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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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).

> 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.

Not usually. Usually the way it works is the person who wrote the code and developed the technology decides to write a blog post about it and then writes it. Then they pass it around to their peers and other leadership for comments and edits.

Then, at least at Netflix, the next step was usually to publish it yourself on the tech blog. Sometimes if it was a big new tech it might get reviewed by PR or legal but not often.

At the other tech companies I don't know what their process is after that.

But what I do know is that I know a lot of those authors personally and they are definitely implementers.

> Brendan Gregg is a professional tech author.

He gets paid to write, yes, but that doesn't mean he's not also an engineer. I've worked with him, he does quite a lot of heavy engineering and then writes about it. His writing is so good sometimes he gets paid for it.

But OP said that tech blogs aren't written by implementers, and that's not at all true.

> 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.

I believe the rest of my statement made it clear that I believe it is very untrue.

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.

If those engineers are working 40 hours a week and are awake for about 110, what are they doing with their other 70 hours? Sure some of that is commuting, showering, etc., but presumably they have other activities.

For some people, their hobby is technical writing.

Saying that they are mutually exclusive would be like saying that being an engineer and doing puzzles is mutually exclusive because they both require a lot of mental effort.

Or being an engineer and a musician are mutually exclusive. It's a silly thing to assume that technical writing is somehow different from any other hobby.

Writing great blog or having pet project after working full time is equivalent of working overtime or crunch. Had this been effective, persistent overtime would be effective too.

Which is why it is not happening. The actual rest time and hobby is when you do it whenever you feel like and stop how you feel like. Once you make it project and treat it seriously, it is work.

Also, other stuff that is done after work: cooking, cleaning, shopping, picking up kids and talking with them, sport to be healthy. These amount to not exactly small chunk of time.

I am in an odd position where I'm writing a book at the same time I'm writing a library the book uses.

It's a fascinating experience. How being a good writer and software engineer go hand in hand. If my library is not easy to understand, my book won't be succesful. I'm constantly going back to edit the library to make sure the book / related concepts can be grokked.

I feel this is a fairly general truism. Great software engineers are often technical writers. Both involve understanding what the 'reader' expects to see, needs to understand, and how the whole narrative/program fits together cohesively. I'd encourage anyone who wants to up their software engineering game to work on their writing skills first.

To be clear - I didn't mean that the two _roles_ are mutually exclusive. The opposite - I think that definitely, there are common quality required between software engineering and technical writing.

What I meant is that in real world, due to times constraints, they are. As a sibling poster commented, working as a hobby ends up being a work in itself, so doing both things ends up being, effectively, overtime.

And as a consequence, all the general considerations about overtime apply.

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.

Function of their job or not, the point is that the people who are implementing the technology are the ones writing about it. The "doers" are also doing the writing.

The point is that many (not all, of course, so there will always be counterexamples) who are "doing" don't have the bandwidth to produce great content. If your employer pays you to do it inside of your regular work schedule, that changes the equation.

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.

Written on company time or not, those are still engineers who are doing real engineering work who are also writing about their work.

Meh, I've worked for more than one of these, and I'd say they are thinly veiled hiring or marketing material.

Sure, but again, not sure how that disproves that the doers are the ones writing about the tech.

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

https://www.infoq.com

https://www.heavybit.com/library/

https://alestic.com

https://blog.deepracing.io

https://www.haproxy.com/blog/

Podcasts:

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/offerzen-podcast

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzo_FqWUbEH0AYs0NilUWpA

https://podbay.fm/podcast/996111298

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