
Most tech content is bullshit - velmu
https://www.aleksandra.codes/tech-content-consumer
======
tonystubblebine
Good is hard.

When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many
programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And
everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by
free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming.

At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd
thing that would lead to high quality. I remember this sort of was true in the
PHP documentation. The official documentation was always deeply flawed, but
the comment thread attached to that documentation generally had the right
info.

But that was a precursor to our current situation. To get correct info you had
to read a lot of conflicting info and synthesis it yourself.

So I think we are seeing as good as the free ecosystem can get and what's sad
is that we seem to have lost the paid ecosystem. It's not nearly as strong as
it used to be.

What people probably don't know about O'Reilly back in the day is what went
into a book.

The author was almost always a subject matter expert already. And their editor
was also a subject matter expert. Then the book would go through tech review
and those people were generally also pedantic luminaries. Then the book would
be published and bugs would come into an errata tracking system. The vast
majority of those bugs would get fixed between printings.

And then, on top of all that, there was a tech support number. And if the code
in the book wasn't working for you, then you could get a live person to try to
work through it with you.

That all costs a lot of money, but when you split the cost out across
consumers it was only $30 or so per book.

I value my time. And there are many, many places where I wish I could pay for
quality. Tech content is one of them.

~~~
jjice
Seems kind of like the video game crash of 1983[0]. A flood of low quality
content that begins to drown out the high quality content. One of the best
things about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they
want. One of the worst parts about the internet is that anyone can create and
publish what they want.

I'm a big fan of books because that is where a lot of experts seem to prefer
to publish their knowledge, and it's usually worth the price. Of course that's
not always the case, but I feel like I get much higher quality content from
books than Medium articles.

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983)

~~~
azemetre
What are some high quality books you’d recommend that are somewhat recent
(last ten years)?

The only ones I can say, that I’ve also read, are YDKJS and Secrets JavaScript
Ninja (work in web, but willing to read anything, good information is good
information regardless of the tech).

~~~
ProZsolt
Pro Git, Coders at Work both are ~10 years old. A recent one is Site
Reliability Engineering published in 2016

~~~
afc
Whoah, it's already ~4 years since the SRE book... How time flies.

I wrote two of the chapters in the SRE book but I have very mixed feelings
about them. I'm glad that I got a chance to talk openly about some of the work
I've been doing for the last decade, but I felt that, in the end, I couldn't
devote to my chapters as much time as I would have liked, so I don't feel as
proud about them as I would have liked. Boy, this really took soooo much time!

I don't know what I'm trying to say, I guess just that I find seeing someone
praise the book interesting. What were your favorite chapters?

~~~
ProZsolt
Embracing Risk changed how I think about downtime, the other chapters didn't
really offer anything new for me, I already used those principles in practice,
so I can't really pick a favorite from those.

Despite that, I still recommend it to anybody new to DevOps/SRE/Cloud
Engineering/whatever you call it, with a grain of salt that you don't operate
at Google scale so you shouldn't implement it as is. Just reading the
principles chapters helps a lot to talk the same language.

------
_hardwaregeek
There's a particular brand of young developer where every opinion comes from a
blog post, talk or HN comment. They have strong views on many different topics
and believe that they're knowledgeable and smarter than the average
developer^[1].

The only issue? They don't have actual experience to back this up. Because not
only is most tech content bullshit, the small percentage that isn't BS may not
apply to their situation. You may not be working on soft real time systems.
You may not be working with big data. You may not be running a company.

I should know—I'm certainly guilty of assuming that because I read about
software development, I'm a better software developer. When really there's a
big big big difference between reading about development and actually
practicing the craft. Especially if you've only been programming casually.
There's a massive difference between writing code for fun and writing code
that needs to be a value-add for the company.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Bear](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Bear)

~~~
openfuture
Being young is hard, no need to judge to harshly, often a rivalrous blogpost-
driven discussion can be turned into a cooperative exploration, which is
exactly a way for them to gain the experience.

Quiet, or at-arms-length, dismissal hurts self-confidence and reinforces this
blogpost-driven defense mechanism.

~~~
_hardwaregeek
It's definitely not the worst to be overly well read in programming
literature. But oh man does it get old arguing with someone who is taking
advice from a very niche, very particular field such as game development and
applying it to general software development.

------
whack
Call me a cynic, but the whole "think critically and figure it out for
yourself" solution is inefficient at best, harmful at worst. Global warming
skepticism is exactly the kind of thing that often occurs when people trust
their own judgement more than that of subject matter experts.

There are very effective ways to get high quality recommendations, with
minimal effort on your part. Want to get good medical advice? Find two highly
regarded medical specialists and ask them independently for a diagnosis and
treatment plan. Not two doctors next door. Not two doctors who published
random blogs. Two doctors who are highly regarded by their peers and by the
wider industry.

Want to get good financial advice? Do the same thing with financial advisors.
Looking for good fitness advice? Do the same with fitness trainers or
nutritionists. Looking for good software engineering advice? Do the same thing
with developers.

Eventually the day will come when you have learnt and grown so much, that you
are just as capable as the "highly regarded" experts. When that day comes,
feel free to debate the merits of their arguments. But until then, don't try
to be an expert at everything. Don't feel pressured to derive every single
thing from first principles. That's just not scalable.

~~~
rapind
Many of us were told growing up that we were a special snowflake. Not sure
there's correlation (not sure how you'd prove it), but I have my suspicions.
IMO we're in the age of individualism. Hopefully it's just a cycle.

The real kicker is it seems to be self-fulfilling. If experts are no longer
trusted or respected, the market / margin for expertise shrinks. You get lots
of self-proclaimed experts to fill in the gaps with less investment (lower
margin == lower investment, clickbait), and then the individual is justified
in thinking most expertise is crap... because it is now crap (advertiser
supported business model).

Maybe we wake up some day and say "Holy shit, it's all just bullshit!" and
then expertise can again attract an audience that's willing to pay for it.

~~~
frequentnapper
How would the non-experts differentiate between true expertise and self-
proclaimed one?

~~~
rapind
Lack of consensus I suppose, but that can also be a false positive.

------
Veen
Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Tech content is no
exception. As the article points out, the corollary is that you have to think
for yourself, assessing every piece of content you come across.

~~~
dredmorbius
Since we're arguing by aphorism, Brandolini's law a/k/a bullshit asymmetry
principle: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of
magnitude bigger than to produce it."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417790)

The value of a _healthy_ established pedagogy, curriculum, and canon is that
these distribute the bullshit-sifting role and guard and promote the jems.

~~~
quickthrower2
2 orders of it’s your boss!

But seriously I hate working with non self critical developers because it’s
exhausting trying to refute what they say. Although “asking questions” can
help.

------
tuyguntn
I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but
marketing content is even more bullshit.

I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read
from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books,
specification of devices for writing drivers and so on.

Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles,
kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and
modifying a little and trying to get lots back links. I remember when Quora
had quality content, now everything is sales pitch. I feel like people are not
trying to create quality content, they are trying to sell and to sell you need
more back links.

~~~
PragmaticPulp
Personal brand building is another major contributor to search engine content
dilution.

Whenever I Google for something in hot new languages or frameworks, I have to
sift through 10s of Medium articles from beginner developers who are trying to
establish themselves as industry experts.

I don't want to read some junior developer's Medium post full of animated GIFs
and a pseudo-tutorial that is really just entire source code files embedded as
GitHub gists one file at a time. I just want to skip to the documentation and
get to work.

~~~
Jorge1o1
The truly worrying development is when those same Medium posts start circling
HN.

I’m not trying to be elitist, but what I enjoy about HN is seeing truly novel
and interesting content, and every “crappy” article on the front page bumps an
interesting one downwards into oblivion.

~~~
karolisram
I’m ashamed to say that was me at some point. On top of that, those articles
did nothing to further my career. All that mattered so far is my past
experience, projects and how well I can (leet)code. Now if I start blogging
again, it will have to be purely out of intellectual curiosity.

