Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

This is a really well-written and well-thought out piece. The author touches on a number of points but never gets polemical. This piece resonated with me particularly well:

> Be wary of self-promotion

> Over the last few years I’ve seen much more aggressive self-marketing in the JavaScript world, possibly due to the rise of paid online training materials and the employment/consulting advantage of being a Github ‘celebrity’. I’ve no problem with people being incentivised for good content, but increasingly I feel I see dishonest tactics: self-citation; invented, proprietary terminology (so searching takes you back to the author’s materials), and name-squatting (e.g. ‘Standard.js’)

This is becoming a big problem in JS world, particularly over the last 3 to 4 years. Like the author, I have no problem with people taking credit and being respected, but we as a community are becoming much too centered around people/personality than technology. I've been guilty of this in the past too (love you Pete Hunt ;-) but it's not healthy IMHO.

I'm finding the growing celebrity culture of programming to be troubling. I find that programming is becoming less and less about code or architecture and more about evangelism and marketing, but I'm not sure what changed in the incentive structure for this to happen, and I would like to find out.

Aside: This has made me reconsider being a career programmer.

It's an extremely large and diverse field. There are plenty of us who aren't celebrities and don't care about celebrities (except to the extent that it is caused by deep expertise). Just like you ignore reality TV celebrities, ignore these guys. It's just noise. Turn off Twitter and read "Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests" instead.

That really is an amazing book :-)

Man, I couldn't get through it! It seemed like its own kind of hype-y proselytizing and I didn't find its examples spoke to the kind of issues I actually have. Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance, but I don't know, I had been hearing for years that it's so great and I was really excited to start reading it, and it just didn't speak to me at all. Anyway, YMMV I guess!

It's not a religious text or anything (I suspect that the proselytising tone comes from the fact that at the time it was written, it's recommendations were still a bit controversial, especially in the kind of organisations likely to have these kinds of codebases). If it's not useful to you, then that's that. The point is, other books written ten years ago by people with deep expertise (rather than a hypey blog post by someone who just discovered some principle five minutes ago) probably will be.

This is a different topic than my comment that you replied to but the "ten years ago" thing stuck out to me: I think books (and blog posts!) written very recently by people with deep expertise are likely useful as well. Figuring out which ones those are is the tough part.

Is it just me, or is the last line basically "other gurus are fake, only this guru I support is real"?

No, it was a quip, basically intended to mean "forget about minute to minute popularity and read a book that is well respected by practitioners in the field and has stood up to the test of time". And I didn't mention the authors, it's about content, not personalities.

>I'm not sure what changed in the incentive structure for this to happen, and I would like to find out.

People started getting paid more for doing this because managers have no idea what programming actually is.

Which is why it is so much more cost effective to spend your time marketing to those managers than writing code to market to the developers.

It doesn't help that most developers are language fanboys who have no idea what actual programming means.

I ask this in the most serious of ways, could you explain what actual programming is?

The minimum ability someone needs to have for me to consider them a programmer is the being able to write a parser using yacc or something equivalent. Anything a person with that ability does is programming because they know enough to realise when switching to putting legos together it more efficient.

If not programmers, what are these people who spend their days programming, but who may not necessarily have ever written a parser using yacc because none of the jobs they've ever had have required that?

Depends how superior you want to make yourself feel.

Stamp collectors.

Ha! I'm not sure how serious this comment is in terms of how you choose to spend your time at work, but a person with that attitude isn't going to last long working for me. I expect them to deliver.

I'm not a tyrant, and I avoid setting hard deadlines as much as reasonably possible, but I do expect concrete evidence of output that delivers customer and/or business value.

Still, in many organisations I think you're right. So much energy is expended on marketing to/currying favour with managers that not much is actually delivered. It's how you end up with 100+ people taking more than 6 months to deliver two pages that allow customers to register for a service (names omitted to protect the guilty).

Someone with that attitude isn't going to last long working for you anyway: as soon as they're hired, they'll put your company on their resume, blog about everything they've learned, trump up their first project, and start looking for their next gig, usually getting a big pay increase in the process.

Indeed - and possibly write an expose about how terrible it was to work for us that will gain traction across a variety of social media sites.

(I am not usually this cynical before lunchtime, honestly.)

You mean realistic.

NDAs are there for a reason.

I got asked if I had a blog in an interview. I am a software engineer not a self marketer.

Yikes! As someone who can't stand being the center of attention and also can't stand talking about themselves (yes I see the irony here), this is terrifying.

I am a software engineer that loves to help others. Nothing to do with self-marketing, at least not intentionally, but a welcomed skill in the team. So the question makes sense to me.

I like helping others as well. I don't need to fart about writing blogs to do it.

It does increase your reach though. I work on Windows software and a blog like Raymond Chen's Old New Thing is super valuable.

I have a blog no one knows about. If I’m trying to teach a concept or find something interesting I’ll write it up.

