The "most popular" (and maybe click-bait like) the content, the more crap you'll get. Especially when people think they know the subject but they don't.

Most common offender nowadays: ML and Data Science. I've found articles with glaring errors, techniques that don't make sense, very shallow tutorials, etc (Disclaimer: nobody is immune from making mistakes, not even me)

And then you get "oh but you start training and then your loss go to zero, right?! This means it works, right?" Yeah. No.

If your training loss goes to zero, your are probably overfitting or the problem you're trying to solve is too simple. If your testing loss goes to zero, you're probably doing something wrong. Or my favourite: your loss is very low but what you're trying to predict has result A 99% of the time and result B 1% of the time. What's your loss if you only predict result A?

I mean, if even the myths about /dev/random and /dev/urandom keep circulating around, can you imagine about other stuff?

GuiA• 6 years ago

I took a grad level course on data mining/machine learning back in the early 2010s, before the current gold rush, and while there was some level of theory and programming, the professor spent a lot of his time discussing these finer points. The (apocryphal) example of armoring planes in the wrong spots [0] sticks with me to this day.

It’s human nature to focus on the more immediate, tangible outcomes - eg going through a pytorch tutorial - over spending time trying to really understand the problem they are trying to solve. Great teachers try to guide their students there, and great students are perpetually calling themselves out mentally to try and stay on the track of understanding rather than rote repetition. But it’s very hard.

[0] http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fc-2016-06

fxtentacle6• 6 years ago

I believe this all started with the advise to write blogs and books to market yourself as an authority.

As a result, nowadays, most blog posts are written by people who are seeking a job in that area, not by people who have experience working in that area.

I mean I'm sure that I would have experience about different topics. But I rarely have the time to write about it. Customers and their projects keep getting in the way.

So if someone has time to write one 2000 word blog post every 2 days, ask yourself: Why does that person have so much time for writing? Aren't they working?

tracerbulletx• 6 years ago

Ok, it might be true that a lot of inexperienced people are writing blogs now as a way to build a personal brand. But your reaction is an over-reaction. There are also lots of incredible experts writing, and writing its self is an incredibly rewarding and educational activity. It's not a waste of time, no matter how busy you are.

fxtentacle6• 6 years ago

Of course, there are also articles written by experts. But those experts will be busy and, thus, publish on a slow schedule. So I believe my heuristic is accurate that anyone posting content too quickly will most likely not do much actual work.

Also, if the internet is 95% articles by job seekers, then I'm better off distrusting everyone instead of expanding the trust that only 5% deserve to the other 95%.

MattGaiser6• 6 years ago

I know half a dozen students who have published "Intro to React" tutorials. They themselves know they are crap, but also know that recruiters will be impressed by the publishing without reading it.

foreigner• 6 years ago

"I was just following the pattern" is the programmer's Nuremberg defense.

jdnordy• 6 years ago

Articles have plenty of conceptual mistakes. And people are not perfect, either! Senior developers are not always good developers.

I think this point is well made. It is a good caution when consuming content on the internet to always be assessing. I seek to understand how something works before I use it.

Yet here's my question: Does this mean I should not be writing for my personal blog?

Writing helps me work out, articulate and understand better the tech that I am working with. And it might help others to work it out as well, even if it's not perfect.

janeshmane• 6 years ago

"Your solutions are not any worse than the ones on the internet."

Sorry, I just don't agree with this. Of course you need to vet the solutions you find online, but chances are you will find solutions that have already worked through bugs and edge cases you would only learn the hard way if you went forward naively.

stared2• 6 years ago

"Big data" was the biggest "appeal to authority epidemics". fortunately, it seems that now people have a more balanced view on small vs big data.

Way to often I heard "Google uses Hadoop, so you need to use it to" for companies with data good for an old laptop.

Now I hear a bit of "appeal to authority" when it comes to monorepos.

ineedasername• 6 years ago

As long as we're using project tracking systems like Jira and agile development, and at the same time developers are evaluated on the basis of how many "story" points they closed, this isn't really going to change.

MPSimmons• 6 years ago

See also, Cargo Cult Programming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

dpc_pw• 6 years ago

Oh, there's so much to unpack here...

Vast majority of my blogposts that have reached HN front page were ... inflamatory and controversial. The (IMO) wise content that isn't steering up the argument seems rather ignored.

... or it was about Rust. I love Rust, I really do, but I feel some of the things I wrote weren't really thaaaat worthwile, and it's just jumping on Rust bandwagon. SWE is mostly driven by fashion and trends, and not by merits.

I have a lot that I wish to share, but don't have to write it down in well-structured way.

The more you know, the more you realize the that right answer to everything is "it depends". And it's really hard to turn subtle context-dependent knowledge to something more universal that benefits broader reader. It's good to seek after most knowledgeable and skilled people you can find at your job and pick their minds whenever possible asking about opinions, experiences, and so on. The context is already there.

And in SWE as in anything complex it's just hard to verify any theory. Nothing is reproducible, really comparable. What worked for me don't have to work for you, and we don't even know why. Everyone, even if well informed and experienced, has just a fraction of the picture and is trying to deduce the whole as best as they can.

Then there's a whole thing that ... people in SWE aren't as smart and knowledgeable as they often think they are. Being Senior Software Engineer doesn't mean anything anymore. Oh, you did two bigger projects, and you think you know a lot, hmm? Even after a lifetime of practicing the craft, keeping up with the tech, languages, tools ... there's still so much to learn. And a big part of SWE is not the tech itself but psychology, management, business, social skills... .

My advice for people that are looking for great content ... "you have to dig through a lot of dirt to find a couple of gold nuggets", and "weird&niche" is efficient way to get familiar with new stuff: You're not going to learn a lot of if you only travel the mainstream paths. Learn Haskell, Forth, Lisp, write some side-projects using some really weird and niche tech just to get familiar with it and gain some new perspectives. You'll talk with people who have some interesting opinions and learn things that will be surprisingly useful even on the mainstream path.

efitz• 6 years ago

The author is complaining about random internet content but it seems to me he should be complaining about cargo cult programming by his team.

runawaybottle5• 6 years ago

I’ll just share a recent anecdote from work. A developer asked someone ‘What are the pros/cons of using _____ library?’, here was the answer — ‘This is what everyone is using right now’.

There must be a limit to this nonsense. So we’re just going to drop this into our stack because that’s what everyone else is doing?

phlakaton• 6 years ago

It's the "beating the averages" debate all over again. You get certain economies of scale doing what everyone else is doing, and face less political friction getting it adopted. But it may not be the absolute best solution for what you need, and over time, it may hold you back.

It's why we're not all writing our stuff in Lisp. ;-)

hidiegomariani• 6 years ago

so am i no longer allowed to copy-paste from stackoverflow?

f0rfun2• 6 years ago

Haha, no. You can still copy-pasta and also blog about it as real content. C'mon, how else can I feel good about my shitty self?

annoyingnoob• 6 years ago

I think it comes down to task turn-over. We get lazy when our job is about story points. There is no real reason to reinvent the wheel most of the time. When you need to eek out every bit of performance you need to dig deeper. I think finding the right balance of time spent vs perfection is important.

ddp• 6 years ago

This site is one of the reasons.

adamzapasnik• 6 years ago

Personally, my favourite one is seeing 1000th tutorial post on React.

f0rfun2• 6 years ago

Hey c'mon, back in elementary school, every cohort has at least written about their favorite past-time during writing classes. Just because the subject/title is the same, it doesn't mean the writing is the same. Every writer ends up with a style of their own and as a teacher, it was mostly a joy to read. ;) The only reason why there isn't a 1000th tutorial on Favorite Past-time is because there wasn't high speed, unlimited internet back then and students weren't allowed to use the computers back then. ;)

TrackerFF• 6 years ago

People tend to follow paths that are tried and tested, and often blindly so. Why? Because it's incredibly efficient to do so, and the vast majority of products do not need some incredibly levels of tolerance or performance.