~~~
Nextgrid
I confirm this doesn't do anything for your career, or at least not as much as
just focusing that time on actual, paid _work_. I find that in my career my
resume and experience that's on it as opposed to any side-projects or attempts
at writing.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
Yes, however on helping the career I think the writing is like a nice little
detail on the resume, a way to make it standout a bit more, I also found that
in a recent interview for a project an article I had just written on SVG was
naturally relevant. As a general rule talking about little articles you've
written isn't going to naturally happen in the interview because the interview
process is focused on past work and horrible trick questions.

It has also been somewhat useful in projects where a concern with
documentation has been expressed because the writing is a better example of my
ability to document things than having worked on a lot of projects where you
may be able to go see what we shipped but not be able to see anything of the
documentation.

I think of the writing as the equivalent of a side project:

* it allows me to focus on something I want to learn

* it helps to make what I learn stick in my head

* it gives me a deadline and people who will send me emails to say how's it going with that

* it works as documentation for what I've learned

* it gives me a trivial amount of money for having taken the time to learn something. Basically the last article I wrote is paying for an annual Dropbox account, and a couple days worth of food for my family. It was way too much work for that to be worthwhile, but I did learn some things that will help with later stuff.

------
omniscient_oce
I think it has something to do with this current culture of 'personal
branding', wherein a lot of content online aimed at beginners says you should
be blogging, writing articles, basically telling people how to do the thing
you learnt that day on dev.to, blogs, Twitter, Medium, etc. I don't think it
is necessarily bad per se, but it all seems a bit useless? I think there is
good value in writing a personal blog, a log of what you've learnt coming from
the perspective of a learner, rather than a teacher.

~~~
me_smith
Do you have any suggestions for blogs that come from a perspective of a
learner, rather than a teacher? I feel like DevLogs in the game dev corner
could be an example of that.

~~~
omniscient_oce
That's pretty much what I was thinking of haha. I like watching game devlogs
too.

None come immediately to mind but I've definitely come across some before on
the web. Basically they kind of go "here is my problem, here's what I tried
first, that didn't quite work so I tried that, but then I learnt about
super_mega_amazing_tech and I wrote my code like this and it seems to work."

I find those kind of things quite interesting to at least skim through if not
read in full if it's well-written.

------
leetrout
I’ve said this for a long time:

The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the
people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work.

Of course there are exceptions but I’m extremely skeptical of a lot of stuff I
read.

Also that the HN bubble will always make readers feel behind when in reality
90% of the industry hasn’t even begun to catch-up. I felt behind with K8S in
2016, for example, not realizing we were just seeing the wave form when I felt
like it was cresting.

~~~
jedberg
> The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the
> people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work.

I think that's a really sad and cynical view. I assume you don't spend 16
hours a day writing code. I assume you have hobbies and other interests. For
some people, educating others about their favorite topics is their hobby.
Writing about their projects is their hobby.

Here are entire blogs by people who are "doing":

[http://www.brendangregg.com](http://www.brendangregg.com)

[https://perspectives.mvdirona.com](https://perspectives.mvdirona.com)

[https://netflixtechblog.com](https://netflixtechblog.com)

[https://www.allthingsdistributed.com](https://www.allthingsdistributed.com)

[https://airbnb.io](https://airbnb.io)

[https://engineering.fb.com](https://engineering.fb.com)

Those are just a few I can think of in one minute. If I went through my RSS
feeds and bookmarks I could find more.

~~~
timwaagh
Obviously the people who write for fb or airbnb or netflix might well be
professional tech bloggers or people in tech-leadership positions that tell
other people how to do the work. Or even researchers (I see the last one
appear in ms tech blogs a lot). Or it might have been heavily edited. Brendan
Gregg is a professional tech author. Not a hobbyist. Mr Vogels is a CTO, far
from a programmer. That's not to disrespect any of their content. In fact i
think its great that companies bother with it and that we have so many tech
authors willing to put in the hours it takes to come up with something
sellable. Arguably the people writing such things put their companies rep on
the line so should be more trusted than the average grunt programmer who is
still on the implementation level. But if these are the best counterexamples
we can find, then I'd say OP has a point. That's not to say coders don't write
blogs, I've written a few technical blogs myself and I am very much on the
implementation level. But that's not something people will actually read
because it's pretty low effort and not about work stuff (every work contract
has a secrecy clause these days).

~~~
jedberg
> Brendan Gregg is a professional tech author.

He gets paid to write, yes, but that doesn't mean he's not also an engineer.
I've worked with him, he does quite a lot of heavy engineering and then writes
about it. His writing is so good sometimes he gets paid for it.

But OP said that tech blogs aren't written by implementers, and that's not at
all true.

------
Brozilean
I basically realized this when I was at an internship talking to a buddy about
a compilers course I could be taking and his language he was making for fun.
He was talking about a couple topics I'd probably go over in the course.

Then a more senior coworker came over to join the convo and mentioned a few
similar words that were clearly jargon related to compilers etc. He spoke with
such confidence that I didn't want to admit I didn't know about them, but
figured I shouldn't be ashamed at not knowing stuff. I asked him what it meant
and he said he didn't really know and wasn't entirely sure. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
hinkley
I once mentioned off-hand that I was a SIGPLAN member so that I could get the
proceedings and learn about future tech in compilers and JITs and GC.

One person did a double-take, looked at me, and said, "You can _understand_
those?" I knew exactly what he meant, and consoled him by saying "only about
2/3rds," at which point all of the tension drained out of his shoulders. I had
communicated that yes, some of it is just bullshit not fit for consumption,
and that he was not an idiot.

As a Feynman dilettante, if you can't have a human conversation about a
subject (note: conversation, not 'curing cancer'/winning the Nobel) then you
don't really know the subject. Or perhaps more generously: It doesn't matter
if you know it because you can't pass that knowledge on. You are dead end as
far as human progress is concerned.

I suspect Tech people feel this more than pure researchers, because we know
that in a couple years we will be focusing on something else, and 5 years at
most we will be gone. If we haven't passed on our knowledge, then there will
be consequences that are readily apparent. In academia you get so many
opportunities to connect and if you connect with 5 people, you probably feel
like your work is done, and you forget about people like me who regret ever
encountering certain teachers because they set me back or in one case, put me
off a course I believed I would stay to the end.

Me, I have 10-15 people not of my choosing and I have to connect with 2 and
1/2 of them. It's a tempest in a teapot.

------
randompwd
> At the beginning of my career, I would never, ever, post anything technical
> on the internet. I thought that if someone was brave enough to post a blog
> post or take part in a tech discussion, they always know what they are
> doing. I couldn't be more wrong!

So true.

I think this is just personality trait of people who are over-confident. I
started out profesionally at roughly the same time as another dev in a non
tech company. Pretty much the only devs in the company.

Technically, I was more skilled and had more engineering mindset. Both of us
were savvy on biz side.

However, I was more reserved and less cowboy solutions than him. He was a nice
guy and a friend but the difference in personalities were stark when it came
to technical things. (This was a mature, real business who previously had
outsourced the only dev system they used(ERP)).

He jumped so quickly from doing technical to _just_ talking technical and his
career climbed. All the while, I'm wondering how the heck can he take that
position when he doesn't know shit about the tech. Turns out if you drift
towards management, nobody gives a shit if what you're talking about is a good
idea or feasible - the people above you in non-tech companies generally know
less than shit.

Now an engineering manager at Bezos company.

~~~
robocat
I hate to diagnose over the internet, but it is possible you have engineer’s
blindness. This usually only happens to technically excellent developers.

When an developer lacks some productivity, political, or teamwork skill, they
sometimes simply don’t know that they are missing that skill (or they think it
is a worthless skill), and can’t understand why someone else gets promoted
over them.

In this case, you could ask the other dev, because if he has a skill that you
are lacking, he should be able to recognise your lack of that skill. This
sounds a bit Dunning-Kruger but it usually isn’t. The issue is more about
deliberate blindness (e.g. considering technical skills are king and politics
as valueless), and usually a wilful disdain for recognising the hidden skills
of others (“how did that idiot get that promotion” - maybe that idiot has some
skill you struggle to recognise?)

