Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012) • Hacker News Board

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#91

Post by Davertron » Sun, Aug 04, 2019, 1:02 PM UTC

IceDane wrote: post #24

Davertron wrote: post #7

The fact that you go mostly "unseen" online seems completely orthogonal to whether you love programming and keep up with the latest technologies, etc. I would consider myself "dark matter" in the respect that no one knows who I am and I'm not constantly blogging or tweeting about stuff. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in, passionate about and highly competent in technology. I find it kind of insulting actually t…

I think that by virtue of being here to comment at all, you are not one of these dark matter devs. The group of people he is describing I think largely don't bother to come to communities like this. They do their job, go home and only know about developments in tech if it is relevant to their job and most likely because it comes through in-house channels. I know a lot of people like this. Many of them aren't even awa…

Maybe I'm just missing the point of his article then. The way I read this though is "hey there are lots of devs out there who never post on social media or write blog posts. That's because they don't care about technology or being on the cutting edge, they just do their jobs and go home." If we disagree on that point, fair enough, I might be projecting some of my own angst here.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#92

Post by Davertron » Sun, Aug 04, 2019, 1:08 PM UTC

sjclemmy wrote: post #61

IceDane wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that by virtue of being here to comment at all, you are not one of these dark matter devs. The group of people he is describing I think largely don't bother to come to communities like this. They do their job, go home and only know about developments in tech if it is relevant to their job and most likely because it comes through in-house channels. I know a lot of people like this. Many of them aren't even awa…

I don’t think it’s about ability or interest. It’s about presence. There’s loads of developers out there with a range of skills. I work with devs who are great who you’ve never heard of and others who aren’t so great who you’ve never heard of. I’d consider myself in the 99%. I aspire to market myself but I’ve got lots of interests and I’m quite a private person so I find marketing myself in conflict with that aspect…

Same. I'm just horribly bad at self-marketing and generally have zero interest in getting attention. I used to think that as long as I was doing good work people would notice, and sometimes if you're lucky that can happen, but there are lots of situations where you're doing yourself a major disservice if you're not selling yourself and your accomplishments. You just shouldn't depend on any one else to advocate for you.

That doesn't mean it's easy though. I still hate it and have to make a conscious effort to market myself.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#93

Post by A2017U1 » Sun, Aug 04, 2019, 3:35 PM UTC

acollins1331 wrote: post #11

davesmith1983 wrote: post #3

I've seen this article before. A lot of people that are active on the internet like to assume that everyone is using the latest tech and can just use whatever tech they like. This is rarely the case. I've spent the majority of my career tending to old code bases. There is a lot of legacy code that is still working fine. There is a lot of old C# code bases that are working exactly as intended in now unsupported .NET v…

>It is absolutely infuriating when an API is changed when the old API was working perfectly well. Good thing Google is reading this.

This is virtually all of the important rust libraries that refuse to go out of v0 because of semver and their urgent need to break everything. Anyone who complains is not "apart of the team" either. It's astounding how much post-purchase rationalisation exists in the community, rust has plenty going for it, the people will destroy it before that though.

Sorry guys but if you can't manage the task of providing randomness as a stable basic lib then maybe all you have is an experimental language not fit for production? It's scary how the security and correctness of the lang doesn't match the namespace problem that exists currently.

The single owner of one of the most popular crypto libraries hasnt responded in years to anyone. Hundreds of downloads a day still. Evangelists please take a step back and think about that.

Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)

#94

Post by teh_klev » Sun, Aug 04, 2019, 8:13 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #73

teh_klev wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started out working with .NET and C# in early 2001, feels like yesterday but suddenly it's ~18 years O_o.

Did you also used those beta MSDN releases where the documentation was full of red text for the parts that were still in flux?

I have some vague memories of this. I worked for a MS Gold Partner and half remember getting access to all sorts of pre-release bits.