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I’ll admit it. I’m a jealous developer

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Re: I’ll admit it. I’m a jealous developer

#51
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Team players don't work alone. What has happened to all the introverts who work alone? They're not working in tech. Tech is for extroverts who get paid to copy from public GitHub repositories and paste into private GitHub repositories and sell proprietary products built upon code ripped from open source projects. But that's okay. Not everybody can be an extrovert who gets paid to pretend to code. RMS said it best: >…

It's a bit sad that although coding tends to attract introverts, most SW development (especially in a work environment) fundamentally needs to be more social than other engineering disciplines. If you can find a job where you, and only you, are writing code, and not integrating it into a larger piece of SW, then everything is fine and you can work alone. This is incredibly rare. There is very little in SW that is cle…

There seems to have been something that happened between the 80s and 90s and today that caused any team doing something non-trivial to go from like 3-8 people to more like 100. Like, you look at a description of exactly what the project was and you ballpark what you'd need today, and it's like 100+ people. The team that actually did it was eight humans and an office cat, and in many cases not one of them is famous for being some superhuman-level programmer.

I'm not sure what caused it. You'd think the opposite would have happened, in fact, since our tools are supposed to be so much better now. But I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that part of it's something along the lines of changing interests and work styles for developers entering the field.

Re: I’ll admit it. I’m a jealous developer

#52

> They stream themselves coding at the same time each week without fail. Nope. Anybody who streams themselves coding is not a real coder. Coding is not rapid fire typing memorized boilerplate code to techno background music. Real life is not Mr Robot. When they do it at the same time each week that's the reddest of red flags that they're performing an act. It's all staged. As staged as professional wrestling is kayfa…

> Real coding doesn't happen on a strict schedule. There's research, design, and testing to be done and mistakes to be made and corrected.

I’ve seen streamers do exactly this (while interacting with their audience through chat).

Why did you interpret “stream themselves coding” as “typing code flawlessly on stream”?

Re: I’ll admit it. I’m a jealous developer

#53
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading the iWoz book by Steve Wozniak. At the end he had some advice and one thing he said went against all popular advice but sort of agreed with my internal dialog. It was basically "work alone". EDIT: "Artists work best alone. Work alone."

Woz would have been nowhere without Jobs. Jobs wouldn’t have succeeded when he came back without Schiller, Forstall, Cook, Fadell, etc.

I took it to mean "get in the zone", not "don't play well with others".

Re: I’ll admit it. I’m a jealous developer

#54

> They stream themselves coding at the same time each week without fail. Nope. Anybody who streams themselves coding is not a real coder. Coding is not rapid fire typing memorized boilerplate code to techno background music. Real life is not Mr Robot. When they do it at the same time each week that's the reddest of red flags that they're performing an act. It's all staged. As staged as professional wrestling is kayfa…

I stream myself writing code on roughly the same schedule once a week and I certainly disagree with what you're saying here. One of the reasons people like to watch streams is for the problem solving aspect and seeing how someone else researches then solves a problem, that might involve a person going to a documentation site, reading Stack Overflow or just playing around with something. As long as the audience is still engaged and the streamer is thinking out loud then the audience will enjoy it. The streamer might research things before hand or broadly think of a solution to something but I don't think that makes it any more staged than someone on a live TV segment thinking what they're going to say.

Re: I’ll admit it. I’m a jealous developer

#55

> They stream themselves coding at the same time each week without fail. Nope. Anybody who streams themselves coding is not a real coder. Coding is not rapid fire typing memorized boilerplate code to techno background music. Real life is not Mr Robot. When they do it at the same time each week that's the reddest of red flags that they're performing an act. It's all staged. As staged as professional wrestling is kayfa…

https://youtu.be/yIrFIOx4VP8 You clearly haven’t seen Geohot in action yet.

Re: I’ll admit it. I’m a jealous developer

#56
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woz would have been nowhere without Jobs. Jobs wouldn’t have succeeded when he came back without Schiller, Forstall, Cook, Fadell, etc.

I took it to mean "get in the zone", not "don't play well with others".

How did that whole leaving artists alone to get in the zone work out when Ive wasn’t reigned in?

Re: I’ll admit it. I’m a jealous developer

#57

Can we stop with "medium.com" links here? They reward read-time which means it's in a dev's interest to write click-bait and stretch content. It also might just be me, but always something off about a dev not hosting their own blog, leading to a company being able to throw a pay-wall over your content.

I wish we could stop complaints about Medium from showing up on every post from Medium. It's a distraction from the content, and off topic, and yet the complaint shows up with remarkable regularity.

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Re: I’ll admit it. I’m a jealous developer

#58

Can we stop with "medium.com" links here? They reward read-time which means it's in a dev's interest to write click-bait and stretch content. It also might just be me, but always something off about a dev not hosting their own blog, leading to a company being able to throw a pay-wall over your content.

This problem isn't unique to Medium. Content itself performs optimally in the current web ecosystem when it is click-baity and stretched out. I've seen just as bad stuff from developers who create their own #learntocode[0] blogs. [0] Referring to the current trend of developers creating YouTube channels and blogs that funnel people into their "crack the Google interview" subscription course that is basically just the…

I have more of a chance of making money doing this than passing a leetcode interview, so I understand the appeal. It's hard to get mad at them for doing what makes money.

Re: I’ll admit it. I’m a jealous developer

#59
post #34
post #3

I am a good developer, and even better communicator. That said, I have no interest in social media. It just seems so forced.

Let's face it, it's not much to do with being a good communicator. People don't go on twitter because they want to be more effective at communicating, they go on twitter because that's where the audience is despite it being a terrible place for communicating complex issues. (Here, let me link you to that 27 tweet thread, which, inexplicably, is 27 separate posts instead of a single post because we're insane ).

The whole post honestly just sounded like he was jealous of the attention the ‘thought leaders’ were getting. Not only is jealous a petty thing to be, but that’s a particularly petty thing to be jealous of.

Re: I’ll admit it. I’m a jealous developer

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting perspective. I think the truth is they needed each other and the circumstances in which they excelled.

Wozniak didn’t do anything significant after Apple. Not meant to be a judgmental, once you almost die it kind of changes your priorities and just by founding Apple he has done more in his life than most. Jobs on the other hand, cofounded Apple, Next, and Pixar. The leaders at Next basically took over at Apple and the leaders at Pixar basically took over Disney’s animation division and ushered in a new era of animatio…

Seems to me like Woz has lived a fullfilling life doing basically what he's wanted to do. I don't see how that's not significant. My impression is that he never made his life's mission the ostensibly virtuous path of making commodity products for the masses. Not at Apple and not elsewhere. If I were to admire someone for how they lived their life, I'd probably choose Woz, not Jobs, because it almost seems laughably unhealthy to do otherwise.
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