

Everything's Blub All Over Again - raganwald

Just a random observation, but the recent founders vs. employees kvetch-storm reminds me strongly of the response to Paul's original Blub Languages article.<p>"Blub's a great language! And there are lots of jobs programming Blub! Why would I be happier using that weird language? Not everybody wants to take risks using an unpopular language. And how dare you say I'm inferior for not using something else!"<p>I'm not passing value on the essay or its critics, but I just think it's interesting how much the two essays and their responses have in common.
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Xichekolas
I'm just sick of hearing about it. This is like the OJ Simpson trial of hacker
news.

Or I should say Reddit. The responses here were fairly normal until someone
pointed out that reddit-ers were freaking out about it. I really hate to beat
the old 'reddit is teh dumb' dead horse, but it kind of seems like it
sometimes.

I think someone read into that essay what he wanted in a search for
controversy, and then a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon in order to
grind an axe with PG or YC, or to appear politically correct, or any number of
other reasons.

It's just like when the whole world had a cow over the (lack of) unicode
support in Arc0.

I am currently a caged lion, and I feel like one. I dream of nothing else but
the open savanna and a tasty gazelle. How is that for taking a metaphor too
far? I understood the whole thing as "startups are liberating to hackers" ...
not "hackers that aren't doing startups suck" as others have suggested. I
think his points about giant organizations not being natural make sense, and I
really don't see why everyone took it personally.

Sure, people can enjoy their big company jobs. But you have to wonder... I
have yet to meet an (ex)entrepreneur that hated running his own business. Just
because you happen to like your company job doesn't mean you wouldn't get more
done and feel more free in a startup. _And just because you would get more
done and feel more free in a startup doesn't mean you should quit a company
job you are happy at either._ It's up to the individual. It's not like we are
arguing over religion here.

Or are we? It sure sounds like it lately.

~~~
pg
The situation with reddit is a unique one. I think I'm the only person who
both writes a lot and started a news site. Not surprisingly, people who like
what I write tended to switch to that news site. The switch was particularly
extreme in the case of reddit, because News.YC is in a sense an offshoot of
reddit: most people who switched from another site to this one came from
there.

The result is that practically anyone left on reddit who has an opinion about
me has a bad one. At this point, I could write an essay saying 1 + 1 = 2, and
the reddit comment thread would be pretty unanimous that I was mistaken, and
moreover, an asshole for saying so.

Usually this doesn't effect anything much, but I think you're right that it
did in this case. I exchanged email with Atwood and it seemed clear he'd been
influenced by the tone of the reddit thread.

I don't think there's anything one could actually do about this problem. I
only mention this because it is so far as I know a novel one.

~~~
xlnt
Of course there is something you could do. People aren't static. So what if
the people who like you came here, and the ones who didn't stayed there? If
you say good enough things everyone will like you and it will be a mute point.

Sure it's harder because there is some initial negative reaction to overcome
from the reddit group. And it may not be the best use of your time. But it
could be done with sufficient skill.

~~~
gruseom
_If you say good enough things everyone will like you_

Oh my goodness. You're not serious, are you? This is a strategy for obtaining
misery and contempt... and deserving it!

~~~
xlnt
I am serious. What do you think could possibly prevent this from working
(other than insufficient skill to say good enough things)?

You say it's a strategy for obtaining misery and contempt. But it's not a
strategy. It's just a fact. The strategy of attempting to get everyone to like
you in this way is something different. That's hard and I didn't recommend it,
I only said it is possible.

~~~
DougBTX
> What do you think could possibly prevent this from working?

One possibility springs to mind. What if someone was to comment on an article
by PG, but without reading the article itself? Someone could say bad things
about you without listening to what you have to say, you'd have no chance to
change their mind.

~~~
xlnt
Heh. Well if it's good enough then word will get around. One day all his
friends will have read it, loved it, and told him to read it. Plus it would be
all over TV and radio and culture in general, so it'd be hard to have a normal
conversation while missing all the references to it.

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marvin
Enough already. I don't see why we should waste our time on arguing with a
large group of people who don't get it. No matter what you say, if it is not
obvious and carries any insight at all, people are going to be insulted. This
is their problem, not ours. It only takes 10% of the readers to turn a good
story into a flamefest. Personally, I found this essay as insightful and
interesting as any of PG's essays, and I'm sure that most of the other people
who read it feel the same.

All this no-restraint bashing of an interesting article ("you shouldn't have
used the 'lions in cages' metaphor! Now I feel terrible! Bghwaaa-waaa-waaa")
is really getting on my nerves. Sometimes someone says something that insults
you. Get over it. Paul Graham _isn't_ out to get you, and he has explained _at
length_ that he didn't actually imply that cubicle workers are losers.

With that in mind: people complaining on this scale about "mere" words is
usually a sign that there is an unpleasant truth being uncovered. I think
everyone who had their feelings hurt should stop and think about that for a
while.

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gruseom
The funny thing about Blub was (if I recall correctly), pg introduced the
concept explicitly to _avoid_ offending the users of any specific language.
When someone is offended by what you're doing to avoid offending them, you've
clearly touched a nerve.

