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. I remember this sort of was true in the PHP documentation. The official documentation was always deeply flawed, but the comment thread attached to that documentation generally had the right info.
But that was a precursor to our current situation. To get correct info you had to read a lot of conflicting info and synthesis it yourself.
So I think we are seeing as good as the free ecosystem can get and what's sad is that we seem to have lost the paid ecosystem. It's not nearly as strong as it used to be.
What people probably don't know about O'Reilly back in the day is what went into a book.
The author was almost always a subject matter expert already. And their editor was also a subject matter expert. Then the book would go through tech review and those people were generally also pedantic luminaries. Then the book would be published and bugs would come into an errata tracking system. The vast majority of those bugs would get fixed between printings.
And then, on top of all that, there was a tech support number. And if the code in the book wasn't working for you, then you could get a live person to try to work through it with you.
That all costs a lot of money, but when you split the cost out across consumers it was only $30 or so per book.
I value my time. And there are many, many places where I wish I could pay for quality. Tech content is one of them.
Seems kind of like the video game crash of 1983[0]. A flood of low quality content that begins to drown out the high quality content. One of the best things about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want. One of the worst parts about the internet is that anyone can create and publish what they want.
I'm a big fan of books because that is where a lot of experts seem to prefer to publish their knowledge, and it's usually worth the price. Of course that's not always the case, but I feel like I get much higher quality content from books than Medium articles.
Another reason to vouch for books is, it takes painstaking amount of research, collection, compiling, citations and proof reading before you would read it. Not like someone spotting in the blog comment about a (logical) flaw.
Not all tech content is BS though. Choosing whom to follow makes a huge difference, I follow Raymond Hettinger for Python, Blog posts make as a quick reference but fails as foundation building block.
What are some high quality books you’d recommend that are somewhat recent (last ten years)?
The only ones I can say, that I’ve also read, are YDKJS and Secrets JavaScript Ninja (work in web, but willing to read anything, good information is good information regardless of the tech).
Yeah I went back to good old expert written books after years realizing that a lot of content on the internet, that is not paid for, is opinion and drivel and cannot be trusted.
I think part of the problem is that publishers did a bad job of pricing their digital products and missed an opportunity to increase sales volume. In my opinion they got greedy thinking they could increase volume and prices at the same time, so digital products were priced way too high.
I had a Safari Books subscription for a little while, but I got rid of it. I can't remember the exact pricing, but IIRC it was around $250 / year for the cheap option that let me "borrow" 10 books a month. The problem for me was that I'd typically buy 2-3 books per year ($100-$150) and I owned more than 10 books total, so the subscription seemed like a bad deal by comparison. The "unlimited" (with limited downloads IIRC) was $500+ / year. That's a lot of books.
O'Reilly could have been the Spotify of tech books, but old school publishers were too scared to reassess their pricing. When the cost of distribution plummets, but results in a worse (ie: more expensive), product for your customers, it's not a shock to see those businesses struggle IMO, especially when the competition is free and "good enough".
I think it’s around 20/month now for O’Reilly learning (the new name for safari books). I’ve had it for around 5 years now, and I don’t ever recall having a limit on number of items. I feel like they have actually got better, with some really good video courses included as well. I’m just completing the second of two courses which are available elsewhere for $99 each, so I’ve almost paid for the year. I really like the idea of having this huge library I can dip into when I want to look something up, rather than getting lost in large amounts of low-quality blog posts online.
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 since then.
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 books aren't easily searchable or copy-pasteable.
Really, there's not much of a reason to have physical programming books anymore; it's just not practical, whatever the level of quality you get elsewhere. And you seem to have left out official documentation and stuff, which is getting really good imo.
The only reason for having a physical programming book is for totally timeless ideas, like algorithms and data structures textbooks, or introductory books to concepts like compilers.
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.
yea, in short, the internet enabled speeding up all of the extremely time consuming processes described by GP. You could have kept the steps the same on the O'Reilly books, but used the web for bug reports, pushing updates, etc. So what it comes down to is curated and paid content vs crowd sourced and free (ad supported).
For me it comes down to scale. The chances I find precisely what I'm looking for on stack overflow is much higher than even the best curated content of all kind, just because SO is much bigger.
I make a living selling iOS development courses at high prices, so I can tell you that the we didn't lose the paid ecosystem.
I can't talk about book publishers like O'Really, and probably the market for books shrank. But I have several competitors that sell self published ebooks.
The plethora of free content you find online is not always a good thing for everyone. As the author of the article says, most tech content is bullshit. Most people don't care, but there are plenty of people that realize that and are willing to pay.
Paid tutorials, especially in video format, usually serve different clientele. There's often 'show me how it's done' instead of 'let me figure this out after reading it' mentality.
Books are awesome and somewhat under-appreciated piece of knowledge today. Many people prefer to lurk around blogs, documentation, tutorials for some technology, but I always trying to find a book from some reputable author. It does not always exist, but often it does exists and it's much better way to learn a technology. It might take a bit more time, because usually books present information in a more thorough way so you need to work from basics rather than copy-pasting some code and call it a day. But in the end it's worth time spent.
I find very few books to be thorough. If you find books that contradicts itself, then the author doesn't know what he is talking about. A good reference point for a good book IMO
a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf.
