This is a common HN fallacy. The reality is that most software engineers wildly overestimate their own intelligence and are barely even competent at their own jobs. The notion that they could quickly get up to speed on another complex job is ludicrous. For starters most engineers struggle with interviewing people and extracting accurate information from them; that's one key reason why most new software fails to satisfy user requirements.
Thanks for saying this. I am sick of software engineers thinking they are smarter and than other people because they make more money.
How much money you make does not equate to your worth as a human being.
Software engineering is not that difficult.
There are lots of things just as difficult if not more difficult than software engineering.
The majority of software engineers contribute very little to society if anything.
Just because you have a good software engineering job does not make you a successful person or better than other people who are pursuing other ways of living their lives.
Software engineering is pretty darned difficult. But it turns out that there are also plenty of difficult-but-poorly-paying fields. Journalism is one of them. GP is absolutely wrong that a bunch of software engineers can stand up a decent news reporting org.
I thought that "write text" was the easiest part of journalism. Most people capable of getting through college (usually required for both software and journalism jobs) are capable of writing at a high enough standard for any journalism outlet.
Doing research, then understanding and distilling it, developing contacts, networks, and sources - these seem like the hard parts of journalism.
If "display text on a screen at scale" wasn't hard it was it wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar industry with crazy high salaries. Not to mention, it's not just displaying the text but everything that goes into it - figuring out product market fit, getting hundreds or thousands of engineers organized and productive, logistics of data centers and hardware.
If writing good news and good software both come easily to you, you just might be an outlier. Or you're taking a very superficial view of both kinds of work.
Coming from the self-taught perspective, I disagree that software engineering is not difficult. It is difficult. Otherwise everyone would be doing it just for the money.
Though I do agree with you on the other points, although it seems like you are bitter about something.
That said, I work with a company that makes stuff that does contribute to society in a positive way, and because of that I make less than most.
When I started to teach myself, I knew I never wanted to work on something that was involved in ads, data collection for ads, or making junk software, which seems to be the focus of the majority of software companies.
> Otherwise everyone would be doing it just for the money.
This is pure survivor bias talking while ignoring impediments that make switching careers, retraining, &c., not a viable path for most people. The fact that there are structural impediments does not make it difficult.
Your comment makes no sense. Survival bias? Structural impediments? I get that not everyone can become a software engineer due to many different reasons.
Your comment can literally be applied to any other industry that someone might try to get into when changing careers. It's a poor reason.
Seriously. It's especially laughable to say that a room of software engineers could become journalists, of all things. The vast majority of the SWEs I know, even the rockstars at FAANG companies, can hardly write coherent emails or give a presentation during a 5-person standup meeting. To think they could write entire news articles is hilarious.
It's about bargaining power. The simple fact is that the income gap is widening, and wealth is increasingly held by a small minority. This indicates that a small elite disproportionately reap the rewards of increased efficiency in production. Software engineers are better able to claw back some of this gap (and are often responsible for automating jobs away, increasing efficiency).
We went to 5 day work weeks with full pay during the industrial revolution - it's probably high time to consider a 4 day week / 6 hour day with full pay as a result of the increased efficiency since.
I've always found it interesting that the Dunning-Kruger effect especially applies to software engineers. And I think the reason is actually really simple - software engineering is actually really easy to get started and start making an impact. Think of the early engineering projects college students learn: mechanical engineers might develop a racing chassis for FSAE, civil engineers may design a small-scale structure to withstand an earthquake simulation, electrical engineers can build a superheterodyne receiver - all of these require planning for hardware because it's not as easy as recompiling software. The amount of time and work the compiler magics away is utterly astounding, and an extraordinarily small percent of software engineers appreciate it. The reason software engineers think they are so smart is because they are operating in one of the easiest work-to-reward environments imaginable, and this is only reinforced by their high salaries.
That said, the opportunities for learning and growing as an engineer are just as large in software engineering as other disciplines (probably greater given the current economic environment). Most software engineers have shaken off a lot of this hubris by the time they have 'senior' in front of their title.
