
Hey programmers, we need to talk - spiffytech
http://sealedabstract.com/rants/hey-programmers-we-need-to-talk/
======
ebbv
Two things:

1) This is based on a false premise that the time I'm spending writing
comments is taking away from time I'd otherwise spend programming. I don't
know about anyone else but I'm one of those programmers who likes to
internalize a problem, absorb it and digest it subconsciously while doing
other things and then write code. Guess where internet comments fit into this?
Additionally, reading and writing on places like HN has contributed
immeasurably to my skills as a programmer over the years. Not so much by
teaching me specific things but by keeping me in touch with the community and
aware of things I wouldn't otherwise be aware of.

2) There are already real points which we are awarded for programming, it's
called dollar bills. Ok, you were talking about free open source projects that
we wouldn't get paid for. True, no dollars directly there. But these are
things you can cite on your CV/portfolio when job hunting or when review time
comes around. Dollars.

Also, Github.

~~~
steveklabnik
Based on your #1, I can say the same thing. Grep for my username in both these
places:

[https://gist.github.com/paulmillr/2657075/](https://gist.github.com/paulmillr/2657075/)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders)

Now, maybe my GitHub rank would be even higher without my HN rank...

~~~
3pt14159
Sorry man, that is only for people with followers over 187. It stands to
reason that the people that are truly at the top are the ones that don't take
time promoting themselves on Hacker News.

Not that I think you are wrong, but those things might be related :)

~~~
steveklabnik
Of course, that's always possible. It's also only GitHub, there are many,
many, many people who develop a _lot_ of open source software on other places
as well. Furthermore, the long tail dictates that the mass of people with a
few contributions contribute waaaaay more than the people who are at the top.

That said, there's nobody on that list who has an insignificant number of
contributions, either, which is more important. #256 is ~3 commits/day.

------
jamesaguilar
I don't understand how you've concluded that the reward for writing code is
lower than the reward for HN comments. I get paid lots and lots of money to
write code. So far, I haven't seen much return on the time I've invested into
HN comments, except in terms of the internet points you mentioned. The going
conversion rate for those to dollars is around infinity:zero.

~~~
jsnell
Exactly. And it's not just about being paid to write code for your job. My
open source contributions have had orders of magnitude bigger effects than
writing on Usenet or commenting on forums.

\- I made some of my best friends through working on projects in the same open
source ecosystem.

\- I attribute some of my best jobs to having built some reputation from OSS.
Would I have gotten through Google interviews if one of the interviewers
hadn't been a user and a fan of one of my projects? I'm pretty sure it, and
having a long term public track record must have helped some.

\- What little internet fame I have (and it is very little) is all purely
attributable to coding something, releasing it, and then writing about it.

\- I still get a kick out of looking at some old code I've written every now
and then (like old Perl Golf entries). Every now and then I'll get to tell a
good debugging war story to friends, or swapping stories with them about cool
things we've coded lately. Boasting about the cool forum posts... Yeah, not so
much.

And Hacker News? I don't think I've have had one business lead (which didn't
pan out) as a result of a comment, but haven't interacted with a poster
outside of HN otherwise. There's no reason to believe my HN karma will ever
matter for anything. I guess it's nice to cross the downvote threshold.

------
thebear
Ok, beautifully written article, I enjoyed reading it. But you really are
downplaying and underestimating the kind of reward and benefit that one gets
from writing articles and code. For example, I have written a number of
articles and library tools on and in C++. Over time, these things received
lots of links from places like stackoverflow. As a consequence, my stuff is #1
on the search engines for terms like "C++ rvalue references". That gets me an
enormous amount of attention and exposure. And if someone, like a prospective
employer, hasn't found me yet that way, I just tell them, "Hey, search for
'C++ rvalue references', you'll see." Now if someone were to say, "Ok, that's
all fine and well, but you don't have a lot of Karma points on HN," then screw
them, I don't want to work for them anyway.

~~~
mjb
That's been my experience, too. I get much more attention from colleagues and
recruiter for my articles, papers and other publications than my HN or Reddit
karma. If you want to get your name out there as an expert, you're much better
off writing the occasional long form article, chunk of code, paper or
conference talk than racking up HN karma in my opinion.

------
obviouslygreen
Starting from false premises makes the rest of your article likely worthless
(I can only say _likely_ worthless because I stupidly kept skimming but
fortunately stopped carefully reading).

 _This programming thing is a lot of fun, right? We have been entrusted with
the unique responsibility of making pretty much the entire world go round.
(There aren’t a lot of industries that don’t need software these days.) And
not only that, but we have a lot of fun doing it._

Fun? It can be, sometimes, or at least was for some of us when we started.
Making pretty much the entire world go round? No, most of us aren't anywhere
close to that. We make happy little sites and apps for rich people to buy
jewelry and make fun of their friends and mark posts 'liked' on social
networks. I know people who work on the software that runs airplanes, and
that's soul-crushing C tweaks and opimization at best. We have a lot of fun
doing this? No, I think most people in any reasonable place to comment do this
for _work_ , and "fun" is almost always a secondary consideration if it is one
at all, at least for the non-independently-wealthy and personal-future-minded.

Yeah, I guess we do need to talk. Because you don't seem to understand what
the vast majority of us _don 't_ do or what our priorities _aren 't_, let
alone that we are pretty much _normal people_ that don't need hyperbole about
which comments on which sites matter.