I’ve never been so productive as I was in those days. Good quality documentation and no distractions. A golden age that we didn’t even know we were in. The modern development paradigm is a dumpster fire in comparison. Thanks for the good work you did back then producing those materials.
In a perhaps futile attempt to solve the problem (contribute to solving it) I came to think of it like this: Web pages have the same kind of content as the first bunch of pages of a book. The entire internet is like that. You reach the largest audience by assuming the reader knows nothing. Eating nothing but appetizers turns out unsatisfying. It gets truly absurd where everyone seems to [further] optimize for delivering as little as possible.
Part of the reason for the higher productivity probably was the lower amount of churn in the development tools, frameworks, paradigms-du-jour, deployment strategies, microservices, picoservices and more. It doesn't make sense to produce and print books about technologies with a half-life time of a year nor does it seem to make sense to invest time and effort into learning them - but you'll have to anyway.
A lot of that free content is not just wrong but also convoluted to extremes. I was reading about roles in Asp.net. After watching a few videos, reading a few articles, including the ones from Microsoft,I was none the wiser. Then I pulled out a book I bought a few years ago and it turns out it had a section on about roles.The guy explained the whole thing in just few pages and in a way that even a donkey would understand,while all those websites were showing some unnecessary complexity. I bought some technical books, including some classics and it's so refreshing compared to all that junk on Medium.
Perhaps part of the problem is that books are hard to search?
It may well be a bad habit, but I frequently don't learn new technologies through a concerted effort. Instead, there's just something I want to do, and I google it, and after doing that a bunch I eventually learn a lot.
I feel like that method of discovery is how I learn best, because I learn WHY something is the way it is, and how it's actually used outside of toy examples. Plus, it's just how most people are built to learn.
And yes, books not being searchable is basically THE reason I never use programming books.
I really appreciate good books, I recently bought Javascript The Definitive Guide, for a second time 2020 edition (O’Reilly) it’s expensive £40 but worth every penny, 10 times more valuable than umpteen books at £10 to £20, so actually great value.
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 situation. You may not be working on soft real time systems. You may not be working with big data. You may not be running a company.
I should know—I'm certainly guilty of assuming that because I read about software development, I'm a better software developer. When really there's a big big big difference between reading about development and actually practicing the craft. Especially if you've only been programming casually. There's a massive difference between writing code for fun and writing code that needs to be a value-add for the company.
Being young is hard, no need to judge to harshly, often a rivalrous blogpost-driven discussion can be turned into a cooperative exploration, which is exactly a way for them to gain the experience.
Quiet, or at-arms-length, dismissal hurts self-confidence and reinforces this blogpost-driven defense mechanism.
It's definitely not the worst to be overly well read in programming literature. But oh man does it get old arguing with someone who is taking advice from a very niche, very particular field such as game development and applying it to general software development.
>often a rivalrous blogpost-driven discussion can be turned into a cooperative exploration
They also often drive away any possibility of meaty conversation because everyone worth hearing from is drowning under a sea of underinformed responses written in a way that sounds like a convincing in-depth discussion to the even less informed passerbys.
I'm no sage, but it doesn't take a genius to see when Hacker News and /r/programming get swept away by a new silver bullet in software development. Then we all have to wait years before the enthusiastic youngsters are ready to hear a realistic conversation about the prima facie limitations of the new magic beans.
I think I possibly fall into this category of developer. I'm currently a few years into game development in the AAA space. The people I listen to most in descending order are Casey Muratori, Andrew Kelley, and Jonathan Blow.
I try to take their opinions with a grain of salt and find my own balance of considerations/tradeoffs. A common sentiment between them that I agree with is that software is a lot of commercial software is often an order of magnitude too slow in important places and that object oriented programming is almost always taken far too far.
I also look up to a few senior programmers I work with who have in-the-same-ballpark values as them.
On a whole, I think reading and listening to them has made me a better developer than if I just fumbled around to draw my own opinions completely from scratch.
I think being that type of young dev is probably fine so long as you keep your dogmatism and humility in check, and ensure your mentors are a spread of different individuals.
I think that's better than other young devs not seeking out information to try and grow.
Yeah you're quite similar to people I know, especially in your view of performance and choice of sources. I definitely agree that bottom line, seeking out info is a net benefit.
I have a fair amount of respect for game developers. However at the same time I feel they can make the assumption that all development should follow their practices. That everybody should be writing in C++/Zig/Jai/Rust, using data oriented programming and avoiding objects like the plague. That if other developers were just smart enough they'd make everything ridiculously fast and awesome. Not every game developer thinks this way, obviously, but there is a subset.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes all developers have the same priorities. In actuality game development is an extremely rare area where there are close-to real time requirements. Not painting the screen every 1/24th of a second is a disaster in game dev. Meanwhile GitHub uses Rails in all of its object oriented, garbage collected, interpreted horror. And nobody cares!
I suspect if a troop of elite game developers were dropped into your average web development job, they'd spend an unreasonable amount of time optimizing perf, only to have their lunch eaten by someone who focused on user facing issues. Not that web development is hard or anything. It's just a different set of requirements.
