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Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

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

#21

Post by CM30 »

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…

Yeah, there's definitely an element of unintentional gatekeeping in many communities/fields, especially given how many 'popular' or 'famous' creators only seem to mention other popular or famous creators. Often made worse by their tendency to not look for the original source of an article or news post, and to end up retweeting or sharing the aggregated version from some popular site or creator.

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

#22

Post by ynkz »

CM30 wrote: post #21
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…

Yeah, there's definitely an element of unintentional gatekeeping in many communities/fields, especially given how many 'popular' or 'famous' creators only seem to mention other popular or famous creators. Often made worse by their tendency to not look for the original source of an article or news post, and to end up retweeting or sharing the aggregated version from some popular site or creator.

Worse, some of these 'creators' did not actually create the software they pretend to have created.

Usually they control the conference circuit by donations and are able to de-platform people who would tell the truth.

It always pays off to look at the git history, which few people do.

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

#23

Post by polskibus »

rikkus wrote: post #19
polskibus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on the success metric. If you look at the cost of the tech churn to the businesses that have to spend much more than before to achieve similar results as before, then it is not positive result to anyone but tech providers, and (young) developers that are needed to redevelop. I wonder how much will businesses tolerate this if promised efficiency gains do not materialize for most of them.

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

#24

Post by IceDane »

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…

I think that by virtue of being here to comment at all, you are not one of these dark matter devs.

The group of people he is describing I think largely don't bother to come to communities like this. They do their job, go home and only know about developments in tech if it is relevant to their job and most likely because it comes through in-house channels.

I know a lot of people like this. Many of them aren't even aware that automated testing is a thing. They hardly know anything about any programming languages or technologies except for those they work with.

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

#25

Post by coldtea »

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…

>He, and the majority or other very visible people in the community, gatekeep the blogosphere by failing to help anyone else break in

It's not his job/role to give people breaks. He's not a Hollywood impresario, he's a blogger. If people are good, they will be discovered.

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

#26

Post by JustSomeNobody »

codingdave wrote: post #6

> we need to find a balance between those of us online yelling and tweeting and pushing towards the Next Big Thing and those that are unseen and patient and focused on the business problem at hand. What makes him think we don't have a balance already? Most devs are the quiet ones who just do their job and then go home. Aside from participation on HN, I consider myself to be be one of those quiet ones. I work on busin…

Plenty of us are using the latest technologies to push our particular domains forward but we aren’t writing blogs or evangelizing. This doesn’t mean we are in the dark. It just means we get stuff done. It doesn’t mean we don’t have skills. What it does mean is I don’t need google or stack overflow to write my code for me. I can solve my own problems thank you.

So, I think I am pretty well balanced.

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

#27

Post by mikeash »

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…

The phrase “old C# code bases” makes me feel incredibly old.

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

#28

Post by kayoone »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #26
codingdave wrote: post #6

> we need to find a balance between those of us online yelling and tweeting and pushing towards the Next Big Thing and those that are unseen and patient and focused on the business problem at hand. What makes him think we don't have a balance already? Most devs are the quiet ones who just do their job and then go home. Aside from participation on HN, I consider myself to be be one of those quiet ones. I work on busin…

Plenty of us are using the latest technologies to push our particular domains forward but we aren’t writing blogs or evangelizing. This doesn’t mean we are in the dark. It just means we get stuff done. It doesn’t mean we don’t have skills. What it does mean is I don’t need google or stack overflow to write my code for me. I can solve my own problems thank you. So, I think I am pretty well balanced.

Nobody was implying that the "Dark matter" devs do not get stuff done or don't have the skills, you missed the argument of the article.

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

#29

Post by BenoitP »

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…

That's why the JVM (and platforms with a similar philosophy), to me, is the best runtime there can be. Sure, there's fancy state-of-the-art stuff being integrated into it; but the most compelling feature is the continuing commitment to making dusty old jars work, unmodified.

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

#30

Post by briandrupieski »

davnicwil wrote: post #13
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 be…

I was about to try to comment this same idea to defend Scott. To further support it, I recommend anyone to look at the guests he interviews on his podcast, https://www.hanselminutes.com/. He goes out of his way to find and interview guests who are under-represented. Scott Hanselman is someone who I believe definitely does NOT gatekeep, and tries as best as he can to give people a chance to "break in".

onion2k I ask you to look again at his Twitter stream and podcast, and re-assess your evaluation of him.

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