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Most tech content is bullshit

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Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#211

Post by peterkos »

omniscient_oce wrote: post #46

I think it has something to do with this current culture of 'personal branding', wherein a lot of content online aimed at beginners says you should be blogging, writing articles, basically telling people how to do the thing you learnt that day on dev.to, blogs, Twitter, Medium, etc. I don't think it is necessarily bad per se, but it all seems a bit useless? I think there is good value in writing a personal blog, a lo…

Yep. I've read a lot of medium articles that have zero actual substance and are just pharaphrasing a different article. Or, they are advocating for an objectively bad principle that the first SO result says is not optimal...

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#212

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

Most content is bullshit, including this comment.

For possibly the least bullshit content you'll ever read, I defer to HN user RobertoG's comment from ~2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22792243

This blog post shoots itself in the foot with its conclusions:

> Realize that there's tons of misconception in the world. People and their solutions aren't flawless.

Therefore, any solution you come up with yourself is likely to be flawed and full of misconceptions. Might as well use someone else's code / misconceptions / flaws.

> Adapt solutions to your particular use case. Always analyze it before you decide to use it.

Who has time for that? We're all too busy being distracted by contentless-content. Or you could just say something like: it seemed appropriate at the time.

> Believe in yourself. Your solutions are not any worse than the ones on the internet.

This is the real kicker. My solutions probably aren't any better either. On the whole half of all people engaged in a profession or job-role are below average. You'd probably do just as well to outsource all of your decisions to either someone else or the crowd.

> Being a developer is about constant learning.

That's very idealistic. Maybe some / many people just want to go to work, do the minimum possible, and get home, and for a lot of people that's probably okay.

> People sometimes use libraries without a more profound understanding.

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't at least part of the reason for using libraries that they abstract away the need to have a profound understanding of the topic?

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#213

Post by pizza234 »

jedberg wrote: post #176
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…

> 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…

What's the point, exactly?

That there is a certain number of engineers who have a mix of talent and resources (=time), so that they can exercise software engineering and high quality technical writing?

They are an exception. Almost all the engineers I know (with one exception), who also have a regular life (roughly 40 hours engineering/week), have little time to dedicate to technical writing. As a consequence, it's not unreasonable to state that, in general and in practice, software engineering and (regular) technical writing are mutually exclusive.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#214

Post by gregmac »

alibarber wrote: post #187
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,…

Uggh - this! Maybe I'm so used to it for programming queries, but I've gotten back into electronics and ham radio after a long time, and have always dreamed of owning a decent oscilloscope. Googling 'good digital hobbyist oscilloscope' just now was a frustrating waste of time. It's just pages and pages of regurgitated specs and affiliate links, no useful _actual_ reviews or anything... Take this top 10 result. It's o…

Even though I generally prefer reading to watching, I've found in the past few years that YouTube is better for reviews, and I think it's actually because of this.

If you don't actually recognize the channel, you can usually tell if it's worthwhile by subscriber count, the other (types of) videos they've posted, and usually just by watching for tens of seconds. Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs), and you can judge their bias appropriately. Plus for many things, seeing it in action is much, much better than written descriptions or (carefully chosen) pictures.

For example, it's hard to disguise a crappy oscilloscope UI in a video (and if the reviewer doesn't show that, be suspicious!)

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#215

Post by tomxor »

bartread wrote: post #197
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,…

> I believe part of problem is Google SEO. This and the fact that Google search is actually as dumb as a sackful of hammers. Don't get me wrong, for the longest time Google's results were "good enough", but Google has no real concept of the quality of a result (they've tried and it worked for a while - e.g., PageRank). Still, fundamentally their algorithms aren't smart enough to figure out whether any given piece of…

What I don't get is how SEO isn't countered by unvisiting... By which I mean navigating back to the google search, I always assumed that would be a clear indicator to google that it's not what the user was looking for.

Maybe this does happen but it not weighted highly enough against SEO.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#216

Post by Carpetsmoker »

mrisoli wrote: post #144
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 5 years ago I attended a local code meetup and someone gave a presentation about this new TypeScript thing. He basically just explained the basic syntax, concepts. etc. A bit boring, but not the worst I've seen. Then in the Q&A someone asked a "In our experience, we've had problems with X, what's your take?" (I've forgotten what X was specifically), and the guy replied with "well, actually, we haven't really us…

This seems very common in JS land, I once saw a talk in a conf which seemed very basic, later on I stumbled onto a tweet about how the speaker often submits abstracts to CFPs often not knowing much(or at all) about the subject, which serves as motivation to learn and talk about it, works well after having a track record of speaking at events some conferences you can get invited or not have to prove yourself so much t…

In general I find presentations at conferences not all that interesting; I've been to conferences where I've not attended a single presentation. There are some good talks, but they're not common. Giving a good presentation requires a few different skill and some practice – I'm not good at it either.

The value is mostly in hanging out with various people. The best experience has generally been when I went alone and met loads of new people, instead of going with coworkers or friends and then just hang out with them. Not that's not fun either, but I can do that next weekend anyway.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#217

Post by aledalgrande »

cjonas wrote: post #180
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal brand building is another major contributor to search engine content dilution. Whenever I Google for something in hot new languages or frameworks, I have to sift through 10s of Medium articles from beginner developers who are trying to establish themselves as industry experts. I don't want to read some junior developer's Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial that is really just entire sourc…

This drives me crazy! I hate searching for documentation and the top results are blogs containing outdated copy and paste of the official docs with some witty text and gifs.

Or SO answers from 2011, pasting official docs.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#218

Post by fxtentacle »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #171
fxtentacle wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, there are also articles written by experts. But those experts will be busy and, thus, publish on a slow schedule. So I believe my heuristic is accurate that anyone posting content too quickly will most likely not do much actual work. Also, if the internet is 95% articles by job seekers, then I'm better off distrusting everyone instead of expanding the trust that only 5% deserve to the other 95%.

>Also, if the internet is 95% articles by job seekers, then I'm better off distrusting everyone instead of expanding the trust that only 5% deserve to the other 95%. I guess if better off means not finding anything good but no crap either, instead of only finding some good and lots of crap.

Well, I deliberately chose the word "distrusting" here.

If I know that the internet is 95% crap, I will treat every article as wrong until proven correct, meaning that I will not copy & paste anything without verifying myself that it works as it should.

If I had a provably reliable author, on the other hand, I could skip that work and just take his/her word for it. But only about 5% of the people writing on the internet deserve this level of trust.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#219

Post by Nextgrid »

karolisram wrote: post #139
Jorge1o1 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truly worrying development is when those same Medium posts start circling HN. I’m not trying to be elitist, but what I enjoy about HN is seeing truly novel and interesting content, and every “crappy” article on the front page bumps an interesting one downwards into oblivion.

I’m ashamed to say that was me at some point. On top of that, those articles did nothing to further my career. All that mattered so far is my past experience, projects and how well I can (leet)code. Now if I start blogging again, it will have to be purely out of intellectual curiosity.

I confirm this doesn't do anything for your career, or at least not as much as just focusing that time on actual, paid work. I find that in my career my resume and experience that's on it as opposed to any side-projects or attempts at writing.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#220

Post by weinzierl »

umvi wrote: post #62
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,…

Or when you want to compare two products and the top result(s) are just auto-generated pages that dump the stats/spec of each product side by side. I hate that so much. I want to read what a human who has tried both thinks.

There was a time when searching for "A vs B" produced useful results. Nowadays a search like this is completely useless. I wish those auto-generated sites would completely disappear from the search results.
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