Dark Matter Developers != Bad Developers

"Just because somebody has a blog or a twitter account it doesn’t make them a good developer or expert. It just means they shout louder."

Exactly. 99.9% of developers' blogs aren't worth reading. They're full of articles like "I just wrote my first Go program, and here's what you should know about it!" Please, if I wanted to learn about Go, why would I read something that was written by someone who just admitted he knows almost nothing about it? I'd rather go to golang.org and read the tutorials written by the developers of the language.

This is the first I've heard the term "dark matter developer", but this type of developer definitely exists. There's probably equal numbers of those who are happy with their jobs as aren't, and who are brilliant as are mediocre. I imagine that the typical dark matter developer is more risk-averse than an "outgoing" developer (intentionally not using the term "regular" because outgoing developers are a vocal minority according to this hypothesis), simply by virtue of the tendency of developers in the startup scene to downplay risk.

I used to be one of these. I never aspired to move to the Valley, or to found a company. I eventually had an opportunity to try it and have never looked back, but the idea simply would never have occurred to me had I not been approached.

I am always amazed that people who blog, tweet etc. a lot think they are somehow "pushing things forward". Actually, it's people who write a lot of working code who push things forward. Maybe they blog too, but maybe not. Tweeting and blogging does not mean you are productive or on the cutting edge of anything meaningful.

As a dark matter developer, I'll tell you why I'm not more public:

I don't have enough time to maintain a decent blog. I could maintain a shitty one, but what's the point of that?

Join a community? I barely have enough time for HN as it is!

Stack Overflow? I contribute sometimes, but once again, it comes down to time. If you have the time, I applaud your contributions. As for me, I'll settle for answering maybe one question a month.

New tech? Sure, that's cool. But I really need to get my software to a working state, and that won't happen if I keep changing the technologies. I'd rather wait for a front runner to emerge before joining in.

Twiiter? No thanks. I get enough aggravation from email.

Meetups & conferences? I've gone to a few, but I've found that I can gain a far deeper understanding of a particular language/technology/paradigm through online articles or books.

About the only thing I leave any kind of footprint with is github, because coding is one creative outlet I can't live without.

I will gladly put myself in this camp. I will trade dark matter devs for ones constantly spouting off all the time about their questionable "innovations" and committing themselves to 70 hour work weeks while they create nothing products and disrupt this and that so that...gah I'm already getting bored writing this.

There are also entire dark matter companies. Small tech companies that just launch, run, and make a comfortable living for the employees. They are not trying to be huge, not trying for a huge exit, not trying to make news. Just trying to build and work for a good company and live a good life.

Those of us who are "dark matter" developers really like working for these small, quiet, solid companies.

What would you call the middle ground between the two of them? I feel like I spend a lot of time reading, but I just can't bring myself to blog. I've had one for years that has maybe 5 posts. It's a combination of being tired at the end of the day, feeling like I have nothing useful to say (that hasn't already been said), and generally not thinking about it.

It's also a similar story with Stack Overflow. When I think to try and answer questions, they've already been answered by people more knowledgeable than me.

i just started using stack overflow recently & i've found it's mainly a bunch of people asking very simple questions or fixes to very nuanced quirks.

When faced with similar situations, i've always followed my own judgement through research. I can see how this kind of a resource is useful in certain cases, but a ton of the site is just silly gamification.

Time spent on these sites is time that I could have spent watching a video lecture about Scala, or trying a new library.

I guess github is better in this respect since it's about active coding and understanding distributed projects. But I see a ton of forked repos in users' projects with few (if any) of their own code in them. It makes me realize that many cutting edge devs are just filling out the "digital resume" of a programmer. Yet there are obviously some who are driving the industry mixed into the same sources.

signal to noise is difficult to determine in all systems and being current can be a bad indicator in programming. There are tons of badass devs who just learn design patterns and language nuances for "older" languages who can write much more modular/reusable code than those who learn MVC framework after MVC framework. I think..... a lot of them work for Netflix.

This is to say, lurkers can be just as thoughtful, as intelligent, and just as competent as those up on stage.

thanks for introducing me to this term - and also the original blog post. :)

(no, not everybody had heard of it already)

there are a lot of these guys out there - i've worked with some, and whilst the generalisation is poorly motivated it is generally accurate. a good proportion of these kinds are in the job for money, stability, parental pressure etc. and care little to improve themselves or their work. they do a 9 to 5, just like you would if you were stacking shelves in a supermarket.

its a rare person who tries to excel at shelf stacking.

This just seems wrong. You can be a contributer to the community but not the public community. You can contribute within your organization and still use the latest and greatest technologies if you choose. You can talk and collaborate on many development topics.

I work with other developers and we are constantly collaborating on ideas and technology. I don't believe that makes me a "Dark Matter Developer" because I don't share those conversations publicly.

Thoughts?

