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Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

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Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#11

Post by acollins1331 »

davesmith1983 wrote: post #3

I've seen this article before. A lot of people that are active on the internet like to assume that everyone is using the latest tech and can just use whatever tech they like. This is rarely the case. I've spent the majority of my career tending to old code bases. There is a lot of legacy code that is still working fine. There is a lot of old C# code bases that are working exactly as intended in now unsupported .NET v…

>It is absolutely infuriating when an API is changed when the old API was working perfectly well.

Good thing Google is reading this.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#12

Post by Davertron »

onion2k wrote: post #8

Scott talks about how devs don't do anything to be seen yet if you look at his twitter stream it's mostly just him tweeting his own posts and retweeting other "famous" developers. He, and the majority or other very visible people in the community, gatekeep the blogosphere by failing to help anyone else break in (not necessarily consciously of course; they may just never see the less famous devs posts). Scott could be…

I don't think the point of his article is that this is a "problem" to be solved. And personally, I don't think these people owe you anything. Twitter etc. are all open platforms, there's nothing preventing your stuff from being seen by others.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#13

Post by davnicwil »

onion2k wrote: post #8

Scott talks about how devs don't do anything to be seen yet if you look at his twitter stream it's mostly just him tweeting his own posts and retweeting other "famous" developers. He, and the majority or other very visible people in the community, gatekeep the blogosphere by failing to help anyone else break in (not necessarily consciously of course; they may just never see the less famous devs posts). Scott could be…

I feel obliged to jump in and defend Scott here - I just don't think what you are saying is a fair summary of his behaviour.

For sure, I see him doing what you say, but I also see him regularly retweeting and responding to comments and questions from accounts with few followers, and particularly so from people from minorities within the developer community.

There are plenty of examples of people I can think of who behave in exactly the way you suggest, mainly spinning the flywheel of boosting the online presence of already famous people and not engaging much with outsiders, but Scott not only isn't one of them but perhaps one of the best examples I can think of of actively doing the opposite of that.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#14

Post by PaulHoule »

Back in the usenet days it was said that 99% of users were readers and 1% were writers. The same is true for the web.

That is, I think "dark matter" developers read blogs but they just don't write them.

As for conferences, these are widely seen as a scam. I remember sitting through a presentation at the end of a conference by the platinum sponsor where I sat next to some tired defense contractors from the East Coast and then drinking in the hotel bar later with the director of marketing for the sponsor who thought that he hadn't gotten what he paid for.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#15

Post by progval »

acollins1331 wrote: post #11
davesmith1983 wrote: post #3

I've seen this article before. A lot of people that are active on the internet like to assume that everyone is using the latest tech and can just use whatever tech they like. This is rarely the case. I've spent the majority of my career tending to old code bases. There is a lot of legacy code that is still working fine. There is a lot of old C# code bases that are working exactly as intended in now unsupported .NET v…

>It is absolutely infuriating when an API is changed when the old API was working perfectly well. Good thing Google is reading this.

Do they care if the old API was working, if it didn't make them (enough) money?

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#19

Post by rikkus »

polskibus wrote: post #9
jm__87 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on a team before where we every dev said "we need to upgrade X, we're Y versions behind" and management always responded with "no budget, this is not a priority". This continued until our hand was forced by a company wide initiative to modernize some aspects of our architecture and all of a sudden our team was frowned upon for being so far behind. Then we had to spend many months on an "upgrade project".…

Sure, there's an extreme on both ends. The problem you're describing is that the upgrades suggested were probably not frictionless, managers were burnt before by needless upgrades that took too much resources for little value. If tech companies took much more care wrt upgrades and not breaking stuff, then users of the tech would not see upgrades as needlessly risky. An example of this is net core vs net fx. Net core…

There is always going to be major flux as new architectures are evolved until they are stable. If this was hidden, there would have been little input from outside Microsoft.

While there have been legitimate problems with this process - for example, the explicit ‘go live’ given by Microsoft before things were truly stable, there was a choice made to develop in public and the net result (sorry) seems positive to me.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#20

Post by CM30 »

Davertron wrote: post #7

The fact that you go mostly "unseen" online seems completely orthogonal to whether you love programming and keep up with the latest technologies, etc. I would consider myself "dark matter" in the respect that no one knows who I am and I'm not constantly blogging or tweeting about stuff. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in, passionate about and highly competent in technology. I find it kind of insulting actually t…

This is a really good point too, especially when considered the whole 99% rule or what not. Tech community sites like Hacker News, and web dev sites like Smashing Magazine or CSS Tricks or what not have a large audience of lurkers that keep up to date with everything mentioned there yet don't spend their time posting about it on social media. Hell, I'd say I'm in the same boat there too. Read a lot of these kinds of sites and blog articles, but generally don't talk about 'em online much.

Of course that's not to say being in it for the paycheck is necessarily a bad thing. Not everyone needs to be 'passionate' about their job to do well in it, and if say, my doctor or surgeon is good at what they do, I don't really care if they spend all their free time talking medical issues on social media or posting on Hospital News or what not.

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