[HN Gopher] Most tech content is bullshit (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
Most tech content is bullshit (2020)
Author : udev4096
Score : 155 points
Date : 2023-06-18 13:16 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.aleksandra.codes)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.aleksandra.codes)
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| True, but most content in general is bullshit.
|
| Most scientific publications is BS published for the sake of
| pumping your numbers.
|
| Most student memoire is BS to pass the exam.
|
| Most financial analyses, most TV journal reporting, most tweets,
| most books are BS.
|
| Ever read doctors or lawyers specialized magazines? Most pages
| are BS on top of BS.
|
| Paid content, content produced to fill space, making volume, low
| quality authors trying to make it, agendas every where, and of
| course automated crap.
|
| Why do you think HN is so successful?
|
| The concept?
|
| The tech?
|
| Of course not.
|
| It's the quality of moderation, and the fact they used their
| ability to publish their BS to the front page with moderation.
| Just enough to help them, but not so much as to destroy the
| average HN quality.
|
| Dedication to quality on the long run, and restrain in milking
| the cow. This show visions, and it's hard.
| anticristi wrote:
| I tend to think of any kind of contemporary creation as BS. We
| are the filter who will decide what will become test-of-time
| validated legacy.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| HN has decent technical discussions and some really good
| historical/personal anecdotes. Otherwise, it falls short and
| lacks in ideological diversity. And there is also bullshit
| here.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| I think you're going a little bit far, but I tend to agree. My
| reasoning for this is, to look back on experts from the past.
|
| Unless it's a hard scientific fact, a law of physics, most
| things are really just opinions that people tend to agree with.
| Remember Leaded gasoline? How about DDT or Asbestos? How about
| Freud? Of the thing the bible likes to talk about, slavery.
|
| Even in the 25 years, I've been in programming, it seems like
| all "Proper Way To Do It" have all aged about as well as milk
| on a hot day.
|
| The only thing I follow is keeping stuff simple.
| Solvency wrote:
| Opinions people tend to agree with us too charitable and
| simple.
|
| It's called corporate propaganda. It's all around us.
| manmal wrote:
| > The only thing I follow is keeping stuff simple.
|
| Some other things I've kept around:
|
| - Complex systems must develop out of a simple system
| (there's a clever quote I can't find right now) - also known
| as "make it work, then make it better"
|
| - Bugs shall become test cases
|
| - Bug reproducibility should be maximized (crash tracking /
| good logs, sacrifice performance if necessary)
|
| - Fail fast
|
| - Composition over inheritance (arguably a subjective one,
| but I've never regretted doing it)
| aloisdg wrote:
| Seen it on c2 wiki: Make It Work Make It Right Make It Fast
|
| https://wiki.c2.com/?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast
| j_french wrote:
| Many years ago a friend of mine proposed a theory of his (I use
| the word "theory" in the loosest possible sense here, more
| student dorm than lab) that sounded a lot like this. In his
| version, most of everything is shit. Most music is shit, most
| movies are shit, most pizzas are shit. Only a minority of any
| given thing is actually of high quality.
|
| I haven't seen much over the years to convince me that he or
| you are wrong
| tensor wrote:
| This is grossly reductive. There is a huge spectrum of quality
| in content. Most of what you describe, formal studies by
| experts, is on a much much higher tier than the 99% of content
| most people read.
|
| Comparing informed formal studies to the uninformed opinion
| pieces most of the tech crowd reads and implying they are
| somehow the same is borderline supporting disinformation.
|
| There is absolutely a big spectrum of quality in the higher
| tiers of content too. People in those domains spend countless
| evenings discussing it.
|
| But the vast majority of people are not reading anything at
| that level. The typical tech blog is closer to talking about
| what kind of sandwich you like for lunch than anything that
| will advance the field.
| kazinator wrote:
| Most of the time, you should not be inventing your own
| equivalents of off-the-shelf algorithms. (Let alone something
| like crypto.)
|
| How much you evaluate the borrowed alternatives (or whether you
| even evaluate alternatives) entirely depends on how much that
| choice matters in the situation.
|
| Situations in which the choice doesn't matter are very common,
| and in situations in which it doesn't matter.
|
| The scientist isn't concerned with "does it matter" but with
| "does it make an observable difference". But the latter concern
| is often a luxury or idle preoccupation for the engineer.
|
| Writing code is mostly a kind of engineering; more rarely is it
| science.
|
| Engineers usually select existing materials and patterns of
| putting them together to put together a solution.
|
| Engineering isn't entirely creative in every detail, like
| painting or music. Even painters and musicians reuse from others.
|
| "Why did you resolve this G7 chord to a C?"
