Hacker News Reader

Comment by ar_lan | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is the fastest way for me to feel like I'm a completely worthless human being, especially in the tech sector.

It overwhelmingly emphasizes the following, from my experience:

1. If you are not famous, you don't matter. 2. Front-end engineers are invariably the most important and skillful, and backend engineers really aren't valuable. 3. If you hold any position that's even accidentally politically incorrect, you will be publicly shamed for it, and some people are quite relentless at bringing up tiny past mistakes.

Overall, it seems like a fairly useless space unless you can take advantage of the above 3, or if you want to have the lowest self-esteem possible as rapidly as possible.

View on HN

> 3. If you hold any position that's even accidentally politically incorrect, you will be publicly shamed for it, and some people are quite relentless at bringing up tiny past mistakes.

A friend got disinvited from speaking at an NLP convention, not because of something he said or did, but because his employer was tangentially related to national security contracts. Of course, the person that organized the dis-invite also used it as an opportunity to get themselves ahead.

Wait a minute what kind of NLP you talking about here?

I'm not a fan of twitter either, mainly for reason (3). It is a platform where it's very easy to be publically shamed in an unproportional manner.

In comparison, forums like hacker news and reddit don't focus on the person writing, but focuses on the conversation. People can respond in a mean way (unfortunately) to a comment, but not "to the person", it doesn't have the same dynamic. The potential for huge reach of any single tweet is a big factor in giving twitter this bad dynamic.

That we feel relatively safe to have conversations, to try arguments and to sometimes be wrong about stuff is healthy. Maybe I'm confused and wrong about what I'm writing in this comment. Someone will tell me, but I'll live. :)

the point you are making here is spot on but woefully under acknowledged imo

the conversational semantics of twitter and hn/reddit are completely different; the underlying models can be seen as formally -and sharply- distinct.

> Front-end engineers are invariably the most important and skillful, and backend engineers really aren't valuable.

Heh, that's interesting. I didn't see a whole lot of that on Twitter (though I kinda see what you mean), but I did know a senior engineer that referred to front-end engineers as "finger-painters".

I think both camps probably kinda looks down on the other a bit. (But I guess the frontend camp is louder on Twitter?)

Regardless of what they think I'm still thankful for front-enders. CSS / UI-design/layout...people that enjoy that sorta thing are great because it means I don't have to do it. Maybe they feel the same way about backend work. Whatever, it all works out!

Yeah plus it is a sign of security. It is so much easier and more reasonable to trust a UI that is pixel-perfect throughout all transformations than a glitchy one (the glitch might be farther down the stack). It's just like trusting a bank with impeccable marble in the lobby over one with crappy construction, it tells you how thorough they are about everything else.

>2. Front-end engineers are invariably the most important and skillful, and backend engineers really aren't valuable.

As mainly a back end developer, I find this statement the opposite of reality. :) Good thing I don't post on Twitter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com