Hacker News Reader

Comment by foobarrio | Hacker News Reader

I have encountered this too. Some of most useful personal coding time is spent to exploring something new or solving a real problem with a quick and dirty solution. At no point do I set out to create a full polished, deliverable thing. I don't even know if I will solve my problem or understand the new thing! Why publish such code? A carpenter doesn't varnish and sell every single bit of wood that is practiced or worked on nor an artist present every single sketch.

View on HN

Now imagine that to be hired as a carpenter you had to first prove that you have worked on dozens of pieces of wood before anyone would even consider you. Of course, the analogy falls apart here because we can expect most carpenters to have produced finished products, but most finished software products are highly complex and can take years to complete. Worst of all, these products exist in a marketplace where cynicism reigns: "Why did you build that? We already have three hundred of those. Quit reinventing the wheel!"

Do we complain when a carpenter builds a nice stool because there are already enough stools in the world?

Many companies now expect a GitHub history, as if that alone determines your value. It's no wonder people publish everything. They need to establish that they're doing something, even if it isn't master level "carpentry."

> Worst of all, these products exist in a marketplace where cynicism reigns

For better or worse, that cynicism is a natural outcome of the environment.

Imagine if there was a global service in the furniture market, called OS, to which you subscribe, and it lets you browse through a catalog of all pieces of furniture ever created, and order any one you like, for free. It's still desirable for carpenters to hone their crafts by making n-thousandth iteration of a stool, but were one to publish such a stool to the OS, everyone would immediately ask: "why did you publish that? We already have three hundred variants of those!".

This is how it works in computing industry. People will commend you for doing side projects for learning, but if you try to release something as a product, it will be immediately evaluated against existing alternatives. As long as you mind the difference between publishing code on your personal site (or Github profile, etc.) and publishing something as a product for others to use, you won't encounter the criticism.

I don't know how others approach Github profiles, but personally, when I view someone's profile, I assume everything there is side projects and playing around, unless it's clearly marked otherwise.

> Worst of all, these products exist in a marketplace where cynicism reigns: "Why did you build that? We already have three hundred of those. Quit reinventing the wheel!"

I've been sitting on a bit of rhetoric in case that comes up, though I've been blessed not to need it. Regardless, let me share the rhetoric -- just in case someone finds use for it:

"Put bicycle wheels on a cement truck. Put airplane wheels on a skateboard. Put train wheels on a wheelbarrow. The metaphor about reinventing the wheel doesn't go very far -- because the wheel has been reinvented many times, and thank god for that. I like having trains and planes and bicycles and trucks and skateboards and wheelbarrows. The world would be poorer if they all used the same wheel."

Worse, people frequently put truck wheels on wheelbarrows because they're the new hot thing.

Edit: Thanks for sharing. I will use this some day.

Yes, I think this very thing when people try to commoditize software components by analogizing them to a wheel. It works in some places (I wouldn't want to write a custom Redis or an RDBMS) but in most places, it falls down.

All the people I've heard use that analogy don't know what they're talking about when it comes to software development. I think it comes from the "Taco Bell" MBA types. They're the same people who think WordPress will put all web developers out of business.

It's frustrating to see the art of software development regress so much.

> I think it comes from the "Taco Bell" MBA types. They're the same people who think WordPress will put all web developers out of business.

And then on the other end of the spectrum are 'programmer types' who think WordPress is never a good solution because it's shitty for their particular use case.

Unfortunately most businesses these days rely on MBAs to make those decisions. Most MBA tracks don't even offer software development courses. They offer Accounting, Finance and Marketing, but not software development. That's funny because all of Accounting, Finance, Marketing and especially Operations run and rely on software systems, many designed and/or customized in house. It's a huge gaping hole in management knowledge in the US and it shows.

http://www.hbs.edu/coursecatalog/

Start-up managers don't want a "master carpenter."

They want a replaceable journeyman who smacks a few nails and strings together a few prefabricated solutions.

There are pros and cons. And, as for stools, well, these journeymen "coders" have polluted GitHub with quite a lot of stool.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com