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Comment by onra87 | Hacker News Reader

This is a lot of lines for not saying much. I was expecting much more from a "world-class software developer"(see About section) :)

Saying that the community is more advanced in the JavaScript ecosystem than it is in the iOS world is a nonsense to me. Don't we have more JS developers than iOS developers ?

Moreover, saying that JS syntax is really good with tools like TypeScript is another nonsense. You can also write Swift code and use another transpiler to get JavaScript code from it and you would say that JS is great.

Last but not least, giving a state of the art of JS without event talking about tools like npm, babel or webpack is like scratching only the surface of the subject. I mean come on, JS is not only about == and === in 2018

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That's interesting because I also picked up on that: "I am a world-class software developer living in New York’s East Village"

and I just thought, hmm, here's this guy with ~5 years of ~professional dev(mainly with iOS) and he self qualifies himself as world class.

Looking at his bio, I see he's worked for 3 companies doing quite ordinary things.

I would love to know what gave him the confidence/ignorance to describe himself as such.

calculatePaycheck("i am a world class programmer") > calculatePaycheck("i am a programmer")

Let's stick to the content of the article and not tear down our fellow engineers.

He is kind of inviting it by declaring himself "world-class". You don't get to make an assertion like that and then complain when it is challenged.

Regardless of whether tech or not, any opinion piece is framed within the context of the author of the piece.

I personally blame Jeff Atwood who pretty much green lit a lot of developers to consider themselves "elite" just because they were reading a blog about programming.

That attitude is something I'd love to see stamped out.

Oh, come on. So the guy uses some harmless exaggeration when selling himself on his own personal website & you're taking him to programmer jail over it?

Do you frequently launch into personal attacks on authors whose articles you disagree with?

No but on HN you should expect that criticism in that direction is valid. You can be world-class in certain niches but I doubt that calling oneself a world-class developer holds in the context of parts of the audience here.

It's ok to sell oneself but I'd be careful with exaggerations in a field with probably >1 million professionals.

If a medical doctors classifies himself as world class and then posts articles about medical matters, then my expectation would be his world class-ness is evident.

This guy's not writing an opinion piece about which brand ketchup tastes best. He has published an opinion piece in which he speaks authoritatively about matters related to the domain he claims he's a world expert in.

As for the harmless exaggeration, it's not harmless. It's poison to my chosen profession.

What does world class mean?

That you are good enough that people would accept your work in the United States?

It's typically used in sports and means an athlete or team has won championships in an international league, or a person is an Olympic athlete.

Coding is less explicitly competitive, but there is an element of competition to it. If you were a major contributor to a project that had displaced multiple international competitors, that'd clearly be world class. For example, Linus is a "world-class" coder because Linux is used all over the world and has displaced many operating systems.

No less than Don Knuth’s protégé.

> As for the harmless exaggeration, it's not harmless. It's poison to my chosen profession.

Now you seem to be the one exaggerating there. While yes I agree that is a crappy way of describing himself, there is no reason to start being so mean about it.

Yeah, I think pretty much any ordinary asshole that goes around calling himself world class ought to be mocked for it

I think its valid to point out.

If the author is joking about being world class, that would be kind of odd. So is saying you're world class at something in general (unless you're the tiger woods of that something and can demonstrate/back it up).

I have found it is commonly a trend with frontend/javascript/rails devs to be senior/lead/etc after a few years of experience. I think there's a variety of reasons for this, but going back to the author he probably is very adept at his given field. But to brand yourself as world class seems a bit much.

Personal attack? Nope. But if I saw that line before interviewing a candidate - I'd definitely probe them about it

That 5 years blog post is from 4 years ago.

Ash is a pretty well known developer in the iOS world. He contributes to a lot of well used open source projects and what Artsy is doing (open source by default) isn't something I would describe as "quite ordinary" even if what they're working on is.