~~~
cunac
I am so sorry if programming stopped to be fun for you but please don't
extrapolate that to all of us. I would hope that for most there is fun and
less work.

In immortal words of Confucius "Choose a job you love, and you will never have
to work a day in your life"

~~~
obviouslygreen
Very cute. I didn't extrapolate it to "all of us;" if it fits you, you're not
"us" in the sense it was intended.

Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life? Very petty
sentiment from an industry that's swamped with demand.

~~~
cunac
Point is I am doing this for last 30 years , I choose this when computers were
not 'cool' and 'hip' , internet was arpanet and BBS was well BBS. It wasn't
demand or promise for richness what drove my choice of profession. Good
question is why you choose/do this if it is not fun to you?

------
tjr
From
[http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup](http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup)

 _Between March 2001 and April 2004 roughly 400,000 American jobs in
information technology were eliminated. Many of those who had coded Java in
obscurity ended up as cab drivers or greeters at Walmart. A personal
professional reputation, by contrast, is a bit harder to build than the big
salary but also harder to lose. If you don 't invest some time in writing
(prose, not code), however, you'll never have any reputation outside your
immediate circle of colleagues, who themselves may end up working at
McDonald's and be unable to help you get an engineering job during a
recession._

------
taylodl
Before there was Hacker News there was Slashdot. Before Slashdot there were
NNTP servers (Usenet). Before Usenet there were BBSes. We've been chatting
online for the past 30 years and yet have still been able to create operating
systems, window managers, office productivity suites, databases, compilers and
all sorts of other things.

Not saying our system is perfect, but it's working and besides developers need
to let off some steam and just talk about geeky stuff.

------
InclinedPlane
But then, let's look at the other side of the equation.

By having places where programmers hang out with each other and just chit chat
a community arises. Experience, expertise, knowledge, and judgment is shared.

Developers learn many important things this way.

They learn about new technologies, new languages, new tools, they get a sense
for new things to study. And new things to build too.

They learn about security vulnerabilities in frameworks and operating systems.
Not everyone is signed up for all of the relevant security mailings that
impact them, and sometimes there aren't security mailing lists for some
products.

They learn about good practices and bad practices. Everything from how to
work, how to bill and interact with clients, how to be a good boss, signs of
bad bosses, what opportunities are out there in the world, all that stuff.

They learn about interesting and deep problems in programming and computer
science and perhaps think about ways to tackle them.

It's easy to discount these things but they are important. As important as
fundamental computer science stuff like algorithms, if not more so. Sure, it
also comes with a lot of baggage and bloviation and uselessness, but sometimes
it can be more difficult to tell the difference between useful and useless
than one might think.

~~~
bereft_orange
Certified newbie-programmer here: without HN, r/programming on reddit, and a
few other places, there's no way I'd know about half the things I know now.
When it comes to choose tools for a project, that's really helpful.

That all said, I think it's reasonable to say "Hey, we should think about
motivating people to contribute code too!", but both elements can be
complimentary.

------
scott_s
I'm perplexed by this. On HN, karma's purpose is to promote civil discussion.
It attempts to do this by providing both positive and negative feedback. If
you confuse those points with some universally valuable thing... well, don't.

I will note that I have had many pleasant interactions with people on HN
outside of HN itself. Some of these interactions included offers to interview
for a position. But this did not happen because of my karma points itself.
They happened because of how I conduct myself here.

------
groby_b
This is only true for people who care about "Internet points".

As others have pointed out, there are many other metrics. Number of lives you
positively affect, for those of us who work in large-scale projects. Dollar
bills for those who choose to get paid. Recognition by peers for those who
choose to publish papers/reviewed articles.

And to be completely trite, "you get back what you put in". If all HN is to
you is a place to collect Internet points, yeah, that's pretty shallow. If you
think it's a place where you can have interesting discussions with people with
similar interests, it's a completely different kettle of fish. I'm not here
for my karma points, I'm here because I occasionally enjoy the discussions.
(And I comment because I wait for my compiler ;)

------
tomphoolery
I find that many of the best programmers, and many of the programmers on my
Twitter feed, do not post very much if ever here on HN, or on Reddit, or
anywhere else really. They're too busy doing what they love, which is
programming and not talking about programming.

The same goes for musicians. Name the last Daft Punk comment you saw on
Reddit? Oh it's not there? Probably because they're too busy spending 6 weeks
on the perfect kick drum sound.

