Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

> I said that the programming field is a fertile ground for beginners, and it is. But what’s fertile for grain is fertile for weeds too, even moreso. And we need to talk about these people, taking advantage of the fertile ground.

Yikes. What a gross, self-congratulatory rant. The author tries to defend against the term "gatekeeping" by getting out ahead of it, but that doesn't change how deeply exclusionary the result is.

It doesn't even stick to a specific complaint; it jumps around to different things that emotionally feel related in the author's mind but aren't actually. First we're talking about boot camps, then we're talking about how StackOverflow is "the scariest thing that happened to the programming community in the past 10 years", then we're talking about "diversity" speakers at conferences riling up "mobs" in some kind of conspiracy against the author and people like him?

Buried under all of this (literally, at the very end) is perhaps a poorly-executed attempt to tell beginners something of value, that it may not be easy now, but you can push through and it will get better. But I don't see any actual beginner reaching that part before getting discouraged by the rest into doubting whether they should be in this career field at all.

You left off the last sentence of that paragraph, which made me interpret the overall sentiment very differently:

> I said that the programming field is a fertile ground for beginners, and it is. But what’s fertile for grain is fertile for weeds too, even moreso. And we need to talk about these people, taking advantage of the fertile ground. And where there’s plenty of beginners, there’s plenty of people taking advantage of them.

That is, I interpreted "These people, taking advantage of fertile ground" not to mean subpar newbies who can't cut it (which is how I read your interpretation), but instead to mean the snake-oil salesman/huckster types who take advantage of these newbies by sort of implying "hey, just come to our 30 day bootcamp and you'll be a programmer, just like those programmers who make top dollar at Google and Microsoft!"

I actually generally largely agreed with article, and I didn't find it gross at all. Yes, programming does have a low barrier to entry, but to become a true expert at it takes the same level of skills and preparation as, say, a doctor or scientist. But you don't see any "Become a doctor in 30 days!" bootcamps out there trying to convince people that "Hey, anyone can become a doctor!"

The next paragraph:

> There are many ways this happens; some of them are not even aware that they do it, they are just instinctive hustler that oversell their own skills. Usually you see them: two years of experience in software development, writing books and giving advice, sometimes at a hefty price. You see them at conferences, or with articles promoted, or with other types of media, sometimes playing the diversity card, at other times the beginner card, pushing their way in and taking advantage of credulous mass of beginners.

So the "weeds" are still beginners, just beginners who the author perceives as overselling their skills. That isn't much better, in my view.

It might be unpopular to say, but I think underqualified people giving unearned advice, and flooding the job market, is indeed a huge problem. I don't think it's gatekeeping to call it that.

> underqualified people giving unearned advice, and flooding the job market

If they're speaking at conferences and getting published and working on projects that are out of their depth, then it's on the conferences and publishers and employers to identify them as underqualified.

If they're "flooding the job market" and working on things that are appropriate for their skill level - which I would guess the majority are - then that's a good thing, even if their skills are at the low end.

So you're saying that conferences and publications should act as.. gate-keepers? It sounds more like you disagree more with the tone of the article than the actual substance.

You're intentionally giving a bad-faith interpretation.

The term "gate-keeper" is colloquially used to refer to those who needlessly prevent or discourage others from participating at all in an entire hobby/career-field/community.

Conferences and publications and employers should absolutely filter candidates by their actual ability to do the job they're being paid to do; nobody in their right mind would suggest otherwise. But this is a) a temporary condition of the individual's ability at that particular time, b) relative to the specific task at hand, and c) just one piece of what it means to participate in the field as a whole. A person might not currently be fit for programming job X but simultaneously be capable of programming job Y, and in the future they might even become capable of X. They might not even be capable of any paid programming work at all, but in the meantime should still be welcome to learn and to hack and to participate in the community.

Of course I didn't really need to explain all that, because you knew what I meant and chose to frame it differently, but there you go.

And you're intentionally giving a bad faith representation to the author.

> The term "gate-keeper" is colloquially used to refer to those who needlessly prevent or discourage others from participating at all in an entire hobby/career-field/community.

Disagreed. That term is frequently used for anyone that isn't an overly positive cheerleader.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Just came off as an agry rather pointless rant to me.

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