I don't know if those credentials are enough to be described as world class, but I would bet it's a bit tongue in cheek anyway.

Does "world-class software developer" even mean anything other than a big ego?

I hope it's just ironic, so I give him the benefit of the doubt :)

It could mean that they see themselves as competing in a global marketplace. That they don't rely on geography and are quite happy to be ranked against the best of them. Not necessarily ranked highly but content to compete based on productivity and quality of work alone.

Probably not what they meant though :)

The Leica selfie in the header says everything that needs to be said.

I can't be absolutely sure what you mean by this comment, but it feels like a needlessly personal attack.

FWIW, I don't really approve of the self-description of "world class software developer", either because (i) I'm not really sure what it means, but (ii) it sounds a bit pretentious. Still, it doesn't really relate to the quality or validity (or otherwise) of the post.

Its no more a personal attack that your comment, "it sounds a bit pretentious" since that's all my comment means.

Leica manufacture cameras made of brass and, like apple, are more "experience-oriented". I can appreciate putting a picture of yourself on your blog, but taking a photograph of yourself holding a camera which obscures everything but a brand name... that's equally suggestive of "a bit pretentious".

Given his github profile, I think we can give him credibility that he is pretty good.

https://github.com/ashfurrow

are you that saying based on his contributions or the actual projects he's created? Because former doesn't make any sense to me.

Did you ever notice that real world-class software developers don't even have to say that they are ? :)

Not really if you work as a contractor or freelancer. In those cases you have to shout to the world that you are world class developer. Recruiters or Managers love terms like world-class, ninja, rockstar etc. Its unfortunate state of our industry.

This is unfortunately true in life in general. Many people of decision making power are attracted to self promoters. So if you really want more opportunities and more upward growth, you'll get what you want faster by peacocking.

Any time I see ninja or jedi in a job ad I avoid it. Rockstar is borderline because Joel coined the term as far as I am aware and actually has some decent stuff to say about software.

Well, I just looked through some of his commits on some of the repos. Not pretty good. Productive maybe but definitely not good. Commit messages are quite lacking he's hard coding user display strings.

Without spending more time or having some domain knowledge of his problem, I can't really comment on the architecture setup/choices.

You’re showing your inexperience here nitpicking on commit messages (set by team / project conventions) and situational things like constants.

I’d work with Ash any day of the week.

I've worked with him five or six years ago and he was very productive and smart even then. People on HN need to relax and dial down the harshness of their criticism.

    s/good/busy/

> You can also write Swift code and use another transpiler to get JavaScript code from it and you would say that JS is great.

I haven't read the article yet, but what you're saying is something completely different, in my opinion. If you write Swift you're writing a completely different language, with all the hassles usually introduced when transpiling. TypeScript, however, is just Javascript with some of the assumptions made explicit and a transpiler that actually checks whether you're violating those assumptions. In that sense, it's not much different from a linter - another tool that makes Javascript more pleasant to write.

In the end, you have to transpile your code to JavaScript. Whether you are writing TypeScript or Swift code. But I agree, Typescript has more similarities with JS than Swift does.

That is true, but there are a lot of risks associated with transpiling completely different languages that are not there when using TypeScript. For example, if TypeScript ever goes away, you simply transpile it to Javascript once (i.e. strip away the explicit type annotations) and continue to work on the resulting Javascript - in a different language, that would be a complete mess. Furthermore, TypeScript integrates really neatly with the rest of the Javascript ecosystem (because it's just Javascript), saving you a lot of hassle and lock-in.

Reducing all that to "but it has to be transpiled to Javascript" is a simplification that doesn't help in highlighting potential concerns associated with transpilation, in my opinion.

I totally agree with you. My point here was just to prove that you cannot sell the beauty of JavaScript syntax by saying that you have to use TypeScript :)

Haha, that's true, though I guess in the context of this article that's mostly semantics, since it says that tooling (like TypeScript) is part of what makes "Javascript" great :)

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