Most tech content is bullshit

One person did a double-take, looked at me, and said, "You can understand those?" I knew exactly what he meant, and consoled him by saying "only about 2/3rds," at which point all of the tension drained out of his shoulders. I had communicated that yes, some of it is just bullshit not fit for consumption, and that he was not an idiot.

As a Feynman dilettante, if you can't have a human conversation about a subject (note: conversation, not 'curing cancer'/winning the Nobel) then you don't really know the subject. Or perhaps more generously: It doesn't matter if you know it because you can't pass that knowledge on. You are dead end as far as human progress is concerned.

I suspect Tech people feel this more than pure researchers, because we know that in a couple years we will be focusing on something else, and 5 years at most we will be gone. If we haven't passed on our knowledge, then there will be consequences that are readily apparent. In academia you get so many opportunities to connect and if you connect with 5 people, you probably feel like your work is done, and you forget about people like me who regret ever encountering certain teachers because they set me back or in one case, put me off a course I believed I would stay to the end.

Me, I have 10-15 people not of my choosing and I have to connect with 2 and 1/2 of them. It's a tempest in a teapot.

To you. On the flip side, it provided an introductory level overview of a concept many watching/attending may not have looked into themselves, or were thinking of looking into. It also provided a different form of introduction, which could be valuable for attendees with a learning style preference different to that of look-at-a-how-to or check-out-the-docs.

>the guy replied with "well, actually, we haven't really used it yet, we're just looking at it".

Hey, at least he was honest and didn't try to bluff his way through an answer, as many in our industry will.

Overall, depending on the audience and context, it sounds like it may have been worthwhile for many attendees. Plus he got to work on his soft skills, and doing so with such vulnerability could inspire others to also.

I don't always go on a blog post searching for THE truth. I go to get someone's view on something. Maybe get excited by the journey or what was achieved. Learn about the use case. And somehow, in some cases, because they are less biases junior developers that write actually have interesting insights.

If I want the dry and no BS info, I'll go read the source, or the doc. If I go on a blog post to read about X, Y or Z, I don't just swallow it and take it at face value, I just hope to find something that will interest me to learn more about it.

And yet, I agree that a lot of what I see lately is marketed to no end, and it becomes harder and harder to separate actual value, from tooling marketing.

It's why we're not all writing our stuff in Lisp. ;-)