Until someone shows up and claims that a bunch of developers could start a “functioning news organization” overnight. Comments like that are so eye-rollingly naive that they make all of HN look bad.
I have extreme doubts that anyone could take a room full of software engineers and start a functioning news organization the next day. We're not even good at estimating the amount of effort it takes to get things done in our own field (witness "I could have built Stack Overflow in a weekend"); I think we all need a lot more humility about what it takes to do other people's jobs.
It would take years for most software engineers to write material up to the questionable standards of journalism, but you could have them writing functional articles in a weekend. You won't have most journalists writing functional code in a weekend, even if you don't hold them to the questionable standards of software development. Practically every field is deeper than a single human can delve in their lifetime, but that doesn't mean that every field has an equally high barrier of entry.
I'm not sure I have a grasp on what you believe journalism to be. Could a room full of software developers write a bunch of blog posts about random topics? Sure. But, as much as it may seem otherwise from the outside, that's not what a newsroom is doing. In fact, that's not even what the trade press does.
We also, as a profession, have a real problem with the rift between our enthusiasm for the work we do and its real world complexity. An enormous chunk of all software development work could be approximated or even substituted entirely with a reasonable set of Excel spreadsheets (spreadsheets, of course, being the world's most popular software development environment); many of us spend entire careers simply plumbing one set of database columns into another set of form fields and tables. Could I teach a bunch of journalists to model a bunch of business processes in Google Sheets? Yes, I think I could.
If you think that's a laughable comparison, I'd ask you to consider whether your conception of the work of a journalist isn't akin to my hypothetical conception of the work of a software developer.
And to add on to your point, what makes a news organization successful is not just good writing, but good journalism, which comes from journalistic and beat experience – i.e. you couldn't produce a successful news org by hiring English PhDs.
The original commenter's thought process is as absurd as a layperson bragging they could just as easily produce a functioning website with production-ready code because they've learned how to write the <link> and <script> tags needed to include Bootstrap and jQuery. It's not the code itself that makes a tech company. Just as it is not just words strung together in paragraph form that makes a news org.
I'd argue that you can have a successful news organization through producing lots of profitable content that has poor journalism and poor writing, but is sufficiently aggressively optimized clickbait - and that's the cause of the current degradation of news quality; good news and good writing have become neither sufficient nor absolutely necessary for success in news (or "news") industry.
And that's even not that new, already a hundred years ago there were highly successful news organizations that thrived not despite but because of bad journalism, exploiting misleading sensationalism to its full potential.
This has already been attempted for nearly a decade, by traditional journalists and outsiders (e.g. Demand Media), and the number of successful/sustainable/functional such companies is as infrequent as any tech unicorn, so the empirical evidence does not support your argument.
> And that's even not that new, already a hundred years ago there were highly successful news organizations that thrived not despite but because of bad journalism, exploiting misleading sensationalism to its full potential.
No argument there. And the golden era of American journalism – e.g. the 1970s to 1990s – produced great journalism and printed money for its owners (30%+ profit margins were not unheard of), but it's because established outlets had a virtual monopoly in their regions, especially newspapers (because TV/radio killed the need for evening newspapers, and in smaller cities, multiple newspapers).
But it has never been easy to create a successful/functional news org by just doing journalism. Just as it has never been easy to build a useful tech startup by creating production ready code.
Thank you. I write and edit professionally and am constantly amazed by how often people overestimate their own writing abilities, especially if they are very skilled in other fields. There is a difference between "using words" and "writing". The thought process usually goes: we all do the former every day, so how hard can the latter be? (Also, there are non-writing skills that are hugely important in journalism.)
The original post about journalists vs. SWEs is a comment on the content-mill, lowest common denominator nature of huge swathes of the current online publishing landscape, not about the difficulty(??) of Journalism vs. Coding or whatever.
Aren't we passed the point where good journalism drives a successful news org? The mainstream media is controlled by a few large companies. They buy up chains and hire like minded writers. Journalism has become a cog in a bigger machine.
I have worked with old-school journalists, and have done my share of freelancing between ~1993 and 2005.
Even reasonably well done journalism is like debugging complex technical problems, but instead of working with systems that behave in a well-defined manner, you are dealing with people and complex wetware systems. They do not behave well at all.