Personally, I like this whole discussion because, agree or disagree, the frame
of the debate is exactly what I'd like it to be: what creative people can do
about the soul-destroying culture of most software jobs. Paul Graham's essays
have done an amazing job of raising this question. The emotions they've
provoked (or more precisely, the emotions people already feel which they
believe the essays have provoked) can't and shouldn't be factored out of it.

------
daniel-cussen
I've wondered if one could arrive at a good decision using _no evidence or
facts_ , but only based on how the different sides debate the issue. The idea
is you could determine which party is right based solely on how they say
things, rather than how strong the evidence is. You look at how different
parties debate. You then compare their styles or types of arguments with
debates from the past that have since been settled.

It's Bayesian spam filtering, applied to debates. I don't know how accurate it
would be, or if it would be easy to game, but it seems useful for educating
guesses.

~~~
Xichekolas
I've always held that the person that is the most angry is the one that is
least sure of his position.

It's not useful as the only predictor, because people's emotional involvement
in ideas can vary, but I find it to be useful meta-information.

~~~
raganwald
Compare and contrast with: "To raise your voice is to confess you have run out
of arguments."

~~~
xlnt
What if the other person is just being an idiot? What if you think he's not
capable of understanding? What if he's a child? What if you think he's
trolling? Is better argument still the way to go?

~~~
raganwald
I am a parent, so I can answer your question with respect to children: raising
your voice does not do anything except escalate the discussion into an
emotional melt-down.

With respect to people you deem to be idiots and trolls, we have known the
answer for a very long time. One of the more amusing bits of advice about the
matter came from Mark twain:

"Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."

~~~
xlnt
I agree that yelling at children doesn't help. But I'm wondering if you would
debate with a child, or try to persuade him with good ideas, or would use some
other sort of approach that isn't yelling or persuading?

~~~
raganwald
Interesting question, but let's take it somewhere else: Are we describing
programmers as children, idiots, and/or trolls? I hope not...

~~~
xlnt
I didn't mean to be, although certainly a programmer _could_ be any of those.

------
xproduct
I choose to remain emotionally neutral about this article simply because
taking it to heart either positively or negatively is counterproductive. I
believe others have already pointed this out, but use of the lion metaphor is
not unintentional. Lion is widely recognized as being the "King of the Jungle"
-- a powerful and virile animal.

This is an undue specialization, a form of flattery. If anything, this alone
should leave all programmers satisfied, because naturally, not everyone fit
this definition or can duly ascribe it to themselves, whether they formed a
successful startup or not.

A more general "animals in the jungle/zoo" might have equally well served to
enrage both camps. In that instance, the onus of deciding which animal is
being spoken of would lay on each individual -- some of whom would wind up
with rather silly characterizations such as: ape, rat, etc.

------
icky
Note also the correlation: startups get to choose their tools, so they usually
go with cool "new" languages (yes, I'm aware that Ruby and Python are
technically older than Java, and that C# is technically newer than any of the
three, but here I use "new" to mean, "not the next COBOL" ;-).

Bigger, older companies tend to be more conservative, or simply have a large
legacy codebase, so they tend to use Blub more often.

Languages can also stagnate and become Blub, compared to newer languages.
Think of a 10-year-old dot-com-era company who used Perl 5 because it was the
best thing around at the time, and now, 10 years later, has a bunch of legacy
Perl code that seemed like the coolest thing ever, but somehow looks like Blub
now...

------
leoc
The response to Steve Yegge's writing about software interviewing is very
similar too:

[http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/truth-about-
intervie...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/truth-about-
interviewing.html)

------
xirium
Sometimes it pays to be a contrarian. Sometimes it doesn't. For programming
and employment, it pays to be a contrarian and that is the focus of this
forum.

------
andreyf
I say we just wait it out. It'll blow over.

------
shiranaihito
> All this no-restraint bashing of an interesting article ("you shouldn't have
> used the 'lions in cages' metaphor! Now I feel terrible! Bghwaaa-waaa-waaa")
> is really getting on my nerves.

Yes, I think Jeff overreacted too :)

Anyone would love to get (really) rich, and founders have a lot better chance
of that happening than employees do.

So people are upset about not having that chance (at least while they're
employees).

It's natural to feel like founding a startup is just more than you can handle,
and maybe that's what's bothering most people.

Knowing that them founding something is very unlikely to happen, they insist
that working on cool stuff is way more important anyway.

Something like the software equivalent of a cure for cancer can only be deemed
more important than founding a startup, that's for sure.

But what most people seem to be missing is that being a founder doesn't
prevent you from doing something noble later on - rich or not.

~~~
cstejerean
not everyone would love to get rich. Certain people want to get rich and some
of them work in startups. But even within startups not everyone is trying to
get rich. I'm pretty sure Paul didn't start FriendFeed just to make even more
money, but I could be wrong.

~~~
shiranaihito
Well, if someone asked you: "Would you like me to transfer 50 million dollars
to your account?" - what would you answer?

What would the "certain people" answer?

"No thanks" ?

------
jk4930
Why can't we simply admit to the jealous world of corporate wanna-be lions
(i.e. pussycats) that we are the creme de la creme and they are not. We are
always smarter, faster, stronger, and more sexy. We have more fun and self-
esteem. We are on top of the evolutionary and social ladder. We are the gold
standard. And we troll them down on their hate-blogs while we compile our next
cash cow.