If you think you might have engineers blindness, and are in a big enough
organisation then:

1\. try to look at “successful” idiot/wanker/useless engineers and see what
things they are good at. Try to look at those you might disdain
(sales/marketing/exec) and try to see where their value comes from. If someone
can get their mind to be non-judgemental about others and be interested in the
unobvious skills of others, they learn a lot (in my experience).

2\. Look at what holds back other engineers, and look within yourself to see
if you have any similar pattern.

Disclaimer: I would definitely call myself an engineer type. The above took me
decades for me to recognise, and I still can’t do politics (but I now
recognise the value, and I am learning to see when someone is good at it). And
it is quite possible none of this applies to you: I am likely to be misreading
you completely.

~~~
randompwd
Well, it could be. However, a family member who had years earlier excelled in
a (non software) technical field before jumping to management positions then
founder had given advise. Become excellent at $skills then move up. Good
advise. Advise i'd pass on with the caveat that talking tech is so f*kin easy
at 10,000 feet, be prepared to see less able people jump upwards before
they're anywhere near ready.

edit: this was ~10 years ago at this stage. I've stayed hands-on technical by
choice(in various roles) while the other jumped to "pseudo-leadership (incl.
Thought Leadership©").

edit edit: By no means was he an idiot. Just cavalier.

~~~
robocat
Sorry, I didn’t intend for my comment to advise moving “up” into management.

It is about maintaining an open mind. How can you tell the difference between
someone who has valuable 3_048 metre advice versus someone who has highly
negative value at 3km?

I have remained in a developers rôle for my working life so far.

I wish I could find the anecdote where this guy recognised that this one woman
was always on successful projects within a business. He didn’t know what she
did, but he recognised that if she was involved then somehow the project was
successful (I think surprising him because many software projects fail). I
wonder why he didn’t ask her what her secret was? At least he was open minded
enough to see she had some magic, even if he couldn’t directly learn her
presumed skill.

Thanks for reply - I’m still working on my own blindnesses - I can say trying
to be non-judgemental and looking for hidden skills in others has really
helped me.

~~~
amznthrowaway5
Here it is, from peopleware:

> I was teaching an in-house design course some years ago, when one of the
> upper managers buttonholed me to request that I assess some of the people in
> the course (his project staff). He was particularly curious about one woman.
> It was obvious he had his doubts about her: “I don’t quite see what she adds
> to a project; she’s not a great developer or tester or much of anything.”
> With a little investi- gation, I turned up this intriguing fact: During her
> 12 years at the company, the woman in question had never worked on a project
> that had been anything other than a huge success. It wasn’t obvious what she
> was adding, but projects always succeeded when she was around. After
> watching her in class for a week and talk- ing to some of her co-workers, I
> came to the conclusion that she was a superb catalyst. Teams naturally
> jelled better when she was there. She helped people communicate with each
> other and get along. Projects were more fun when she was part of them. When
> I tried to explain this idea to the manager, I struck out. He just didn’t
> recognize the role of catalyst as essential to a project.

\---------

I don't think engineers blindness is the cause in the majority of cases, and
that woman would be put on a PIP.

To get ahead things like unethical behavior, lying and corruption matter far
more than competence, teamwork and making real contributions. A lot of people
simply can't stand to admit this.

~~~
robocat
> To get ahead things like unethical behavior, lying and corruption matter far
> more than competence, teamwork and making real contributions. A lot of
> people simply can't stand to admit this.

I am a cofounder of a successful small bootstrapped business where competence,
teamwork and making real contributions absolutely matter. I suspect those
positive traits matter for ycombinator startups too.

I must admit I have never worked for a large corporation, where perhaps
unethical behavior, lying and corruption are effective. However I have seen
many founders fail trying to use those negative traits.

Thank you for recalling the Peopleware reference: great book!

~~~
amznthrowaway5
Yes, once the corporation gets large enough it becomes almost purely
political.

------
nippoo
Counter-argument: coming up with your own, carefully considered solutions to
every technical challenge is absurdly time-consuming. The reason we can build
such complicated applications in such a small amount of time is partly because
we're relying on other people to make default, sensible tradeoffs - a
framework supporting a particular type of SQL database, or NoSQL, or PHP or
Django or whatever it might be. The mental effort of analysing all the
tradeoffs of doing something one particular way (with such a wide range of
possible options) for every little decision rapidly gets overwhelming. Of
course it's worth doing a bit of research (which often ends up being "read
someone else's blog" for bigger decisions, but unless you're willing to spend
2 months building a prototype application in each of Ruby, Django, PHP, and
whatever other fun new JS framework du jour there is, it's perfectly valid to
go for the path of least resistance and hope it doesn't cause you too many
problems in the long run.

~~~
ori_b
> _Counter-argument: coming up with your own, carefully considered solutions
> to every technical challenge is absurdly time-consuming._

You should really understand the problem you're trying to solve. Once you
understand the problem, evaluating a solution is not so hard.

And implementing a solution without understanding it is negligence that will
bite you in prod sooner or later.

[https://blog.nelhage.com/post/computers-can-be-
understood/](https://blog.nelhage.com/post/computers-can-be-understood/)

~~~
quickthrower2
There just isn’t time for what I think you are saying. Analysis is a cost
itself. Shortcuts have to be taken to get anything done. Judgment is required
to navigate those shortcuts. Some might be unknown unknowns.

------
habosa
I don't think people realize how much hyper-focused tech content is out there
these days. I work in developer relations (at Firebase) so I see a lot more of
it than an average person.

There are entire channels devoted to making YouTube videos that show you how
to solve a very specific error message for a certain combination of Framework
X and Library Y.

This content is obviously great for SEO but the people making it often record
it 30 seconds after finding the solution themselves and because it's video it
can't be maintained, it just rots.

Often I'll get to work in the morning and see 5 new GitHub issues where people
are making the same hyper-specific mistake. Why? They are all misled by the
same new blog post or video.

That said, I love how passionate developers are about teaching each other. No
other industry shares knowledge as rapidly, excitedly, and broadly as we do.
Even if there's a lot of bullshit, I find the whole scene very energizing.

------
jdauriemma
I agree with the problem presented by the author, but not necessarily with the
solution.

If blind acquiescence to random blogs and forums is a sin, then so is blind
acquiescence to one's own limited experience. Most categories of software
problems have already been solved. Being a "creator," in the truest sense of
the word, is therefore rare. Most of the time, when we endeavor to "create"
instead of "consume," we are just reinventing the wheel. That's often a good
use of time, but it can also lead to bad code.

Instead of abandoning "consumerism," I try to challenge others to refer to
prior art. It is only by filtering through books, documentation, and yes,
random tech blogs, that we can get a sense of how much of what we're doing
truly needs to be "created."

~~~
ozim
I would say author meant not "create from scratch" as in "reinvent the wheel",
more like be a creator who is making conscious choices. You can still be a
creator by making a remix using samples created by other people. Difference is
that you just don't blindly copy-paste with a bit of tweaking so it "fits",
but to know what you do.

~~~
jdauriemma
That's a reasonable conclusion. If that was the author's intent, I think it
would have been helpful to have described that further. In particular, I've
noticed (anecdotally) that many early-career devs tend towards trying to code
their way out of problems like it's a test or challenge.

------
fxtentacle
I believe this all started with the advise to write blogs and books to market
yourself as an authority.

As a result, nowadays, most blog posts are written by people who are seeking a
job in that area, not by people who have experience working in that area.

I mean I'm sure that I would have experience about different topics. But I
rarely have the time to write about it. Customers and their projects keep
getting in the way.

So if someone has time to write one 2000 word blog post every 2 days, ask
yourself: Why does that person have so much time for writing? Aren't they
working?