Journalist hunting for confirmation or corroboration of a good lead is like a software engineer doing root-cause analysis in a byzantine maze, where reliability of information is suspect and all interactions with various interfaces must be assumed adversarial. Or at best to provide wildly incomplete data.
And the final output, the article that eventually gets published? Ask yourselves: have you ever written postmortems that must make sense to an audience who do not have the technical background to understand the nuances of the problem domain? Audience who will actively try to misunderstand what you have written, and extract soundbites out of context? Could you include enough information in the postmortem to pre-emptively defuse such attempts, so that you could trivially quote a section to point out the strawman attempt?
That's what proper journalism is like. And I consider myself privileged to have worked with people that; they taught me skills I could not have picked up in the university or most workplaces.
> Could a room full of software developers write a bunch of blog posts about random topics? Sure. But, as much as it may seem otherwise from the outside, that's not what a newsroom is doing. In fact, that's not even what the trade press does.
This is an accurate description of most of the news I see. For every piece of news that's actual original journalism, there's 2 articles that essentially amount to summarizing C-Span and another 2 that are essentially blog posts. And then there's the editorial section that really is essentially a collection of blog posts.
No, a group full of software engineers definitely couldn't start a news room on their own in a day, week, or month. But there's definitely still a huge hole in the news room for folks who "know how to code [together]", or at the very least folks who know how to build the support infrastructure. At many of the biggest news rooms, it's often a single person building infrastructure, ETL pipelines, performance tuning, visualization, etc etc. Taking away a lot of the drudgery of dealing with ETL pipelines could go a very long way for the news room. The competition for these jobs is so high that newsrooms end up with data folk who can wield magic, but with very little pay, support, and equipment (one data reporter I talked to had a windows machine with 4gb of ram!) to fulfill their jobs.
My point being that there's a middle ground where we simply have more software folk inside, or close to, the news room. Consider that as more information is created/stored (regardless of government, corporations, or private), the requirement for collecting/parsing/cleaning through that information for the news room will become harder and harder. I'm sure some phase transition will happen, but probably not for a while.
It's funny this came up. Before Al Jazeera shut down their American operations, I met with a number of software engineers in their employment who were embedded with news teams and whose primary responsibilities were to do journalism.
They were trying to recruit more. This was 5 years ago. They were ahead of the curve and I think they were so ahead of the curve they realized that journalism was a dead end here and closed up shop.
We've established, unsurprisingly, that there are journalists who can code and coders who can do good work in journalism. I'm not clear on where that gets this thread though.
Hi that is me. I do not think journalism is a dead end nor have I ever thought that. From my personal view, Al Jazeera America failed largely because of the TV and broadcast market, not its digital presence. We had a pretty good publishing system that the multimedia team, which I was on, built our own tools to integrate with. Many of them we open sourced: https://github.com/ajam
That's an interesting extrapolation of your personal experience. You think that's more likely than the widely reported explanations of why Al Jazeera America closed up shop?
Your example of a room full of software developers running a newsroom appears to be a newsroom that wasn't run by software developers, and which failed.
I've worked at Google and a newspaper (Chicago Tribune). I can guarantee you that a room full of Google SWEs could not start producing an edition of the Trib one day later, though they could absolutely put words into articles.
There's so much more that I want to say to you but I'll leave it there. You are wildly incorrect.
+1 as a current member of a Big Tech product org and a trained journalist.
The basic information gathering skills of a junior reporter would be completely foreign to most engineers. These are real skills like navigating a FOIA request or pulling financial information from public filings. Soft skills like effective interviewing, structuring an article, translating technical topics to non-technical audiences, writing good headlines.
If your idea of a functional newsroom is a wordpress instance, sure, but the hubris here is cringeworthy and demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of the work that goes into good reporting.
I wonder how much overlap there is between the group of software engineers who eschew writing documentation and the group of software engineers who believe they could start a functioning news organization the next day.
I think the quality of journalism done by a bunch of software engineers will be identical to the quality of the software written by a bunch of journalists.
