Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
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Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
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Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#2Just don't actually go and look, if you're not prepared for the fantasy to be broken that such persons are super productive and doing quality work.
There's enough dysfunction to go around that all types of programmer can be uniquely afflicted, and usually are.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#3I'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 versions.
One of the constant annoyances of some of the newer tech stacks is that developers constantly break the API meaning that when you upgrade the framework version you have to fix code and probably tests as well. It is absolutely infuriating when an API is changed when the old API was working perfectly well.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#4I wonder if Scott Hanselman ever had to maintain large system while having limited resources to do so. Churn is bad for most, apart from companies who must sell new things to keep on going, like software companies. Moving fast and breaking things is great when you don't have to consider churn cost. Calling the anti-churn crowd "dark matter developers" seems at least a bit derogatory.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#5I wonder if Scott Hanselman ever had to maintain large system while having limited resources to do so. Churn is bad for most, apart from companies who must sell new things to keep on going, like software companies. Moving fast and breaking things is great when you don't have to consider churn cost. Calling the anti-churn crowd "dark matter developers" seems at least a bit derogatory.
I've worked on a team before where we every dev said "we need to upgrade X, we're Y versions behind" and management always responded with "no budget, this is not a priority". This continued until our hand was forced by a company wide initiative to modernize some aspects of our architecture and all of a sudden our team was frowned upon for being so far behind. Then we had to spend many months on an "upgrade project". I'm sure this same story has played out many times over in many other companies. In my own experience, often lack of tech currency/accumulation of tech debt is a management/organization problem. They won't get rewarded for upgrading things until their boss makes it a priority and there is some highly visible "upgrade project", so why bother doing so now.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#6> we need to find a balance between those of us online yelling and tweeting and pushing towards the Next Big Thing and those that are unseen and patient and focused on the business problem at hand.
What makes him think we don't have a balance already? Most devs are the quiet ones who just do their job and then go home. Aside from participation on HN, I consider myself to be be one of those quiet ones. I work on business problems with whatever tools are appropriate, which includes both modern stacks and legacy codebases.
I'm not sure what other balance he is seeking.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#7The 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 that someone would assume that just because I'm not loud about it means anything else about how much I care about it or how good at it I am. I'm not totally surprised by this though; for most people, if you're not jumping up and down telling them about how awesome you are they have no way of knowing. I see this a lot in my current job; all the developers know which of their colleagues are kick-ass at their jobs, but you have to sell yourself and your accomplishments to everyone else.
TL;DR, I know this is an old article, but it seems there's still some perception that us dark matter folks are all just passionless drones in it for the paycheck, and while there's surely some percentage of us for which that's true, I think it's completely wrong-headed to assume that's how we all are.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#8Scott talks about how devs don't do anything to be seen yet if you look at his twitter stream it's mostly just him tweeting his own posts and retweeting other "famous" developers. He, and the majority or other very visible people in the community, gatekeep the blogosphere by failing to help anyone else break in (not necessarily consciously of course; they may just never see the less famous devs posts).
Scott could be a much bigger part of the solution than he chooses to be.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#9I wonder if Scott Hanselman ever had to maintain large system while having limited resources to do so. Churn is bad for most, apart from companies who must sell new things to keep on going, like software companies. Moving fast and breaking things is great when you don't have to consider churn cost. Calling the anti-churn crowd "dark matter developers" seems at least a bit derogatory.
I've worked on a team before where we every dev said "we need to upgrade X, we're Y versions behind" and management always responded with "no budget, this is not a priority". This continued until our hand was forced by a company wide initiative to modernize some aspects of our architecture and all of a sudden our team was frowned upon for being so far behind. Then we had to spend many months on an "upgrade project".…
Sure, there's an extreme on both ends. The problem you're describing is that the upgrades suggested were probably not frictionless, managers were burnt before by needless upgrades that took too much resources for little value. If tech companies took much more care wrt upgrades and not breaking stuff, then users of the tech would not see upgrades as needlessly risky.
An example of this is net core vs net fx. Net core broke many things, has not implemented full compatibility from day one, introduced netstandard , which as of latest version is not implemented by netfx, introduced new toolset (dotnet) aside msbuild (bear in mind that VS still uses Ms uild) and so on.
This is all a matter of incentives both for tech companies and for their workers - they are often rewarded for short term/easy to see by managers impact, not for bugfixing, stability or long term support. It was not always like this - in the 90s MS would be picked because they took care to not break stuff. Migrating .Net 1.1 to 2.0 was super easy.
Re: Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
#10That's a nice way to describe something, but it doesn't have to be a problem. Some devs around me (partially me too) just doesn't want to tweet or write blogs about tech, yet we could work in bleeding edge tech or writing cobol at the same time.
Some people maybe don't need help, guidance, or something like that, maybe just maybe we like the things as they are now.
Maybe we'll start doing all of social stuff some day.
It's just okay.