If everything on the web were to be bespoke items, built from scratch, things would stop up. Simply too resource consuming.

For many, the process is to simply copy something that works, and use it until it breaks - and then look at the needed upgrades / reasons to why things failed.

soneca• 6 years ago

I agree with every argument she made and I think following her advice is great for every developer. But I would like to add a small caveat that I think doesn’t detract from the good advice.

Some of the reasons she mentioned are legitimate (meaning, they are good reasons to follow random blog posts and stack overflow answers), like having no time, or it is comfortable. Some are not exactly good reasons, but happens often since we are humans (we are lazy, we don’t believe in our selves).

I also would like to add one more legitimate reason: it is not that important. Like it is an edge case, a temporary code, a piece of software where the highest performance isn’t necessary.

I think it is important to maintain an attitude of always having a critical mind while reading tech content. And understanding her point that something being published does not mean that something is right. But, once that’s your default attitude, it is ok to accept that, sometimes, you can critically conclude that it’s ok to just follow that tutorial and copy that code without much thought.

If that is challenged in the future, it is also ok to answer that you did just because you copied someone on the internet. As along as you accept that this is not a strong reason, and recognize that it might have been a misjudgment on your part.

tonystubblebine3• 6 years ago

Good is hard.

When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming.

At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd thing that would lead to high quality. I remember this sort of was true in the PHP documentation. The official documentation was always deeply flawed, but the comment thread attached to that documentation generally had the right info.

But that was a precursor to our current situation. To get correct info you had to read a lot of conflicting info and synthesis it yourself.

So I think we are seeing as good as the free ecosystem can get and what's sad is that we seem to have lost the paid ecosystem. It's not nearly as strong as it used to be.

What people probably don't know about O'Reilly back in the day is what went into a book.

The author was almost always a subject matter expert already. And their editor was also a subject matter expert. Then the book would go through tech review and those people were generally also pedantic luminaries. Then the book would be published and bugs would come into an errata tracking system. The vast majority of those bugs would get fixed between printings.

And then, on top of all that, there was a tech support number. And if the code in the book wasn't working for you, then you could get a live person to try to work through it with you.

That all costs a lot of money, but when you split the cost out across consumers it was only $30 or so per book.

I value my time. And there are many, many places where I wish I could pay for quality. Tech content is one of them.

jjice• 6 years ago

Seems kind of like the video game crash of 1983[0]. A flood of low quality content that begins to drown out the high quality content. One of the best things about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want. One of the worst parts about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want.

I'm a big fan of books because that is where a lot of experts seem to prefer to publish their knowledge, and it's usually worth the price. Of course that's not always the case, but I feel like I get much higher quality content from books than Medium articles.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

brightball• 6 years ago

I’m the same way. I prefer books because an expert had the opportunity to help you understand a subject from start to finish.

Stack Overflow is great for quick reference to small questions.

azemetre3• 6 years ago

What are some high quality books you’d recommend that are somewhat recent (last ten years)?

The only ones I can say, that I’ve also read, are YDKJS and Secrets JavaScript Ninja (work in web, but willing to read anything, good information is good information regardless of the tech).

Sherl• 6 years ago

Another reason to vouch for books is, it takes painstaking amount of research, collection, compiling, citations and proof reading before you would read it. Not like someone spotting in the blog comment about a (logical) flaw. Not all tech content is BS though. Choosing whom to follow makes a huge difference, I follow Raymond Hettinger for Python, Blog posts make as a quick reference but fails as foundation building block.

trianglem2• 6 years ago

Yeah I went back to good old expert written books after years realizing that a lot of content on the internet, that is not paid for, is opinion and drivel and cannot be trusted.

jedberg12• 6 years ago

and those people were generally also pedantic luminaries

Having been involved in publishing tech books, that is a beautiful way of describing tech reviewers.

I too miss the paid ecosystem. And not just in tech books. Music too. Paying someone for curation had definite value to me.

tonystubblebine3• 6 years ago

Yes. I meant it lovingly. The feedback I got on my own OReilly book was intense!

goatinaboat2• 6 years ago

a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf.

I’ve never been so productive as I was in those days. Good quality documentation and no distractions. A golden age that we didn’t even know we were in. The modern development paradigm is a dumpster fire in comparison. Thanks for the good work you did back then producing those materials.

6510• 6 years ago

In a perhaps futile attempt to solve the problem (contribute to solving it) I came to think of it like this: Web pages have the same kind of content as the first bunch of pages of a book. The entire internet is like that. You reach the largest audience by assuming the reader knows nothing. Eating nothing but appetizers turns out unsatisfying. It gets truly absurd where everyone seems to [further] optimize for delivering as little as possible.

Yetanfou• 6 years ago

Part of the reason for the higher productivity probably was the lower amount of churn in the development tools, frameworks, paradigms-du-jour, deployment strategies, microservices, picoservices and more. It doesn't make sense to produce and print books about technologies with a half-life time of a year nor does it seem to make sense to invest time and effort into learning them - but you'll have to anyway.

vbezhenar2• 6 years ago

Books are awesome and somewhat under-appreciated piece of knowledge today. Many people prefer to lurk around blogs, documentation, tutorials for some technology, but I always trying to find a book from some reputable author. It does not always exist, but often it does exists and it's much better way to learn a technology. It might take a bit more time, because usually books present information in a more thorough way so you need to work from basics rather than copy-pasting some code and call it a day. But in the end it's worth time spent.

rammy12342• 6 years ago

I find very few books to be thorough. If you find books that contradicts itself, then the author doesn't know what he is talking about. A good reference point for a good book IMO

DeusExMachina2• 6 years ago

I make a living selling iOS development courses at high prices, so I can tell you that the we didn't lose the paid ecosystem.

I can't talk about book publishers like O'Really, and probably the market for books shrank. But I have several competitors that sell self published ebooks.

The plethora of free content you find online is not always a good thing for everyone. As the author of the article says, most tech content is bullshit. Most people don't care, but there are plenty of people that realize that and are willing to pay.

cosmodisk2• 6 years ago

Paid tutorials, especially in video format, usually serve different clientele. There's often 'show me how it's done' instead of 'let me figure this out after reading it' mentality.

tonystubblebine3• 6 years ago

Do you have a link? I'd like to check them out.

donmcronald• 6 years ago

I think part of the problem is that publishers did a bad job of pricing their digital products and missed an opportunity to increase sales volume. In my opinion they got greedy thinking they could increase volume and prices at the same time, so digital products were priced way too high.

I had a Safari Books subscription for a little while, but I got rid of it. I can't remember the exact pricing, but IIRC it was around $250 / year for the cheap option that let me "borrow" 10 books a month. The problem for me was that I'd typically buy 2-3 books per year ($100-$150) and I owned more than 10 books total, so the subscription seemed like a bad deal by comparison. The "unlimited" (with limited downloads IIRC) was $500+ / year. That's a lot of books.