The writing process itself acts as a check if I understand something. Then when people have similar questions/problems in the future I can just link.

The personal value of the blog makes it worth trying at least.

I have tried it a couple of times (I do have a couple of posts on my github pages). I just don't have the time / motivation combination to do it on a regular basis.

I find it quite time consuming writing in a way that makes it clear to others what I am doing. I'll come over to your computer and explain the same concepts in ten minutes that would take me an hour or two to write up and format in a manner that I would want to display publicly.

(I find answering questions on Stack Overflow a lot less time consuming to get a useful point across).

And because you don't have time / motivation everyone that has is a self marketer?

I agree it's silly to expect every developer to have a blog. I strongly disagree with the only motivation for it being self marketing, or it being a somehow unreasonable question if you have one.

I agree there are talkers and there are do-ers, and very few who are good at both. They do exist but they are rare. This is true for many professions, not just programmers.

Sure. Luckily the blogs written by the two categories are fairly easy to tell apart. Even checking if the domain is medium.com or something else is a good first estimate, but to be sure you should look at the content.

I'll come over to your computer and explain the same concepts in ten minutes that would take me an hour or two to write up and format in a manner that I would want to display publicly.

That’s right, but multiplied by the number of people who read it…?

> I am a software engineer not a self marketer.

I sure hope that wasn't your answer. Writing a technical blog can also be about sharing what you know or participating in a greater community.

Even a non-technical blog can give an interviewer a better sense of who you are and how well you write.

I think it's a reasonable question. Writing is an important skill for a software person.

> Writing is an important skill for a software person

In some roles perhaps, but relatively few roles require it. I am currently working in Spanish and my written Spanish is probably like that of a child.

If you ever used any F/OSS software, or made use of a blog post when solving some problem, you owe to the community a blog or something similar. That can be answering SE questions etc. occasionally or an anonymous blog, not contributing knowledge to the community that saves you many years of work every day is outright selfish.

Furhtermore, I don't see what makes self marketing a bad thing given it is of the honest kind. The CV you send to them in order to get the interview is self marketing too, and so are thw clean clothes you wore to that occasion.

I cant count how many times a random blog post has saved me blinking weeks. You are being very rude with that statement.

> You are being very rude with that statement.

If you want to write a blog by all means do so. I have written a handful of blog posts but I don't have the time / motivation to do that in my spare time on a regular basis.

I think its silly to assume that all software engineers want to and are good at writing blog posts. Could you explain what is rude about that?

> you owe to the community a blog or something similar

Do I?

Maybe that should be put in the terms and conditions if that is the case.

I have a decent score on Stack Overflow from answering questions (~379k people reached apparently), is that good enough for you?

I'm not going to answer the second part, but for the rudeness, you are being rude because you reduce blogging about one's experiences w/ programming and related stuff to self marketing.

You did that. I didn't specify any type of blog. Blogs are more often than not about self marketing.

Any why don't you want to answer the second part?

> Any why don't you want to answer the second part?

Because I think the answer is obvious. BTW I did not see the Stack Owerflow part, that is the exact kind of compensation for tge greater community I was talking about. Thank you for that.

For the other paragraph, well, that's how I read you comment in its context, and I maintain my interpretation. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

I answer Stack Overflow out of mainly self interest. I don't have a portfolio of work to show people at job interviews - my work is mainly in house. I realized it isn't that hard to get a decent score on SO if you know something well.

Also because it annoys me seeing things done poorly having worked in enough maintenance programming jobs and worked with crap that could have been done so much better (this is probably a bigger motivation with certain topics).

I don't do it because I feel I owe anyone anything.

It does feel good to contribute somewhat, but that is far from my primary motivation.

Nobody owes you anything. He gets to have whatever perspective he wants and it's not rude because you disagree with it. You need to take a step back and pretend for a moment that your perspective isn't the only one.

Nobody owes me anything but eaach and every on of us owe something to the FOSS community.

No, we don't. The FOSS community operates on the idea that people that want to contribute to it (financially, programming, etc) can do so. Nothing about open source obligates that behavior, outside of certain licenses. Nobody "owes" FOSS anything either, that's up to them.

It is really shocking people can think this way when also making use of hundreds of people's free labour, and when the very existence of most of programming careers are a direct product of OSS innovation. Hopefuly this attitude is not the widespread one.

Plenty of people get paid to work on OSS. I imagine that Linus is pretty well compensated.

Those people are volunteering their time. I'm one of them. But that doesn't mean owed something as a result, that's absurd. I made OSS because I wanted to.

I think that this was inevitable given the rise of social media and the Internet. It’s still entirely possible to be a great developer without having a Twitter or Facebook account, but it’s tempting to feel like I’m missing out on information from not subscribing to the latest fight on Twitter.

You're at the right place to work out what started it.

The aggressive personal branding is clearly spillover of startup hype/marketing/branding styles and techniques. If your whole career has been at startups then that is just called "marketing" to you.