Watching jblow et al is definitely great! But there might be a point where you're put on a team using OOP and asking them to refactor to DOP with bulk allocation because you gotta get that cache utilization will just earn you stares and no buy-in. Or you might be running a startup and realize that all the time you spent getting all requests under 100ms could have been spent writing features.
Popularity of blog posts are driven largely by SEO which is good for marketing but not so much for consuming knowledge.
I believe a lot of people (myself included) don't realize they read a lot of blog posts and articles about a topic they are interested in, but have no time trying out, and feel they know something about the subject when most of these articles are copying each other to gain popularity.
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.
It's no really about experience but rather about the ability to reason from first principles. Lots of developers with experience don't even attempt doing something because the structure of the problem demands it; they would only do something if they've seen a similar approach before.
Call me a cynic, but the whole "think critically and figure it out for yourself" solution is inefficient at best, harmful at worst. Global warming skepticism is exactly the kind of thing that often occurs when people trust their own judgement more than that of subject matter experts.
There are very effective ways to get high quality recommendations, with minimal effort on your part. Want to get good medical advice? Find two highly regarded medical specialists and ask them independently for a diagnosis and treatment plan. Not two doctors next door. Not two doctors who published random blogs. Two doctors who are highly regarded by their peers and by the wider industry.
Want to get good financial advice? Do the same thing with financial advisors. Looking for good fitness advice? Do the same with fitness trainers or nutritionists. Looking for good software engineering advice? Do the same thing with developers.
Eventually the day will come when you have learnt and grown so much, that you are just as capable as the "highly regarded" experts. When that day comes, feel free to debate the merits of their arguments. But until then, don't try to be an expert at everything. Don't feel pressured to derive every single thing from first principles. That's just not scalable.
There are too many bullshitters in the software industry.
Years of experience helps but it's not sufficient to be a good developer. There are many terrible developers with 20+ years of experience and there are some great developers with only 10 years of experience.
The number one characteristic that makes a developer great is their critical thinking ability.
These developers don't blindly adopt tools and business processes based on popularity. They are always able to justify their decisions with strong arguments which convincingly explain why their chosen option is better than all the other possible options. This applies to every decision they make.
Writing software is more like chess than checkers - You need to consider every reasonable option many steps ahead.
IMO software development is a complex area - Following common industry patterns and best practices without thinking about whether or not they actually apply to your particular use case is almost always the wrong approach.
There are nuances in essentially every single software project which would warrant deviating from industry norms in at least some ways.
To always follow best practices blindly without questioning them or adapting them to your use case is in itself a terrible practice.
Also, the problem with trusting experts in complex domains is that the line between an expert and snake oil salesman is incredibly blurry. Sometimes even moderately skilled insiders with domain expertise don't know how to tell apart an expert from a conman.
The software industry has grown extremely fast and now the situation is that there are a huge number of highly vocal novices who pose as experts and who are silencing the real experts.
Median competency in most professions will typically be quite low. In software this is exacerbated by the high pay, which attracts a lot of charlatans, and the fact that our industry has almost no professional standards (unlike say structural engineering). I’ve never thought it was much of a problem though, because it just makes it easier for the sufficiently competent to distinguish themselves.
> Call me a cynic, but the whole "think critically and figure it out for yourself" solution is inefficient at best, harmful at worst. Global warming skepticism is exactly the kind of thing that often occurs when people trust their own judgement more than that of subject matter experts.
I don't think that's true. Lots of global warming sceptics point to some subset of experts who are themselves sceptics. Even subject matter experts have biases. If we ignored those, we'd probably still be unlikely to find many global warming sceptics who had done their own in-depth research. It seems to me that most people in this category (whether it's global warming scepticism, anti-vax, 5G death rays or something else) merely seek to confirm already held beliefs and end up rejecting the opinions of actual experts in favour of misinformation from the kinds of people the blog post is talking about.
Beyond that there are also people with deeper issues than just a disregard for subject matter experts. If you look to extremes (e.g. flat Earth believers), some won't change their mind even when they do the experiments themselves and find proof to the contrary.
> Lots of global warming sceptics point to some subset of experts who are themselves sceptics
Yes, this is exactly why you should:
1. Consult more than one expert, until you've found a clear majority. And then trust in that majority
2. Pick either a couple experts who are the most highly regarded in their field. Or use random sampling to pick a couple experts from among a pool of equally qualified experts
As you yourself pointed out, people who fall for fallacies often form their own judgement first, and then cherry-pick experts to lend more support to their argument. This is precisely the danger in telling lay people to trust in their own judgement.
Cherry-picking of experts is the opposite of expert-guided decision making, because the cherry-picking part is being driven by lay judgement, not expert recommendation. A truly expert-driven approach would rely either on the most highly regarded experts, or random sampling from a pool of equally qualified experts. This leaves minimal room for cherry-picking and confirmation bias.
Knowledge from experts should feed into "think critically and figure it out", rather than replacing either with the other.
Software has an added bonus of the "works or doesn't" test, so it's easier to (in)validate the results of that thinking than, say, something on the scale of a planet and decades.