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Counter point: writing things from scratch once in a while
| sharpens your skills and helps you make better decisions in the
| future about tradeoffs, and let's you evaluate different
| implementations without having to resort to a search on
| hackernews, stack overflow, or GitHub to find out what the
| trendiest option is
|
| Take exercise for example: it's all unnecessary work, but it
| makes you stronger so that you maintain your fitness longer and
| so when you need to be strong for something, you're ready
| geophph wrote:
| Agreed. I also like calculus as an example. First you gotta
| write out derivatives by hand, then you learn you can "drop
| the exponent then subtract one from it."
|
| Doing it the long way without the shortcuts helps you
| understand it better inside and out I'd think for when you do
| use existing code.
|
| I find sometimes it's fun to write out a program to do
| something without any (or at least very minimum) imports just
| to see how I'd solve it (for a reasonably real use case).
| Helps to better understand the concepts / tricks the "real"
| implementation might use.
|
| Some fun examples: building an animated UI spinner "by hand"
| or setting up a sub-pub implementation for passing data
| around my app.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Opinion pieces probably are, but honestly most tech content is
| tutorials which are generally pretty cool.
| l0b0 wrote:
| > Don't consume. Create. Ask questions. Stay curious.
|
| Like everything else, it's a balance. Nobody can build a modern
| system in finite time that will be maintainable, secure, fast,
| etc. without relying on their own and others' experience
| ("consuming").
| beardedwizard wrote:
| The irony is that this article is based on bs anecdotes.
| notfromhere wrote:
| Its an opinion piece, not a study in Nature
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Stay in the field long enough and the number of anecdotes will
| grow so much that you will notice the pattern, unless your pet
| rock's intelligence can surpass your own.
|
| Also, hasn't there been a link [0] just a couple days ago about
| how most of the "serious science research" done about software
| development estimation is based on datasets that are either
| smaller than the number of anecdotes a typical software
| developer will easily encounter in five years, or are right
| away made up? Just what kind of data would you expect, and from
| whom?
|
| [0] https://shape-of-code.com/2021/01/17/software-effort-
| estimat...
| louwrentius wrote:
| The real irony is that in this context they matter and do make
| a point.
| [deleted]
| jackfoxy wrote:
| > Tutorials show harmful patterns.
|
| Try to find a sample SQL database, for any vendor, that does not
| employ artificial table primary keys. This was a requirement in
| the 1980s so that your queries would execute before the heat
| death of the universe, but that has not been the case for
| decades. Microsoft is particularly guilty of this. Artificial
| keys are an anti-pattern. (And, btw, there's a dearth of
| literature on why artificial keys are an anti-pattern.)
|
| Here's the only sample database I know of that consistently uses
| natural keys across all tables, created by a SQL educator who
| knows his stuff.
|
| https://github.com/ami-levin/Animal_Shelter
| redhale wrote:
| "X is an anti-pattern" comments/articles, offered with no
| backing evidence, is a spot-on example of bullshit tech
| content.
| msla wrote:
| > Artificial keys are an anti-pattern. (And, btw, there's a
| dearth of literature on why artificial keys are an anti-
| pattern.)
|
| Why, in specific, are artificial keys an anti-pattern?
|
| Seems like they preemptively solve problems. For example, using
| an SSN as a "natural" primary key is both a potential security
| nightmare and a data normalization nightmare if someone shows
| up with two or more SSNs, which does happen. (Yes. _Yes._ My
| great uncle had at least two SSNs. You won 't convince me it
| can't happen.) Similarly for other "natural" data which isn't
| bound to obey the properties DBAs need for primary keys.
