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Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

What dichotomy?

Are you being misled by the fact that the article uses only two examples? That's a rhetorical shortcut, not a proposed dichotomy. The article does not actually claim that "those who use Sexy Tech X tend to have bad judgement" or anything like that. What it says is that folks with good judgement use appropriate tools for appropriate reasons, which may be situational.

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I'm not making a rhetorical argument. You should take me seriously.

The article stereotypes "rock star" developers as being obsessed with using the latest tools and compares them to more "average developers" who (it is claimed) better know their limits and ship more maintainable products.

I believe that this is a false dichotomy.

There are plenty of "rock star" developers who ship maintainable products which use appropriate technology. There are far more "average developers" who ship awful, barely-functional code because they're only able to use a limited set of technologies.

So, though it isn't entirely unambiguous, when I read the article closely I see that it agrees with you.

Let me see if I can make this boring enough to understand. Let's draw a classic management-consulting two-by-two matrix:

  GENIUS-JUDGEMENT       GENIUS+JUDGEMENT

  AVG-JUDGEMENT          AVG + JUDGEMENT

The author's argument is that the column on the right trumps the column on the left: Judgement is important, even if the genius-with-poor-judgement is some kind of CS demigod. However, he doesn't actually say that lack-of-genius and lack-of-judgement are correlated, or that he'd turn down a wise genius if such a rare and precious being fell on him from the sky. You've gotten the unfortunate impression that he's saying that, but that's an artifact of trying to use two examples to describe a fuzzy multidimensional space. (I mean, really, even two dimensions is a painfully naive approximation, except of course to a management consultant. ;)

Of course, if the original blog post used my four examples it would be as dull as... management consulting. The moral of this story is that writing is hard. You have to leave some ambiguity, and trust the reader to fill in the gaps, and hope the gaps are not too large, and that your sly invocation of the trendy-yet-pragmatic NoSQL user in the penultimate paragraph helps people take the hint. But sometimes the whole thing just doesn't work. C'est la vie.

If clarity was one of the design goals, the author should have included the 2x2 matrix. Sometimes, the best opinions aren't those that corrects our wrongly-held beliefs, but those that don't create them, which is much more silent.

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