>> Software has an added bonus of the "works or doesn't" test,
This is true, but I think the new problem that our industry is facing now is "How much effort and how many resources are required to make this software work" - This leaves a lot of room for manipulation and people do exploit it in most companies (especially large corporations). These are many tech companies these days where it takes 20 developers to produce results which could in fact have been done by just 1 developer in the same amount of time. I'm not exaggerating the numbers here.
I think the problem lies in perverse corporate incentives (or rather, the absence of meaningful incentives) and the way in which it affects how people pick their battles. Most employees pick all the wrong battles for all the wrong reasons.
The more money a company has and the more solid their monopoly is, the more employees will be focused on internal politics rather than value production.
> with minimal effort on your part. Want to get good medical advice? Find two highly regarded medical specialists and ask them independently for a diagnosis and treatment plan. Not two doctors next door. Not two doctors who published random blogs. Two doctors who are highly regarded by their peers and by the wider industry.
This is a tangent, but I'm currently in the situation where I really need to find these two doctors, after years of suffering from a rare (combination of) medical issues. I've been searching for a doctor who has experience with treating my (or similar) conditions, for decades now, and I just can't seem to find it. Meanwhile, my problems become more and more disturbing, with me being unable to work anymore in the near future.
So please, if you know how to find the "highly regarder medical specialists", please tell me. Especially if it would take "minimal effort", because I'm steadily losing strength and soon the minimal effort will be the most I can exert.
Clearly it was an general example with limited life application. The expert doctor problem is a good example of this. So is the expert financial advisor, etc.
In your case I would ask doctors for doctors recommendations, and test alternatives - through recommendation only - outside of the common doctor. The former since doctors know other doctors, the latter due to most alternatives being non invasive, and with no side effects except the perpetual disappointment you've experienced so far.
Many of us were told growing up that we were a special snowflake. Not sure there's correlation (not sure how you'd prove it), but I have my suspicions. IMO we're in the age of individualism. Hopefully it's just a cycle.
The real kicker is it seems to be self-fulfilling. If experts are no longer trusted or respected, the market / margin for expertise shrinks. You get lots of self-proclaimed experts to fill in the gaps with less investment (lower margin == lower investment, clickbait), and then the individual is justified in thinking most expertise is crap... because it is now crap (advertiser supported business model).
Maybe we wake up some day and say "Holy shit, it's all just bullshit!" and then expertise can again attract an audience that's willing to pay for it.
You can always rely on the Lindy effect in times like these. Except for technical books, I try not to read any book that have been published in the last 20 years.
Old books that are still read will continue to be relevant while the current NYT best seller is more likely to fall into obscurity.
Humans have only been writing software for less than a century, mostly the last 50 years. That's nothing like other professions like blacksmithing or writing. It will take centuries until people learn how to write software well.
> Global warming skepticism is exactly the kind of thing that often occurs when people trust their own judgement more than that of subject matter experts.
Except that the "subject matter experts" have a horrible track record. Also, global warming proponents misrepresent the skepticism. Nobody is really questioning the warming of the earth. People are questioning how much man is responsible for it. After all, the "globe" has been warming for thousands of years before industrialization. There are "subject matter experts" who believe the warming is mostly a natural phenomenon. There are even fringe "subject matter experts" who believe the earth will cool. You aren't a cynic, you are just agenda driven.
> Want to get good medical advice? Find two highly regarded medical specialists and ask them independently for a diagnosis and treatment plan.
Where and which ones? The one's that say you don't need to wear masks or the one's that say you need to wear masks?
I won't bother with the rest. All you are saying is believe and trust authority. But the problem with that was a time when "experts" believed in global cooling, medical experts believed in blood letting, political experts believe in racism, financial experts believe in subprime loan derivatives, etc. Blindly believing authority also tends to cause a lot of problem. The problem with the "experts" in your list is that it has become so politicized and corporaticized that one has to be skeptical by default.
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.
Since we're arguing by aphorism, Brandolini's law a/k/a bullshit asymmetry principle: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
But seriously I hate working with non self critical developers because it’s exhausting trying to refute what they say. Although “asking questions” can help.
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.
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]
It's a shame that it's now cool to hate on Java nowadays. It's still a great language to design web applications in, especially now with the newer releases and all the amazing features they put in. I will never understand why things like JavaScript are being used in the back end...
I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit.
I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on.
Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and modifying a little and trying to get lots back links. I remember when Quora had quality content, now everything is sales pitch. I feel like people are not trying to create quality content, they are trying to sell and to sell you need more back links.
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 source code files embedded as GitHub gists one file at a time. I just want to skip to the documentation and get to work.
The truly worrying development is when those same Medium posts start circling HN.
I’m not trying to be elitist, but what I enjoy about HN is seeing truly novel and interesting content, and every “crappy” article on the front page bumps an interesting one downwards into oblivion.
In my experience this is particularly egregious when trying to compare frameworks and libraries in the JS ecosystem. The posts usually boil down to “I wrote a hello world with X and Y, here are my thoughts”, or worse, “I wrote a hello world with X, didn’t even bother to write it with Y, here are my thoughts on why X is awesome and Y sucks”, or worse still, “I wrote a hello world with X, didn’t even bother to write it with Y, here are my thoughts on why X is awesome and Y sucks, and I’ll pretend I have ten years of experience with each.”