O'Reilly could have been the Spotify of tech books, but old school publishers were too scared to reassess their pricing. When the cost of distribution plummets, but results in a worse (ie: more expensive), product for your customers, it's not a shock to see those businesses struggle IMO, especially when the competition is free and "good enough".

xfer• 6 years ago

Also for selling digital goods regional pricing plays a big role in my opinion. Part of the reason why steam is so hugely successful.

com2kid2• 6 years ago

The Spotify of books is a great way to look at it.

If a publisher had insanely high quality articles on everything, behind a paywall, I'd subscribe to $15 a month pretty quickly.

Every hour saved would pay for itself many times over.

The problem is having a wide enough array of content that such a site becomes the single go to. O'Reilly had that catalog, but I think the tech world had gotten much more complicated since then.

ghufran_syed• 6 years ago

I think it’s around 20/month now for O’Reilly learning (the new name for safari books). I’ve had it for around 5 years now, and I don’t ever recall having a limit on number of items. I feel like they have actually got better, with some really good video courses included as well. I’m just completing the second of two courses which are available elsewhere for $99 each, so I’ve almost paid for the year. I really like the idea of having this huge library I can dip into when I want to look something up, rather than getting lost in large amounts of low-quality blog posts online.

ramesh213• 6 years ago

Orielly learning comes free with ACM membership which is very affordable in developing countries. It really helped me.

cosmodisk2• 6 years ago

A lot of that free content is not just wrong but also convoluted to extremes. I was reading about roles in Asp.net. After watching a few videos, reading a few articles, including the ones from Microsoft,I was none the wiser. Then I pulled out a book I bought a few years ago and it turns out it had a section on about roles.The guy explained the whole thing in just few pages and in a way that even a donkey would understand,while all those websites were showing some unnecessary complexity. I bought some technical books, including some classics and it's so refreshing compared to all that junk on Medium.

Wowfunhappy• 6 years ago

Perhaps part of the problem is that books are hard to search?

It may well be a bad habit, but I frequently don't learn new technologies through a concerted effort. Instead, there's just something I want to do, and I google it, and after doing that a bunch I eventually learn a lot.

logicprog3• 6 years ago

I feel like that method of discovery is how I learn best, because I learn WHY something is the way it is, and how it's actually used outside of toy examples. Plus, it's just how most people are built to learn.

And yes, books not being searchable is basically THE reason I never use programming books.

garyclarke27• 6 years ago

I really appreciate good books, I recently bought Javascript The Definitive Guide, for a second time 2020 edition (O’Reilly) it’s expensive £40 but worth every penny, 10 times more valuable than umpteen books at £10 to £20, so actually great value.

logicprog3• 6 years ago

The problem with physical programming books - and don't get me wrong, I love physical books to a fault - is that they're easily made outdated, either with new versions of the same software, or the software gets replaced, or new best practices arise. Then you have to buy another version of the book. In addition to this, which basically makes physical programming books a nonstarter already, you have the issue that books aren't easily searchable or copy-pasteable.

Really, there's not much of a reason to have physical programming books anymore; it's just not practical, whatever the level of quality you get elsewhere. And you seem to have left out official documentation and stuff, which is getting really good imo.

The only reason for having a physical programming book is for totally timeless ideas, like algorithms and data structures textbooks, or introductory books to concepts like compilers.

bagacrap2• 6 years ago

yea, in short, the internet enabled speeding up all of the extremely time consuming processes described by GP. You could have kept the steps the same on the O'Reilly books, but used the web for bug reports, pushing updates, etc. So what it comes down to is curated and paid content vs crowd sourced and free (ad supported).

For me it comes down to scale. The chances I find precisely what I'm looking for on stack overflow is much higher than even the best curated content of all kind, just because SO is much bigger.

amw-zero2• 6 years ago

There are a lot of “totally timeless” ideas, so lots of reasons to have paper books. There’s also nothing wrong with a book becoming outdated. A book is the most efficient way to transfer a large amount of information between two human minds. Just because some syntax changes doesn’t remove the value of that information being transferred in the first place. And just because a “best practice” changes, that doesn’t mean that understanding the old best practice has no value. In fact, everyone would benefit from understanding the history, context, and evolution of “best practices” (which change so often that they should really be called “current practices”).

So, if you’re only looking at a book along one dimension which is “getting the most recent fashion status” in a fast-changing industry, then paper books aren’t appealing. But that’s the saddest dimension to evaluate a book on.

kumarvvr• 6 years ago

Good was hard.

Nowadays anyone can publish a book on Amazon, digitally and get published. It's reflected a lot in their Kindle bookstore.

Sometimes, having a good barrier to entry, brings out the best and the most dedicated.

kcorey• 6 years ago

I'd certainly pay for timely quality (I had at one time 4 packed bookshelves lining the walls of my office).

The problem is that "timely" bit.

A good book take 3-6 months to write, edit, review, and publish.

In that time we could have as many releases with the info in the book radically out of date.

Only solution is to go online, but that doesn't help the traditional write/edit/review cycle much.

Things change so fast, I don't see much option to Stack Overflow... Not really.

metrokoi2• 6 years ago

At the beginning of my career, I would never, ever, post anything technical on the internet. I thought that if someone was brave enough to post a blog post or take part in a tech discussion, they always know what they are doing. I couldn't be more wrong!

It's unfortunate that to have any sort of success as a software developer you must write about your opinion on frameworks, languages and techniques even if you know little about what you're talking about. Many developers and engineers blog because that's just what you do, not because they have anything important to say.

MattGaiser6• 6 years ago

The problem is that many people are willing to admire and praise the action and infer something from it because they aren't willing to spend time actually judging the work.

That makes the action prestigious in itself.

mclovinit• 6 years ago

Making a ton of mistakes early in your career, being lucky to work with those that took the time to have constructive discussions/arguments with you (i.e. they're passionate and actually give a crap about budding talent), and paying it forward are a few key things that make for a good engineer.

I've pulled whatever hair out that I have on a Friday night trying to figure out something with a solution or approach unpublished elsewhere when I could be watching Doctor Who or getting fat on fat free ice cream and sedentary on my couch instead. Sometimes spending that personal time experimenting pays dividends in the form of a working solution. Other times it builds grit.

jlengrand• 6 years ago

It's funny because I agree with what she says, but the amount of black/white in her post (and many of the comments) also trigger me.

I don't always go on a blog post searching for THE truth. I go to get someone's view on something. Maybe get excited by the journey or what was achieved. Learn about the use case. And somehow, in some cases, because they are less biases junior developers that write actually have interesting insights.

If I want the dry and no BS info, I'll go read the source, or the doc. If I go on a blog post to read about X, Y or Z, I don't just swallow it and take it at face value, I just hope to find something that will interest me to learn more about it.

And yet, I agree that a lot of what I see lately is marketed to no end, and it becomes harder and harder to separate actual value, from tooling marketing.

arpa• 6 years ago

Crypto is not bullshit, probably. Don't roll your own crpto, probably.

jvilalta• 6 years ago

And then your manager/architect reads this content and asks you to implement this, saying "it's easy and it just works". They never go deep enough to understand the costs, consequences and tradeoffs.

