They've chosen a way to express, what to _us_ on social media platforms, are the people whose voices are not heard. If you have chosen to take that in bad faith, please take a step back.
Scott is a fantastic teacher, I've learned a lot from listening to him and his podcasts. But at the same time, being in his position requires one to stay on the bleeding edge in some cases, to be able to teach newcomers emerging technologies and explain new features in Microsoft tech like ASP and C#.
When you're surrounded by tech bloggers, social media and the like all day, I expect it to shape your view of what the wider development community actually looks like - even if you're in it. As you say, I feel the vast majority of us just go to work, go home then carry on with our lives. Perhaps pop our head over the fence one in a while if something truly earthshattering is happening.
Somehow using older tech is being conflated with being a lesser developer, and not being “cool”, when that’s kind of the opposite of the point of the post.
Scott Hanselman is projecting the world view conference-goers and blog-posters onto everyone else. He is obsessed with modernity, so everyone else must be using stable technology; he worries that his bleeding-edge tools are problems in need of a solution, so everyone else must be producing. In reality, any given 99% of developers is going to be using a diverse and varied mess of different technologies of varying maturity levels.
I don't think it's animosity at being called a lesser developer, but rather a baffled sense of insult at the claim that 99% of any group can be homogenous enough to teach lessons. Imagine a car enthusiast who drives a Porsche 911 writing the same article about the "dark 99%" who drive proven vehicles like a Toyota Camry (sensible passenger car) or a Mack Titan (gigantic truck used for pulling 200 tonne road trains) and are out there transporting. It's just a really weird claim to make given that the differences between his 1% and absolutely everyone else are dwarfed by the massive internal differences within that 99%.
Promoting adoption of the latest thing is the job of marketing, and his job for the past decade-or-more falls squarely into that category.
The people who go to car meetups and follow all the engineering and racing teams will be much closer to modern tech. Because it requires them to know about the latest developments in order to stay in the conversation.
What I disagree with is the % - it’s more like 90/10 instead, and most commenters here are probably in the 10% just for being on HN.
> Or they are just totally chilling and punching out at 5:01pm, but I like to think they are producing
...because everyone knows that you can't be productive during normal business hours, right?
"Guys, did you know there are developers who are just developers and don't jump on the self-promotion-and-conference-speaker-train out of actually-writing-codeville at the first opportunity?! Shockingly, such people exist! They might—and you'll want to sit down for this—even not be bad at their jobs!"