Ugh. I cringe every time I have an actual, non-trivial, issue or fairly technical question about whatever I'm working on lately.
I remember feeling it while I was working with Swift (50 articles titled: "What is a Protocol?" Give me a break!) and lately I keep running into all kinds of bizarre, complicated behaviors with Jackson in my Kotlin project. It's a new kind of hell to sift through every article that describes the "hello, world" of writing a single data class and having Jackson magically turn it into JSON.
P.S., if you can avoid mixing Jackson with Kotlin, save yourself the trouble.
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 curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little.
...
There is no greater mistake than to suppose that the last work is always the more correct; that what is written later on is in every case an improvement on what was written before; and that change always means progress....
If the reader wishes to study any subject, let him beware of rushing to the newest books upon it, and confining his attention to them alone, under the notion that science is always advancing, and that the old books have been drawn upon in the writing of the new. They have been drawn upon, it is true; but how? The writer of the new book often does not understand the old books thoroughly, and yet he is unwilling to take their exact words; so he bungles them, and says in his own bad way that which has been said very much better and more clearly by the old writers, who wrote from their own lively knowledge of the subject....
It often happens that an old and excellent book is ousted by new and bad ones, which, written for money, appear with an air of great pretension and much puffing on the part of friends. In science a man tries to make his mark by bringing out something fresh. This often means nothing more than that he attacks some received theory which is quite correct, in order to make room for his own false notions. Sometimes the effort is successful for a time; and then a return is made to the old and true theory. These innovators are serious about nothing but their own precious self: it is this that they want to put forward, and the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to start a paradox. ... Hence it frequently happens that the course of science is retrogressive.
This drives me crazy! I hate searching for documentation and the top results are blogs containing outdated copy and paste of the official docs with some witty text and gifs.
As a programmer with some 20 years of experience who likes to write tutorials on original research and techniques — you can pry my animated gifs out of my cold dead fingers! All my life I waited for broadband to be widespread enough to write articles with rich embedded animations.
And yes, sometimes they only serve the purpose of entertainment or emotional tone setting. Other times they’re actual part of the content.
Gifs are great
Edit: you downvote and yet I often get comments appreaciating how the gifs make my 2000 word emails feel like a quick short read.
> Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial...
It's almost like trying to find recipes on the internet in the age of SEO and 'personal brand building'.
To get to the content you want (ingredients and method), you have to scroll through a mess of unrelated, low quality, insincere blog-like content with pictures etc..
When you actually find the recipe, half the method (always the bits you don't bloody know) is interwoven into the irritating blog content or on a separate 'blog' entry page entirely.
By the time you realise there's nothing of value and decide to turn back, it's too late; they've already won. You've given them a page view, interacted with the site, and maybe their ads have loaded, too.
At least you can find good cookbooks in op shops! Tech books are great, but they're not always the best resource when you're curious about a tool and want something like an implementation or configuration guide, or a post-implementation review.
I have random blogs to thank for clear guides with great explanations on implementing and configuring loads of things, like early versions of webpack. It seems that in only a few years, quality content has rapidly become so much harder to find amidst the mass of low quality SEO bait.
That's an interesting, albeit selfish, perspective.
Experienced developers usually aren't busy writing blog posts. Nor are they engaged on HN. As the old saying goes, those who can are out doing, those who can't `teach'.
This touched a nerve, but sorry it's spot on. The more faltering the career, the less certain the skills, the more likely the person has a vigorous social media and blog presence.
Maybe I'm so used to it for programming queries, but I've gotten back into electronics and ham radio after a long time, and have always dreamed of owning a decent oscilloscope. Googling 'good digital hobbyist oscilloscope' just now was a frustrating waste of time. It's just pages and pages of regurgitated specs and affiliate links, no useful _actual_ reviews or anything...
Take this top 10 result. It's on Medium which is new and hip and nice so must be of high quality...
Oh cool, hmm ok - what else does the author write about? "Things to consider before buying a camera for hunting" - "Drug Rehab for Married Couples" - <<Several>> Reviews for a particular line of vaccum cleaner, Baltimore Security Cameras and Interior Design in India. I mean sure they could genuinely have diverse interests and a chaotic and international personal life - but these articles are just keyword stuffing for another bunch of 'content' that will helpfully let you 'check the price on Amazon' for just about anything...
Even though I generally prefer reading to watching, I've found in the past few years that YouTube is better for reviews, and I think it's actually because of this.
If you don't actually recognize the channel, you can usually tell if it's worthwhile by subscriber count, the other (types of) videos they've posted, and usually just by watching for tens of seconds. Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs), and you can judge their bias appropriately. Plus for many things, seeing it in action is much, much better than written descriptions or (carefully chosen) pictures.
For example, it's hard to disguise a crappy oscilloscope UI in a video (and if the reviewer doesn't show that, be suspicious!)
> Best Oscilloscopes are not a common field where people would choose to spend their spare time relaxing. However, analyzing and measuring signals might be an interesting fact for most engineers or people looking for complexity, isn’t it? That’s what we actually thought about before doing our research.
Reads like it went through Google translate twice.
Some search hits are deeper than others. Specifically, forums. EEVblog comes to mind. Figure out the spectrum of specific brands/models, then read and watch some reviews.