~~~
tracerbulletx
Ok, it might be true that a lot of inexperienced people are writing blogs now
as a way to build a personal brand. But your reaction is an over-reaction.
There are also lots of incredible experts writing, and writing its self is an
incredibly rewarding and educational activity. It's not a waste of time, no
matter how busy you are.

~~~
fxtentacle
Of course, there are also articles written by experts. But those experts will
be busy and, thus, publish on a slow schedule. So I believe my heuristic is
accurate that anyone posting content too quickly will most likely not do much
actual work.

Also, if the internet is 95% articles by job seekers, then I'm better off
distrusting everyone instead of expanding the trust that only 5% deserve to
the other 95%.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
>Also, if the internet is 95% articles by job seekers, then I'm better off
distrusting everyone instead of expanding the trust that only 5% deserve to
the other 95%.

I guess if better off means not finding anything good but no crap either,
instead of only finding some good and lots of crap.

~~~
fxtentacle
Well, I deliberately chose the word "distrusting" here.

If I know that the internet is 95% crap, I will treat every article as wrong
until proven correct, meaning that I will not copy & paste anything without
verifying myself that it works as it should.

If I had a provably reliable author, on the other hand, I could skip that work
and just take his/her word for it. But only about 5% of the people writing on
the internet deserve this level of trust.

------
_bxg1
From personal experience, including reading a lot of HN, I think programmers
as a species are especially biased towards putting forth opinions in the hopes
of being validated for our experience or intelligence, even when we know we
don't know much about the subject. The fact that IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer)
[but...] is a common enough statement in these circles to deserve its own
_acronym_ is telling. We often throw out unchecked opinions in hopes they may
be right, because that would feel really good, and just let others tell us if
they're wrong. When those opinions take the form of a blog post, rebuttal
often doesn't exist in the same place as the content, making it seem more
authoritative than it often deserves to be.

~~~
stared
I am not a sociologist, but I think it's not only programmers. A lot of my FB
friends suddenly became COVID-19 experts, or experts on US police violence (or
lack of thereof).

In programming, at least the code needs to work. Maybe it is a bad pattern or
anything - but the barrier of entry is non-trivial. For anything else (e.g.
politics), a lot of people have opinions, with their strength being not much
correlated with their knowledge of the subject.

~~~
andrewflnr
> I am not a sociologist, but...

Please tell me you did this on purpose.

~~~
diarrhea
IANAS!

------
jugg1es
"Those who can't do, teach". While I think this is usually a pretty offensive
statement, I think it is an apt one in the world of tech blogs. The people who
really know what they are doing are not writing blogs. That's why the content
that the Netflix team releases really sticks out. If only they broke their
1h-long presentations into 500 word tech blogs.

~~~
salawat
Those who are doing, also teach, but are constrained in their audience and
time with which they can disseminate their know-how by employment contracts.

This is a feature; not a bug given the way our quasi-free-market founded on
protection of trade secrets over actual marketwide innovation that lifts
everyone else.

I try guiding anyone who'll listen how to do things I'm well versed in; but
there is only so much one can do in a day.

------
hn_throwaway_99
I disliked a lot of this article, as "there is bullshit _everywhere_ " seems
like something that should just be an axiom at this point.

However, I will expand on a specific _pattern_ of bullshit that is common in
the tech world: over-complication for the sake of some sort of "theoretical
purity". I think Redux is a good example of this. I think Redux can be used
well, but it became the "recommended way to do global state in React" and IMO
way many more code bases have become an incomprehensible nightmare because of
Redux than have been helped by it.

Similarly, and I'm probably dating myself, but anyone remember the original
Enterprise Java Bean specs, and the laughably bad "Pet Store" demo app from
the early 00s? It was as if you took a collection of "architects" with no real
world experience, and certainly no regard for performance, and had them create
the most elaborate Rube Goldberg machine possible.

~~~
acemarke
Ironically, Dan and I have spent more time trying to convince people to _not_
use Redux all the time than we have trying to actually market it :( [0] [1]

We specifically have info in our docs on when it actually makes sense to use
Redux [2] [3], but that doesn't change the flood of Medium blog posts out
there.

I created the Redux Style Guide docs page [4] to try to give some
clarification on our actual current recommended patterns and usage practices,
and our Redux Toolkit package to simplify common Redux use cases [5].
Unfortunately, there's only so much we can do - a lot of people never even
look at the actual docs.

[0] [https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/you-might-not-need-redux-
be4...](https://medium.com/@dan_abramov/you-might-not-need-redux-be46360cf367)

[1] [https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/05/idiomatic-redux-
ta...](https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/05/idiomatic-redux-tao-of-redux-
part-1/)

[2] [https://redux.js.org/introduction/getting-started#should-
you...](https://redux.js.org/introduction/getting-started#should-you-use-
redux)

[3] [https://redux.js.org/faq/general#when-should-i-use-
redux](https://redux.js.org/faq/general#when-should-i-use-redux)

[4] [https://redux.js.org/style-guide/style-guide](https://redux.js.org/style-
guide/style-guide)

[5] [https://redux-toolkit.js.org](https://redux-toolkit.js.org)

~~~
ng12
Just like to chime in and say I'm really appreciative of these efforts. I get
devs at my firm who are learning to do web dev for the first time and ask why
we're not using Redux by default. I link them to Dan's article and the Redux
FAQ as part of my explanation that Redux is a life-saver when you need it and
aggressive overengineering when you don't.

~~~
acemarke
Thanks :) I also should have linked my post "Redux - Not Dead Yet!" [0], which
talks about how Redux compares to other tools like context, useReducer, and
GraphQL, when it makes sense to use those, and reasons why Redux is still
useful depending on what you're actually trying to do.

[0] [https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/03/redux-not-dead-
yet...](https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2018/03/redux-not-dead-yet/)

------
w1nter
What’s more, I think the incentives are not aligned. People who write content
nowadays don’t usually have the reader in mind, but instead focus on promoting
something (a tech, a tool, or their personal brand):
[https://angryscript.home.blog/2020/05/08/in-2020-all-
content...](https://angryscript.home.blog/2020/05/08/in-2020-all-content-is-
marketing/)