The amount of hubris and cynical populism in this comment is almost breathtaking.
> and some say that the news is just a loss leader for the media a
If you use the phrase "some people say..." at the New York Times, you're fired, because it's international shortcode for I-just-pulled-this-theory-from-....
You don't know that, and that's not terrible. But you should at least be aware of how little you know about the profession you're so keen on ridiculing.
So few people understand this. Even engineers who undervalue salespeople misunderstand this as well.
No matter what your job is, at a company you either cost money or you bring in money.
You want to be on the "bring in money" side of the business 99 times out of 100. The career path of being "obviously valuable" and a bottom-line employee is difficult. While I've been there and it's rewarding, one change in management where someone comes in who doesn't "get it" and you're screwed (and usually so is the company).
You're right about where you want to be, because a lot of managers think like you do.
But if a person cost money and provided no value a rational company would fire them. Either almost every company is insanely dumb or you need the employees not directly bringing in wads of cash to support the ones that don't.
This isn't an original idea of mine, if you want to see discussion of the issue Google "cost centers and profit centers", the technical terms for those sides.
To provide a totally trivial example suppose your business is going to people handing out free money, taking the money, and putting it in the bank. Suppose different people in different locations hand out different amounts of money. Suppose you have a data scientist who predicts the optimal route for your money getters to travel. This person is a cost center, and firing them would be dumb. Now suppose you have a caterer who makes sure they don't need to leave for lunch...
Edit: Looking at your last paragraph again I think you might possibly agree with me? I'm not sure if that quote is sarcastic...
"cost center vs profit center" are the same thing as "bottom-line vs top-line" (as I referred to) just different audience.
I'm not saying that people that cost money don't provide value but your compensation will always be minimized by management and bad managers will look for reasons to remove you from the balance sheet, even if they're bad ones.
If you're bringing the company money, the company could be literally on fire and you can still command a sizeable salary.
If you're bringing in millions and could be replaced easily you'll make peanuts. If you're bringing in millions but don't negotiate your salary at all your employer will generally happily pay you less than your work is "earning".
If you're a dev for a newspaper you'll be paid around what other similarly qualified devs make irregardless of whether you work on their subscription system (allegedly profit center) or on the backend their journalists use to post content (allegedly cost center)
Edit: I absolutely agree our terms mean the same. That's why I said I was just providing the terms so people can Google existing articles on the subject.
Lets take the argument one step further. You could take the room full of software engineers and automate most writing. Business, sports, not a problem. So the question is, how many journalists work as actual journalists in their field and which are easily replaceable by AI or unskilled humans. Here i think the initial comparison comes back. You could also get the room of software engineers to get a newspaper running. Full of clickbait, chum and all the other psychological tricks to get people hooked over shit content. Producing such content is an organization task like any else. Its not quality content but it doesnt have to be, you only need clicks. You wouldnt have journalists, but how many do we currently have who also work as such in "functioning news organizations"? Unless payed by a benefactor with deep war chest, very few journalists get to do any real journalism, simply because its not a profitable venture to pay all the research that didnt turn into big stories. The few that do have been on their deathbed for a while.
So on that level, sure, journalism isnt a profitable career option. The stuff that you do get paid for likely can also be done be anyone else who can handle the advertisement financed industry. Its the basic crux of the problem, journalism isnt profitable. Trying to solve that problem by trusting the market will leave us without professional journalism.
What would be the coverage area and audience of this software-engineer-staffed news organization?
edit: to elaborate on my question, when you imply that, unlike journalists, a room full of software engineers could write "production ready code in under a month" – what are you talking about, exactly? Because most readers of HN are well aware of tech firms pouring venture money into rooms full of software engineers and producing production code that is as ephemeral and lasting value as any blog.
What? Journalism can drive whole political landscape.
I can bring issues to people they'd never heard of else.
This can start such a huge feedback loop that has the power to help changing the world (for better or worse).
Journalism has a very high ROI on the long run.
High profile and quality Journalism, especially Investigative one, can be worth so much that its hard to comprehend, as it shows..
I think that what I like the most about this comment is that it involves a professional engineer announcing a time estimate for a complex project with a three word specification.