LockAndLol• 6 years ago

There's bullshit everywhere

The words of George Carlin ring in my ears:

Bullshit is everywhere. Bullshit is rampant. Parents are full of shit, teachers are full of shit, clergymen are full of shit, law enforcement people are full of shit. The entire country is completely full of shit

shill_predictor• 6 years ago

That was my thought as well. It's hard to define something to not appeal as bullshit but so many people do not care or can't comprehend the outcome/judgement on the reader side. A few comments above mentioned hackernoon and I saw that on our slack a couple of times. Now that I checked it its a complete shitshow with people just starting in the sector or shilling their crypto coin.

A bit hard to get around the whole thing when up to senior engineers seems to enjoy this type of content.

And thats why I am enjoying HN and more unfiltered channels like /g/. You can have a somewhat anonymous review/judgement/comment on topics which you would never came across on these blog posts.

badfrog• 6 years ago

Adapt solutions to your particular use case. There's no one-size-fits-all solution for everything. Compare different approaches, analyze them. Tutorials or articles show an idea, but may not present production-ready code. Always analyze it before you decide to use it.

This advice seems weird to me. I've been a professional software developer for a decade, and probably 95% of the time it doesn't matter if you're doing things in the most ideal way. The important thing is that it works, is reasonably performant, and is reasonably maintainable. If you can get that in 20 minutes from stealing somebody else's solution, it's probably better in the long run than spending 4 hours figuring out a slightly better solution. Maybe the hard part is identifying the 5% of the time when it does matter that you do something the most ideal way?

andai• 6 years ago

Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

Henry Ford

djmips2• 6 years ago

I like how "choose boring technology" and "most tech content is bullshit" are simultaneously trending.

29athrowaway• 6 years ago

I think the observation is OK, but the conclusion is wrong.

Engineering is not only about hard science, but also about processes. The way processes evolve is often based on empirical data rather than hard science.

Now, that does not mean that one can just forget about science entirely. As engineers, we should try to use a logical, rational, data-oriented mindset when making decisions.

If the reason a decision takes place is only because an authority said so, with no real reasoning behind, that would dogmatism: strongly held beliefs that will not be rationally discussed.

We should always keep an open mind and understand that a large part of our knowledge is simply a local maxima in our way to a deeper and better understanding of things, and dogmatism puts a stop to that process.

codingdave• 6 years ago

I call this (BDD) blog-driven development. There is nothing inherently wrong with tech content posted online... the problem is when people don't put some critical thought into it and decide whether the solutions they see online actually match their current needs.

jdauriemma2• 6 years ago

I agree with the problem presented by the author, but not necessarily with the solution.

If blind acquiescence to random blogs and forums is a sin, then so is blind acquiescence to one's own limited experience. Most categories of software problems have already been solved. Being a "creator," in the truest sense of the word, is therefore rare. Most of the time, when we endeavor to "create" instead of "consume," we are just reinventing the wheel. That's often a good use of time, but it can also lead to bad code.

Instead of abandoning "consumerism," I try to challenge others to refer to prior art. It is only by filtering through books, documentation, and yes, random tech blogs, that we can get a sense of how much of what we're doing truly needs to be "created."

ozim2• 6 years ago

I would say author meant not "create from scratch" as in "reinvent the wheel", more like be a creator who is making conscious choices. You can still be a creator by making a remix using samples created by other people. Difference is that you just don't blindly copy-paste with a bit of tweaking so it "fits", but to know what you do.

jdauriemma2• 6 years ago

That's a reasonable conclusion. If that was the author's intent, I think it would have been helpful to have described that further. In particular, I've noticed (anecdotally) that many early-career devs tend towards trying to code their way out of problems like it's a test or challenge.

jwr• 6 years ago

This is very true. I think I'm breaking at least several dozen "Rules for How It's Supposed To Be Done" in my fairly large software system (self-funded SaaS). But each and every time I thought carefully, considered it, and then made a decision. It's worked out great each and every time I did that.

My takeaway is the same as the author's — rational approach is king, things should not be taken for granted and "best practices" might be good ideas, or they might just be the current fashion du jour.

Think for yourself.

rchase• 6 years ago

I'm 51 years old. Think I was about ~40 when I realized the dipshits I went to high school with (and thousands more like them) are running the world now. That was an absolutely terrifying realization. The author's point about tech content is true in my opinion and experience, but the larger point also applies to most every aspect of our society. 'Appeal to authority' indeed.

Fuck everything about that.

My friend from middle school, Mike 'the douche' W. is now the MAYOR OF A FUCKING CITY. Just no.

BECOME an authority on a given subject (takes a little longer, is much more valuable long term.) This also means you have to pick your battles... life is only so long, pick your shit and get good at it.

All that being said, community knowledge is a GOOD thing. We don't exist in an isolated state, the tech. community in particular. There's no one person who knows how all this shit works anymore, so thoroughly documenting what we do know, and sharing it globally is also incredibly valuable in a communal sense. None of us makes this stuff happen, whether you like it or not, we're all working as a team.

Oh, and also, passing on some wisdom here... never trust a contractor with clean boots.

randompwd3• 6 years ago

At the beginning of my career, I would never, ever, post anything technical on the internet. I thought that if someone was brave enough to post a blog post or take part in a tech discussion, they always know what they are doing. I couldn't be more wrong!

So true.

I think this is just personality trait of people who are over-confident. I started out profesionally at roughly the same time as another dev in a non tech company. Pretty much the only devs in the company.

Technically, I was more skilled and had more engineering mindset. Both of us were savvy on biz side.

However, I was more reserved and less cowboy solutions than him. He was a nice guy and a friend but the difference in personalities were stark when it came to technical things. (This was a mature, real business who previously had outsourced the only dev system they used(ERP)).

He jumped so quickly from doing technical to just talking technical and his career climbed. All the while, I'm wondering how the heck can he take that position when he doesn't know shit about the tech. Turns out if you drift towards management, nobody gives a shit if what you're talking about is a good idea or feasible - the people above you in non-tech companies generally know less than shit.

Now an engineering manager at Bezos company.

robocat3• 6 years ago

I hate to diagnose over the internet, but it is possible you have engineer’s blindness. This usually only happens to technically excellent developers.

When an developer lacks some productivity, political, or teamwork skill, they sometimes simply don’t know that they are missing that skill (or they think it is a worthless skill), and can’t understand why someone else gets promoted over them.

In this case, you could ask the other dev, because if he has a skill that you are lacking, he should be able to recognise your lack of that skill. This sounds a bit Dunning-Kruger but it usually isn’t. The issue is more about deliberate blindness (e.g. considering technical skills are king and politics as valueless), and usually a wilful disdain for recognising the hidden skills of others (“how did that idiot get that promotion” - maybe that idiot has some skill you struggle to recognise?)

If you think you might have engineers blindness, and are in a big enough organisation then:

1. try to look at “successful” idiot/wanker/useless engineers and see what things they are good at. Try to look at those you might disdain (sales/marketing/exec) and try to see where their value comes from. If someone can get their mind to be non-judgemental about others and be interested in the unobvious skills of others, they learn a lot (in my experience).