| Tehdasi wrote:
| Never specifically heard about this terminology until now, but
| after looking, yeah, I can see why ppl prefer 'artificial' keys
| to natural ones. From the animal shelter example, for people it
| uses email as the 'natural' key, which immediately runs up
| against 1,2,3 and 7 in
| https://beesbuzz.biz/code/439-Falsehoods-programmers-believe...
| bsuvc wrote:
| I am curious based on your opinion of this. Do you work in
| academia or business?
| ellis0n wrote:
| Probably 20% of fake jobs generate fake content. Startups have
| long become the fashion of technology and not about tech itself,
| as it once was. Even PG does not post on this forum because of
| the unsolvable problem of the wrong/fake commentator. More and
| more politics and fashion in IT and less technologists. There are
| only 28 million programmers, and all the other billions of people
| do not even know how it works, but they have learned how to copy
| and sell. Market wins!
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Also known as cargo cult
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I think HN is a madhouse. Any article I click on, there's things
| I've never heard of that sound like made up techno-jargon, like
| programming languages which I've never seen used in a real job,
| let alone met anyone who uses them
|
| But I go to the comments and there's 150 people who all know
| every intimate detail of this technology already. Experts in the
| subject.
|
| I think most of you all are faking it
| echelon wrote:
| > I think most of you all are faking it
|
| The world is huge. We're all traversing different areas of
| interest and expertise.
| nathants wrote:
| some always rebuild, others never do.
|
| the best of us pause and think hard, about which is advantageous
| in a particular time and place.
|
| in any given situation, it could easily go either way.
|
| tolerating and resolving ambiguity to the best of one's abilities
| is the name of the game.
|
| i wonder, which bias is healthier? toward or away from
| rebuilding?
| revskill wrote:
| One example is, just use a monothlic framework, or just use
| Golang.
|
| It's not about right or wrong, they lacked contextual information
| on who you are and when to use it.
| aatd86 wrote:
| Just use Go is fine with me though :p
|
| Why singleing this little programming language? (I understand
| your point still)
| vrnvu wrote:
| I was in a meeting one day, explaining some tech decisions I had
| made. At one point, my manager interrupted me, looking pale and
| completely out of place. He asked, "I don't get this approach.
| Can you share with me the tech blog where you read about this?"
|
| (...)
|
| I couldn't help but think: would a random blog post from the
| internet have more respect and authority than my own decisions
| and explanations?
| antod wrote:
| Being as generous as possible and without other context, I
| would interpret that as a request for some background info _you
| trust_ that they could use to catch up on those concepts in
| their own time without derailing the meeting by getting you to
| explain it. Especially if most others present probably already
| understand it.
|
| Or at least that is how I would've tried to convey it if I was
| your manager.
| spacemoon wrote:
| [flagged]
| spacemadness wrote:
| One devious form of bullshit is always using the simplest of
| examples to prove out an architecture pattern and call it a day.
| I've lost count on how many times I've seen patterns with glaring
| open questions and pitfalls the author avoids. Then the cacophony
| of likes follow from folks who're likely very early in their
| career or hobby and don't know any better. This is very prevalent
| on iOS development blogs as authors rush to write their blog
| posts after every WWDC.
| factorialboy wrote:
| The fundamental deficiency with our society is that we value
| talking about X more than performing/implementing X.
|
| This is true for most fields, including programming.
|
| Most teams have folks to do the heavy lifting, and a small
| percentage of folks who talk about it.
|
| The talkers are considered more valuable than the doers, within
| the organization or without.
|
| These are our thought leaders, influencers, architects, you
| name it.
|
| I am not complaining, this is a game we are all playing. It
| took me far too long to recognize it.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| Uber's "RIBs" come to mind.
| jvans wrote:
| The devil is always in the details and it's too easy to present
| a high level intelligent sounding argument that ignores all the
| important complexity.
| raincom wrote:
| You zeroed in on the core element of bullshitting: trivializing
| complexity into sound bites, simplest examples.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I've learned to wait a couple of years for dubdub hype to
| subside, and "lessons learned" to be shared.