~~~
delaynomore
>...personal brand... This. Unfortunately it appears that these days if you
want to get ahead in your career is to publish content and develop that
"personal brand".

~~~
dgb23
If it creates new opportunities why not?

Of course your work can speak for itself, but who can hear it? Advertising
through technical writing seems to be a very good thing as long as its
valuable and honest. Because if it isn’t we filter it out.

------
soneca
I agree with every argument she made and I think following her advice is great
for every developer. But I would like to add a small caveat that I think
doesn’t detract from the good advice.

Some of the reasons she mentioned are legitimate (meaning, they are good
reasons to follow random blog posts and stack overflow answers), like having
no time, or it is comfortable. Some are not exactly good reasons, but happens
often since we are humans (we are lazy, we don’t believe in our selves).

I also would like to add one more legitimate reason: it is not that important.
Like it is an edge case, a temporary code, a piece of software where the
highest performance isn’t necessary.

I think it is important to maintain an attitude of always having a critical
mind while reading tech content. And understanding her point that something
being published does not mean that something is right. But, once that’s your
default attitude, it is ok to accept that, sometimes, you can critically
conclude that it’s ok to just follow that tutorial and copy that code without
much thought.

If that is challenged in the future, it is also ok to answer that you did just
because you copied someone on the internet. As along as you accept that this
is not a strong reason, and recognize that it might have been a misjudgment on
your part.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I am in the process of preparing a video class on Core Bluetooth (the native
Apple framework).

I thought that I knew it all pretty well, but I found plenty of places that I
needed to recalibrate, as I reviewed my materials.

I am now a great deal more confident in my grasp of the technology; thanks to
my class.

I do a lot of writing, cast as a "teaching" exercise; even though no one
cares. Doing this helps me to understand the material much more
comprehensively.

When I teach, I then have a Responsibility. It is even more important to know
the material than if I am developing a shipping application.

Speaking of "shipping"...

I write every line of code as "ship quality" code; even if I never have any
intentions of shipping it (like test harnesses). That also helps me to make
sure that I know what I'm doing. I heavily document my code, because
explaining the code is like a built-in "self-peer-review." It helps me to see
the code through fresh eyes.

I also write about my personal processes and approach to engineering, as that
helps me to focus and make sure that I am speaking from a position of
knowledge and experience.

I don't claim expertise I don't have, but I am constantly trying stuff I don't
know how to do (I write about that here:
[https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-
are-...](https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-built-
for-595f4ae2c284)). That's how I learn new stuff.

 _" The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -and therefore
never scrutinize or question."_ -Stephen Jay Gould

------
dpc_pw
Oh, there's so much to unpack here...

Vast majority of my blogposts that have reached HN front page were ...
inflamatory and controversial. The (IMO) wise content that isn't steering up
the argument seems rather ignored.

... or it was about Rust. I love Rust, I really do, but I feel some of the
things I wrote weren't really thaaaat worthwile, and it's just jumping on Rust
bandwagon. SWE is mostly driven by fashion and trends, and not by merits.

I have a lot that I wish to share, but don't have to write it down in well-
structured way.

The more you know, the more you realize the that right answer to everything is
"it depends". And it's really hard to turn subtle context-dependent knowledge
to something more universal that benefits broader reader. It's good to seek
after most knowledgeable and skilled people you can find at your job and pick
their minds whenever possible asking about opinions, experiences, and so on.
The context is already there.

And in SWE as in anything complex it's just hard to verify any theory. Nothing
is reproducible, really comparable. What worked for me don't have to work for
you, and we don't even know why. Everyone, even if well informed and
experienced, has just a fraction of the picture and is trying to deduce the
whole as best as they can.

Then there's a whole thing that ... people in SWE aren't as smart and
knowledgeable as they often think they are. Being __Senior __Software Engineer
doesn 't mean anything anymore. Oh, you did two bigger projects, and you think
you know a lot, hmm? Even after a lifetime of practicing the craft, keeping up
with the tech, languages, tools ... there's still so much to learn. And a big
part of SWE is not the tech itself but psychology, management, business,
social skills... .

My advice for people that are looking for great content ... "you have to dig
through a lot of dirt to find a couple of gold nuggets", and "weird&niche" is
efficient way to get familiar with new stuff: You're not going to learn a lot
of if you only travel the mainstream paths. Learn Haskell, Forth, Lisp, write
some side-projects using some really weird and niche tech just to get familiar
with it and gain some new perspectives. You'll talk with people who have some
interesting opinions and learn things that will be surprisingly useful even on
the mainstream path.

------
tasssko
My two cents many people can't think individually any more. Tech has become
complex some people can only justify a decision based on what other people
did. Honestly the solution is a combination of the scientific method, hacker
mindset and being prepared to RTFM. No tech content is worth its character
count it is just one persons perspective, their biases and mistakes. However
reading code is another story, that tells a story I don't think you need to
write content if you code. A project on GitHub is worth more than 1000 words.

~~~
DrFell
I think at least part of the reason tech has become complex is because so many
tech stacks today are a briar patch of 3rd party libraries and components that
no one person can understand. The 'Don't reinvent the wheel' rule of thumb has
practically become a mantra, and enables this. Newer developers who grow up in
the online community are so afraid to think for themselves, lest they get
mortified to death for doing something dumb. So it's sort of a self-
perpetuating complexity problem.

------
a-nikolaev
A lot depends on the programming language used in the online tech materials.
It's very hard to find anything worthy in Python or JS, because for many
people it's their first language, and "teachers" are only one lesson ahead of
their "students".

On the other hand reading something explained in OCaml, Scheme, Erlang, Julia,
D or similar niche and not hyped language can be of very high quality. C also
tends to be good. Interestingly, C++ is also slowly becoming a niche high-
quality language recently.

~~~
RNCTX
This is just flat out false. You're showing your (lack of) age here.

The nature of niche languages is people who like them run to the next niche
when the next niche springs from the aether. And when their blogs and youtube
channnels die, so will they wither on the vine.

There has always been higher quality documentation for Python things than most
languages, because as a community, Python encourages quality documentation by
providing tools to help developers write it more efficiently. There are quite
literally entire platforms that teach a complete beginner who has never
written a line of code how to write javascript, for free.

There's a difference in having good documentation, and someone reading the
documentation to you. Sounds like you're equating the latter with the former.

You realize C++ has been around since 1979, right?

~~~
a-nikolaev
Okay old man, show me your age and knowledge: do you know about Oleg Kiselyov
and his amazing articles? See here:
[http://okmij.org/ftp/](http://okmij.org/ftp/)

~~~
RNCTX
It's not my age and knowledge, it has been this way since before I was born in
the case of the derivatives of C.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_languages_used_in_most_popular_websites)

The most ubiquitous languages used in the most highly trafficked websites in
the world are Javascript (1995), PHP (1995), Python (1990), C++ (1979), and
Java (1994).

No, I do not keep up with individuals' blogs and articles. I am very familiar
with the O'Reilly books mentioned by one of their authors in another comment
in this thread, however. And it's a universally accepted truth at this point
that Stackoverflow and blogs are poor replacements for them.

~~~
a-nikolaev
Your argument is weak. Popularity of a language does not correlate well with
the average knowledge of the users of the language.

OCaml and Scheme are both very old languages. The original dialect of OCaml
(Robin Milner's ML) was created in 1973. Scheme was also created around the
same time in the 1970s, and Lisp even earlier, so the technology I refer to is
hardly a novelty from aether. Rather, the opposite is true, they are all older
than Python, JS, and the derivatives of C.

People using these less popular languages are not blogging/posting a lot,
spending more time writing code. Nevertheless, most online discussion is high-
quality with high signal-to-noise ratio, much easier to learn new things, find
good code and smart people.

~~~
lispm
Actually both ML and Scheme were at first implemented in Lisp.

~~~
a-nikolaev
Yeah

------
janeshmane
"Your solutions are not any worse than the ones on the internet."

Sorry, I just don't agree with this. Of course you need to vet the solutions
you find online, but chances are you will find solutions that have already
worked through bugs and edge cases you would only learn the hard way if you
went forward naively.

------
on_and_off
This is sadly too true.

I have seen new libraries becoming popular not because they solved their
target problem better in a measurable way than the existing ones, but because
they used [insert fancy tech that is hype right now].

I have seen articles reposted in tech newsletters that were completely
bullshit. The last one was about manually cleaning up some weak references
because that would magically help performances, without any data to back that
up.

Performances in general is HARD. There are very few general truths that hold
true and many rules of thumb that change rapidly as mobile platforms evolve.
Most of the performance optimizations I used to make 5 years ago just don't
matter anymore. Measuring the bottlenecks is not that hard but still very
rarely made, even in performance articles.

------
wonderlg
Yes.

On one side there are blogs that just post content to keep momentum, say
csstricks.com, and don’t care to fix their errors even after you report them.

On the other side there are absolute noobs that post unresearched content just
because some VIP tweeted that you don’t need to be an expert to blog.

Well, that’s what you get: Bullshit everywhere.

Then of course you get awful StackOverflow “top” solutions that are straight
up “worst practice”

------
phkahler
>> Believe in yourself. Your solutions are not any worse than the ones on the
internet.

This needs to be clarified. If taken literally then people will never improve
and Joe average will continue to post bullshit on the internet.

Most solutions are probably comparable to much of what is on the internet, but
that doesnt make it ok. We need to filter what we see on the internet. If you
learn a new concept that's good, and maybe it's what you need. The key is to
keep trying to do better while looking out for fads.

I've seen a lot of change over the years regarding big new paradigms. Some I
tried, some I tried and passed on (Java) only to see them fade. Maybe I'm
ready to start a blog ;-)

------
andersco
This is true for all types of content - the art is to develop a sense of smell
for quality content. And to do that you have to first have been exposed to a
lot of bullshit.

~~~
Nextgrid
Filtering out Medium, HackerNoon and possibly FreeCodeCamp sounds like a good
first step.

------
badfrog
> Adapt solutions to your particular use case. There's no one-size-fits-all
> solution for everything. Compare different approaches, analyze them.
> Tutorials or articles show an idea, but may not present production-ready
> code. Always analyze it before you decide to use it.

This advice seems weird to me. I've been a professional software developer for
a decade, and probably 95% of the time it doesn't matter if you're doing
things in the most ideal way. The important thing is that it works, is
reasonably performant, and is reasonably maintainable. If you can get that in
20 minutes from stealing somebody else's solution, it's probably better in the
long run than spending 4 hours figuring out a slightly better solution. Maybe
the hard part is identifying the 5% of the time when it does matter that you
do something the most ideal way?

------
runawaybottle
I’ll just share a recent anecdote from work. A developer asked someone ‘What
are the pros/cons of using _____ library?’, here was the answer — ‘This is
what everyone is using right now’.

There must be a limit to this nonsense. So we’re just going to drop this into
our stack because that’s what everyone else is doing?

