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The silent majority in software

vadimkravcenko.com

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Re: The silent majority in software

#71

Post by biztos »

mkl95 wrote: post #53

> But let’s be straight, that’s like 1% of all of the developers out there — the rest of them are just lurking and coding with their language of choice and being content with it. Be it Fortran, COBOL, Perl, or PHP. Assuming all developers who are using something like COBOL or Perl are content with it is hilarious. It doesn't really get much worse than something like COBOL or Perl in terms of ergonomics and ease of us…

As a once and, who knows, maybe future Perl dev I find it a weird choice of grouping, no disrespect to Fortran, but I also think there are probably quite a few mature Perl codebases tended by mature Perl programmers who have their ergonomics and ease of use very dialed-in.

Whether you would enjoy it is a different question, but my impression from years of doing Perl is that the most committed hackers tuned their environments and organized their projects just so, and would laugh at anybody else’s idea of “ergonomics.”

Re: The silent majority in software

#72

Post by cubancigar11 »

donatj wrote: post #59

> Sometimes I’ve seen Pull Requests from empty accounts with a brief explanation of what was implemented. They just submit bug fixes, no drama. Over half my coworkers including some very talented developers have no public repos. As someone with almost 200 that always blows my mind. How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill. That’s not a judgment call, that’s an honest questi…

Because they have no love for the job. They are doing it for something else and so are only interested in working on things that have a visible and clear return.

These people are also good at politics. There is a reason bill gates is rich and rms isn't.

Re: The silent majority in software

#73

Post by donatj »

pavlov wrote: post #67
donatj wrote: post #59

> Sometimes I’ve seen Pull Requests from empty accounts with a brief explanation of what was implemented. They just submit bug fixes, no drama. Over half my coworkers including some very talented developers have no public repos. As someone with almost 200 that always blows my mind. How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill. That’s not a judgment call, that’s an honest questi…

Great salespeople aren’t expected to run lemonade stands after work. “You’re so good at sales, how come you don’t want to sell something in the evening? There must be something you’re itching to sell to your neighbors.” Software engineers seem unique among professionals that you’re expected to maintain a hobbyist body of work that’s also your professional calling card.

I think that applies to a lot of creative industries. Certainly when I was looking to be a designer some 20 years ago you were expected to maintain a portfolio.

I don’t even mean in that sense though, I just don’t understand having a skill like that and not using it for fun.

For what it’s worth, the best salespeople I know have almost no purely home life and are taking calls and making deals all hours of the day.

Re: The silent majority in software

#74

Post by kkfx »

Well... Silent majority also means the mass of people who do not contribute to the society except for they use as meat-based weapons in politics, religion... Yes they have a value, for some it's the same value of a flock of cows: munging meat, milk etc. For some a hope or absence thereof for the humanity. IN history unfortunately the former tend to win all the time...

Re: The silent majority in software

#75

Post by dan-robertson »

mkl95 wrote: post #53

> But let’s be straight, that’s like 1% of all of the developers out there — the rest of them are just lurking and coding with their language of choice and being content with it. Be it Fortran, COBOL, Perl, or PHP. Assuming all developers who are using something like COBOL or Perl are content with it is hilarious. It doesn't really get much worse than something like COBOL or Perl in terms of ergonomics and ease of us…

Php had pretty good docs online. COBOL presumably has good docs (though I think it’s a bad example and not used much). Perl used to have a thriving online community so it seems pretty conceivable to me that people could like the language. And CPAN still exists and is full of reasonably practical packages for doing lots of reasonable things, as well as packages like marpa which don’t really have equivalents outside of Perl.

Re: The silent majority in software

#76

Post by verisimilitudes »

cookieswumchorr wrote: post #66
verisimilitudes wrote: post #18

The disgusting natures of UNIX, UTF-8, and the general culture here whose members don't understand that touching a computer (poorly) doesn't entitle them to dominion over the non computer-touchers is generally controversial on orange Reddit.

a professional community has the right to a place to communicate among themselves, about things they like and understand. This has nothing to do with dominion

I'll elaborate. Firstly, this may be a community of "professionals", but that term means something very different for programmers. No "professional" here is an engineer, as an example, because real engineers would be imprisoned and stripped of title for what the typical programmer does. The dominion to which I refer is the fact that many of these "professionals" work for large advertising corporations who encourage them to believe they know better than the people trying to do real work with a computer. They expect their tools to have a price, and then work on tools intended to never be sold, but be rented forever. They touch computers poorly, because out of one side of their mouths do they decry things such as Bitcoin and out of the other they excuse the extreme waste of their corporations and of asinine practices such as embedding an entire WWW browser solely to execute a chat program wastefully.

> about things they like and understand

They like politics and understand very little about being a hacker, certainly.

Re: The silent majority in software

#77

Post by pjerem »

donatj wrote: post #63
jongjong wrote: post #52

I used to be part of the silent majority of software developers but that changed after I became disillusioned about the direction of the industry. Nowadays, I'm basically forced to use certain inefficient tools in order to get a job because a bunch of highly vocal junior devs who got their way. It's a bit like in politics; when times are good for the majority, most normal people aren't interested in politics; they ha…

I am regularly up at night in a cold sweat worrying about how if I suddenly needed to find a new job I’d have to learn some sort of front end JavaScript framework.

Could be worse.

I am regularly up at night in a cold sweat worrying about how if I suddenly find a technically fulfilling job, realizing I forgot everything about computers after a decade on working on meaningless front end JavaScript framework.

Re: The silent majority in software

#78

Post by tehCorner »

donatj wrote: post #59

> Sometimes I’ve seen Pull Requests from empty accounts with a brief explanation of what was implemented. They just submit bug fixes, no drama. Over half my coworkers including some very talented developers have no public repos. As someone with almost 200 that always blows my mind. How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill. That’s not a judgment call, that’s an honest questi…

Because there are a great bunch of developers who just code for work and want to maximize leisure/family time (including me). Sometimes I also do that _fun script_ you were thinking about over the week, or play with some random programming language, but I let those cases be the exception not the norm.

Re: The silent majority in software

#79

Post by yourapostasy »

donatj wrote: post #59

> Sometimes I’ve seen Pull Requests from empty accounts with a brief explanation of what was implemented. They just submit bug fixes, no drama. Over half my coworkers including some very talented developers have no public repos. As someone with almost 200 that always blows my mind. How do you work in software for years and not find some little hole you want to fill. That’s not a judgment call, that’s an honest questi…

I found repos a good conversation starter, but I'm far more interested in how one troubleshoots and works together in teams than code creation. Code creation is table stakes, and I can ascertain that in a variety of ways and repos are just a partially sufficient but not necessary signal.

Re: The silent majority in software

#80

Post by gernb »

veltas wrote: post #42
dollo_7 wrote: post #15

I may belong to that silent majority. I have learnt a lot from the discussions here in HN and other sites, but I rarely participate on them. This post made me think about being a little more active because, sincerely, most of the times it is just laziness what prevents me from commenting anything. In fact, this is my first comment here in HN. Little by little.

I will say that in my own experience, if you go against the zeitgeist on HN you can often get by as long as you're sensitive/respectful and intelligent on the issue. There are people who downvote things they disagree with, but I think most people on here downvote people who sound unconstructive or argumentative. And at the end of the day, if you're respectful etc, who cares about being downvoted or having people argu…

you're supposed to downvote things you disagree with on HN. Here's Dang pointing to PG saying that downvoting for disagreeing is what you're supposed to do

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

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