|
| I get tired of the "write an app in five minutes" demos. As
| someone that regularly works on _ship_ apps, I can report that
| there is a _world_ of difference between academic demos, and
| something that can be shipped.
| msla wrote:
| https://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html
|
| > The academics in computer science have gotten into the
| "structured programming" rut over the past several years. They
| claim that programs are more easily understood if the
| programmer uses some special language constructs and
| techniques. They don't all agree on exactly which constructs,
| of course, and the example they use to show their particular
| point of view invariably fit on a single page of some obscure
| journal or another-- clearly not enough of an example to
| convince anyone.
|
| So it isn't a new phenomenon.
| ilyt wrote:
| I feel like classic object oriented tutorials talking about
| fruits and apples with no connection to actual apps you'd build
| are ones to add to this pile
| nyrikki wrote:
| I may be wrong on this but weren't the fruit analogies
| originally meant to describe the difference between class
| based and prototype based languages and then it was extended
| to actually teach the concepts in a way that didn't work?
|
| I remember my professor using them to try and teach pre-
| standard C++ and when I pressed him to explain actual use
| cases I figured out he didn't understand himself.
|
| I have the feeling it was meant as a bridge for lisp
| programmers moving to class based languages but that may be
| because we learned lisp first.
|
| Anyways that context is the only place I found value in it.
| manmal wrote:
| Coming up with protocol oriented programming was probably one
| of the bigger disservices Apple has done its developers.
| There are still people who think everything needs a protocol,
| or it isn't soundly structured.
| crabmusket wrote:
| Coming up with good examples of inheritance is hard. Instead
| of teaching with bad examples, that should have been a
| warning that inheritance should be much less commonly used.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| spacemoon wrote:
| [flagged]
| jlengrand wrote:
| " On est toujours le con de quelqu'un, et tant pis pour lui". ->
| "We are always someone's jerk, and so much the worse for him".
|
| Agree with the article, I just wished it wasn't conflating
| "bullshit / actual harmful content" as much with "stuff that is
| valid, but in a given context".
|
| 200% that nothing online, (nor IRL to be fair), should be taken
| as universal truth. I see that same at conferences, with certain
| topics/fads/trends being absolutely overrepresented compared to
| what's actually happening on the ground.
| quenix wrote:
| I think a more natural translation would be "You are always the
| idiot to someone else. And too bad for them."
| strangattractor wrote:
| I interpreted "bullshit" to mean fluff. Much of the content I
| encounter appears to be regurgitated trivial examples from
| tutorials. Entire websites are dedicated to this. The goal
| generally appears to generate some type of influencer status or
| get money from ads. Few people offer helpful content that
| provides a deeper understanding or solves a tricky problem.
| Probably because they can't.
| Little_Kitty wrote:
| You get a lot more views for a video on how to index a column
| in MySQL than for how to approach evaluating your needs and
| choose a suitable database. The latter would be outdated in a
| few years as new technologies emerge, while the former can be
| padded with enough fluff to show two adverts. So we end up
| with the content you know today, rather than what you'd
| really like to see. It's good to remember this and interact
| with those who do publish the latter content, plus it makes
| the algorithm feed you more content that's worth your time.
| ilyt wrote:
| The latter is also hard to google, you can't exacly ask
| google "what database to pick with this and that
| constraints and capabilities"
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| "helpful content that provides a deeper understanding or
| solves a tricky problem" is a lot if work to create, even if
| you know the solution or can solve the problem easily.
|
| I can empathize with people who dont spend their limited free
| time on explaining others how to solve problems out of the
| goodwill of their heart and I am eternally grateful for the
| tiny minority that does this.
| strangattractor wrote:
| I am also grateful to the people that do actually share
| exceptional content. The problem is that search engines
| don't know the difference and the trivial seems to drown
| out the useful more and more over time.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
| lbriner wrote:
| I think this article glosses over quite a number of different
| things so the conclusion doesn't always follow.
|
| It says that people who copy stuff without thinking are consumers
| instead of creators. The implication is that this is wrong when
| many of us spend most of our time _aggregating_ , not creating.
