
You can't impress developers. So don't try - adgasf
https://baus.net/you-cant-impress-developers/
======
combatentropy
There are countless comments on Hacker News by a developer impressed with
something. So this headline is wrong. What you can't do is impress all
developers. But neither can you please all people. So the article's advice to
"focus on impressing your users" could also lead to a very special kind of
hell, about which more ink hath been spilt.

What the writer was really writing about, though, was that there is little
acknowledgment of the effort that went into something, even if in the end it's
not for you. Someone wrote a Python interpreter in JavaScript, and in that
there is skill, even if overall you reject the effect. What the writer may be
asking for is the attitude of a coach: "That was a fast throw, kid, now next
time just see if you can aim it more over the plate." That is a legitimate
want, and I think the forum would be better if there were more of it. But
again, this isn't a deficiency endemic to developers, it's endemic to People
on the Internet.

Key takeaway: seeking encouragement from anonymous or semianonymous people on
the internet could be harmful.

~~~
amelius
Still, it is very hard to make developers _pay_ for software.

So on a different level, perhaps it _is_ hard to impress developers.

~~~
ummonk
Yeah that's the biggest issue. Many developers (myself included) seem to
refuse to pay for software. At least normal users are willing to accept ads
and data collection in exchange for getting a free service, but we developers
don't even accept that.

~~~
moystard
Assuming that a majority of developers refuse to pay for software is, in my
opinion, an exageration.

I feel that we are in a position where we can estimate the amount of work and
the dedication that a team has put into a great product. I have paid for many
of the great softwares that run on my machine because of this knowledge.

------
jamestimmins
Part of it is that responses rarely seem to take into account the reason
something was built. Someone building a Python interpreter in JS to learn
about languages and interpreters often gets the same response that Facebook
would get it they released the same code as an open source library, even
though in the first case a Dev isn't saying it's perfect, just that they made
something cool and want to show off work they're proud of.

Oftentimes effort alone is commendable, even if it misses the mark, as long as
it's not hurting users. We so easily forget that though when judging others'
work.

~~~
nomel
> effort alone is commendable

I think this is where things fall apart for me, and I suspect others. I don't
see effort, by itself, as commendable.

Projects like these usually have the goal "can I do this too?"[1] The answer
is always an obvious "yes", since it's been done before. The effort to learn
something is commendable, but the act of learning is rarely "impressive".

> No matter how successful, reliable, or loved a piece of software is,
> inevitably other developers will not value the time, effort, and
> craftsmanship that went into building it.

Come on now. This can only be true if he himself has never been impressed with
anyone else work.

HN is filled with professionals who will be quick to give, usually helpful,
critical feedback. I would go as far as to claim "wow cool" feedback doesn't
contribute to the discussion, especially if the only purpose of the project
was to complete a learning exercise. If others are like me, I'll often read in
amazement, maybe try out the code, rather than fill the comment section with
congratulations, which would rightfully be down voted.

[1] ~20 projects for getting Python in the browser:
[http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~strombrg/pybrowser/python-
bro...](http://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~strombrg/pybrowser/python-browser.html)

------
gameswithgo
I think you can impress them more when your feat of good programming is also
useful to others. "Ive done this trick to make Rust compiler faster", "I've
improved a frequently used function in the core libary of C#", "I've made a
cross platform gui library that is easy to use and efficient", "I've found a
faster way to hash in certain use cases"

Telling people about your feat of programming that was very difficult but was
a (probably) non-useful learning exercise probably won't be interesting unless
they are a friend or also happening to be wanting to learn about the same
thing.

------
sudosteph
My gut feeling is that this is right. Some devs really do seem to have little
respect for "code on the ground", and the problem is magnified in places
without any DevOps culture / a sense of developer responsibility towards
operations (ie, Devs who won't do oncall or refuse to write RCAs).