That Medium page on is hilarious! I recommend it if you are into oscilloscopes and want a laugh. My favorite parts are the opening paragraphs and the list of Key Points for each scope, which include:
• Available only in Grey. [Rigol]
• The color available is Grey. [Siglent]
• The devices comes only in blue. [LIUMY]
Yes, one of the main things I look for in a scope is what color it comes in!
• Works with both laptop and desktop PC. [Hantek]
Uh, why would any USB device not work with both a laptop and desktop PC?
Or when you want to compare two products and the top result(s) are just auto-generated pages that dump the stats/spec of each product side by side. I hate that so much. I want to read what a human who has tried both thinks.
There was a time when searching for "A vs B" produced useful results. Nowadays a search like this is completely useless. I wish those auto-generated sites would completely disappear from the search results.
This and the fact that Google search is actually as dumb as a sackful of hammers.
Don't get me wrong, for the longest time Google's results were "good enough", but Google has no real concept of the quality of a result (they've tried and it worked for a while - e.g., PageRank). Still, fundamentally their algorithms aren't smart enough to figure out whether any given piece of content is intrinsically worthwhile.
That's really important in a world where most content is, regardless of Google's guidelines, primarily written for the benefit of GoogleBot, to harvest clicks or drive traffic.
Unfortunately Google has literally zero incentive to change this situation (because they're making an insane amount of money off the back of the status quo), so they won't[1].
Logically then, the time is ripe for a new search engine to disrupt but the problem - that of determining intrinsic worth - is really hard to solve, so as yet nobody has, and Google still reigns supreme as the most popular search engine.
[1] It is also possible that I'm being too harsh here: they might be trying to change it - perhaps because they're worried about eventually being disrupted - but, as noted in the following paragraph, the problem is REALLY hard.
> Logically then, the time is ripe for a new search engine to disrupt but the problem - that of determining intrinsic worth - is really hard to solve, so as yet nobody has
I'm sort-of trying to solve this with a recommender system approach.[1] Search isn't my primary objective; I'm mainly focusing on the case where you want to be made aware of relevant information on an ongoing basis but you aren't necessarily looking for something specific.
But that involves building up a ratings database of lots of different URLs. If it becomes really popular, I'd like to experiment with search. It could start with a "normal" search algorithm but then adjust the results based on rating data. E.g. "the top result for this query is X, but people with similar rating data to you always down vote that link, so we'll move that result down".
I've heard people complain about how Google gives you personalized search results sometimes, but I'm not sure if the approach is actually bad. Perhaps it could work if it was focused on from the start instead of bolted on.
What I don't get is how SEO isn't countered by unvisiting... By which I mean navigating back to the google search, I always assumed that would be a clear indicator to google that it's not what the user was looking for.
Maybe this does happen but it not weighted highly enough against SEO.
Or those fake how-to tutorial pages. Often when I’m looking up, say, error codes in Windows, I need to wade through pages of “Step 1: Download the MyNewFreeComputerCleaner.biz app”
after working at couple of startups, I also noticed worrying trend.
* 21 years old marketer writing about life crisis in 40s
* fashion blogger explaining is Teflon harmful or not (come on, fashion and chemistry?)
* 18 years old student who never immigrated to another country or studied abroad writing about how difficult is immigrant life and what to look for in different country and many more similar content.
The internet is a big bucket where everyone drops all sorts of stuff in. Some people drop in gold nuggets, sometimes even diamonds, many other people drop in less valuable materials, and some dump in a torrent of bodily fluids.
Our current solution is to rely on magical black box algorithms to give us the diamonds, but it's been creaking for a while.
I'm not sure how to make this better: one person's turd is another person's diamond, and people trying to game the system will always be a problem.
Old school links might be a solution. I remember back in the day those blog websites which contained "links" page to the websites that owner likes and recommends. It's true P2P solution and does not require anything to invent. If you own a website and know some rare but valuable gems, just share them. Someone will find them. I think that's how Internet should really work.
As a side effect, it should really help Google and other search engines to rank those websites. External links of good quality still the best SEO.
Honestly, I wish I could just remove commercial results from google as part of the query. Some terms are essentially now useless because the first N pages are just ecom sites. Google definitely knows which sites are commercial because they’ve been pushing product metadata for about a decade now and serve ads for the same clients....
Of all the people who got all excited that the internet would "democratize information," most seemed to be thinking on the demand side. And it did come to pass, but very few seem to have anticipated that it would democratize the supply side too. Turns out the much-maligned elitism and gatekeeping of the past were actually performing (with imperfect fairness perhaps) the quality-control function they always purported to be performing.
> Turns out the much-maligned elitism and gatekeeping of the past were actually performing (with imperfect fairness perhaps) the quality-control function they always purported to be performing.
Do you have an example? I’m getting strong “century of the self” vibes from this post.
If you’re referring to “fake news”, you should also acknowledge that the current protests across the nation would not exist at all without social media. People who want to characterize the effects as monolithically positive or negative leave me scratching my head, and I certainly don’t want to return to getting all my news via AP.
My solution for this problem:
1) stop trying to learn from random blogs, get a book. Books are still out there and you can learn just as good from them now as 20 years ago.
