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Most tech content is bullshit

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Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#201

Post by ng12 »

acemarke wrote: post #31
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #16

I disliked a lot of this article, as "there is bullshit everywhere " seems like something that should just be an axiom at this point. However, I will expand on a specific pattern of bullshit that is common in the tech world: over-complication for the sake of some sort of "theoretical purity". I think Redux is a good example of this. I think Redux can be used well, but it became the "recommended way to do global state…

Ironically, Dan and I have spent more time trying to convince people to _not_ use Redux all the time than we have trying to actually market it :( [0] [1] We specifically have info in our docs on when it actually makes sense to use Redux [2] [3], but that doesn't change the flood of Medium blog posts out there. I created the Redux Style Guide docs page [4] to try to give some clarification on our actual current recomm…

Just like to chime in and say I'm really appreciative of these efforts. I get devs at my firm who are learning to do web dev for the first time and ask why we're not using Redux by default. I link them to Dan's article and the Redux FAQ as part of my explanation that Redux is a life-saver when you need it and aggressive overengineering when you don't.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#202

Post by twic »

leetrout wrote: post #34

I’ve said this for a long time: The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work. Of course there are exceptions but I’m extremely skeptical of a lot of stuff I read. Also that the HN bubble will always make readers feel behind when in reality 90% of the industry hasn’t even begun to catch-up. I felt behind with K8S in 20…

This is absolutely true, and it's fascinating to see the strength of visceral reaction against it.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#203

Post by diarrhea »

andrewflnr wrote: post #121
stared wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a sociologist, but I think it's not only programmers. A lot of my FB friends suddenly became COVID-19 experts, or experts on US police violence (or lack of thereof). In programming, at least the code needs to work. Maybe it is a bad pattern or anything - but the barrier of entry is non-trivial. For anything else (e.g. politics), a lot of people have opinions, with their strength being not much correlated wit…

> I am not a sociologist, but... Please tell me you did this on purpose.

IANAS!

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#204

Post by twic »

_bxg1 wrote: post #13

From personal experience, including reading a lot of HN, I think programmers as a species are especially biased towards putting forth opinions in the hopes of being validated for our experience or intelligence, even when we know we don't know much about the subject. The fact that IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer) [but...] is a common enough statement in these circles to deserve its own acronym is telling. We often throw out…

I would say this is not unique to programmers, because i did it before i became a programmer. But then, i did eventually become a programmer, so maybe it is.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#205

Post by jdauriemma »

ozim wrote: post #195
jdauriemma wrote: post #163

I agree with the problem presented by the author, but not necessarily with the solution. If blind acquiescence to random blogs and forums is a sin, then so is blind acquiescence to one's own limited experience. Most categories of software problems have already been solved. Being a "creator," in the truest sense of the word, is therefore rare. Most of the time, when we endeavor to "create" instead of "consume," we are…

I would say author meant not "create from scratch" as in "reinvent the wheel", more like be a creator who is making conscious choices. You can still be a creator by making a remix using samples created by other people. Difference is that you just don't blindly copy-paste with a bit of tweaking so it "fits", but to know what you do.

That's a reasonable conclusion. If that was the author's intent, I think it would have been helpful to have described that further. In particular, I've noticed (anecdotally) that many early-career devs tend towards trying to code their way out of problems like it's a test or challenge.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#206

Post by Carpetsmoker »

vbezhenar wrote: post #164
arp242 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet is a big bucket where everyone drops all sorts of stuff in. Some people drop in gold nuggets, sometimes even diamonds, many other people drop in less valuable materials, and some dump in a torrent of bodily fluids. Our current solution is to rely on magical black box algorithms to give us the diamonds, but it's been creaking for a while. I'm not sure how to make this better: one person's turd is another…

Old school links might be a solution. I remember back in the day those blog websites which contained "links" page to the websites that owner likes and recommends. It's true P2P solution and does not require anything to invent. If you own a website and know some rare but valuable gems, just share them. Someone will find them. I think that's how Internet should really work. As a side effect, it should really help Googl…

Yeah, I actually maintain such a list on my own site. I should update it more often though.

I think the biggest problem isn't so much find "hey, that's a cool article"-type of content, but typing in [programming concept] in Google. What I want to find is things like in-depth experiences and advice regarding this which complement the manual. What I actually find it loads of "howtos" with "copy this" which just rehash the manual.

Results vary a bit depending on [programming concept], and I don't think simple "getting started with"-articles are completely useless either. But generally speaking, there are too many of them, many of them are not of high quality, and it obscures more in-depth content.

I'm not sure if maintaining a list of links would really solve that. Perhaps community projects like "awesome-foo"-lists have some potential here, but in practice I've found many of them to be dumping grounds rather than carefully curated.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#208

Post by jedberg »

twic wrote: post #200
jedberg wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people actually doing the work don’t have time to talk about it and the people spending all their time talking about it aren’t doing the work. I think that's a really sad and cynical view. I assume you don't spend 16 hours a day writing code. I assume you have hobbies and other interests. For some people, educating others about their favorite topics is their hobby. Writing about their projects is their hobby. H…

> I think that's a really sad and cynical view. It doesn't matter if it's sad and cynical, it matters if it's true.

I believe the rest of my statement made it clear that I believe it is very untrue.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#209

Post by mdoms »

ozim wrote: post #182
tuyguntn wrote: post #4

I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit. I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on. Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content,…

My solution for this problem: 1) stop trying to learn from random blogs, get a book. Books are still out there and you can learn just as good from them now as 20 years ago. 2) Get a subset of blogs to follow and stick to it. If you want to search in specific sites google has "site:" operator, you can search on specific sites. 3) by following 1 and 2 you can easily stop visiting shitty blogs made only for SEO, when th…

Unfortunately today a lot of the good content is hosted on the same domains as the terrible content. This is one of the many great downsides to content centralization.

If I read a really great piece of tech content it's not going to help me to use that domain in a site: query later when it's so often going to be medium.com or dev.to (which is starting to fill up with this same kind of bullshit content in the article).

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#210

Post by aledalgrande »

jedberg wrote: post #161
aledalgrande wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thumbs up for this. It is just a physical limitation of time, if you're writing you're not coding. I love when Aaron Patterson writes a post once in a blue moon, because they are so interesting.

> if you're writing you're not coding Do you code 16 hours every day? Or do you do other things with your time in addition to coding? It's possible to spend your "free time" writing about coding instead of writing code. Humans can do both well if they choose to.

I don't work 16 hours a day. Writing good content is a lot of effort, especially after 8 hours of coding. If you're churning out a post a week I would say that is already a lot.
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