| Look at a load of game shows, how many are creative? Not many,
| most are simply aggregations but done in a way that makes the sum
| much better than its parts.
|
| However, if you then ignore that and look at what they say about
| this copying. Again, the tone is that it is wrong to copy without
| "a bit of skepticism" but you know what? Sometimes I don't care.
| I need to know how to extract something from a string, I find an
| example, it works, the need to analyze it might well be a waste
| of time. Might there be a faster/more efficient way? Probably but
| that will take even more time to find to save some CPU that is
| not worth the investigation.
|
| There is also an implication that most of this copying is related
| to appeal to authority e.g. I will copy this because person X is
| experience or highly regarded but again, I don't believe that at
| all. I can't remember the last time in my nearly 30 years in the
| game that I looked out for a specific person because I believed
| their authority, most of the time I suspect we try and find the
| easiest article that meets our needs and perhaps seems a bit up
| to date.
|
| I don't care that nobody is perfect because anyone worth their
| chops should know that the code you copy from somewhere else
| often lacks context and information about trade-offs but we are
| trusted to make the call as to whether the risk is high enough
| that we need to go back to first principles.
|
| In most cases, it is more annoying for me for someone to waste
| time reinventing something than it is for someone to get
| something a bit less than perfect and maybe having to revisit it
| later.
| mola wrote:
| In some respect being a software engineer today is really hard.
| OTOH you want to do the right thing, so you don't want to invent
| a solution yourself. So you look for available resources, you go
| online. There you're going to encounter either:
|
| 1. Spam from junior devs who started a blog so to build a name
| for themselves.
|
| 2. Spam from SEO mills peddling junior level wisdome so they can
| get ad money.
|
| 3. Spam from software vendors that try and convince your that X
| is the best solution for everything. (Looking at you Confluent)
|
| 4. SEO Spam by software consultencies mainly interested in
| hitting the relevant buzzwords so the suits will find their site.
|
| 5. Spam from FAANG employees showcasing their google scale
| solutions made to attract talent.
|
| What is the engineer to do? Either cargo cult the FAANG
| engineers, you don't got their scale but atleast these are actual
| solutions. Or invent it yourself. Which maybe scary after you
| read all of these conflicting advices.
|
| We really are drowning in spam. Thanks heavens we we employed
| humanities best to create LLMs so we can now automate this. /s
|
| But seriously, seems like most useful information is siloed in
| the brains of battle worn engineers who are surrounded by an
| inflation of junior devs. I have a feeling this field grew too
| fast and we are losing a lot of wisdom and knowledge.
| packetlost wrote:
| 100% agree. All the best devs I know literally do not give a
| flying fuck about blogs at all (with a few exceptions). They
| read white papers and textbooks from 40 years ago (this is a
| bit of an exaggeration).
| OmarShehata wrote:
| > Spam from junior devs who started a blog so to build a name
| for themselves.
|
| I often find this is the most useful category out of the 5 you
| listed. Junior devs writing something like "How to setup
| webpack" often explain things in plain words and just spell out
| how to get the thing working. There's humility to the post like
| "I don't know what all these options do, but this is what
| worked for me".
|
| I find that a lot more honest/useful than say category 5 there
| where I have no idea if what they're talking about will
| actually work for me or how much effort it's going to take to
| integrate because the assumption there is you have big teams
| who can spend all their time maintaining these tools.
| wccrawford wrote:
| While I do think that most of the useful pages either come
| from juniors or from someone promoting their own product, I
| think there are a _ton_ of bad pages from juniors that have
| outright incorrect or dangerous information, too. So it can
| be hard to tell what advice to use and what not to if you 're
| at a level that you're asking the question in the first
| place.
| Dudester230602 wrote:
| _> How to setup webpack_
|
| Half the juniors are creating a problem ("modern"
| frameworks), the other half is trying to solve it.
| OmarShehata wrote:
| I am completely baffled by this comment. You're saying the
| _juniors_ are creating overly complicated modern
| frameworks, or are the ones pushing it?? It's clearly the
| opposite in my opinion. Big companies/teams are releasing
| tools that may work well for their scale but are overkill
| for most, and they're championing them as good solutions
| for everybody, and juniors are the force working in the
| opposite direction (trying to simplify/untangle all this
| complexity, they don't have the experience to recognize if
| it's overkill. They also want to get hired at all the
| companies that use these tools so they have to learn it).
