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Most tech content is bullshit (2020)
41–50 of 169 posts
Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)
#42Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)
#43True, but most content in general is bullshit.
Most scientific publications is BS published for the sake of pumping your numbers.
Most student memoire is BS to pass the exam.
Most financial analyses, most TV journal reporting, most tweets, most books are BS.
Ever read doctors or lawyers specialized magazines? Most pages are BS on top of BS.
Paid content, content produced to fill space, making volume, low quality authors trying to make it, agendas every where, and of course automated crap.
Why do you think HN is so successful?
The concept?
The tech?
Of course not.
It's the quality of moderation, and the fact they used their ability to publish their BS to the front page with moderation. Just enough to help them, but not so much as to destroy the average HN quality.
Dedication to quality on the long run, and restrain in milking the cow. This show visions, and it's hard.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)
#44One devious form of bullshit is always using the simplest of examples to prove out an architecture pattern and call it a day. I’ve lost count on how many times I’ve seen patterns with glaring open questions and pitfalls the author avoids. Then the cacophony of likes follow from folks who’re likely very early in their career or hobby and don’t know any better. This is very prevalent on iOS development blogs as authors…
Uber's "RIBs" come to mind.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)
#45One devious form of bullshit is always using the simplest of examples to prove out an architecture pattern and call it a day. I’ve lost count on how many times I’ve seen patterns with glaring open questions and pitfalls the author avoids. Then the cacophony of likes follow from folks who’re likely very early in their career or hobby and don’t know any better. This is very prevalent on iOS development blogs as authors…
I’ve learned to wait a couple of years for dubdub hype to subside, and “lessons learned” to be shared.
I get tired of the “write an app in five minutes” demos. As someone that regularly works on ship apps, I can report that there is a world of difference between academic demos, and something that can be shipped.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)
#46One devious form of bullshit is always using the simplest of examples to prove out an architecture pattern and call it a day. I’ve lost count on how many times I’ve seen patterns with glaring open questions and pitfalls the author avoids. Then the cacophony of likes follow from folks who’re likely very early in their career or hobby and don’t know any better. This is very prevalent on iOS development blogs as authors…
I feel like classic object oriented tutorials talking about fruits and apples with no connection to actual apps you'd build are ones to add to this pile
Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)
#47In some respect being a software engineer today is really hard. OTOH you want to do the right thing, so you don't want to invent a solution yourself. So you look for available resources, you go online. There you're going to encounter either: 1. Spam from junior devs who started a blog so to build a name for themselves. 2. Spam from SEO mills peddling junior level wisdome so they can get ad money. 3. Spam from softwar…
> But seriously, seems like most useful information is siloed in the brains of battle worn engineers who are surrounded by an inflation of junior devs. I have a feeling this field grew too fast and we are losing a lot of wisdom and knowledge.
I think knowledge siloed in the brains of people working somewhere successfully is underrated. These people just don’t have time to write a blog or don’t need to due to their success. Maybe also because the topics that make them successful aren’t that consumable compared to $FAVORITE_NUMBER_STEPS to use this new and shiny framework.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)
#48In some respect being a software engineer today is really hard. OTOH you want to do the right thing, so you don't want to invent a solution yourself. So you look for available resources, you go online. There you're going to encounter either: 1. Spam from junior devs who started a blog so to build a name for themselves. 2. Spam from SEO mills peddling junior level wisdome so they can get ad money. 3. Spam from softwar…
> you want to do the right thing, so you don't want to invent a solution yourself
How is that the right thing?
Over 90% of the time, the fastest, most maintainable, and simplest solution is to do it yourself.
Yeah sure, there's a few horror stories out there of homegrown database engines that reinvent every wheel of RDBs the wrong way, have been unmaintained for 10 years and the original dev has left.
But those are the exception. The things you shouldn't invent yourself, you can count on one hand. And they're obvious.
The spam is only the first hurdle. You have to find a solution that doesn't suck. Evaluating whether it sucks would take at least 3x as long as writing it yourself, so you can only give it a cursory glance.
There's a chance it sucks in non-obvious ways that you're gonna find out over time, most likely in production, through a slow trickle of WTFs over the months as you work around increasingly weirder bug. There's of course a chance it's good. But you're gonna have to take the risk.
Then comes the maintenance phase. Of course it's gonna redesign its interface every month. Until it suddenly gets abandoned and starts to bitrot. Eventually it stops working when you upgrade something unrelated.
Then you're not only back to square one but have to find a replacement fast because now you're relying on it.
The stuff you wrote yourself 5 years ago, on the other hand, still works exactly like it did when you wrote it with minimal changes.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)
#49Not every decision has to be done with maximum research. That’s usually a waste of time. It’s more efficient to try a couple things until something works and move on (“satisficing”). A key skill you learn over time is why decisions actually matter. But it’s not inherently bad that there’s no good reason for something, it really depends on the context. And sometimes things that had good reasons turn out bad anyway bec…
> Not every decision has to be done with maximum research. I’ve been at a couple companies that wouldn’t take any proposal seriously unless you showed up with a list of citations to blog posts, books, or even podcasts. The root cause was a management structure that wanted to do everything with a maximum of evidence. It opened the door to a lot of terrible decisions winning for no reason other than someone found a blo…
Or in general wanting to do "what industry does", not the solution that people they pay and work with actual product and their customers invented.
> The most egregious abuse was when a team that had to deal with maybe 100 logins per day spent over 6 months researching how to build their auth system to match Big Tech. They could have picked any off the shelf solution and been done in a week, but instead it became an endless boondoggle of research, presentations, proposals, and committees. Several people were even planning conference talks around it, so it started to evolve into whatever would sound best for their talks.
To be entirely fair, after dealing with the reverse way of solving it ("just the simplest solution that works", which was just a bunch of static passwords per app) I'd say spending a bit extra to start with good solution for auth in your 50 man company will save a whole massive amount of pain when company grows both in internal service count, users, and compliance requirements.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit (2020)
#50True, but most content in general is bullshit. Most scientific publications is BS published for the sake of pumping your numbers. Most student memoire is BS to pass the exam. Most financial analyses, most TV journal reporting, most tweets, most books are BS. Ever read doctors or lawyers specialized magazines? Most pages are BS on top of BS. Paid content, content produced to fill space, making volume, low quality auth…
This is grossly reductive. There is a huge spectrum of quality in content. Most of what you describe, formal studies by experts, is on a much much higher tier than the 99% of content most people read.
Comparing informed formal studies to the uninformed opinion pieces most of the tech crowd reads and implying they are somehow the same is borderline supporting disinformation.
There is absolutely a big spectrum of quality in the higher tiers of content too. People in those domains spend countless evenings discussing it.
But the vast majority of people are not reading anything at that level. The typical tech blog is closer to talking about what kind of sandwich you like for lunch than anything that will advance the field.