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Most tech content is bullshit

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Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#291

Post by jedberg »

city41 wrote: post #287
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…

Not sure if the blogs from tech companies can really count here. Those articles are made with the company's interest in mind, typically to boost recruiting. In my experience, they are always written on company time.

Written on company time or not, those are still engineers who are doing real engineering work who are also writing about their work.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#292

Post by cmdshiftf4 »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #181
cmdshiftf4 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The entire talk seemed pretty useless to me. 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 repli…

I attended exactly because of those reasons. The problem is mostly that actually explaining a language (even from a high-level overview) well is a bit more involved than just explaining the syntax and the like. For example I currently mostly work with Go, and if I would give a high-level presentation about Go I'd start with the "tour of Go" tutorial, but I'd also add some context to some things, explain where you nee…

>Was it useful for others? Maybe; I hope so. But for me personally I consider it a wasted hour in my life.

Is this not true of most tech meetups / tech conferences though? I feel like they all carry an implicit YMMV with them, which attendees know when deciding to join.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#293

Post by z3t4 »

If something works, we keep doing it. Often we learn by looking at others. Or we try out different things and stick with what works best. For example: Every day you brush your teeth, why do you brush it that way? Probably you where told by a Dentist, but you haven't question it.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#294

Post by robocat »

randompwd wrote: post #274
robocat wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 as…

Well, it could be. However, a family member who had years earlier excelled in a (non software) technical field before jumping to management positions then founder had given advise. Become excellent at $skills then move up. Good advise. Advise i'd pass on with the caveat that talking tech is so f*kin easy at 10,000 feet, be prepared to see less able people jump upwards before they're anywhere near ready. edit: this wa…

Sorry, I didn’t intend for my comment to advise moving “up” into management.

It is about maintaining an open mind. How can you tell the difference between someone who has valuable 3_048 metre advice versus someone who has highly negative value at 3km?

I have remained in a developers rôle for my working life so far.

I wish I could find the anecdote where this guy recognised that this one woman was always on successful projects within a business. He didn’t know what she did, but he recognised that if she was involved then somehow the project was successful (I think surprising him because many software projects fail). I wonder why he didn’t ask her what her secret was? At least he was open minded enough to see she had some magic, even if he couldn’t directly learn her presumed skill.

Thanks for reply - I’m still working on my own blindnesses - I can say trying to be non-judgemental and looking for hidden skills in others has really helped me.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#295

Post by vbezhenar »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #127

Good is hard. When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming. At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd thing that would lead to high quality…

Books are awesome and somewhat under-appreciated piece of knowledge today. Many people prefer to lurk around blogs, documentation, tutorials for some technology, but I always trying to find a book from some reputable author. It does not always exist, but often it does exists and it's much better way to learn a technology. It might take a bit more time, because usually books present information in a more thorough way so you need to work from basics rather than copy-pasting some code and call it a day. But in the end it's worth time spent.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#296

Post by zamubafoo »

watwut wrote: post #246
fxtentacle wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But within context of a tutorial, anything less than flawless is not worthy of inclusion (making it binary in this case). IMO, any content aimed for beginners should be flawless.

Beyond introductory material, it's a trade off of complexity and time as it's hard to compress the factors needed to demonstrate anything technical.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#297

Post by jedberg »

timwaagh wrote: post #248
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…

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…

> 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.

Not usually. Usually the way it works is the person who wrote the code and developed the technology decides to write a blog post about it and then writes it. Then they pass it around to their peers and other leadership for comments and edits.

Then, at least at Netflix, the next step was usually to publish it yourself on the tech blog. Sometimes if it was a big new tech it might get reviewed by PR or legal but not often.

At the other tech companies I don't know what their process is after that.

But what I do know is that I know a lot of those authors personally and they are definitely implementers.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#298

Post by runawaybottle »

city41 wrote: post #270
hn_check wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worrying development? HN has never been particularly enlightened in this respect, and has all of the same trends and superficial articles that emerge on the other networks. The illusion that it's some higher ground has never held true.

Based on your bio, you may be a bit biased in your assessment.

Someone should create that chart with ‘Lawful Good Dunning Kruger Expert’, ‘Chaotic Dunning Kruger Expert’, etc, since I need to know where I fit.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#299

Post by jason0597 »

tomxor wrote: post #215
bartread wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A lot of times I middle click any interesting links I find on Google, in which case it becomes hard for Google to know if I unvisited a site. It's not like they can track me clicking the Back button on my browser and arriving back to the search results

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#300

Post by rammy1234 »

Every thing you read needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Always look back in the history to see if the same problem came up and how some one solved it. If you can find it, use it. Only by using some existing solution you can find faults if any and improvise. The write about that. This cycle will keep going on. Thats how we have evolved. There is no BS, it is just how they solved it
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