2. Look at what holds back other engineers, and look within yourself to see if you have any similar pattern.

Disclaimer: I would definitely call myself an engineer type. The above took me decades for me to recognise, and I still can’t do politics (but I now recognise the value, and I am learning to see when someone is good at it). And it is quite possible none of this applies to you: I am likely to be misreading you completely.

randompwd3• 6 years ago

Well, it could be. However, a family member who had years earlier excelled in a (non software) technical field before jumping to management positions then founder had given advise. Become excellent at $skills then move up. Good advise. Advise i'd pass on with the caveat that talking tech is so f*kin easy at 10,000 feet, be prepared to see less able people jump upwards before they're anywhere near ready.

edit: this was ~10 years ago at this stage. I've stayed hands-on technical by choice(in various roles) while the other jumped to "pseudo-leadership (incl. Thought Leadership©").

edit edit: By no means was he an idiot. Just cavalier.

unsignedchar• 6 years ago

I wonder if you know how he fared at Bezos company afterwards; presumably “the people above you in non-tech companies generally know less than shit” doesn’t apply there

randompwd3• 6 years ago

Still there and I wouldn't be so sure. Fake it until you're high enough in an org then jump sideways to another gig(which is what he did).

nippoo• 6 years ago

Counter-argument: coming up with your own, carefully considered solutions to every technical challenge is absurdly time-consuming. The reason we can build such complicated applications in such a small amount of time is partly because we're relying on other people to make default, sensible tradeoffs - a framework supporting a particular type of SQL database, or NoSQL, or PHP or Django or whatever it might be. The mental effort of analysing all the tradeoffs of doing something one particular way (with such a wide range of possible options) for every little decision rapidly gets overwhelming. Of course it's worth doing a bit of research (which often ends up being "read someone else's blog" for bigger decisions, but unless you're willing to spend 2 months building a prototype application in each of Ruby, Django, PHP, and whatever other fun new JS framework du jour there is, it's perfectly valid to go for the path of least resistance and hope it doesn't cause you too many problems in the long run.

ori_b• 6 years ago

Counter-argument: coming up with your own, carefully considered solutions to every technical challenge is absurdly time-consuming.

You should really understand the problem you're trying to solve. Once you understand the problem, evaluating a solution is not so hard.

And implementing a solution without understanding it is negligence that will bite you in prod sooner or later.

https://blog.nelhage.com/post/computers-can-be-understood/

quickthrower22• 6 years ago

There just isn’t time for what I think you are saying. Analysis is a cost itself. Shortcuts have to be taken to get anything done. Judgment is required to navigate those shortcuts. Some might be unknown unknowns.

phkahler• 6 years ago

> Believe in yourself. Your solutions are not any worse than the ones on the internet.

This needs to be clarified. If taken literally then people will never improve and Joe average will continue to post bullshit on the internet.

Most solutions are probably comparable to much of what is on the internet, but that doesnt make it ok. We need to filter what we see on the internet. If you learn a new concept that's good, and maybe it's what you need. The key is to keep trying to do better while looking out for fads.

I've seen a lot of change over the years regarding big new paradigms. Some I tried, some I tried and passed on (Java) only to see them fade. Maybe I'm ready to start a blog ;-)

lowbloodsugar• 6 years ago

I have seen first hand two people getting hired (I did not interview them) who had reasonable blog posts and who, once they arrived at a desk, could not program. (Fortunately the second time I was in a position to change the hiring process).

I have also worked with several people whose skill was sounding clever. One liked to read MSDN magazine, and then regurgitate the talking points to the CEO and CTO, who liked to trot him out in front of potential investors and customers. The content was just advertising Microsoft products utterly inappropriate for our startup, and eventually the company died after failing to deliver feature after feature because of vast over-engineering.

There are communication skills and then there are programming skills. Being good at either one is rare. So statistically if you meet someone who is good at talking or writing about coding then, absent any other evidence, that actually tells you nothing about whether or not they can code. Script kiddies are still alive and well, and some of them are Blog Kiddies now.

Yet, though it is a small intersection, it is not empty.

TheSpiceIsLife• 6 years ago

Most content is bullshit, including this comment.

For possibly the least bullshit content you'll ever read, I defer to HN user RobertoG's comment from ~2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792243

This blog post shoots itself in the foot with its conclusions:

Realize that there's tons of misconception in the world. People and their solutions aren't flawless.

Therefore, any solution you come up with yourself is likely to be flawed and full of misconceptions. Might as well use someone else's code / misconceptions / flaws.

Adapt solutions to your particular use case. <snip> Always analyze it before you decide to use it.

Who has time for that? We're all too busy being distracted by contentless-content. Or you could just say something like: it seemed appropriate at the time.

Believe in yourself. Your solutions are not any worse than the ones on the internet.

This is the real kicker. My solutions probably aren't any better either. On the whole half of all people engaged in a profession or job-role are below average. You'd probably do just as well to outsource all of your decisions to either someone else or the crowd.

Being a developer is about constant learning.

That's very idealistic. Maybe some / many people just want to go to work, do the minimum possible, and get home, and for a lot of people that's probably okay.

People sometimes use libraries without a more profound understanding.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't at least part of the reason for using libraries that they abstract away the need to have a profound understanding of the topic?

a-nikolaev4• 6 years ago

A lot depends on the programming language used in the online tech materials. It's very hard to find anything worthy in Python or JS, because for many people it's their first language, and "teachers" are only one lesson ahead of their "students".

On the other hand reading something explained in OCaml, Scheme, Erlang, Julia, D or similar niche and not hyped language can be of very high quality. C also tends to be good. Interestingly, C++ is also slowly becoming a niche high-quality language recently.

RNCTX3• 6 years ago

This is just flat out false. You're showing your (lack of) age here.

The nature of niche languages is people who like them run to the next niche when the next niche springs from the aether. And when their blogs and youtube channnels die, so will they wither on the vine.

There has always been higher quality documentation for Python things than most languages, because as a community, Python encourages quality documentation by providing tools to help developers write it more efficiently. There are quite literally entire platforms that teach a complete beginner who has never written a line of code how to write javascript, for free.

There's a difference in having good documentation, and someone reading the documentation to you. Sounds like you're equating the latter with the former.

You realize C++ has been around since 1979, right?

a-nikolaev4• 6 years ago

Okay old man, show me your age and knowledge: do you know about Oleg Kiselyov and his amazing articles? See here: http://okmij.org/ftp/

bdcravens3• 6 years ago

A lot of times I want to share, and while I'm a pretty good writer, I really don't have the bandwidth to write a great article, but can usually throw it up on a screen. Example: https://medium.com/@bdcravens/fixing-docker-for-mac-and-rail...

I'd probably share a lot more, but it's not about not having time to share, as much as not having the time to bring the quality up to a level I'm willing to attach my name to. I suspect many are in the same boat.

thefujin• 6 years ago

Most of the things are bullshit. Especially on the internet where everyone can share their thoughts virtually without any filters.

whack2• 6 years ago

Call me a cynic, but the whole "think critically and figure it out for yourself" solution is inefficient at best, harmful at worst. Global warming skepticism is exactly the kind of thing that often occurs when people trust their own judgement more than that of subject matter experts.

There are very effective ways to get high quality recommendations, with minimal effort on your part. Want to get good medical advice? Find two highly regarded medical specialists and ask them independently for a diagnosis and treatment plan. Not two doctors next door. Not two doctors who published random blogs. Two doctors who are highly regarded by their peers and by the wider industry.

Want to get good financial advice? Do the same thing with financial advisors. Looking for good fitness advice? Do the same with fitness trainers or nutritionists. Looking for good software engineering advice? Do the same thing with developers.

Eventually the day will come when you have learnt and grown so much, that you are just as capable as the "highly regarded" experts. When that day comes, feel free to debate the merits of their arguments. But until then, don't try to be an expert at everything. Don't feel pressured to derive every single thing from first principles. That's just not scalable.