I think it stems from a culture where people want strive to adopt the most
"elite" way of doing things (ie, running Kubernetes for everything, because
Google) because it lets them show they're capable and knowledgeable, and
nobody is going to say Google is doing it wrong. The downside to this is that
cheaper, faster, and more practical solutions get thrown aside as "hacks"
because they don't scale to google level. When really, a lot of places don't
need that kind of scale, and having too much complexity can be a risk of it's
own. I'm not saying scalability isn't important, it can be critical for some
things, but I rarely see devs give the same attention to usability or
monitoring in their designs (there are lots of misconceptions that using
orchestration solves monitoring, when really it can make it harder if you
don't plan for it up front).

So I say let google and co worry about impressing people, and just spend your
time on making things that solve problems. And maybe, in OPs case, (this may
be unpopular) you don't have to share everything you write, especially if it's
not something that solves a problem for other people. Put it on your github
and resume, but if it's not solving real problems, it's just for your
learning.

------
lalos
I would interpret it as a push back to using Javascript for everything and
anything, unless it's clearly marked as this is for fun and a learning
experience. People will easily jump in and say but why Javascript? and the
answer is almost always that's the only language I know how to use. Using one
language for everything doens't impress good engineers (or developers). Not my
opinion, but that's what I felt in the comments of the linked post.

------
boffinism
It's not really developers who are hard to impress - it's just anonymous
developers on internet forums

~~~
ChrisSD
If you want to impress developers wouldn't you simply get an FTP account,
mount it locally with curlftpfs, and then use SVN or CVS on the mounted
filesystem?

~~~
swift532
What even?

~~~
sbradford26
It is making fun of the one of the top comment that was on the Show HN
Dropbox.

Here we go:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

Ninja'd, should have refreshed.

------
asragab
Does any know of a community of practitioners in a field or discipline who are
by and large usually impressed by output of the members of that field on a
regular basis.

Not rhetorical, asking for myself. I guess, I want to know how much more toxic
are we as a community (to the degree you can talk about all folks who read or
might read HN as a single monolithic community).

I mean, I know a few artists, they are absolutely savage when it comes to the
work of others. Is this a dev problem or human one?

~~~
viraptor
Indie game art seems to be pretty good. There are some annoying comments, but
overall I see lots and lots of positive comments and support.

Even on Twitter, see #screenshotsaturday responses.

------
ilovecaching
I believe the number of good software engineers numbers in the thousands. This
is completely anecdotal, and I have no studies to back up this claim. The
longer I've been in industry, the more I've come to believe that the number of
_good_ software engineers seems to remain fairly constant over time. I also
contend that more than fifty percent of developers are bad, and shouldn't be
programming.

Given those margins, finding someone who actually is impressive is difficult.
Most projects are not that interesting, are rehashes of something that's
already been done, or are just poorly designed and executed.

------
probably_wrong
I'm not sure about that. Instances of code that I know impressed lot of
developers: several sections of the original Doom code, at least one entry in
Gamasutra's old article "Dirty Coding Tricks", their first time groking
functional programming (a functional declaration of quicksort, for instance).

Then again, I'm not really impressed by "X in Javascript" anymore, so I'm
definitely biased.

~~~
ummonk
The functional declaration of quicksort one is ironic considering it isn't
actually quicksort.

------
tbirrell
I'd postulate it is because we are intimately familiar with how the sausage is
made, so we can identify the problems (perceived or otherwise) with ease.
Since everyone thinks a little bit differently, even if we do make something
impressive, everyone who sees it will think of how they would do it instead.
Either that or we think "why the hell did you think this was a good idea?"

~~~
smacktoward
Yes, this is my theory as well. I wrote a little thing about how it applies to
selling products to developers a few years back:
[https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2012/04/how-to-sell-products-
to-n...](https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2012/04/how-to-sell-products-to-nerds/)

------
wild_preference
This seems to extend into any community where nobody has any skin in the game
yet the topic has superficial qualities in which it can be knee-jerk judged
(unlike, say, a book).

Some of the most unsettling behavior I've seen online is a thread on Reddit
where an indie developer shared their game with /r/gaming. The reactions:
"Looks like dogshit", "This really took you two years to build? lol", "Doesn't
even work on Android? lol miss me with that garbage."

