
Dark Matter Developers != Bad Developers - mat-mcloughlin
http://mat-mcloughlin.net/2013/11/26/dark-matter-developers-do-not-equal-bad-developers.html
======
greenyoda
" _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.

~~~
Arnor
Cool, someone _does_ read my blog :)

I've been feeling like a bad developer because I never write. Then when I try
to write, I think wonder why anyone would read what I'm writing (because it's
about my first Go program) and I give up. Even when I come up with something
relatively novel, I usually just get the info out via StackOverflow.

The point: those useless dev blogs with posts that don't matter to anyone are
there because many devs (i.e. me) without much to share, feel obligated to
write.

~~~
mikeash
That's really weird. Feeling like a bad developer because you never write
would be like feeling like a bad racecar driver because you never bike.
Totally different activities.

------
CGamesPlay
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.

~~~
mey
I am also a "dark matter developer". I go to some larger conferences as an
attendee, read up on the tech, learn new things, but primarily watch from the
sideline. I respect open source developers and companies cutting the bleeding
edge by my risk tolerance is too low to currently deploy node.js in production
for example.

I used to be more active in the niche development fields I got started in,
work in a lot more startups but as I've gotten older I've simply directed my
free time and energy elsewhere.

Edit: This is also the first time I've heard that term.

------
cgh
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.

~~~
tedks
Fabrice Bellard doesn't have a twitter, doesn't blog, and maybe doesn't go to
conferences. But he's done more than most who have, almost certainly.

His wikipedia page:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard)

~~~
cgh
Yep, one of my coding heroes.

------
kstenerud
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.

~~~
vellum
_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._

According to this paper, 95% of the users on Stack Overflow are "low activity"
users, but they provide 50% of the answers.

[http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...](http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=computerscidiss)

------
arcosdev
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.

------
codingdave
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.

------
mscottmcbee
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.

~~~
purringmeow
Don't concern yourself with labels. Apply yourself, learn new stuff and meet
new people who work in the industry :) You'll figure out the rest.

------
fat0wl
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.

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

~~~
ars_technician
I would argue that the original definition isn't even about lurkers. It's
about the developers that aren't even reading the latest tech/programming
news. They have been using the same IDE/language/environment for the last 10
years and are just happy where they are at.

------
jheriko
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.

~~~
untog
I'm wary of equating "care little to improve themselves" with "do a 9 to 5".
The two are not related.

~~~
jheriko
really? maybe there is an over generalisation there, but i think that people
who do their jobs for money often have little motivation, or even reason, to
try to improve their skill at work. what they will generally improve at is
finding psychological tricks to ease the passage of time, ways to hide a lack
of productivity or monopolise the work that they find the most comfortable...

practically speaking they get more mileage from finding a different job
entirely... 'working your way up' as a path to success is not what it used to
be, their are too many layers and too many automatic promotions for time
served.

edit: maybe my meaning of 9 to 5 is not clear, but for me its a term that
comes from the fixation on time which comes with having a 'job' vs a 'career'

~~~
mildtrepidation
"9 to 5" refers to a salaried position, i.e. regular W-2 work. I'm not totally
clear on your connotation, but I don't think it's common.

This seems really presumptuous to me, though. Many people just don't consider
anything _but_ regular work like this as an option, as they just haven't been
exposed to other things; this doesn't say anything about how much or little
they love their work or wish to excel at it.

Some people are just lazy do-as-little-as-possible drones, sure. But assuming
everyone who isn't an entrepreneur is like that is more than a little bit
nasty and quite baseless.

~~~
jheriko
/assuming everyone who isn't an entrepreneur/

i've used the term poorly if you think this - that is clear.

i'm not even thinking of entrepeneurs. i don't consider myself working '9 to
5' even if those are coincidentally my hours... the amount of time i work is
much more to do with my desire to fulfil my tasks and deliver.

i've used the term wrongly, but i think of the '9 to 5' mentality as the
eagerness to pack up and go home at 5, but yet not wanting to leave early so
that you don't get docked minutes in your pay packet.

my point was more to differentiate between those there for survival or
routine, compared to those there from desire.

i've met plenty of entrepreneurs who have no passion for what they do and are
either terrible or lucky at it... some doing it out of misguided expectation
from family or peers. its got nothing to do with that.

------
leerodgers
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?

------
kohanz
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.

~~~
bobbles
Pretty sure that the idea came from this article
[http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen9...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen99.aspx)

at least the current discussion anyhow

------
AKifer
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 !

------
fotbr
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.

~~~
xerophtye
Tell me more about this wood work startup. Does it have a website? I am
genuinely interested

~~~
fotbr
It's just a small, local signmaking business. No web presence; currently
relying on word of mouth to keep the workload low enough that I can still meet
expectations -- quality and deadlines -- while working out of my garage and
working my software development job full-time. I'm also, slowly, getting into
wooden canoe & kayak building; if I can successfully turn that into a
profitable product line, I'll be thrilled.

------
mathgladiator
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.

------
measure2xcut1x
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.

------
bthornbury
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.

------
VladRussian2
substituting "dark matter dev" with "introvert" i think we'd get to the very
old and standard discourse.

------
rheide
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.

------
lingoberry
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.

------
moocowduckquack
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.

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

People thought that? WTF.

------
mfarid
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

------
dylanrw
This same monicker can be applied to designers.

------
ars_technician
>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...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen99.aspx)),
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.

~~~
pionar
Not true. I'm a "dark matter" developer. I don't blog, I only use Twitter to
keep up on sports, I only use Facebook to keep up with far away friends and
family. I post something programming-related on Facebook about once a year.

However, I know (and know that most of my fellow dark matter peeps know) the
latest and greatest out there. We discuss it, take a look at it, and usually
come to the conclusion of "been there, done that, not mature enough for our
system that handles billions of dollars in transactions annually".

Also, one thing that's bothered me recently with developers is the focus on
greenfield development. I've done both green- and brownfield, and find
brownfield to be tons more stimulating than greenfield development. I know
that a lot of my fellow dark matter folks do too. Constraints are more
thought-provoking than "I can do anything".

That's why you don't see us caring about some new javascript framework or RoR
or Azure, or any other "new" (and usually unproven) technology. We're too busy
kicking ass and finding beauty in mature, established languages and frameworks
that actually have all the features (and then some) of "newer" technologies.

~~~
enen
>That's why you don't see us caring about some new javascript framework or RoR
or Azure, or any other "new" (and usually unproven) technology. We're too busy
kicking ass and finding beauty in mature, established languages and frameworks
that actually have all the features (and then some) of "newer" technologies.

Comments like these saying 'Oh you are a stupid hipster using node/ror
whatever' are basically in the same spirit as 'Oh I'm cooler than you because
I use this and that and you are using Java' just the other way round. Thanks
for your childish negativity and adding to unneeded stereotypes in the tech
community. If you are one of those 'wise' devs that use what is mature and
stable and whatnot instead of chasing new trends you should be smart enough to
preach that all technologies have their use case and people should use the
best tool for the job etc etc… but hating is fun, isn't it.

------
aaron695
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.

~~~
10098
> Person B dies, company/idea dies, world loses something.

Well, actually, world loses nothing. It doesn't care. Humans care, maybe, but
you only think they matter because you are one.

~~~
Nursie
Bleak, nihilistic and true.

Would upvote again :)