Also: it works. "No one ever got fired for going with IBM" is now applied down to the micro-level. Few choose a project because of a code/architecture review, most choose one because it has a good reputation. The industry has fantastic expertise at manufacturing reputations by now.

Once the market is large enough, you're going to have some people at the top who excel at marketing. Look at almost any large market, it's not the "best" products that win, it's the best marketers.

Similar boat. I’ve been presenting passion projects to user groups / unconferences for a decade. Now, I wasn’t aware at the time but around 2013 seems like the turning point. I was getting tingles then. I never wanted to be a celebrity but it seems my aptitude has sent the wrong signals to some. I refuse to tow company lines, but acknowledge funding of open work or course. Starting to explore other outlets for sohpistic endeavors eg. live streaming (shameless plug, building an open source platform, search: ispooge live). People subscribe and keep coming back and chatting too, didn’t expect that but it’s pretty cool. I feel it can lead to a good career in some way, involving good natural collaboration. Maybe even money ;).

[Offtopic]

I don't know if this is your intention, but your streaming platforms title may be sending different signals than you think: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Spooge

FreshSpooge and iSpooge sound like awesome product names if you're working for MindGeek, tho ;)

Is this actually a new phenomena? I remember when I started programming c. 2000, the big-name programming gurus were folks like Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, Uncle Bob, Ron Jeffries, Dave Thomas, Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Martin Fowler, et al. While some of them mostly knew their stuff, some were outright hacks (Peter Norvig's vs. Ron Jeffries' attempts to create a sudoku solver is one of my favorite examples [1]). Most of their names wouldn't be recognized by someone just getting into programming now.

As I've gotten older, I've learned that there's often an inverse correlation between how good a programmer is and how likely you are to have heard of them, because the folks who get good at programming are actually programming and not writing blog articles about programming. Most of the latter are really content marketing, trying to drum up business for consultancies, and so you should treat them as advertisement rather than advice.

[1] http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s...

Like everytime Fabrice puts out something you know it is bound to be something interesting: https://bellard.org/

not driven by selling anything.

This is true for anything.

People that are actually doing stuff have no time to talk about it, and people that are talking about it are wasting time by not doing it.

So beware of gurus. No one gets that popular without spending a large proportion of their time promoting. In the decade I’ve been programming I’ve never had time to write even one damn article.

> I've learned that there's often an inverse correlation between how good a programmer is and how likely you are to have heard of them.

Yep. I second this. The best programmers on my radar are terrible at self-promotion, and are quite content to be terrible at it.

I think this is a very good point. But it's also important to remember that not all programmers/tinkerers that are creating blog posts/videos are looking for fame - some of them are just proud of something they built, and that's fine.

Inspiration is a great enabler, and taking a few shortcuts to make something work may be just the thing that allows someone to actually finish one of their projects. The problem is that if you lack the knowledge to see that something is a hack - you learn things the wrong way. Still, without this inspiration - some people wouldn't start to learning at all.

It's gone mainstream, and just like the internet going mainstream, it isn't what it used to be. These days I only enjoy the programming I do on the weekend.

It's a problem for other communities, like Python. I read a blog post recently from a well known python dev where he talks about explicitly cultivating "fame" around his open source tools. My experience, as one who has tried to promote my own tools, is that literally nothing good will come of it for the community as a whole. It's a bad practice in my opinion.

For example: https://github.com/pypa/pipenv/issues/2228

What incentives would a someone have to invest a considerable amount of time in releasing and maintaining an open source project if they can't even use that to promote themselves?

Maybe they have a genuine interest in the problem they're addressing, and in solving it. I work on some open source projects that gain little attention from others but have great utility to me, personally.

It's a nice sentiment but that's how you end up with abandoned, low quality projects that no one uses. Or even worse - abandoned, low quality projects that half the Internet relies on.

Thus the boot message on all Linux machines:

"Made with <3 and (coffee emoji) by Linus Torvalds"

> It's a nice sentiment but that's how you end up with abandoned, low quality projects that no one uses.

How is it a bad thing that a piece of software that no one uses is abandoned by its developers? Or should i put it like this: how is it bad that no one uses a piece of software that has been abandoned by its developers? Whichever way you prefer to put it.

> Or even worse - abandoned, low quality projects that half the Internet relies on.

It's not my responsibility to make sure that my software is used for things that it is useful for. In fact, I typically use a license where I deny responsibility for fitness for a particular purpose, like MIT or GPL, exactly because it isn't and shouldn't be my problem.

I think this should be accounted for when deciding whether to use open source software in your project. Of course, with Javascript projects I often end up looking at shitty dependencies because some popular library depends on some slightly less popular library which depends on a brain fart someone put on github 10 years ago and never touched since despite stale, open issues. This is a problem with the community's attitude towards dependencies, not with what software I make available for others to use.

Besides, a low quality project that half of the internet relies on doesn't really need any additional promotion or advertisement, does it?

That’s one of the reasons I got out :)

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