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Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

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Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#11

Post by fermienrico »

pmichaud wrote: post #4

This was entertaining to read, I like your style. I also find the webdev low status pretty unjustified. It's true that it's less mathy than other disciplines, but at scale, "webdev" is every bit as architecturally challenging as anything else, and in some cases moreso because of the sheer number of different technologies and stacks you have to be fluent in to make it all work together.

I presume the hatred comes from the purists looking down on the entire mess of web stack: PHP gets a bad rep, JavaScript is at the butt of every joke from an embedded C developer, and the front end of the stack is a total nightmare - CSS, w3c and all.

Web Dev is hard __precisely__ because of this mess!

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#12

Post by sethammons »

A number of years ago, one of the co-founders at work asked various people, "how would you feel if I said you looked like a $LANGUAGE programmer?" And he substituted Perl, Ruby, Python, and PHP for $LANGUAGE.

We often mock up in our minds what it means to work in a language or framework and bucket people based on these poor signals.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#13

Post by bastijn »

I think the negative comments on webdev come from the php era where websites were not much more than information portals. Nowadays webdev is more about web apps, considerably harder to create and maintain. In addition the usage expanded so scale became a thing. Over time it is more that the apps traditionally seen as "true programming" moved to the web but the stigma is only starting to fade.

On the writing style; hope you are more fun over lunch talks :). Hope it is a jokingly written article because the dark writing style can easily be confused with a negative attitude for people who can only judge by the article. Cheer up!

P.s. the fangirl comment is a little out of place in an article on signaling written in this tone. It's like you think less of people who love the language for reasons that qualify them as "fangirl" in your eyes. Just saying.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#14

Post by jobobgo »

Just drop a line about "my startup" and put wage slaves to shame.

If you are in front of other startup founders, and they know you also have a startup, then drop the line that you own multiple income producing real estate properties.

If you are with real estate investors, who know you also have a mini real estate empire, then drop the line that you own a tech company.

If you meet someone who has a successful startup, has multiple real estate properties.... then flex your arm and chest muscles at random to show them who's boss.

If you meet another guy that has the same things as you, then go out for a beer with him and be narcissistic assholes together to slay chicks.

Works every time

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#16

Post by Zelphyr »

axlee wrote: post #5
SCdF wrote: post #3

> when I told other software people I’m a web developer, I got treated like shit. I was a lower class of coder because I wasn’t “solving cool problems” because making web sites is easy. Of all the stupid arrogant awfulness in tech that has crossed my path this one is definitely high on the list of the most baffling. Web dev is the hardest and most intimidating dev work I've ever done, by a country mile. (Whether that…

Whoever says web is "easy" never had to build or maintain a large web application. The ecosystem is incredibly deep and constantly evolving, to the point where best practices change every six months.

Not to mention; web developers are constantly having to context switch between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Old school days they also had a backend language like PHP or Perl. Many still do. Then there was/is SQL. By my count, that's at least five different languages to know all at once.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#17

Post by endorphone »

Often when people perceive signalling it is a confirmation bias -- they feel something and think it exists in the behaviors of others. e.g. I'm doing something I think is cool, therefore positive interactions are because of it. I'm insecure therefore everyone is dismissive of me.

Having said that, I don't know what timeframe this person is referring to but web development went from extraordinarily hackish and ill considered (the WebForm/php/intermixed render blocks era) to being a quite disciplined portion of the industry. I remember when the overwhelming bulk of web developers wouldn't grok that JavaScript had closures, and they didn't have to use globals to store state during an event handler.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#18

Post by Zelphyr »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #7

I was (am maybe.) one of those douches that looked down on webdevs. I was so, so wrong. It came from fetishizing complexity and "smartness". Even setting aside the issue of complexity, from a business perspective, web dev is immensely valuable and only becoming more so. And as for complexity, I always thought I could learn it easily because its "not real CS" but man its a huge, complex, ever-changing ecosystem and no…

There's also something to be said for us working hard at getting rid of the complexity in web development.

Re: Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

#20

Post by iwangulenko »

As someone running a technical recruitment agency, I can assure you that it is true that someone having built stuff in Clojure is more likely to be considered as a good engineer than someone who did JQuery all the time.

Recruiters use an intuitive approach to conditional probability. Given only the info alone (if someone did JQuery or Clojure) exposes you to two bell curves, with the X-axis being "programming ability". The first bell curve that has all JQuery people is more on "the left" and the one having all Clojurians is more on the right. The Clojure bell curve has shitty engineers and some really good people are part of the JQuery one.

Prejudice is sort of rational. If a recruiter looks at one datapoint, it's unlikely that it is at the tails of the bell curve, so the Clojurian applicant will get more attention. If you are treated unfairly because of the group you "belong to", I am sorry - but this is reality.

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