2) Get a subset of blogs to follow and stick to it. If you want to search in specific sites google has "site:" operator, you can search on specific sites.
3) by following 1 and 2 you can easily stop visiting shitty blogs made only for SEO, when they won't see any traffic they will fold because they will see no one is caring about what they write.
I am in process of implementing that. Got some books from humble bundle in topic that I am interested in, so no browsing crap until I get through those.
The main reason books are better is because they are harder to write and produce. The person making the book actually has to invest a lot of their time in making it happen, unlike a blog post.
I've seen lots of articles on hacker news (and other places) that is "PART 1 of..." which does the introduction to what they plan on teaching, and then it just dies right there in the land of "PART 1's"
With a book, if you stop at part 1, no one is going to publish your book.
Another thing about books/web, is books go MUCH deeper into topics. It seems like 99% of the content on the web is "INTRO to xyz" but never "Advanced xyz"
Books are also broken into logical section so you have a learning path you can progress through; not just random content that you are to piece together yourself.
So, yes, very good advice; if you want to learn something, read the book.
blog posts are more just advertisements for buying an actual book.
Unfortunately today a lot of the good content is hosted on the same domains as the terrible content. This is one of the many great downsides to content centralization.
If I read a really great piece of tech content it's not going to help me to use that domain in a site: query later when it's so often going to be medium.com or dev.to (which is starting to fill up with this same kind of bullshit content in the article).
I think the solution (or at least a big part of it) is the resurgence of real blogs. When real developers write deeply technical posts about their experiences, on their own sites, everybody wins. Discovery is an issue, but there have been a number of HN threads recently on ways to mitigate this. Webrings, blogrolls, RSS... there was never going to be a super-convenient or efficient way to generate a high-quality, high signal-to-noise ratio set of sources. But curating your own preferred set of such sites, and making a habit of taking and publishing dev notes on your projects, and participating in the blog revival, is a step in the right direction.
IMHO the worst is that lot of young people actually consume, like and share that SEO/marketing stuff and spread it around without much thoughts. That’s the most popular dev content you will find on dev.to, medium, YouTube (for some reasons dev related videos became huge last year), and other publishing platforms. They don’t just generate useless content, they in fact have a public for it, thus little reason to stop.
My life became a lot better when I stopped reading towards data science (on Medium). It was just so much terrible tutorial content which was not only wrong, but actively misleading.
It is an even bigger problem when searching for advanced/niche concepts: try searching for Redis and Cloudwatch (not Elasticache, plain Redis) and you will get generic AWS docs and "How to get started with Redis" posts.
And social media (including LinkedIn). There are many tech firms who hire marketers to write tech content for other marketers and potential clients as an advertising and brand-building strategy.
I think this problem expands to tech meetups. It is very difficult to find a quality meetup. Most people never used the tech and the presenters make gross errors. Most recent I remember was a person trying to explain why GraphQL is good for APIs, while showing code with crazy N+1s. Certainly didn't convince me.
I'm not saying everyone should be an expert, but I would want the whole spectrum of experience represented. Now I don't invest time in meetups any more.
Meetups cater almost exclusively to younger people who want to learn something and socialize.
I don't think it is particularly wrong, but more experienced people tend to be older and less likely to have inclination or time to prepare talk or go to pub every week or so.
It feels like if you changed the nouns we could be talking about movies. We are, some of us at least, on our guard when a movie has a huge advertising spend because we have been burned by movies where, "all the best parts were in the preview".
Do you think it would be possible for us to have any transparency into how hard a web page has been 'advertised' and use that to inform our decision processes? I've no idea what that would even look like.
"Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and modifying a little and trying to get lots (of) back links."
That's the real problem. There is a market for short-form clickbait crap. One can make a living writing that. There is not much of a market for long-form accurate technical material.
Confluent's marketing content for Kafka does an amazing job of making Kafka sound like the solution for every problem. I have a hard to understanding what it can actually do because the content is stuffed with so much selling and adjectives.
To paraphrase Gary Larson, "We know it is bullshit, but what kind of bullshit?"[1]
Marketing is fact mixed with coercion.
But this is about plagiarism.
The author of the article, in just under 800 words, is addressing the "copypasta" nature of a specific discipline: programming. I like the author's characterization of lazy or necessary plagiarism as "consumer" mentality. That's an interesting twist.
Was this not the 1970's American Auto Industry attempting to implement Japan's earliest implementation of lean manufacturing? Is the same to be said of any "ripoff" product that cheaply imitates the original: e.g., an off-brand version of an Eames Lounger, or cheaply made webcam off Amazon which is a faulty copy of a Logitech?
His observation is a reflection of complex constraints, and while I completely agree individuals should strive for a deep understanding and mastery of what they spend their lives doing, as it benefits us all directly or indirectly by making us conscious citizens (my opinion), I think this is a largely metaphysical reflection lacking contextual nuance rather than a call to action: we've all been in the shoes of his hypothetical individual committing the sin of programmer consumerism, and for good reason.
However, I do appreciate the clarity his transformation applies to a scenario we are all intimately engaged in.
[1] "We know they are idiots, the question is, 'What kind of idiots?'"
I 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.