| MaKey wrote:
| I find it worthwhile to read a book from time to time (I mostly
| read books from O'Reilly and No Starch Press).
| mo_42 wrote:
| > But seriously, seems like most useful information is siloed
| in the brains of battle worn engineers who are surrounded by an
| inflation of junior devs. I have a feeling this field grew too
| fast and we are losing a lot of wisdom and knowledge.
|
| I think knowledge siloed in the brains of people working
| somewhere successfully is underrated. These people just don't
| have time to write a blog or don't need to due to their
| success. Maybe also because the topics that make them
| successful aren't that consumable compared to
| $FAVORITE_NUMBER_STEPS to use this new and shiny framework.
| mike_hock wrote:
| > you want to do the right thing, so you don't want to invent a
| solution yourself
|
| How is that the right thing?
|
| Over 90% of the time, the fastest, most maintainable, and
| simplest solution is to do it yourself.
|
| Yeah sure, there's a few horror stories out there of homegrown
| database engines that reinvent every wheel of RDBs the wrong
| way, have been unmaintained for 10 years and the original dev
| has left.
|
| But those are the exception. The things you _shouldn 't_ invent
| yourself, you can count on one hand. And they're obvious.
|
| The spam is only the first hurdle. You have to _find_ a
| solution that doesn 't suck. Evaluating whether it sucks would
| take at least 3x as long as writing it yourself, so you can
| only give it a cursory glance.
|
| There's a chance it sucks in non-obvious ways that you're gonna
| find out over time, most likely in production, through a slow
| trickle of WTFs over the months as you work around increasingly
| weirder bug. There's of course a chance it's good. But you're
| gonna have to take the risk.
|
| Then comes the maintenance phase. Of course it's gonna redesign
| its interface every month. Until it suddenly gets abandoned and
| starts to bitrot. Eventually it stops working when you upgrade
| something unrelated.
|
| Then you're not only back to square one but have to find a
| replacement fast because now you're relying on it.
|
| The stuff you wrote yourself 5 years ago, on the other hand,
| still works exactly like it did when you wrote it with minimal
| changes.
| ilyt wrote:
| > Over 90% of the time, the fastest, most maintainable, and
| simplest solution is to do it yourself.
|
| That's almost never the case. You'd be near-always putting it
| together with ready made libs or services.
| mike_hock wrote:
| Yeah. Fundamental libraries at the right level of
| abstraction, most of which you're probably already familiar
| with. Those are the obvious things you _shouldn 't_ write
| yourself.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| In my team (big tech company), if there's some new problem to
| solve, you write a design doc, and validate it with your
| colleagues. If nobody gets a better idea than you, then you
| implement what you had in mind. We're not incentized to produce
| perfect designs, but hopefully something that works and is
| simple enough that you can implement it within a few months.
| It's pretty rare that we have to implement entire complex
| systems from scratch. We also have a lot of internal tools and
| specific problematics, so I rarely feel the need to look up for
| an existing solution.
| nathants wrote:
| content creators gotta create content. same as it ever was.
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| I've seen people eagerly suggest the use of GraphQL without being
| able to explain the idea behind REST or SOAP, what can be done,
| the shortcomings... People in the area, specially the fresh out
| of college, will get informed about technology by promoted
| content on social media, specially any technology out of MAANG,
| and automatically assume it's an industry standard.
| lohnjemon wrote:
| As I've been looking into freelance teaching and researching what
| kinds of services people provide, it's become astounding to me
| how poor most freelance teaching is.
|
| There's a bunch of people with the skills of a first year CS
| student offering "learn to code" education out there.
|
| But it sort of makes sense, those are exactly the kind of people
| who would want to make a quick buck on the side, not seasoned
| professionals who are making 6 figs already.
