Comment by alfalfasprout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alfalfasprout | Hacker News Reader

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> Most of the best, highly experienced people in this industry never post in chatrooms or forums. You're getting a biased sample, and don't know what you don't know.

With all due respect, you're just projecting your own experience and being dismissive in the process.

A ton of foundational work in modern computing was done in a distributed fashion and continues to work that way. In fact, open source software development hinges on distributed development.

Now, what I do agree on is that interpersonal connections with other, more experienced folks, is key. Most engineers seem to quickly plateau on their soft skills. I always say that coding is the easy part of software engineering. You can teach anyone to code. It's strategic and critical thinking and how to present and communicate those ideas that make you stand out.

However, it's very much possible to get those connections in a remote world. But it means deliberately operating in a way conducive to getting that face time. I wouldn't say it's much harder. But the company needs to actively focus on this.

> With all due respect, you're just projecting your own experience and being dismissive in the process. A ton of foundational work in modern computing was done in a distributed fashion and continues to work that way

This has nothing to do with what I wrote. Whether or not people work "in a distributed fashion" is unrelated to whether or not those people have a team they see in person on a regular basis, contribute to public forums and chatrooms, or advance in their careers via collaboration with colleagues.

For what it's worth, most professional developers don't contribute to open-source on any regular basis. The ones that do often work in big companies, which then choose to open-source their work. Regardless, working in "a distributed fashion" is not the same thing is posting to forums that other people can see. And it's a rare company where everything you need to know is captured in public code. Usually that's just the table stakes -- the most valuable engineers are walking around with encyclopedic business knowledge in their heads.

The core fallacy I am rebutting here is that everything you need to know is just out there, freely available on the internet. Even in the open-source world, that isn't true.

This actually has nothing to do with public forums. That was your insertion. The point is that the way we interacted with public or private niche communities on the internet informs how we interact with our private always-online work-chat. We're learning from and working with highly qualified coworkers aligned on the same problems, not randos.

> I grew up on the internet, learning from people in chatrooms and forums which were strong communities where most of my personal adult relationships have come from

^ you. I didn't "insert" it. You're saying that most of your "personal adult relationships" came from chatrooms and forums.

Now, OK, maybe your point really was that you're somehow better at all of this because you "grew up on the internet" and the rest of us didn't, but I'm just going to go back to what I originally wrote: I also did that, and still, all of the best things in my career came from seeing people, in person.

There's no magical set of forum skills I'm lacking that makes up the difference; it's just a case where the camaraderie of working closely with someone, in real life, outweighs the virtual.

Sorry for any implied snark. I don't think it's a special set of skills, just a different default and preferred mode of experiencing human connection that some of us ended up with.

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