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Comment by memefrog | Hacker News Reader

This post is the programmer equivalent of teenage girls posting photos of themselves captioned with "I'm so ugly" to farm praise from their friends.

I have come to dislike this growing trend that celebrates mediocrity and failure. Posting proudly that you are stupid, terrible and incompetent seems to result in applause and high praise. Why? Why is that a good thing? I hope this was intended to be a parody.

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>I have come to dislike this growing trend that celebrates mediocrity and failure.

That's not what this is. It's a sarcastic critique of techniques the author thinks don't justify their weight. It's a comment on the cognitive load required by the plethora of complex "best practices" that often goes without questioning.

The multi-repo microservices thing really hit home for me. I only recently had to deal with this, and it was horrible. I finally made my peace with it, but it required adding an entirely unnecessary level of abstraction and techniques where merges are the new commits, and repos are the new directories, and so on. And each service was 90% boilerplate and like one endpoint with a few hundred lines of code.

Ultimately I think reducing the coginitive load of your devs, and making the build-test-debug loop fast, is the highest goal of project leadership, but I seem to be in the minority. If you don't like the "stupid" verbiage, I think one benchmark for a successful system should be usable by devs who are mildly drunk.

The problem is people aren't sure this is sarcastic. I've heard people say shit like this.

It reads very much like "I don't like learning new things" rants I see from time to time.

They've found one way they like doing things and stopped. They don't know how difficult any of the stuff they are talking about is. They just know it's something they don't want to learn.

I don't like learning new things.

Unironically.

I like learning good/useful/effective things.

Not "new" things.

Most "new" things are less capable variations of existing things that are better and more mature.

It may be similar to the idea that if you are deemed to have imposter syndrome, then you cannot be an actual imposter, so if people perceive you to have imposter syndrome then it's in some ways a good thing.

It's impossible to know if the author has imposter syndrome or not without some way of measuring his competence. However, I think "imposter" has become a loaded term as a result of the syndrome it's associated with. There are cases describing workplace incompetence, or not being qualified for a job, or being rejected for cheating at interviews, but there is no discussion of imposters in those cases. They're just deemed incompetent or not the right fit and moved on from. Actual imposters who game interviews and do manage to land jobs aren't called imposters either, they're called dishonest, but there's no "dishonesty syndrome."

So I hesitate to reach for explanations of imposter syndrome if I'm not actually qualified for something. It can become used as a crutch to fall back on like a lot of diagnoses, instead of addressing the root causes of qualification. Waking up on that cycle made me realize I have a lot to work on in some areas.

"Imposter syndrome" is one of those terms that has lost most of its value now that it's become widely known. I don't think it has any value when it's self-diagnosed. People seem to think that being in a new job or a new environment where they are the junior automatically means they have imposter syndrome. No, you probably are junior and do need to learn new things every day. You probably do have a lot to learn before you are useful. It's likely that you are out of your depth. That's not imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is when you are at the top of your field but you have the irrational belief that you're actually a total fraud, an imposter, someone that doesn't deserve to be there. Yet how many threads have I seen where someone with 10 years experience talks about how they had imposter syndrome a few years earlier?

It's a much needed coping mechanism, because the tech buzzword churn prescribed with an imperative tone is the equivalent of media setting unrealistic expectations for teenage girls.

You may be experienced, but a large part of people in our industry are just out of school and don't have the experience to sort through it.

The “10x 1x 0.5x developer” talk at the start is the only thing giving me that feeling. That I find annoyingly grating. Resigning yourself to some self-flagellating label because you don’t like to use docker is just begging for sympathy. I’d be more open to empathizing with the author if they just wrote about why they like their system. Doesn’t have to be a “why X is better Y” where you have to defend everything. Just “how I do Z with out Y” and people might be interested.

I don't think it's hard to see why people have this reaction when they're inundated with people who are better than they will ever be on social media and sites like HN.

Not everyone can be the best and this seriously affects some people's self confidence, especially when they see the best around every corner.

In 2023 it's not good enough to be good enough, at least not if you believe what the people on the internet have to say so folks rebel against such things.

TBH I just read it as someone who's found a way to make web apps that works well for them and want to focus on solving problems rather than toying with their tech stack or copying solutions from contexts that are entirely unlike the one you're working, e.g. because you're at a much smaller scale.

I think in this case being "stupid" is just a narrative pretext to advocate for simpler practices with less cognitive overhead more than anything else.

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