|
| It's just unfortunate, that people get sold this idea of
| "becoming a coder in a few weeks" and go nowhere because of it.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Compared to most other people and industries techies are actually
| relatively good on this front, however I still agree with the
| article that there is a lot of cargo culting.
|
| The author mentions a few reasons why this occurs, but I think
| it's primarily due to time constraints. Not even "I have
| deadlines", but "I cannot physically audit everything".
|
| You simply don't have enough time to independently verify every
| decision that has made in the codebase, and even if you did by
| the time you were finished there would have been new edits and
| additions.
|
| Chesterton's fence also applies here. A decision made on a whim
| might take you hours to investigate, gather context and decide
| whether it was appropriate or not.
|
| ---
|
| Something the author doesn't mention which I think matters a lot
| here is the level of impact the decision has.
|
| Deciding what to name a variable? Unimportant and reversible. Low
| impact on other people.
|
| Deciding which framework to use? Important and irreversible. High
| impact on other people.
|
| Having the correct context and a good mental model for making
| decisions can help you a lot here. Outsourcing your thinking is
| useful and correct for a lot of things, but sometimes it can be
| terrible.
|
| Figure out which problems you cannot safely outsource and spend
| your brain power on them. They tend to be things which are core
| to your work, so investigating them almost always gives you
| valuable knowledge and context that you can share with the rest
| of your team!
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Not every decision has to be done with maximum research. That's
| usually a waste of time. It's more efficient to try a couple
| things until something works and move on ("satisficing"). A key
| skill you learn over time is why decisions actually matter. But
| it's not inherently bad that there's no good reason for
| something, it really depends on the context. And sometimes things
| that had good reasons turn out bad anyway because the assumptions
| proved wrong or circumstances changed.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Not every decision has to be done with maximum research.
|
| I've been at a couple companies that wouldn't take any proposal
| seriously unless you showed up with a list of citations to blog
| posts, books, or even podcasts.
|
| The root cause was a management structure that wanted to do
| everything with a maximum of evidence.
|
| It opened the door to a lot of terrible decisions winning for
| no reason other than someone found a blog post that Google does
| it this way, or Uber wrote a blog post about this, or Martin
| Fowler wrote a post about that.
|
| The most egregious abuse was when a team that had to deal with
| maybe 100 logins per day spent over 6 months researching how to
| build their auth system to match Big Tech. They could have
| picked any off the shelf solution and been done in a week, but
| instead it became an endless boondoggle of research,
| presentations, proposals, and committees. Several people were
| even planning conference talks around it, so it started to
| evolve into whatever would sound best for their talks.
|
| That was my cue that I was at the wrong type of company.
| hitekker wrote:
| I've been at the flip side where a few google searches would
| have contradicted much of the fun complexity proposed by the
| developers of the system. Or the PMs "talked to the users",
| didn't write anything down, and then demanded features that
| weren't used at all.
|
| Just enough research should be the theme for any decisions of
| great consequence.
| ilyt wrote:
| Or in general wanting to do "what industry does", not the
| solution that people they pay and work with actual product
| and their customers invented.
|
| > The most egregious abuse was when a team that had to deal
| with maybe 100 logins per day spent over 6 months researching
| how to build their auth system to match Big Tech. They could
| have picked any off the shelf solution and been done in a
| week, but instead it became an endless boondoggle of
| research, presentations, proposals, and committees. Several
| people were even planning conference talks around it, so it
| started to evolve into whatever would sound best for their
| talks.
|
| To be _entirely_ fair, after dealing with the reverse way of
| solving it ( "just the simplest solution that works", which
| was just a bunch of static passwords per app) I'd say
| spending a bit extra to start with good solution for auth in
| your 50 man company will save a whole massive amount of pain
| when company grows both in internal service count, users, and
| compliance requirements.
| jfengel wrote:
| A good life lesson in general. My version of it: "most of the
| most important decisions you make in life will be made in the
| basis of insufficient information."
|
| As programmers we may be used to the notion that we can
| optimize if we know enough. We often can't. Decisions won't get
| better with more information because it's still insufficient.
| All you can do is use your best judgment -- of when to use your
| best judgment. And live with the consequences.