~~~
phlakaton
It's the "beating the averages" debate all over again. You get certain
economies of scale doing what everyone else is doing, and face less political
friction getting it adopted. But it may not be the absolute best solution for
what you need, and over time, it may hold you back.

It's why we're not all writing our stuff in Lisp. ;-)

------
mcv
I'm in a similar position as the author. I never thought I was expert enough
to blog about how to code. I did rely on other people's blogs. Sometimes they
were good, but quite often, as I developed my own expertise, I discovered
better ways of doing things. At some point I started discovering that some
people gave just bad advice. And not even just anonymous bloggers, but
official documentation might present examples of things that seemed like a
good idea at the time but the community eventually discovered better practices
(I'm looking at Angular 1 in particular here).

Unfortunately, as I discovered better ways of doing things, I still didn't
start blogging about them. I probably should.

------
rchase
I'm 51 years old. Think I was about ~40 when I realized the dipshits I went to
high school with (and thousands more like them) are running the world now.
That was an absolutely terrifying realization. The author's point about tech
content is true in my opinion and experience, but the larger point also
applies to most every aspect of our society. 'Appeal to authority' indeed.

Fuck everything about that.

My friend from middle school, Mike 'the douche' W. is now the MAYOR OF A
FUCKING CITY. Just no.

BECOME an authority on a given subject (takes a little longer, is much more
valuable long term.) This also means you have to pick your battles... life is
only so long, pick your shit and get good at it.

All that being said, community knowledge is a GOOD thing. We don't exist in an
isolated state, the tech. community in particular. There's no one person who
knows how all this shit works anymore, so thoroughly documenting what we do
know, and sharing it globally is also incredibly valuable in a communal sense.
None of us makes this stuff happen, whether you like it or not, we're all
working as a team.

Oh, and also, passing on some wisdom here... never trust a contractor with
clean boots.

------
metrokoi
>At the beginning of my career, I would never, ever, post anything technical
on the internet. I thought that if someone was brave enough to post a blog
post or take part in a tech discussion, they always know what they are doing.
I couldn't be more wrong!

It's unfortunate that to have any sort of success as a software developer you
must write about your opinion on frameworks, languages and techniques even if
you know little about what you're talking about. Many developers and engineers
blog because that's just what you do, not because they have anything important
to say.

~~~
MattGaiser
The problem is that many people are willing to admire and praise the action
and infer something from it because they aren't willing to spend time actually
judging the work.

That makes the action prestigious in itself.

------
sesuximo
> this blog may be bullshit as well

Maybe all blogs should say this lol

~~~
Koshkin
Or you could just assume the possibility regardless.

~~~
sesuximo
Sure but I appreciate humility in an author

------
TrackerFF
People tend to follow paths that are tried and tested, and often blindly so.
Why? Because it's incredibly efficient to do so, and the vast majority of
products do not need some incredibly levels of tolerance or performance.

If everything on the web were to be bespoke items, built from scratch, things
would stop up. Simply too resource consuming.

For many, the process is to simply copy something that works, and use it until
it breaks - and then look at the needed upgrades / reasons to why things
failed.

------
mgh2
This might sound a bit unrelated, but maybe there is a correlation with our
current deterioration of moral values. We started valuing dishonesty a while
ago as a creeping normality, it was a slippery slope from there on. We are
just seeing the repercussions now. [https://medium.com/@marcos.g.hung/why-we-
are-dispensable-7a5...](https://medium.com/@marcos.g.hung/why-we-are-
dispensable-7a577eba4f3e)

------
arendtio
I think 'doing it yourself' vs. 'search online to find a solution' are two
sides of the same medal and we should be good at both things.

An old friend of mine has a tendency to dig deep through searches and while I
tend to fire a few searches and then start doing it myself. There have been
many examples when he came up with something he found online, which was even
better than the thing I started building.

So while it contributes to my programming skills to get some practice, I think
you have to find the optimum between building mediocre results yourself (using
your own amount of limited time) and not being afraid to get your hands dirty
(as opposed to the 'someone else has built it' attitude). In the end, both
skills reinforce each other: The better you are at programming, the better you
can judge a solution you find online, and the better you are at searching, the
faster you can find something that is actually good.

------
lowbloodsugar
I have seen first hand two people getting hired (I did not interview them) who
had reasonable blog posts and who, once they arrived at a desk, _could not
program_. (Fortunately the second time I was in a position to change the
hiring process).

I have also worked with several people whose skill was _sounding clever_. One
liked to read MSDN magazine, and then regurgitate the talking points to the
CEO and CTO, who liked to trot him out in front of potential investors and
customers. The content was just advertising Microsoft products utterly
inappropriate for our startup, and eventually the company died after failing
to deliver feature after feature because of vast over-engineering.

There are communication skills and then there are programming skills. Being
good at either one is rare. So statistically if you meet someone who is good
at talking or writing about coding then, absent any other evidence, that
actually tells you nothing about whether or not they can code. Script kiddies
are still alive and well, and some of them are Blog Kiddies now.

Yet, though it is a small intersection, it is not empty.

------
efitz
The author is complaining about random internet content but it seems to me he
should be complaining about cargo cult programming by his team.

------
stared
"Big data" was the biggest "appeal to authority epidemics". fortunately, it
seems that now people have a more balanced view on small vs big data.

Way to often I heard "Google uses Hadoop, so you need to use it to" for
companies with data good for an old laptop.

Now I hear a bit of "appeal to authority" when it comes to monorepos.

------
unnouinceput
If tech is kinda full of bullshit, which on better or worse kinda need to rely
on math, and most of the time can be reviewed - then wait until you go to
socio science, like psychology. You need to see there how much bullshit it is,
you won't believe it. But, just like tech, it's better with it rather then
without it.

------
TheSpiceIsLife
Most content is bullshit, including this comment.

For possibly the least bullshit content you'll ever read, I defer to HN user
RobertoG's comment from ~2 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792243)

This blog post shoots itself in the foot with its conclusions:

> _Realize that there 's tons of misconception in the world. People and their
> solutions aren't flawless._

Therefore, any solution you come up with yourself is likely to be flawed and
full of misconceptions. Might as well use someone else's code / misconceptions
/ flaws.

> _Adapt solutions to your particular use case. <snip> Always analyze it
> before you decide to use it._

Who has time for that? We're all too busy being distracted by contentless-
content. Or you could just say something like: it seemed appropriate at the
time.

> _Believe in yourself. Your solutions are not any worse than the ones on the
> internet._

This is the real kicker. My solutions probably aren't any _better_ either. On
the whole half of all people engaged in a profession or job-role are _below
average_. You'd probably do just as well to outsource all of your decisions to
either someone else or the crowd.

> _Being a developer is about constant learning._

That's _very_ idealistic. Maybe some / many people just want to go to work, do
the minimum possible, and get home, and for a lot of people that's probably
_okay_.

> _People sometimes use libraries without a more profound understanding._

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't at least part of the reason for using
libraries that they abstract away the need to have a profound understanding of
the topic?

------
RNCTX
Speaking of how much of it is bullshit, it's also amazing how much of a
language, frameowrk, insert multi-year project involving dozens of people, are
willing to cede their entire knowledge base to... a google group? Blogs?
Stackoverflow?

If your documentation sucks, your thing sucks. And as time goes on whether you
like it or not, the collective record of community supporting itself _IS_ part
of the documentation.

What happens when Google or Microsoft buys Stackoverflow and drives everyone
away from it, and it eventually goes dark? What happens when all of those
blogs start to disappear as people move on to the next thing (Ruby/Rails...),
what happens when google just wakes up one morning and declares that they're
tired of groups and are going to delete them all like they've done with a
dozen other failed projects?

------
jlengrand
It's funny because I agree with what she says, but the amount of black/white
in her post (and many of the comments) also trigger me.

I don't always go on a blog post searching for THE truth. I go to get
someone's view on something. Maybe get excited by the journey or what was
achieved. Learn about the use case. And somehow, in some cases, because they
are less biases junior developers that write actually have interesting
insights.

If I want the dry and no BS info, I'll go read the source, or the doc. If I go
on a blog post to read about X, Y or Z, I don't just swallow it and take it at
face value, I just hope to find something that will interest me to learn more
about it.

And yet, I agree that a lot of what I see lately is marketed to no end, and it
becomes harder and harder to separate actual value, from tooling marketing.

------
itsspring
This resonates with me. I use caution now, as much security (and cryptography)
advice on StackOverflow is wrong and Perpetuates harmful patterns, yet is
never taken down. What’s worse? It often shows up at the top of Google. Many
devs don’t show the same level of caution until something blows up

------
codingdave
I call this (BDD) blog-driven development. There is nothing inherently wrong
with tech content posted online... the problem is when people don't put some
critical thought into it and decide whether the solutions they see online
actually match their current needs.

------
LockAndLol
> There's bullshit everywhere

The words of George Carlin ring in my ears:

> Bullshit is everywhere. Bullshit is rampant. Parents are full of shit,
> teachers are full of shit, clergymen are full of shit, law enforcement
> people are full of shit. > The entire country is completely full of shit

