Well, I could certainly have done without the patronizing undertone, but the advice is: work for free for my company, and I might hire you.
However taking a step back, if you don't have the context around the tweet, it can certainly be seen this way.
Since it was not my intention to have that tone, I will remove the tweet from the article.
First off, thank you for the article, it was certainly interesting for me, being a newcomer in the industry myself.
What I did not like about it began after the first two lines with you quoting your own twitter post, which gave me real "i only listen to real music" vibes in the first sentence alone, but the "you're all adorable" took it from a bit edgy to condescending. Given, that might have been an attempt at a joke which I simply did not get.
Then the part about the "common discourse" which I really failed to understand, because in my experience there are lots of different specializations when talking to fellow developers and this frontent/backend divide you perceived I did not.
And finally all that talk about contributing to meaningful Open Source projects, thereby implying that there is a league of worthy projects and other projects that are wasting ones time. Then, by chance your company maintaining some of those good open source projects and the anecdote of V contributing to one of your projects a lot, to get hired eventually.
To me this is just saying: "Work for free for software companies, and if you only work hard enough, maybe someone will notice". And while that may even be the truth, I just don't find it good advice to give to people trying to become developers, frontend, backend or whatever.
It seems that you have a huge experience and knowledge, and it's nothing about those things but how you convey your ideas coming with a very strong background.
I'm not offended by the post because I am not your target audience, but seeing other comments here I can highlight some pieces that others can think that you're patronizing.
> We kernel and database people think this discussion about whether frontend or backend is harder is kinda cute.you're all adorable!
Right at the start you pose as some kind of "hardcore outsider" that poses as some old uncle observing some children playing around. That's the same tone and words. Of course I understand that this is an irony/joke but here you start to lose some people, specially when you talk about "carrer advice" that supposed to be something bit serious.
> There are other developers. The ones writing databases, operating systems, compilers, and foundational building blocks that, if they do their jobs right, end up becoming almost invisible to the average programmer.
We got the point of the "unseen work", but to set some importance you do not need to conflate and contrasting that with the experience of an "average programmer". If the "average programmer" does his/her job right you will have your food delivered in your door, your airline tickets being booked correctly, your municipality having the scheduling systems working, etc. Again, here you lost the opportunity to highlight why is awesome to work with systems programming.
> Lots of the advice that you see on Twitter (X?), is especially bad when it comes to systems level software.
Strong affirmation and I think you can have a hard time to support that with data. I know that is a personal blog and you can do your hot takes on medium, but again, it's not about contrast and more about to elevate how nice is to work with systems programming.
> There’s a certain level of “move fast and break things” that you would never accept from your OS Kernel.
Big statement and it can be completely debatable. I can say anedotically that this was true on Facebook and small companies... in 2016. The entire world of Tech involved a lot since, and for lot of products outage can mean end of an entire day of revenue.
> The whole discussion of whether or not you should write unit tests sound frankly quite stupid from the point of view of a compiler author or some core Open Source library.
This ends the first paragraph of your topic "Advice for systems programmers". So far you made contrasts, call names, say that systems engineering advice in twitter is bad, but no substance; no red meat so far in terms of advice.
...
I can go on, but again I am not your audience, but I think the tone matters in those days and the article has some good gems, but the start of the text and tone distracts. Having that writing attitude to "contrast -> call names -> conflate via superiority -> show advice from a self pedestalized standpoint" used to work, but now I think we're in another internet.
Thanks for the text anyways.