RangerScience2• 6 years ago

You're a cynic ;)

Knowledge from experts should feed into "think critically and figure it out", rather than replacing either with the other.

Software has an added bonus of the "works or doesn't" test, so it's easier to (in)validate the results of that thinking than, say, something on the scale of a planet and decades.

cryptica4• 6 years ago

> Software has an added bonus of the "works or doesn't" test,

This is true, but I think the new problem that our industry is facing now is "How much effort and how many resources are required to make this software work" - This leaves a lot of room for manipulation and people do exploit it in most companies (especially large corporations). These are many tech companies these days where it takes 20 developers to produce results which could in fact have been done by just 1 developer in the same amount of time. I'm not exaggerating the numbers here.

I think the problem lies in perverse corporate incentives (or rather, the absence of meaningful incentives) and the way in which it affects how people pick their battles. Most employees pick all the wrong battles for all the wrong reasons.

The more money a company has and the more solid their monopoly is, the more employees will be focused on internal politics rather than value production.

rapind2• 6 years ago

Many of us were told growing up that we were a special snowflake. Not sure there's correlation (not sure how you'd prove it), but I have my suspicions. IMO we're in the age of individualism. Hopefully it's just a cycle.

The real kicker is it seems to be self-fulfilling. If experts are no longer trusted or respected, the market / margin for expertise shrinks. You get lots of self-proclaimed experts to fill in the gaps with less investment (lower margin == lower investment, clickbait), and then the individual is justified in thinking most expertise is crap... because it is now crap (advertiser supported business model).

Maybe we wake up some day and say "Holy shit, it's all just bullshit!" and then expertise can again attract an audience that's willing to pay for it.

andreilys• 6 years ago

You can always rely on the Lindy effect in times like these. Except for technical books, I try not to read any book that have been published in the last 20 years.

Old books that are still read will continue to be relevant while the current NYT best seller is more likely to fall into obscurity.

frequentnapper• 6 years ago

How would the non-experts differentiate between true expertise and self-proclaimed one?

XelNika• 6 years ago

Call me a cynic, but the whole "think critically and figure it out for yourself" solution is inefficient at best, harmful at worst. Global warming skepticism is exactly the kind of thing that often occurs when people trust their own judgement more than that of subject matter experts.

I don't think that's true. Lots of global warming sceptics point to some subset of experts who are themselves sceptics. Even subject matter experts have biases. If we ignored those, we'd probably still be unlikely to find many global warming sceptics who had done their own in-depth research. It seems to me that most people in this category (whether it's global warming scepticism, anti-vax, 5G death rays or something else) merely seek to confirm already held beliefs and end up rejecting the opinions of actual experts in favour of misinformation from the kinds of people the blog post is talking about.

Beyond that there are also people with deeper issues than just a disregard for subject matter experts. If you look to extremes (e.g. flat Earth believers), some won't change their mind even when they do the experiments themselves and find proof to the contrary.

whack2• 6 years ago

Lots of global warming sceptics point to some subset of experts who are themselves sceptics

Yes, this is exactly why you should:

1. Consult more than one expert, until you've found a clear majority. And then trust in that majority

2. Pick either a couple experts who are the most highly regarded in their field. Or use random sampling to pick a couple experts from among a pool of equally qualified experts

As you yourself pointed out, people who fall for fallacies often form their own judgement first, and then cherry-pick experts to lend more support to their argument. This is precisely the danger in telling lay people to trust in their own judgement.

Cherry-picking of experts is the opposite of expert-guided decision making, because the cherry-picking part is being driven by lay judgement, not expert recommendation. A truly expert-driven approach would rely either on the most highly regarded experts, or random sampling from a pool of equally qualified experts. This leaves minimal room for cherry-picking and confirmation bias.

dredmorbius5• 6 years ago

I'm working on a reply to another HNer on just this point.

cryptica4• 6 years ago

There are too many bullshitters in the software industry. Years of experience helps but it's not sufficient to be a good developer. There are many terrible developers with 20+ years of experience and there are some great developers with only 10 years of experience.

The number one characteristic that makes a developer great is their critical thinking ability. These developers don't blindly adopt tools and business processes based on popularity. They are always able to justify their decisions with strong arguments which convincingly explain why their chosen option is better than all the other possible options. This applies to every decision they make.

Writing software is more like chess than checkers - You need to consider every reasonable option many steps ahead.

IMO software development is a complex area - Following common industry patterns and best practices without thinking about whether or not they actually apply to your particular use case is almost always the wrong approach. There are nuances in essentially every single software project which would warrant deviating from industry norms in at least some ways.

To always follow best practices blindly without questioning them or adapting them to your use case is in itself a terrible practice.

Also, the problem with trusting experts in complex domains is that the line between an expert and snake oil salesman is incredibly blurry. Sometimes even moderately skilled insiders with domain expertise don't know how to tell apart an expert from a conman.

The software industry has grown extremely fast and now the situation is that there are a huge number of highly vocal novices who pose as experts and who are silencing the real experts.

AmericanChopper2• 6 years ago

Median competency in most professions will typically be quite low. In software this is exacerbated by the high pay, which attracts a lot of charlatans, and the fact that our industry has almost no professional standards (unlike say structural engineering). I’ve never thought it was much of a problem though, because it just makes it easier for the sufficiently competent to distinguish themselves.

dntbnmpls• 6 years ago

Global warming skepticism is exactly the kind of thing that often occurs when people trust their own judgement more than that of subject matter experts.

Except that the "subject matter experts" have a horrible track record. Also, global warming proponents misrepresent the skepticism. Nobody is really questioning the warming of the earth. People are questioning how much man is responsible for it. After all, the "globe" has been warming for thousands of years before industrialization. There are "subject matter experts" who believe the warming is mostly a natural phenomenon. There are even fringe "subject matter experts" who believe the earth will cool. You aren't a cynic, you are just agenda driven.

Want to get good medical advice? Find two highly regarded medical specialists and ask them independently for a diagnosis and treatment plan.

Where and which ones? The one's that say you don't need to wear masks or the one's that say you need to wear masks?

I won't bother with the rest. All you are saying is believe and trust authority. But the problem with that was a time when "experts" believed in global cooling, medical experts believed in blood letting, political experts believe in racism, financial experts believe in subprime loan derivatives, etc. Blindly believing authority also tends to cause a lot of problem. The problem with the "experts" in your list is that it has become so politicized and corporaticized that one has to be skeptical by default.

yawaramin4• 6 years ago

All of that sounds good in theory until we reach this point:

Looking for good software engineering advice? Do the same thing with developers.

Which brings us back to the OP:

Most tech content is bullshit

So we've now come full circle. Hence I would point you to another post that came out recently that would be useful to understand what you wrote: https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/04/your-statement-is-10...

someguydave• 6 years ago

Humans have only been writing software for less than a century, mostly the last 50 years. That's nothing like other professions like blacksmithing or writing. It will take centuries until people learn how to write software well.

goatinaboat2• 6 years ago

Humans have only been writing software for less than a century, mostly the last 50 years

50 years ago was the beginning of Unix sure but programmable computers were already 25 years old by then, and the concepts were even older.

klibertp• 6 years ago

with minimal effort on your part. Want to get good medical advice? Find two highly regarded medical specialists and ask them independently for a diagnosis and treatment plan. Not two doctors next door. Not two doctors who published random blogs. Two doctors who are highly regarded by their peers and by the wider industry.