~~~
shill_predictor
That was my thought as well. It's hard to define something to not appeal as
bullshit but so many people do not care or can't comprehend the
outcome/judgement on the reader side. A few comments above mentioned
hackernoon and I saw that on our slack a couple of times. Now that I checked
it its a complete shitshow with people just starting in the sector or shilling
their crypto coin.

A bit hard to get around the whole thing when up to senior engineers seems to
enjoy this type of content.

And thats why I am enjoying HN and more unfiltered channels like /g/. You can
have a somewhat anonymous review/judgement/comment on topics which you would
never came across on these blog posts.

------
29athrowaway
I think the observation is OK, but the conclusion is wrong.

Engineering is not only about hard science, but also about processes. The way
processes evolve is often based on empirical data rather than hard science.

Now, that does not mean that one can just forget about science entirely. As
engineers, we should try to use a logical, rational, data-oriented mindset
when making decisions.

If the reason a decision takes place is only because an authority said so,
with no real reasoning behind, that would dogmatism: strongly held beliefs
that will not be rationally discussed.

We should always keep an open mind and understand that a large part of our
knowledge is simply a local maxima in our way to a deeper and better
understanding of things, and dogmatism puts a stop to that process.

------
mclovinit
Making a ton of mistakes early in your career, being lucky to work with those
that took the time to have constructive discussions/arguments with you (i.e.
they're passionate and actually give a crap about budding talent), and paying
it forward are a few key things that make for a good engineer.

I've pulled whatever hair out that I have on a Friday night trying to figure
out something with a solution or approach unpublished elsewhere when I could
be watching Doctor Who or getting fat on fat free ice cream and sedentary on
my couch instead. Sometimes spending that personal time experimenting pays
dividends in the form of a working solution. Other times it builds grit.

------
lmilcin
So... the author works as a developer since 2017.

The reality is most tech content is written by people with relatively little
experience. People with lots of experience tend to have way more on their
plates to bother writing blog posts or (tech) books.

Also the market is stacked against content for advanced users. Whether you are
for ad impressions, visitors, likes, subscribes, book sales, you want to
produce content that sells to masses of people and making it advanced is
definitely going to cut your readership.

There is still a lot of value browsing through it. The reason is that since
finding good information is difficult, the nuggets of wisdom make up for the
lost time reading cruft.

------
ineedasername
As long as we're using project tracking systems like Jira and agile
development, and at the same time developers are evaluated on the basis of how
many "story" points they closed, this isn't really going to change.

------
bdcravens
A lot of times I want to share, and while I'm a pretty good writer, I really
don't have the bandwidth to write a great article, but can usually throw it up
on a screen. Example: [https://medium.com/@bdcravens/fixing-docker-for-mac-
and-rail...](https://medium.com/@bdcravens/fixing-docker-for-mac-and-rails-
performance-baf35f554bc7)

I'd probably share a lot more, but it's not about not having time to share, as
much as not having the time to bring the quality up to a level I'm willing to
attach my name to. I suspect many are in the same boat.

------
moriturius
This is not a tech problem. This applies to all the content on the internet.

I like your suggestion to motivate people to start thinking about what they
are going to use and _why_.

When we have team refinements at work we learned to question everything. There
are some senior developers that get most things right, but not every time.
Sometimes some junior dev just throws an idea that turns out to be way better.

This is why I think the process of coming up with a solution is much more
important than the solution itself.

With that being said - please remember that there is a fine line between
valuable skepticism and just being annoying :)

------
mopsi
I'd go even one step further: doubt what you think you already know.

I often check documentation of even well-known functions like printf() to
remind me of details that I might have forgotten or remember inaccurately.

------
jwr
This is very true. I think I'm breaking at least several dozen "Rules for How
It's Supposed To Be Done" in my fairly large software system (self-funded
SaaS). But each and every time I thought carefully, considered it, and then
made a decision. It's worked out great each and every time I did that.

My takeaway is the same as the author's — rational approach is king, things
should not be taken for granted and "best practices" might be good ideas, or
they might just be the current fashion du jour.

Think for yourself.

------
jdnordy
> Articles have plenty of conceptual mistakes. And people are not perfect,
> either! Senior developers are not always good developers.

I think this point is well made. It is a good caution when consuming content
on the internet to always be assessing. I seek to understand how something
works before I use it.

Yet here's my question: Does this mean I should not be writing for my personal
blog?

Writing helps me work out, articulate and understand better the tech that I am
working with. And it might help others to work it out as well, even if it's
not perfect.

------
ActsJuvenile
Software libraries, APIs, tools, dependencies have exploded exponentially
since the early days of C language and a handful of Berkley/Bell libraries. I
often use a dozen different things for my projects and the next project
invariable needs a different roster.

Thus I want to voice my contrary opinion that it is okay to "consume" and not
"create" for non-core parts of your project. Need to do dump an arcane data
structure to a remote logging tool? Go ahead and copy paste that StackExchange
snippet kings!

------
gonza
I agree that is difficult to find good blog posts/tutorials on technical
stuff. When I want to learn something for the first time, I usually go through
the docs and if they aren't friendly enough (for me) to read them and learn, I
go and google a nice book about the topic. That being said, there are a lot of
nice blog posts about technical stuff, not tutorials/teaching but actual
experiences/opinions, people sharing and documenting what they learnt. I
appreciate those.

------
carapace
I forget the exact numbers but half of all programmers have been doing it less
than five years, and this has been true the whole time. Exponential growth,
eh?

Also, IT is _fashion-driven_ and largely ahistorical. I have worked with
people who don't know who Alan Kay is, for example, or have never heard of
Prolog.

I think we are in an _alchemical_ phase and (hopefully) transitioning to a
_chemical_ phase of knowledge. (Alchemy was mostly bullshit too, but there was
a hellofa bull in there, eh?)

------
bryanrasmussen
a propos this I just thought of a writer who I used to follow at the beginning
of the millennium. I'm not going to mention their name, and I think their
articles were not bullshit per se, but... whenever I downloaded the code for
his longer articles and tried to run it locally there were always lots of bugs
(although to be fair I only did this for the really complicated things he
wrote and only 3-4 times)

Just crazy that I would spend hours working on it to get it to work, I was
always weirded out by it. This guy was sort of famous. Smaller bits of code
were always fine and he had some pretty cogent insights on things, but big
bits of code was just not working without significant rewrites.