Like that /r/gaming thread, we on HN do the same thing with the superficial
qualities of a project.

"Python in JS? Who the fuck would want this lol. It took you how long to build
this dogshit? Yet another web developer who refuses to learn anything beyond
JS." Our analysis goes no deeper than whatever was summed up in the Show HN
title where the author is lucky if anybody even navigates to the Github repo
and looks at the work involved.

I think it comes down to modern entitlement culture where we see the world as
our personal buffet. Now combine that with the ease of sharing your opinion
with the world.

~~~
edc117
Yeah, and in particular: anonymously. It seems to bring out the absolute worst
in people when they can say anything without immediate or visible consequences
of their words.

------
hnruss
"Experienced developers make the difficult seem easy. New developers often
make the routine look hard."

Well said.

------
forgottenpass
You can impress your friends by learning to juggle 3 balls. You won't impress
a circus performer who can juggle 5 is working on 7 and spends every workday
with people they don't feel like they measure up to.

There are ways to impress developers, but you won't get then to see the magic
regular users do. We all work behind the curtain, and nobody online knows you
well enough to understand when your accomplishments are personal milestones.

------
askafriend
Here's a decent example of the attitude described in the post (it was a
conversation I was involved in recently):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18330162](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18330162)

Of course, a random person on the internet thinks s/he can architect systems
of unprecedented global scale without knowing any of the context or goals of
the systems involved.

------
ape4
That entire work of Shakespeare in a jpeg was kinda impressive.

~~~
guessmyname
Context:
[https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1057042085029822464](https://twitter.com/David3141593/status/1057042085029822464)

------
xamuel
I was expecting a rant about job ad filler. "Join a world-class team of
architects, we are changing the world and ushering in the age of Aquarius with
our revolutionary CAAS (CRUD-As-A-Service) model, endorsed by Mark
Zuckerburg's freshman biology classmate!"

It's actually about people posting personal code projects on HN, and I
disagree, personal code projects quite frequently get quite a lot of
recognition here.

~~~
woah
Crud as a service is actually pretty awesome. Been using Airtable and I think
it could replace a lot of single purpose business applications

------
brian-armstrong
Extra context: this article, and the event it references, took place in 2013

------
exabrial
Sorry, but yes you can. Watch:

"Hey guys, ES6 and Node have their problems, so we ratified a new standard
that fixes all their shortcomings and bugs. Download it today and start your
new project in a few mins".

Or:

"Hey guys, I know the whole point of keeping source code is for the next guy,
but check out how I totally obfuscated, er wrote, this complicated algorithm
I'm .5 lines of code"

------
seanalltogether
I think maybe it's always hard to impress your peers, regardless of industry.
Peers tend to be impressed by practical knowledge they can leverage to
increase their own skills, tools that help them speed up work, or successes
within their industry that have been achieved.

------
ummonk
I generally agree that HN commenters tend not to get impressed by things.

That said, I don't agree with this:

 _> The Google search engine brings in $billions each year, and is one of the
most important software projects in history, but I guarantee there are
developers at Google right now complaining about how crappy the core code base
is._

You can appreciate the performance of the Google search engine at scale, while
still being annoyed by how crappy the core code base is. (I have zero
knowledge of what the codebase is actually like, but I would guess that like
most legacy code written in a legacy language without algebraic data types,
it's probably a bit of a mess at this point).

~~~
nafey
As an aside it would be great if anyone who actually has seen google search
source code can provide a general idea about the code quality. One imagines it
should be of thr highest quality being the core google product.

~~~
ken
I know someone who works at Google, and their initial impression of the code
base was that it's the highest quality large codebase (or largest high quality
codebase?) they'd ever seen. Apparently all the qualifications and reviews
really do help.

~~~
zaphar
I saw parts of the codebase while I was there. It definitely has dark corners.
But given it's size and the complexity of the problems it's solving it's
wasn't that bad.

Of course at any given time while I was there the team was running several
different refactor/fix/delete/cleanup projects. It's a continuous and well
funded effort.

