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Most tech content is bullshit

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Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#241

Post by ragnese »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #58
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,…

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…

Ugh. I cringe every time I have an actual, non-trivial, issue or fairly technical question about whatever I'm working on lately.

I remember feeling it while I was working with Swift (50 articles titled: "What is a Protocol?" Give me a break!) and lately I keep running into all kinds of bizarre, complicated behaviors with Jackson in my Kotlin project. It's a new kind of hell to sift through every article that describes the "hello, world" of writing a single data class and having Jackson magically turn it into JSON.

P.S., if you can avoid mixing Jackson with Kotlin, save yourself the trouble.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#242

Post by watwut »

jedberg wrote: post #232
pizza234 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

If those engineers are working 40 hours a week and are awake for about 110, what are they doing with their other 70 hours? Sure some of that is commuting, showering, etc., but presumably they have other activities. For some people, their hobby is technical writing. Saying that they are mutually exclusive would be like saying that being an engineer and doing puzzles is mutually exclusive because they both require a lo…

Writing great blog or having pet project after working full time is equivalent of working overtime or crunch. Had this been effective, persistent overtime would be effective too.

Which is why it is not happening. The actual rest time and hobby is when you do it whenever you feel like and stop how you feel like. Once you make it project and treat it seriously, it is work.

Also, other stuff that is done after work: cooking, cleaning, shopping, picking up kids and talking with them, sport to be healthy. These amount to not exactly small chunk of time.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#243

Post by robocat »

randompwd wrote: post #173

> At the beginning of my career, I would never, ever, post anything technical on the internet. I thought that if someone was brave enough to post a blog post or take part in a tech discussion, they always know what they are doing. I couldn't be more wrong! So true. I think this is just personality trait of people who are over-confident. I started out profesionally at roughly the same time as another dev in a non tech…

I hate to diagnose over the internet, but it is possible you have engineer’s blindness. This usually only happens to technically excellent developers.

When an developer lacks some productivity, political, or teamwork skill, they sometimes simply don’t know that they are missing that skill (or they think it is a worthless skill), and can’t understand why someone else gets promoted over them.

In this case, you could ask the other dev, because if he has a skill that you are lacking, he should be able to recognise your lack of that skill. This sounds a bit Dunning-Kruger but it usually isn’t. The issue is more about deliberate blindness (e.g. considering technical skills are king and politics as valueless), and usually a wilful disdain for recognising the hidden skills of others (“how did that idiot get that promotion” - maybe that idiot has some skill you struggle to recognise?)

If you think you might have engineers blindness, and are in a big enough organisation then:

1. try to look at “successful” idiot/wanker/useless engineers and see what things they are good at. Try to look at those you might disdain (sales/marketing/exec) and try to see where their value comes from. If someone can get their mind to be non-judgemental about others and be interested in the unobvious skills of others, they learn a lot (in my experience).

2. Look at what holds back other engineers, and look within yourself to see if you have any similar pattern.

Disclaimer: I would definitely call myself an engineer type. The above took me decades for me to recognise, and I still can’t do politics (but I now recognise the value, and I am learning to see when someone is good at it). And it is quite possible none of this applies to you: I am likely to be misreading you completely.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#244

Post by abhayb »

ragnese wrote: post #241
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…

Ugh. I cringe every time I have an actual, non-trivial, issue or fairly technical question about whatever I'm working on lately. I remember feeling it while I was working with Swift (50 articles titled: "What is a Protocol?" Give me a break!) and lately I keep running into all kinds of bizarre, complicated behaviors with Jackson in my Kotlin project. It's a new kind of hell to sift through every article that describe…

Hard same on the Kotin/Jackson sadness. Gson also has a bunch of issues. Really want to cut my code over to Moshi but haven't worked up the energy for it. Maybe we all just want to wait till Kotlin serialization is production ready?

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#245

Post by unsignedchar »

randompwd wrote: post #173

> At the beginning of my career, I would never, ever, post anything technical on the internet. I thought that if someone was brave enough to post a blog post or take part in a tech discussion, they always know what they are doing. I couldn't be more wrong! So true. I think this is just personality trait of people who are over-confident. I started out profesionally at roughly the same time as another dev in a non tech…

I wonder if you know how he fared at Bezos company afterwards; presumably “the people above you in non-tech companies generally know less than shit” doesn’t apply there

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#246

Post by watwut »

fxtentacle wrote: post #222
blueridge wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat related: I think this depends on what you're learning and how you've learned how to learn. As a beginner, I don't have any business going right to the master to ask about how I can improve my skills, so that I can "level up" and get the best results right away. Then again, we Western folk like pills and magic solutions for everything. We want results now, now, now. If you're a white belt, go chat with a yell…

I believe there is a categorical difference between skills operating on a continuum and those operating in a binary fashion. Pretty much all motor skills like like Karate can be performed okay, good, better, really good, etc. Similarly, I can take gradual baby steps from being a bad photographer towards becoming okay and then good. But for most programming things, it either works correctly, or it doesn't. There's ver…

This is not true. The code can be flawless, slightly buggy, maintennable with some effort, hardly maintennable or unfixable. And then there are personal preferences and opinions about what is good code.

The algorithm can be slow, slightly faster, fast.

The intro into framework can be in the middle too.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#247

Post by bdcravens »

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…

I assume company blogs have a process where you have approval over what you write, both before and after the article is written. To this end (more so if the author has "evangelist" in their job title) the writing is a function of their job, and not a hobby.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#248

Post by timwaagh »

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…

Obviously the people who write for fb or airbnb or netflix might well be professional tech bloggers or people in tech-leadership positions that tell other people how to do the work. Or even researchers (I see the last one appear in ms tech blogs a lot). Or it might have been heavily edited. Brendan Gregg is a professional tech author. Not a hobbyist. Mr Vogels is a CTO, far from a programmer. That's not to disrespect any of their content. In fact i think its great that companies bother with it and that we have so many tech authors willing to put in the hours it takes to come up with something sellable. Arguably the people writing such things put their companies rep on the line so should be more trusted than the average grunt programmer who is still on the implementation level. But if these are the best counterexamples we can find, then I'd say OP has a point. That's not to say coders don't write blogs, I've written a few technical blogs myself and I am very much on the implementation level. But that's not something people will actually read because it's pretty low effort and not about work stuff (every work contract has a secrecy clause these days).

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#249

Post by beckingz »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #190
dgellow wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO the worst is that lot of young people actually consume, like and share that SEO/marketing stuff and spread it around without much thoughts. That’s the most popular dev content you will find on dev.to, medium, YouTube (for some reasons dev related videos became huge last year), and other publishing platforms. They don’t just generate useless content, they in fact have a public for it, thus little reason to stop.

My life became a lot better when I stopped reading towards data science (on Medium). It was just so much terrible tutorial content which was not only wrong, but actively misleading.

What are your sources for data science news?

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#250

Post by maps7 »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #74
tuyguntn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

after working at couple of startups, I also noticed worrying trend. * 21 years old marketer writing about life crisis in 40s * fashion blogger explaining is Teflon harmful or not (come on, fashion and chemistry?) * 18 years old student who never immigrated to another country or studied abroad writing about how difficult is immigrant life and what to look for in different country and many more similar content.

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…

I know someone who does this and people lap it up. I've heard other people refer to his expertise too many times for my liking.
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