Huh? No I didn't. The claim was never the New York Times.
The register is competitive with the times, they compete for clicks on reddit/google news and so on. I expect the quality to start out more akin to the register (or really, more akin to Wired).
I assumed that because you didn't override the parent assumption. The Register may compete with a very narrow section of the times, but I wouldn't call them competitive (and I doubt many others would either). For example, only one of those outlets regularly breaks stories that are reported on in every other outlet and only one of those outlets has our highest politicians regularly read and quote from it.
The Register is pretty good trade journalism. I doubt your average software dev would get anywhere close to that anytime quickly especially in the absence of existing source networks. Probably closer to whatever write up press releases sources there are.
I agree it's pretty good, and that the average software dev couldn't do it. However, I have seen a few of their articles in passing and haven't run into any that involved non-public sources. I just went to their website and all four of the top stories have no information that couldn't be found by googling. For 3/4 I'd seen an article closer to the original source on HN.
There's very little about trade journalism that involves true scoops.There used to be more but the economics mostly don't support a lot of trawling for unannounced information.
Context is still useful. But if you already have the context, the pub may not be that useful.
Pretty much what I wrote. Providing context, interpreting what was said, providing additional/opposing data points.
Reporting on an announcement still has value if you position it relative to other products/market even if there's no secret information. Bringing in other perspectives.
Writing can be art. Not all writing is art. Plenty of professional work is denominated in writing (expository writing, persuasive writing, contractual writing) that clearly isn't art. We're all writing here. If we're artists, it's in the "Sandwich Artist" sense.
There are works of journalism so carefully written that they have artistic value, but most of it has no such pretense.
You should've left it after the first paragraph. The problem of journalism is one of scalability.
Your run-of-the-mill software has good returns over periods way larger than the development time. Your average article has a low return over a mean life way shorter than the time it takes to produce it.
It's a fallacy to say that Engineering is "harder" than Journalism and expect that to mean anything. They are different skill sets. Is being a Mechanic harder than being a Musician? These are meaningless comparisons.
I agree insofar the bread and butter of most "news organizations" is not serious journalism.
It's garbage opinion pieces and "analysis"(also opinion pieces). Take scraps of news and figure out how to craft a narrative out of it that appeals to a certain target audience with the least amount of effort. Use clicks to dial it in. Sprinkle a few reuters copy pastas. Maybe a few top 10 lists. Bingo bongo.
I've worked with software engineers of various stripes for over 20 years. While more than one knew how to write, a plurality were not very good writers, and very few wrote at a professional level. This has, at least in my experience, been getting steadily worse, as students seem to be receiving ever less meaningful instruction in composition, research, outlining, and even startlingly (to me) basic grammar. Writing is a skill an awful lot of people undervalue in a very Dunning-Kruger Effect fashion, which bluntly can get pretty frustrating at times.
The notion that news is something that nobody wants to pay for honestly strikes me as relatively new; people paid for newspapers and weekly newsmagazines for generations, and broadcast nightly news shows -- paid for indirectly through advertisements -- likewise lasted for decades.
There's also the misconception that journalism is mostly about competent writing, which it is not; news writing has a particular structure, but more importantly, much of the work of a journalist is research and investigation (particularly, in cultivating and corroborating sources).
I'm not sure how people read my comment as an implication that journalism is the same thing as writing blog entries.
Part of what I'm getting at is that I don't believe that it's that complex for someone to learn about proper story structure, investigation, and the various techniques in effectively getting a reader both interested and informed about the right things. Textbooks on the subject aren't particularly long for a reason. Competent writing may not be all that journalism is about, but it's a large part of it, and you even used it as your first example(a writing structure).
Just because I don't believe that journalism is as rigorous a profession as others doesn't mean that I believe that it's worthless, takes no talent, etc.
I'm astonished by the sheer ignorance and under-appreciation of journalism.
First, good journalism is extraordinarily important. (In case that's not obvious in times of Brexit and Trump I can expand on this. Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg released their documents to journalists.) Sure, most stories are not that important, but they are still an important part of a community.