This is a tangent, but I'm currently in the situation where I really need to find these two doctors, after years of suffering from a rare (combination of) medical issues. I've been searching for a doctor who has experience with treating my (or similar) conditions, for decades now, and I just can't seem to find it. Meanwhile, my problems become more and more disturbing, with me being unable to work anymore in the near future.

So please, if you know how to find the "highly regarder medical specialists", please tell me. Especially if it would take "minimal effort", because I'm steadily losing strength and soon the minimal effort will be the most I can exert.

xpaqui• 6 years ago

Clearly it was an general example with limited life application. The expert doctor problem is a good example of this. So is the expert financial advisor, etc.

In your case I would ask doctors for doctors recommendations, and test alternatives - through recommendation only - outside of the common doctor. The former since doctors know other doctors, the latter due to most alternatives being non invasive, and with no side effects except the perpetual disappointment you've experienced so far.

trianglem2• 6 years ago

Absolutely. It’s question everything. Not question everything and replace the explanations you don’t like with personal, gut-feel views.

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 years ago

I am in the process of preparing a video class on Core Bluetooth (the native Apple framework).

I thought that I knew it all pretty well, but I found plenty of places that I needed to recalibrate, as I reviewed my materials.

I am now a great deal more confident in my grasp of the technology; thanks to my class.

I do a lot of writing, cast as a "teaching" exercise; even though no one cares. Doing this helps me to understand the material much more comprehensively.

When I teach, I then have a Responsibility. It is even more important to know the material than if I am developing a shipping application.

Speaking of "shipping"...

I write every line of code as "ship quality" code; even if I never have any intentions of shipping it (like test harnesses). That also helps me to make sure that I know what I'm doing. I heavily document my code, because explaining the code is like a built-in "self-peer-review." It helps me to see the code through fresh eyes.

I also write about my personal processes and approach to engineering, as that helps me to focus and make sure that I am speaking from a position of knowledge and experience.

I don't claim expertise I don't have, but I am constantly trying stuff I don't know how to do (I write about that here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...). That's how I learn new stuff.

"The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -and therefore never scrutinize or question." -Stephen Jay Gould

z3t4• 6 years ago

If something works, we keep doing it. Often we learn by looking at others. Or we try out different things and stick with what works best. For example: Every day you brush your teeth, why do you brush it that way? Probably you where told by a Dentist, but you haven't question it.

rammy12342• 6 years ago

Every thing you read needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Always look back in the history to see if the same problem came up and how some one solved it. If you can find it, use it. Only by using some existing solution you can find faults if any and improvise. The write about that. This cycle will keep going on. Thats how we have evolved. There is no BS, it is just how they solved it

mecki• 6 years ago

"Don't consume. Create."

"We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak."

lmilcin• 6 years ago

So... the author works as a developer since 2017.

The reality is most tech content is written by people with relatively little experience. People with lots of experience tend to have way more on their plates to bother writing blog posts or (tech) books.

Also the market is stacked against content for advanced users. Whether you are for ad impressions, visitors, likes, subscribes, book sales, you want to produce content that sells to masses of people and making it advanced is definitely going to cut your readership.

There is still a lot of value browsing through it. The reason is that since finding good information is difficult, the nuggets of wisdom make up for the lost time reading cruft.

tasssko• 6 years ago

My two cents many people can't think individually any more. Tech has become complex some people can only justify a decision based on what other people did. Honestly the solution is a combination of the scientific method, hacker mindset and being prepared to RTFM. No tech content is worth its character count it is just one persons perspective, their biases and mistakes. However reading code is another story, that tells a story I don't think you need to write content if you code. A project on GitHub is worth more than 1000 words.

DrFell• 6 years ago

I think at least part of the reason tech has become complex is because so many tech stacks today are a briar patch of 3rd party libraries and components that no one person can understand. The 'Don't reinvent the wheel' rule of thumb has practically become a mantra, and enables this. Newer developers who grow up in the online community are so afraid to think for themselves, lest they get mortified to death for doing something dumb. So it's sort of a self-perpetuating complexity problem.

habosa2• 6 years ago

I don't think people realize how much hyper-focused tech content is out there these days. I work in developer relations (at Firebase) so I see a lot more of it than an average person.

There are entire channels devoted to making YouTube videos that show you how to solve a very specific error message for a certain combination of Framework X and Library Y.

This content is obviously great for SEO but the people making it often record it 30 seconds after finding the solution themselves and because it's video it can't be maintained, it just rots.

Often I'll get to work in the morning and see 5 new GitHub issues where people are making the same hyper-specific mistake. Why? They are all misled by the same new blog post or video.

That said, I love how passionate developers are about teaching each other. No other industry shares knowledge as rapidly, excitedly, and broadly as we do. Even if there's a lot of bullshit, I find the whole scene very energizing.

gonza• 6 years ago

I agree that is difficult to find good blog posts/tutorials on technical stuff. When I want to learn something for the first time, I usually go through the docs and if they aren't friendly enough (for me) to read them and learn, I go and google a nice book about the topic. That being said, there are a lot of nice blog posts about technical stuff, not tutorials/teaching but actual experiences/opinions, people sharing and documenting what they learnt. I appreciate those.

hardwaregeek2• 6 years ago

There's a particular brand of young developer where every opinion comes from a blog post, talk or HN comment. They have strong views on many different topics and believe that they're knowledgeable and smarter than the average developer^[1].

The only issue? They don't have actual experience to back this up. Because not only is most tech content bullshit, the small percentage that isn't BS may not apply to their situation. You may not be working on soft real time systems. You may not be working with big data. You may not be running a company.

I should know—I'm certainly guilty of assuming that because I read about software development, I'm a better software developer. When really there's a big big big difference between reading about development and actually practicing the craft. Especially if you've only been programming casually. There's a massive difference between writing code for fun and writing code that needs to be a value-add for the company.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Bear

openfuture• 6 years ago

Being young is hard, no need to judge to harshly, often a rivalrous blogpost-driven discussion can be turned into a cooperative exploration, which is exactly a way for them to gain the experience.

Quiet, or at-arms-length, dismissal hurts self-confidence and reinforces this blogpost-driven defense mechanism.

_hardwaregeek• 6 years ago

It's definitely not the worst to be overly well read in programming literature. But oh man does it get old arguing with someone who is taking advice from a very niche, very particular field such as game development and applying it to general software development.

finnthehuman• 6 years ago

often a rivalrous blogpost-driven discussion can be turned into a cooperative exploration

They also often drive away any possibility of meaty conversation because everyone worth hearing from is drowning under a sea of underinformed responses written in a way that sounds like a convincing in-depth discussion to the even less informed passerbys.

I'm no sage, but it doesn't take a genius to see when Hacker News and /r/programming get swept away by a new silver bullet in software development. Then we all have to wait years before the enthusiastic youngsters are ready to hear a realistic conversation about the prima facie limitations of the new magic beans.

twy8392• 6 years ago

I'm in this comment and I don't like it.

bagacrap2• 6 years ago

Not to mention, the extremely opinionated but well written and charismatic blog post is most often the one believed, even though charisma is not a strong signal for truth.

amw-zero2• 6 years ago

This really just sums up human nature.

ipiz0618• 6 years ago

Popularity of blog posts are driven largely by SEO which is good for marketing but not so much for consuming knowledge.