|
| That doesn't help you make the decision. But it can help you
| avoid spending too much time kicking yourself over it.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Is there a market for quality technical content? Enough to
| generate some type of revenue?
|
| The lack of it makes me think there isn't. Or maybe it's all
| locked up in YT videos that are painful to watch.
| jimmywatersabc wrote:
| [flagged]
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I've noticed this pattern happening on tech blogging pattern,
| dev-dot-to being not the least:
|
| "I've been through a web dev bootcamp 6 months ago and I'm three
| months on my first tech job ever, and here is my enormous trove
| of wisdom I'm about to bestow upon you." What follows is, at
| best, very superficial, and at worst, just plain wrong and bad
| stuff.
|
| This is recent. Back when I've been more active in hackintosh
| communities, one would very often encounter tutorials clearly
| made by people with no clue who just cargo culted it through,
| pass their cargo culted thing on, and have the chutzpa to call
| themselves "experts".
|
| Oh, and there are mediocre journalists (or sometimes even
| vloggers with no training) who start thinking about themselves as
| experts on something all of a sudden and start touring radios,
| podcasts, and TV shows, giving opinions left and right, these are
| probably the worst.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > mediocre journalists (or sometimes even vloggers with no
| training) who start thinking about themselves as experts on
| something all of a sudden and start touring radios, podcasts,
| and TV shows, giving opinions left and right, these are
| probably the worst.
|
| Us vendors pay for those and have some random journalism grad
| or ChatGPT ghostwrite it.
|
| B2B SaaS and Enterprise Sales absolutely depends on SEO from a
| brand and pipeline creation perspective due to legacy marketing
| leadership and perverse incentives.
|
| This is starting to change (a la Product Lead Growth, Persona
| Segmentation, Direct Sales, etc), but to paraphrase Max Planck,
| GTM Strategy only advances with every retirement.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| Most people have no desire to actually use their brain and think
| independently. For one thing, other people who've blindly
| accepted a point of view from some authority figure might be
| nasty to them. Also, they can't possibly imagine that somebody
| whom they really like/respect or who helped them get some code
| working might be wrong sometimes.
|
| There are very good evolutionary reasons why most humans are
| wired to conform rather than to think. If you thought too
| independently in a pre-modern society, you were liable to end up
| burned at the stake or otherwise executed in an especially brutal
| and inhumane manner for "heresy" or "witchcraft". While this is
| adaptive for living in a pre-modern society, this is maladaptive
| for living in a liberal democracy where being able to think
| independently and to respectfully disagree with others are among
| the most critical life skills. This tendency towards mindless
| conformity is also adaptive for an industrial assembly line but
| maladaptive for a modern knowledge economy where productivity
| depends upon creativity and critical thinking not following
| orders and repetitively doing the same thing.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _While this is adaptive for living in a pre-modern society,
| this is maladaptive for living in a liberal democracy where
| being able to think independently and to respectfully disagree
| with others are among the most critical life skills._
|
| That is utterly false when it comes to science and engineering,
| where you're standing on the shoulders of the proverbial giants
| in order to do anything, and reinventing wheels is mainly the
| path to low productivity.
| louwrentius wrote:
| It's funny to me that you write this down and not be reflective
| about your own claims.
|
| I don't buy the quasi-scientific part about evolutionary
| reasons.
|
| Ad for that matter, I don't even buy your first claim, that
| people don't want to think independently.
|
| But it doesn't matter in the end, the whole point of the
| article - to me at least - is that it's a good thing to always
| take the time and at least understand the reasons for choices,
| and challenge them if it makes sense to do so.
|
| If I allow myself a wild stab at things, I think it's more that
| people are "trusting" by nature and assume that things are well
| thought-out, which the article points out.
| aliasxneo wrote:
| This reads like a rant from Richard Dawkins.
| [deleted]
| CPLX wrote:
| This is nonsense. Leveraging the collective wisdom of the
| society you're in is probably the most adaptive thing a human
| can do in any given situation.
|
| Doing the same thing you observe others doing is going to be
| the safest choice most likely to preserve your life and allow
| you to reproduce, and it's not a close contest _at all_.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-18 23:01 UTC)