My fellow geeks, we need to have a talk.

It's true. I don't know how many times I've watched eager hackers get lambasted for "reinventing the wheel," or "don't bother doing it yourself, you'll just screw it up -- someone has probably done it already and did it better than you could." This happens most often at the intersection of technology and entrepreneurship.

The business advice is that it's cheaper to buy it than build it.

The engineer's perspective is that a square peg isn't going to fit in every hole.

"Geeks," are harsh. I mean that in the very broad, general, and discriminatory sense. We have to work with bad code all day written by bad programmers. Some of us make a career out of saving businesses from bad technology decisions and poorly written programs (it is NOT good work, btw. Just pays well). So when yet another new-comer comes on board with bright, eager enthusiasm to revolutionize the Internet (yet again) we do tend to be rather cynical.

I agree w/ the poster that the cynicism is a bad thing. We could be more constructive. Don't stop them from writing their own web server... show them where to look up the RFCs, reference implementations, etc. Encourage them to learn. We could all benefit from having more knowledgeable people around.

While I agree with this to some extent, I'd just like to comment on the the skateboarding analogy; You were probably taking it one step at a time, learning to stand on the board, increase your speed, make turns. Once you got all that done, you might move on to try some tricks, perhaps trying to learn the rock to fakie trick. What you _didn't_ do was, on your 2nd day, to scream out "why am I not sticking my 720 kickflip?!?!".

The latter is fairly common in the world of programming, in my experience.

(There's obviously also a big difference between being physically together with the people in a skatepark and sitting on the other end of an IRC session.)

There is a major difference between sports and programming: In sports, everyone is a critic, and it is really obvious if people cannot skateboard, or cannot throw a basketball.

Compare with programming, where overt effect and actual competence are not always related. Criticizing programming and programmers is nontrivial, and hence people have to do it all the time to build up a shared understanding of good and bad practices.

Looking at visual arts, you'll probably find a similar asymmetry between drawing (where it's difficult to get to even a barely mediocre level) and layout/typography (where it's easy to do something that looks "good" to the layman yet is totally horrible). Needless to say, there are more pages bashing bad layout and bad typography than there are sites dedicated to bashing bad drawings.

I'm glad that HN is a place where people are normally really helpful to each other, but I see it even occasionally here.

On the other hand, let's not take it too far. It's nice for people to have a little bit of backbone. They don't need to endure jackasses unnecessarily, but there are times when criticism is rightly required and backbone is rightly needed to respond well.

I recently started working at a startup and before that my perception of criticism was what I saw on tv and heard from people. Fortunately, my coworks and seniors give me some good feedback.

But I myself still can't have the patience to listen and learn, after reading this, I feel like there's an incentive for me to change my behavior :)