I believe a lot of people (myself included) don't realize they read a lot of blog posts and articles about a topic they are interested in, but have no time trying out, and feel they know something about the subject when most of these articles are copying each other to gain popularity.

Bekwnn• 6 years ago

I think I possibly fall into this category of developer. I'm currently a few years into game development in the AAA space. The people I listen to most in descending order are Casey Muratori, Andrew Kelley, and Jonathan Blow.

I try to take their opinions with a grain of salt and find my own balance of considerations/tradeoffs. A common sentiment between them that I agree with is that software is a lot of commercial software is often an order of magnitude too slow in important places and that object oriented programming is almost always taken far too far.

I also look up to a few senior programmers I work with who have in-the-same-ballpark values as them.

On a whole, I think reading and listening to them has made me a better developer than if I just fumbled around to draw my own opinions completely from scratch.

I think being that type of young dev is probably fine so long as you keep your dogmatism and humility in check, and ensure your mentors are a spread of different individuals.

I think that's better than other young devs not seeking out information to try and grow.

hardwaregeek2• 6 years ago

Yeah you're quite similar to people I know, especially in your view of performance and choice of sources. I definitely agree that bottom line, seeking out info is a net benefit.

I have a fair amount of respect for game developers. However at the same time I feel they can make the assumption that all development should follow their practices. That everybody should be writing in C++/Zig/Jai/Rust, using data oriented programming and avoiding objects like the plague. That if other developers were just smart enough they'd make everything ridiculously fast and awesome. Not every game developer thinks this way, obviously, but there is a subset.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes all developers have the same priorities. In actuality game development is an extremely rare area where there are close-to real time requirements. Not painting the screen every 1/24th of a second is a disaster in game dev. Meanwhile GitHub uses Rails in all of its object oriented, garbage collected, interpreted horror. And nobody cares!

I suspect if a troop of elite game developers were dropped into your average web development job, they'd spend an unreasonable amount of time optimizing perf, only to have their lunch eaten by someone who focused on user facing issues. Not that web development is hard or anything. It's just a different set of requirements.

Watching jblow et al is definitely great! But there might be a point where you're put on a team using OOP and asking them to refactor to DOP with bulk allocation because you gotta get that cache utilization will just earn you stares and no buy-in. Or you might be running a startup and realize that all the time you spent getting all requests under 100ms could have been spent writing features.

ntoshev• 6 years ago

It's no really about experience but rather about the ability to reason from first principles. Lots of developers with experience don't even attempt doing something because the structure of the problem demands it; they would only do something if they've seen a similar approach before.

bryanrasmussen4• 6 years ago

a propos this I just thought of a writer who I used to follow at the beginning of the millennium. I'm not going to mention their name, and I think their articles were not bullshit per se, but... whenever I downloaded the code for his longer articles and tried to run it locally there were always lots of bugs (although to be fair I only did this for the really complicated things he wrote and only 3-4 times)

Just crazy that I would spend hours working on it to get it to work, I was always weirded out by it. This guy was sort of famous. Smaller bits of code were always fine and he had some pretty cogent insights on things, but big bits of code was just not working without significant rewrites.

To be fair perhaps this was a different time and things not working reliably was more widespread, I reemmber this article I wrote for SitePoint in 2008 https://www.sitepoint.com/rewrite-web-chickenfoot/ (please excuse me if too much bullshit, but I was less old) got a remark from the editor that testing took longer than normal, which I was of course surprised by because such is the time-honored reaction of a programmer when the code works on their own machine.

docmars• 6 years ago

I think this applies to a whole lot more than tech. ;)

uniqueid• 6 years ago

thisIsAField thatThoughtCamelCase wasASensible idea

timwaagh2• 6 years ago

Does the fact that this, 'everything is bs' article by a junior developer is taken so seriously on this forum have anything to do with the fact that the author looks like a gorgeous hacker from a science fiction movie? Or maybe just that she has a female name? I was just discussing that with my roommate in the kitchen. My roommate is of the opposite opinion that women get taken less seriously. And I don't want to hate on OP obviously. But I want to ask what do you think?

I do think it was well-written and the writing kind of saves the content. Besides there's absolutely nothing wrong with looking good. We might need a bit more of that in tech. So I'd encourage her to continue blogging.

on_and_off• 6 years ago

This is sadly too true.

I have seen new libraries becoming popular not because they solved their target problem better in a measurable way than the existing ones, but because they used [insert fancy tech that is hype right now].

I have seen articles reposted in tech newsletters that were completely bullshit. The last one was about manually cleaning up some weak references because that would magically help performances, without any data to back that up.

Performances in general is HARD. There are very few general truths that hold true and many rules of thumb that change rapidly as mobile platforms evolve. Most of the performance optimizations I used to make 5 years ago just don't matter anymore. Measuring the bottlenecks is not that hard but still very rarely made, even in performance articles.

moriturius• 6 years ago

This is not a tech problem. This applies to all the content on the internet.

I like your suggestion to motivate people to start thinking about what they are going to use and why.

When we have team refinements at work we learned to question everything. There are some senior developers that get most things right, but not every time. Sometimes some junior dev just throws an idea that turns out to be way better.

This is why I think the process of coming up with a solution is much more important than the solution itself.

With that being said - please remember that there is a fine line between valuable skepticism and just being annoying :)

mcv• 6 years ago

I'm in a similar position as the author. I never thought I was expert enough to blog about how to code. I did rely on other people's blogs. Sometimes they were good, but quite often, as I developed my own expertise, I discovered better ways of doing things. At some point I started discovering that some people gave just bad advice. And not even just anonymous bloggers, but official documentation might present examples of things that seemed like a good idea at the time but the community eventually discovered better practices (I'm looking at Angular 1 in particular here).

Unfortunately, as I discovered better ways of doing things, I still didn't start blogging about them. I probably should.

mola• 6 years ago

I think the major cause for this is the self branding phenomena that started together with the social media boom. Suddenly people got it to their minds that they are supposed to market themselves like products. And with the best tradition of PR, the truth don't matter, only the optics. So you got a bunch of mediocre engineers, some hardly out of uni swamping the net with opinions and shoddy advice , written in a very knowledgeable tone, because "that's the game". Combine this with tons of tech startups using same PR technics to sell their often than not, less than perfect technology.

With the crazy boom in developers, you got a whole generation of mediocre devs without any tradition to build on, surrounded by silly opinions and fads to learn from.

Now replace "developers" with any information age occupation , this remains true.

gitgud• 6 years ago

Twitter is non-stop tech garbage in my opinion, to me it seems like an endless stream of marketing pieces...

arendtio• 6 years ago

I think 'doing it yourself' vs. 'search online to find a solution' are two sides of the same medal and we should be good at both things.

An old friend of mine has a tendency to dig deep through searches and while I tend to fire a few searches and then start doing it myself. There have been many examples when he came up with something he found online, which was even better than the thing I started building.

So while it contributes to my programming skills to get some practice, I think you have to find the optimum between building mediocre results yourself (using your own amount of limited time) and not being afraid to get your hands dirty (as opposed to the 'someone else has built it' attitude). In the end, both skills reinforce each other: The better you are at programming, the better you can judge a solution you find online, and the better you are at searching, the faster you can find something that is actually good.

greyhair• 6 years ago

There might be a lot of BS content, but there are also some gems. It is sort of like the Web at large, really.

Turn up your BS filter and let it roll.

Most tech content is bullshit

Related Stories