To be fair perhaps this was a different time and things not working reliably
was more widespread, I reemmber this article I wrote for SitePoint in 2008
[https://www.sitepoint.com/rewrite-web-
chickenfoot/](https://www.sitepoint.com/rewrite-web-chickenfoot/) (please
excuse me if too much bullshit, but I was less old) got a remark from the
editor that testing took longer than normal, which I was of course surprised
by because such is the time-honored reaction of a programmer when the code
works on their own machine.

------
rammy1234
Every thing you read needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Always look back
in the history to see if the same problem came up and how some one solved it.
If you can find it, use it. Only by using some existing solution you can find
faults if any and improvise. The write about that. This cycle will keep going
on. Thats how we have evolved. There is no BS, it is just how they solved it

------
huffmsa
If most of it is bullshit, then the harm of bullshit mustn't be that high.

If it were, then none of this would exist.

But that there are some many tech companies taking so many different
approaches (the majority bullshit) stands as evidence that there must be some
acceptable amount of bullshit an organization can handle.

Textbook code is nice, but shipping and improving product is nicer.

------
djmips
I like how "choose boring technology" and "most tech content is bullshit" are
simultaneously trending.

------
annoyingnoob
I think it comes down to task turn-over. We get lazy when our job is about
story points. There is no real reason to reinvent the wheel most of the time.
When you need to eek out every bit of performance you need to dig deeper. I
think finding the right balance of time spent vs perfection is important.

------
z3t4
If something works, we keep doing it. Often we learn by looking at others. Or
we try out different things and stick with what works best. For example: Every
day you brush your teeth, why do you brush it that way? Probably you where
told by a Dentist, but you haven't question it.

------
raverbashing
Agreed

The "most popular" (and maybe click-bait like) the content, the more crap
you'll get. Especially when people think they know the subject but they don't.

Most common offender nowadays: ML and Data Science. I've found articles with
glaring errors, techniques that don't make sense, very shallow tutorials, etc
(Disclaimer: nobody is immune from making mistakes, not even me)

And then you get "oh but you start training and then your loss go to zero,
right?! This means it works, right?" Yeah. No.

If your training loss goes to zero, your are probably overfitting or the
problem you're trying to solve is too simple. If your testing loss goes to
zero, you're probably doing something wrong. Or my favourite: your loss is
very low but what you're trying to predict has result A 99% of the time and
result B 1% of the time. What's your loss if you only predict result A?

I mean, if even the myths about /dev/random and /dev/urandom keep circulating
around, can you imagine about other stuff?

~~~
GuiA
I took a grad level course on data mining/machine learning back in the early
2010s, before the current gold rush, and while there was some level of theory
and programming, the professor spent a lot of his time discussing these finer
points. The (apocryphal) example of armoring planes in the wrong spots [0]
sticks with me to this day.

It’s human nature to focus on the more immediate, tangible outcomes - eg going
through a pytorch tutorial - over spending time trying to really understand
the problem they are trying to solve. Great teachers try to guide their
students there, and great students are perpetually calling themselves out
mentally to try and stay on the track of understanding rather than rote
repetition. But it’s very hard.

[0]: [http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-
column/fc-2016-06](http://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-
column/fc-2016-06)

------
mola
I think the major cause for this is the self branding phenomena that started
together with the social media boom. Suddenly people got it to their minds
that they are supposed to market themselves like products. And with the best
tradition of PR, the truth don't matter, only the optics. So you got a bunch
of mediocre engineers, some hardly out of uni swamping the net with opinions
and shoddy advice , written in a very knowledgeable tone, because "that's the
game". Combine this with tons of tech startups using same PR technics to sell
their often than not, less than perfect technology.

With the crazy boom in developers, you got a whole generation of mediocre devs
without any tradition to build on, surrounded by silly opinions and fads to
learn from.

Now replace "developers" with any information age occupation , this remains
true.

------
raspyberr
As are recipes. I don't understand why recipe blog writers want to be seen so
much that they're willing to compromise their content. It's just a bunch of
bullshit to pad out for SEO and then at the end the actual recipe.

~~~
dageshi
The "padding" is for their existing followers who actually do want to read the
padding (life stories,whatever) irrespective of the recipe itself. The recipe
is advertisement to gain new followers from Google traffic. Merging both
together works better than separating them out from the point of view of
gaining more followers.

------
ddp
This site is one of the reasons.

------
jvilalta
And then your manager/architect reads this content and asks you to implement
this, saying "it's easy and it just works". They never go deep enough to
understand the costs, consequences and tradeoffs.

------
enriquto
To be fair, any writing that is labeled "content" is indeed bullshit.

~~~
ch_sm
Weirdly, the word "content" for articles or other media seems to actually
devalue the _content_ of the piece in lieu of its marketing value. Great
stuff. They’ll have to come up with a new word for this practice pretty soon,
as more people realize that they’re reading fancy ads instead of actual
content.

------
greyhair
There might be a lot of BS content, but there are also some gems. It is sort
of like the Web at large, really.

Turn up your BS filter and let it roll.

------
MPSimmons
See also, Cargo Cult Programming:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming)

------
timwaagh
Does the fact that this, 'everything is bs' article by a junior developer is
taken so seriously on this forum have anything to do with the fact that the
author looks like a gorgeous hacker from a science fiction movie? Or maybe
just that she has a female name? I was just discussing that with my roommate
in the kitchen. My roommate is of the opposite opinion that women get taken
less seriously. And I don't want to hate on OP obviously. But I want to ask
what do you think?

I do think it was well-written and the writing kind of saves the content.
Besides there's absolutely nothing wrong with looking good. We might need a
bit more of that in tech. So I'd encourage her to continue blogging.

------
cortesoft
Sure, most tech articles are bullshit... but the question is, is the average
developer going to do better figuring it out on their own? Are articles worse
than the average developer?

------
mrosett
This is pretty good, but I had to chuckle when the author threw in a suitably
impressive quote from Sagan about the dangers of appeals to authority.

------
gitgud
Twitter is non-stop tech garbage in my opinion, to me it seems like an endless
stream of marketing pieces...

------
thefujin
Most of the things are bullshit. Especially on the internet where everyone can
share their thoughts virtually without any filters.

------
johnvega
The word "most" is mostly used between 60% and 90%, or more precisely greater
than 50% and less than 100%

------
mecki
"Don't consume. Create."

vs

"We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we
speak."

------
andai
_Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so
few engage in it._

Henry Ford

------
foreigner
"I was just following the pattern" is the programmer's Nuremberg defense.

------
arpa
Crypto is not bullshit, probably. Don't roll your own crpto, probably.

------
adamzapasnik
Personally, my favourite one is seeing 1000th tutorial post on React.

~~~
f0rfun
Hey c'mon, back in elementary school, every cohort has at least written about
their favorite past-time during writing classes. Just because the
subject/title is the same, it doesn't mean the writing is the same. Every
writer ends up with a style of their own and as a teacher, it was mostly a joy
to read. ;) The only reason why there isn't a 1000th tutorial on Favorite
Past-time is because there wasn't high speed, unlimited internet back then and
students weren't allowed to use the computers back then. ;)

------
hidiegomariani
so am i no longer allowed to copy-paste from stackoverflow?

~~~
f0rfun
Haha, no. You can still copy-pasta and also blog about it as real content.
C'mon, how else can I feel good about my shitty self?

------
docmars
I think this applies to a whole lot more than tech. ;)

------
Koshkin
As a saying that used to be popular back in the day goes, Nobody has been
fired for buying (from) IBM. This in my view is what explains much of the
problem.

~~~
djmips
so... "Choose boring technology"

------
gallerdude
Has anyone else faced the raw existential horror of how many programming
tutorials there are online for a single question? Look up how to concatenate
arrays in JS, and there are just _so many sites_ that it almost makes my head
hurt. I guess complexity and competition are necessary tenets of capitalism,
but I feel some sort of terror at people just churning these articles out when
there are so many already.

------
uniqueid
thisIsAField thatThoughtCamelCase wasASensible idea

------
fizixer
Sturgeon's law.

------
msiafterburner
Agreed