~~~
rismay
Sooo true. And although programming is fun, it's not necessarily how a person
might chose to spend their leisure time.

As tomphoolery alluded to, maybe the problem is that our society as a whole
gives too much credit to how we live our leisure life vs our work life? This
isn't a problem related to programming, it's a general critique.

You could easily write the same article from the point of view of a 4.0 GPA
college student:

Guys, we need to talk. This whole college thing is awesome. Most of you will
only get 4 years of this. Why do we give so much credit to the guy who just
won the case race but not the engineer who's developing the next rocket?
WHY?!?! We should be studying!

I'm going to keep commenting and coding more than the average person.

Great article though.

------
sn0v
If the intention is to reward in terms of karma, judging one liners is a lot
easier (and quicker) than judging the quality of a software patch. The
feedback is instantaneous, thereby explaining the skewed ratio of one-liners
to useful patches. Regardless, those who currently exhibit a superhuman level
of programming expertise will continue to do so while us mere mortals seek out
cat pictures on Reddit.

------
TallboyOne
I really dislike the phrase "we need to talk"

 _shudder_

------
LnxPrgr3
The good news is I suspect the people able and motivated to make real
contributions to our field aren't too worried about Internet points.

At least, I hope that's the case, because the Internet seems to reward easy to
understand and seemingly witty over real contribution. It happens even when
we're talking about actual code—I can't count the number of "X, but in
JavaScript! (Because I ran X through Emscripten, which anyone could've done,
but hey! I published the output first!)" projects I've seen on the front page
here.

At least the person who actually wrote Emscripten got a few Internet points
for the effort too.

It's worth remembering though that to some people some things matter more than
money. Internet points are a cheapened version of peer recognition, and as
such they might matter to some more than they logically should.

------
nostrademons
I think this is more perception than reality. People _do_ get Internet points
for code, it's just that they get very little feedback that they're getting
Internet points for the code. But everybody knows (or can easily find out) if
you, say, invented Django or Redis or memcached or sold a company or make lots
of money selling Bingo Cards or redesigned the Google search page or various
other technical accomplishments. And that does affect how your comments are
perceived. You don't _see_ that effect because it's tacky to argue from
authority, but people know who the authorities are.

------
kybernetyk
> There’s no real reason for this comment to exist.

Sure, there is. Someone wanted to state his opinion. And as the internet most
likely won't get full anytime soon I don't see why that would be bad.

------
tenpoundhammer
Why don't we create an HN like website for writing code. Essentially a member
of an open source community would come and submit a need for a function. It
tell us what goes in the function, what it should return, and the language
necessary. In the "comments" solutions are put into place critiqued and
updated, and everything is up voted.

This lowers the bar of entry, increases the points for doing important stuff,
and helps people learn. Email me if you want talk more. jonathan.barnes11 @
gmail dot com

------
iopq
I'm glad I read this article instead of actually working. I'm even more glad
that this article made me want to write a response to it on HN instead of
working. Wait a second...

------
deckar01
I think the article raises some interesting questions: Can we create a better
incentive system for open source software contribution? Why do the rewards
have to be imaginary?

------
dylandrop
I feel the writer wants me to feel bad about not working 100% of the time.
What's so bad about procrastination, as long as we don't overindulge?

------
swamp40
I want to comment, but then I'd feel bad...

------
zem
linking to content is absolutely a high-effort, reward-worthy endeavour.
perhaps not as much so as writing the linked-to content, but the fact is there
is a torrent of bad articles and webpages out there, and anyone who wants to
take the time and trouble to sift through it and selectively amplify the good
stuff is providing a valuable service.

------
dmead
hot air blog posts get too much attention here

------
rhizome
You know that the "top" comment you see in a post is not the highest-rated
one, right?

------
MarcParadise
Too many people mistake one-liners for wisdom and/or wit.

... see what I did there?

------
6d0debc071
Where are you getting your data from for these graphs?

------
ehm_may
lol. OP is bitching about internet karma. 1st rule of internet karma is it's
irrelevant.

------
AsymetricCom
We still need karma for linking because Google failed to provide us with the
long term value it demonstrated to society when it was established. Had Google
been successful, (at something other than Ad Words) then these other forums
wouldn't be so popular.

------
MostAwesomeDude
I agree with the author entirely.

------
alexcroox
Wasn't this blog linked to on here recently? Anyone know what it was about, is
he buthurt about comments in that thread?

