Sure, most tech articles are bullshit... but the question is, is the average developer going to do better figuring it out on their own? Are articles worse than the average developer?
Most tech content is bullshit
41–50 of 470 posts
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#42Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#43I forget the exact numbers but half of all programmers have been doing it less than five years, and this has been true the whole time. Exponential growth, eh?
Also, IT is fashion-driven and largely ahistorical. I have worked with people who don't know who Alan Kay is, for example, or have never heard of Prolog.
I think we are in an alchemical phase and (hopefully) transitioning to a chemical phase of knowledge. (Alchemy was mostly bullshit too, but there was a hellofa bull in there, eh?)
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#44Agreed
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#45From 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…
Everyone was an expert online as far back as 20 years ago. Now look where we find ourselves. Time isn’t a flat circle; it’s a merry go round.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/03/technology/suddenly-every...
https://web.archive.org/web/20181018000000/https://www.nytim...
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#46I 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 log of what you've learnt coming from the perspective of a learner, rather than a teacher.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#47I’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…
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.
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#48Speaking of how much of it is bullshit, it's also amazing how much of a language, frameowrk, insert multi-year project involving dozens of people, are willing to cede their entire knowledge base to... a google group? Blogs? Stackoverflow?
If your documentation sucks, your thing sucks. And as time goes on whether you like it or not, the collective record of community supporting itself IS part of the documentation.
What happens when Google or Microsoft buys Stackoverflow and drives everyone away from it, and it eventually goes dark? What happens when all of those blogs start to disappear as people move on to the next thing (Ruby/Rails...), what happens when google just wakes up one morning and declares that they're tired of groups and are going to delete them all like they've done with a dozen other failed projects?
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything goes to shit when marketing is involved. Or more like, everything goes to shit when money is involved.
Google incentivizes this. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Wall Street incentivizes Google to do this. Don't hate the game, hate the meta-game?
Re: Most tech content is bullshit
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, IANAL is common across the entire know-it-all internet, which is basically everyone who can read at a college level and plenty who can't.
I've never seen it outside of HN personally
It has a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IANAL