Second, journalism is not trivial. Good writing is hard. Understanding a subject that you're not necessarily an expert in enough to explain it to others is hard. (Have a look at most documentation!)
Third, many journalists are not only very well educated, but with an admirable idealism (well, initially) and a desire to make the world a better place (really better, not peddling ads). A friend of mine was science journalist, and he had studied physics, philosophy, and psychology (with a PhD in the philosophy of mind).
The decline of journalism is something to lament (and I don't how their coding ability has any bearing on the subject whatsoever).
To put it in economic terms: I submit that the good work of journalists has massive positive externalities, while the work of lots of techies has huge negative externalities.
You're ignorant about what journalism actually entails, especially journalism that is consumed and found to be useful (i.e. what anyone will bother reading, nevermind paying for).
It's no different than someone arguing they can be a successful software engineer just because they've literally created "production ready code" by incorporating Bootstrap.css and jquery.
Sorry, but your original comment said “you have no doubt” that you (or anyone) could get a bunch of software engineers and within a day create a functioning news org. But now it sounds like you have no core concept about what journalism is?
edit: just to expand on this, I'm declining to respond to your overly broad request, in the same way that I would decline to respond to someone who, after taking 10 minutes to roll out a beautiful SquareSpace template, mocks the tens of thousands of computer science grads who fail to be even 0.001% the success that dropout Mark Zuckerberg is.
Your original comment, without further clarification on your part, carries an amount of arrogance and likely ignorance that doesn't feel worthwhile to engage with in good faith. But for starters, you make a major categorical error by conflating "functioning news organization" – an entity that requires social and political power, entrepreneurship, and business acumen – as something that only requires a bunch of people (journalists, or not) getting together and doing whatever you think "journalism" is. No non-foolish journalist would ever argue that a roomful of journalists could produce a "functioning news organization" in a day or even in a month.
And recent counter-examples to your belief are plentiful. If it were possible to throw a bunch of software devs into a room to create a "functional news organization", then Facebook would not be throwing millions [0] at existing news orgs for the rights to display article headlines and previews, when it could be using the hundreds/thousands of not-fully-utilized software engineers it already has in-house to produce news, if your hypothesis were based in reality.
> edit: just to expand on this, I'm declining to respond to your overly broad request, in the same way that I would decline to respond to someone who, after taking 10 minutes to roll out a beautiful SquareSpace template, mocks the tens of thousands of computer science grads who fail to be even 0.001% the success that dropout Mark Zuckerberg is.
No, you're declining to reply because you don't know anything about journalism and are talking out your rear end.
See? Anyone can play your ridiculous game.
> Your original comment, without further clarification on your part, carries an amount of arrogance and likely ignorance that doesn't feel worthwhile to engage with in good faith.
What on earth are you talking about? You claimed to know something that I don't, and asking you to provide something more specific besides just saying I'm "ignorant" is perfectly reasonable. All you've done is gotten pissed at the fact that I don't see journalism as being as rigorous or valuable a profession as you believe they are, and you're reading my intent through that lens. Would you believe me if I told you that I am genuinely trying to describe the situation in an honest way?
> And recent counter-examples to your belief are plentiful.
Can you name a single one? Surely, you are much less ignorant about this than I am.
> If it were possible to throw a bunch of software devs into a room to create a "functional news organization", then Facebook would not be throwing millions [0] at existing news orgs for the rights to display article headlines and previews
First of all, I never said that software engineers + wordpress = The New York Times. Everyone seems to forget that there are tons of news organizations out there that aren't even a 10th of the scale of big-name newsrooms.
Second, Facebook paid those organizations as an incentive because publishing articles in Facebook potentially threatens their ad revenue because it could draw users away from their own websites. Facebook wants people to stay within Facebook and not navigate away when they look at a story, and they have the money to make that happen. Lots of people read NYT, WaPo, etc. It's an audience Facebook wants to keep. This has nothing to do with how monetarily valuable journalism is or how much talent it requires. These organizations were selling their audience to Facebook.
>> "Here's how I think of it: I have no doubt that anyone could take a room full of software engineers and start a functioning news organization the next day."
