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Most tech content is bullshit

aleksandra.codes

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Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#411

Post by [deleted] »

dredmorbius wrote: post #353
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…

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curs…

[deleted]

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#412

Post by ternaryoperator »

Veen wrote: post #6

Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Tech content is no exception. As the article points out, the corollary is that you have to think for yourself, assessing every piece of content you come across.

Well, part of the problem is that there are few detailed book reviews anymore. The Jolt Awards for books were at one time a good guide. Nonetheless, one place that has fairly in-depth Java book reviews of all places is Oracle's Java Magazine. [0]

[0] https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/book-review-archive

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#413

Post by Carpetsmoker »

yawaramin wrote: post #317
maps7 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you meet people if you didn't go to the talks?

You meet them in the hallways outside the talks.

Yeah, pretty much. At this one particular conference there were actually loads of stands in the hallway and I would hang out and chat with various people there.

The more professionally organised ones don't tend to have that many stands, except for paying sponsors. I understand why they do that, but I think there's good value in "community stands" too.

I mean, the talks themselves are just "shut up and listen", right? Not too much socializing happening there. I think that revolving the entire conference around presentations is probably not always the best format.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#414

Post by hellisothers »

tmlee wrote: post #395
com2kid wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Spotify of books is a great way to look at it. If a publisher had insanely high quality articles on everything, behind a paywall, I'd subscribe to $15 a month pretty quickly. Every hour saved would pay for itself many times over. The problem is having a wide enough array of content that such a site becomes the single go to. O'Reilly had that catalog, but I think the tech world had gotten much more complicated sin…

That would be Kindle Unlimited model, as far as I know they pay authors by pages read. But I’m unsure how impactful revenue wise for an author can make or how sustainable is it long term. Most of the books I see on Unlimited are either older books (there are some good gems), books that are already freely found on the internet or books that are scrappily put together.

“...by pages read.” That actually sounds great. I don’t want to read a book, I want access to knowledge. I want a great search engine that will surface the pages containing the info I need so I can read them and move on and that is usually a handful of pages from a book.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#415

Post by m463 »

Veen wrote: post #6

Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap. Tech content is no exception. As the article points out, the corollary is that you have to think for yourself, assessing every piece of content you come across.

I think a surprising refined "meta" solution has come up in the last decade or so.

You can read an article, and figure out if it is crap for yourself.

But then you can check your work by reading the discussion around it (like HN comments). Look at the top (and bottom) comments. Match your thoughts against the opinions and comments of other critical thinkers.

A lot of critical thinking has already been done for you.

This doesn't always work, but a good comment/upvote/moderation system can be a surprising bullshit filter.

My comment does NOT apply to automated systems, or systems were money/seo/gaming have a payoff for someone. So please ignore this for facebook, for anything with sponsored results, for product reviews, or for wikipedia pages of wealthy or prominent individuals.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#416

Post by charlysl »

dredmorbius wrote: post #353
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…

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curs…

... and by quoting Schopenhauer's beautiful prose instead of using your own words you are following his wise advice. Montaigne said something similar when confronted as to why he quoted Plutarch so often, replying that if he believed someone had already said something in a way that he couldn't improve, why on earth would he say it in his own words? I would very much have preferred to quote the great man himself of course, for this very reason, but couldn't locate this particular passage.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#417

Post by amznthrowaway5 »

robocat wrote: post #294
randompwd wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here it is, from peopleware:

> I was teaching an in-house design course some years ago, when one of the upper managers buttonholed me to request that I assess some of the people in the course (his project staff). He was particularly curious about one woman. It was obvious he had his doubts about her: “I don’t quite see what she adds to a project; she’s not a great developer or tester or much of anything.” With a little investi- gation, I turned up this intriguing fact: During her 12 years at the company, the woman in question had never worked on a project that had been anything other than a huge success. It wasn’t obvious what she was adding, but projects always succeeded when she was around. After watching her in class for a week and talk- ing to some of her co-workers, I came to the conclusion that she was a superb catalyst. Teams naturally jelled better when she was there. She helped people communicate with each other and get along. Projects were more fun when she was part of them. When I tried to explain this idea to the manager, I struck out. He just didn’t recognize the role of catalyst as essential to a project.

---------

I don't think engineers blindness is the cause in the majority of cases, and that woman would be put on a PIP.

To get ahead things like unethical behavior, lying and corruption matter far more than competence, teamwork and making real contributions. A lot of people simply can't stand to admit this.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#418

Post by amznthrowaway5 »

randompwd wrote: post #278
unsignedchar wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Still there and I wouldn't be so sure. Fake it until you're high enough in an org then jump sideways to another gig(which is what he did).

At amazon a lot of the "engineering" managers are so incompetent they can't write for loops.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#419

Post by amw-zero »

logicprog wrote: post #378
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…

The problem with physical programming books - and don't get me wrong, I love physical books to a fault - is that they're easily made outdated, either with new versions of the same software, or the software gets replaced, or new best practices arise. Then you have to buy another version of the book. In addition to this, which basically makes physical programming books a nonstarter already, you have the issue that book…

There are a lot of “totally timeless” ideas, so lots of reasons to have paper books. There’s also nothing wrong with a book becoming outdated. A book is the most efficient way to transfer a large amount of information between two human minds. Just because some syntax changes doesn’t remove the value of that information being transferred in the first place. And just because a “best practice” changes, that doesn’t mean that understanding the old best practice has no value. In fact, everyone would benefit from understanding the history, context, and evolution of “best practices” (which change so often that they should really be called “current practices”).

So, if you’re only looking at a book along one dimension which is “getting the most recent fashion status” in a fast-changing industry, then paper books aren’t appealing. But that’s the saddest dimension to evaluate a book on.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#420

Post by amw-zero »

bagacrap wrote: post #392
hardwaregeek wrote: post #331

There's a particular brand of young developer where every opinion comes from a blog post, talk or HN comment. They have strong views on many different topics and believe that they're knowledgeable and smarter than the average developer^[1]. The only issue? They don't have actual experience to back this up. Because not only is most tech content bullshit, the small percentage that isn't BS may not apply to their situat…

Not to mention, the extremely opinionated but well written and charismatic blog post is most often the one believed, even though charisma is not a strong signal for truth.

This really just sums up human nature.
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