------
lordnacho
> Instead focus on impressing your users _(if your users are developers, I
> wish you luck)._

Funnily enough I think everyone's impressed with Jetbrains. I rarely meet devs
who don't like their tools. Or Kotlin.

~~~
alien_
The users of an open source project I started often give great feedback and
appear to love it.

But a very small minority like it enough to donate to support the development
efforts, even though it is saving them significant amounts of money and time.

------
arnaudsm
It's mostly because HN is one of the most rigorous communities online. And
it's worth it, it's the only website where you learn more from the comments
than from the article itself.

------
sebringj
Or maybe rephrase to "if you're looking for praise..." as i think it may be
misplaced to expect it in mass unless you have had tons of user
testing/feedback and iterations to move it that way. Opinion is just consensus
anyway and sometimes having a niche of people that love what you do is all
that matters. In this case in particular, python on the web isn't necessary
well liked in mass from the beginning so you are starting an uphill climb.

------
Bjorkbat
I don't think this is necessarily a developer-specific issue. You show
something off to the internet-at-large and they probably won't have nice
things to say about it.

This isn't necessarily because they're unimpressed though. There's only so
many different ways you can say "great job", compared to the potentially
infinite ways in which you could find a flaw in someone's work and highlight
it in a constructive or unconstructive manner.

------
viraptor
> There is a time and place for review, but code on the ground deserves
> respect.

I think the post mixes the respect / approval / praise a bit. You can at the
same time respect that someone produced something that solves what they needed
_and_ think that the project is a steaming pile of poop from the technical /
design side. Maybe the comments should mention the first part more often. I'll
definitely try when criticising some tech in the future.

------
Crazyontap
After reading your article I'm reminded of an article I read sometime ago
about Lennart Poettering, author of systemd for whom users actually were
collecting money to hire a hitman to kill him [1]. I don't think anything can
top this level of hate for free software.

[1]
[https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/81162.html](https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/81162.html)

~~~
JdeBP
The mundane truth is that no-one collected any money, or even tried to.
Despite the perpetuated claim that "this really happened" it actually didn't.
Some fools said some stupid things on an IRC channel.

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8417369](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8417369)

------
tzhenghao
> if your users are developers, I wish you luck.

Lol sounds like my experience working at a SaaS company. It can be hard to get
them to pay for your services.

------
muxator
> There is a time and place for review, but code on the ground deserves
> respect.

This is one of the reasons for which I think that refactoring a code base, in
the original sense by Martin Fowler, where a program is changed without
modifying its functioning, but only extracting its structure, is a severely
underused practice, and one for which there would be a lot of space in the
industry.

------
segmondy
You can't impress those that know more than you. I'm not impressed by half of
the showHN that I see, but then I'm equally impressed by the other half. I
sent an email a few hours ago to someone that had a showHN because I was
impressed by the quality of work, not just in what was done, but code,
documentation & organization.

------
wolco
I don't believe anything really impresses developers. Developers look at
something and think, wow how did they do that followed by I can do that so
this can be ignored.

------
maxk42
People are more likely to speak up when they're unhappy than when they're
happy.

If they agree with everything you said, they'll typically upvote in silence.

It has nothing to do with developers.

------
qaq
I don't think people expect to be impressed they just want their future pain
when working with a given codebase to be minimized.

------
buboard
I was impressed by the audacity of the title even without reading the article.
That can't be right

------
drharby
I hate when people speak on my behalf

------
rurban
dang: please add (2013) to the title.

------
dejaime
This is just a gross generalization

------
withhighprod
Funny.Having been closely working with world class scientists as an engineer,
I’m (and the whole team) being impressed every day, to the extent that I feel
I’m such an underachiever

------
tiglionabbit
Their first mistake was posting about JavaScript on this site. This site has
an unusually high volume of anti-JavaScript people.

~~~
rurban
But it should be different. One of the most beloved languages, Python 3,
implemented in the fastest dynamic language backend. js has an awful design,
but an extremely fast implementation. Biggest problem was the missing of any
benchmark. it should be at least 2x faster than cpython3.