Am I the only one who thinks that "dark matter developer" does a terrible job of describing its intended meaning? I had never heard of the term and I certainly couldn't extrapolate what is meant by it just based on the name. What's more, it has a built-in negative bias due to the term "dark". As a developer who falls somewhere in between "dark matter" and not, consider me not a fan of this terminology.

This post makes me think of an article about "the guild of the silicon valley", "guys" you won't see in social networks or events spotlights but make things done and help startups and companies scaling and reaching success. I think it's just a matter of communication skills, anyone with less com skills won't mean he is "bad" and not helping the community moving forward, and vice versa, anyone always on stackoverflow or github won't guarantee he's a rockstar programmer. And personnaly, I prefer having a "dark matter" developer or black hole programmer, call them what you want, who's focused on a long term vision than anyone always chasing for the latest trend. Experience shows that so called dark matter developers are most versatile by knowing deeper how things work and how to build/extend/improve apps. But advice for "dark matter" peers, improve your communication skills, because it will make you a great developer !

I fall into this "Dark Matter Developer" in more than one way.

On the social front: I go to, on average, one half of one work-related conference per year (real world, I go to one conference every other year). I have no use for twitter, facebook, linkedin, or any other "social network", preferring instead old-school forums and the occasional aggregator like HN where the signal-to-noise ratio is quite a bit better. I have a personal blog, updated every few months, that rarely touches on anything tech related, and is read primarily by friends.

On the tech front: I write code, in part, for decade+ old systems, and the rest with old-fashioned, plain-jane java. I write code that will never be used anywhere else, in languages that are neither new, "cool", or "hip" in any way. I keep somewhat up-to-date with big-picture new tech, but I see no reason to delve into any details if it doesn't relate to my work. I enjoy what I do, and the problem solving that goes into it.

I have, perhaps, fallen out of love with the field, and the industry. Perhaps I never had a passion for writing code, preferring instead the theoretical challenges I found while pursuing my degree in computer science.

What I do have: A life away from work, and away from computing. I'm in the middle of a multi-year "bootstrapping" of my own "start-up" -- one that has absolutely nothing to do with computing, and instead has everything to do with my love of woodworking. It should, with effort, provide a secondary source of income for as long as I wish. If I'm extraordinarily lucky, I may be able to make it my primary source of income at some point. There will be no VCs, no big-payout exit. Yet I consider myself just as much of an entrepreneur as any of the silicon valley crowd -- simply one with different goals and a different market in mind.

The interesting thing is that when I was being loud and focusing on driving traffic to my blog to showing off my shiny new things, I was probably producing my worst and most unimaginative work.

Now, as a 'dark matter' engineer, I don't have the time to write technical blog material nor do anything that would classify me as a 'matter' engineer. The great tragedy is that I'm producing my best work with real world impact.

Ok, lets keep this astronomical cosmological perspective.

You're are coding on a small planet orbiting a small star that will burn out in a few billion years, taking your planet and all of your code with it.

Is it really of any universal consequence if you're producing VB6 during business hours or building a disappearing <whatever> app at an overnight hackathon?

I think not. Code on dark matter developers, wherever the hell you are.

This whole article is written from the perspective that dark matter developers are by nature worse than the alternative, with the exceptional one amongst them.

"They can be just as capable as you."

It has been my experience that those with the loudest voices are rarely the best at what they do. Far more often it's the people who prefer to spend that time experimenting or learning from others who are the best.

substituting "dark matter dev" with "introvert" i think we'd get to the very old and standard discourse.

This is just passively-aggressively implying that dark matter developers aren't bad because they're inferior at coding, they're bad because they're inferior at being social.

Maybe I don't need to go to every Django convention ever to be a good programmer. Maybe I measure myself by different standards.

I find developers with a github account admirable, but I never did contribute to open source at a day job, and while I'd like nothing more than give everything I do for myself away for free, the goal is to sustain myself stand in the way of that.

You can map them by using the curvature of github and the relative speed of development. Is too early to say, but there is also some indication of some kind of dark flow control, possibly as a result of dark energy drinks.

Who thought that if a developer doesn't tweet that they are a bad developer?

People thought that? WTF.

my co-founder is one such dark matter developer... but, sometimes i feel its good... cause it actually keeps him more focused on working than hacking for fun !!! But, yeah..it does bring in a lot of demerits

This same monicker can be applied to designers.

>They may still know the latest design patterns, tools and techniques just as well as you do. They just choose not to talk about it.

I don't think this was the original "Dark Matter Developer" definition. If you read the original article (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9...), you will see that he specifically says they don't keep up to date. They just do what they know, go home at the end of a day, and live a life.

Person A just works job.

Job is paid by other person B(a creator)

Person A dies, person B just hires a replacement. World is the same.

Person B dies, company/idea dies, world loses something.

I think hackers want to be the person B and make their mark. It doesn't have to be bogging, running a charity for free part time also counts but it has to be something.

People have this strange idea working a job is contributing, but no it's just breaking even. You just swap work for money <=> not creating.