Yep. I've read a lot of medium articles that have zero actual substance and are just pharaphrasing a different article. Or, they are advocating for an objectively bad principle that the first SO result says is not optimal...
I’ve thought about this. If I had to paint a metaphor, it’s akin to a tech selfie. Hi, I was here, using X technology (holds up blog post camera, points it at self standing next to the location/celebrity). Rinse and repeat, document your travels, it’s part of the modern melancholy, the extension of the self in a variety of superficial virtual forms.
What’s the main problem with this in the tech community? We need a lot of credible content that is downright technical. It hurts our community if we let the modern condition permeate into this domain too much.
Do you have any suggestions for blogs that come from a perspective of a learner, rather than a teacher? I feel like DevLogs in the game dev corner could be an example of that.
That's pretty much what I was thinking of haha. I like watching game devlogs too.
None come immediately to mind but I've definitely come across some before on the web. Basically they kind of go "here is my problem, here's what I tried first, that didn't quite work so I tried that, but then I learnt about super_mega_amazing_tech and I wrote my code like this and it seems to work."
I find those kind of things quite interesting to at least skim through if not read in full if it's well-written.
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 2016, for example, not realizing we were just seeing the wave form when I felt like it was cresting.
> 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.
I think that's a really sad and cynical view. I assume you don't spend 16 hours a day writing code. I assume you have hobbies and other interests. For some people, educating others about their favorite topics is their hobby. Writing about their projects is their hobby.
Obviously the people who write for fb or airbnb or netflix might well be professional tech bloggers or people in tech-leadership positions that tell other people how to do the work. Or even researchers (I see the last one appear in ms tech blogs a lot). Or it might have been heavily edited. Brendan Gregg is a professional tech author. Not a hobbyist. Mr Vogels is a CTO, far from a programmer. That's not to disrespect any of their content. In fact i think its great that companies bother with it and that we have so many tech authors willing to put in the hours it takes to come up with something sellable. Arguably the people writing such things put their companies rep on the line so should be more trusted than the average grunt programmer who is still on the implementation level. But if these are the best counterexamples we can find, then I'd say OP has a point. That's not to say coders don't write blogs, I've written a few technical blogs myself and I am very much on the implementation level. But that's not something people will actually read because it's pretty low effort and not about work stuff (every work contract has a secrecy clause these days).
That there is a certain number of engineers who have a mix of talent and resources (=time), so that they can exercise software engineering and high quality technical writing?
They are an exception. Almost all the engineers I know (with one exception), who also have a regular life (roughly 40 hours engineering/week), have little time to dedicate to technical writing. As a consequence, it's not unreasonable to state that, in general and in practice, software engineering and (regular) technical writing are mutually exclusive.
I assume company blogs have a process where you have approval over what you write, both before and after the article is written. To this end (more so if the author has "evangelist" in their job title) the writing is a function of their job, and not a hobby.
Not sure if the blogs from tech companies can really count here. Those articles are made with the company's interest in mind, typically to boost recruiting. In my experience, they are always written on company 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.
Not only this, but the most accurate business advice tends to be too boring to attract views and clicks anyway.
Link-sharing sites favor controversial opinions and stances that make the reader feel superior to their peers, so that's what the content producers deliver.
>>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.
This is one of the most poisonous attitudes I have ever seen when it comes to tech content, and unfortunately it is really prevalent in the largest tech companies.
No wonder nearly all the documentation created by the tech giants is complete garbage and often out of date, with almost zero regard for people who actually read the documentation.
> No wonder nearly all the documentation created by the tech giants is complete garbage and often out of date, with almost zero regard for people who actually read the documentation.
A natural consequence of documentation being a "good beginner task" in open source or being assigned to whoever cannot get out of it on the project team.
This might be true for some, but certainly not all.
There are plenty talented, productive people also writing articles and giving talks. Hell, most of what I watch/read (not just skim) is content either from the main drivers of a given tech or people who are experts.
This is definitely true - I have been told by many respected people over the years that I should start a blog since I have a lot of interesting thoughts on subjects, but a lot of the issue to me is that I have a tendency to want to shape the tech the way I want for a blog, which leads to endless bikeshedding, and it's not as rewarding for me for the effort compared to doing more higher value things for work such as creating unplanned projects to solve work pains, planning other projects, figuring out new solutions to problems encountered at work, or mentoring other developers.
I have a tendency to drop my nuggets of wisdom/analysis in chatrooms in Discord and Slack (and IRC prior) and let others adopt/evangelize them on their own if it makes sense for them to. I'm ok being in the background while my true value is appreciated by those who matter for my own career.
Disagree. When I do work, I’m super excited and can’t help but want to share. I know lots of people that have a similar outlook to work that brings them joy. It lights you up and you want others to share in that light.
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.
Do you code 16 hours every day? Or do you do other things with your time in addition to coding? It's possible to spend your "free time" writing about coding instead of writing code. Humans can do both well if they choose to.
I know many people who do great work and talk about it. The work is hard and getting to speak about it at a conference or write a well-received blog post is their preferred kind of reward.
>> 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.
I can't really agree with this. I think it's worth noting that writing about something you have just learned is a really good way to solidify that knowledge, especially if you are able to get feedback from others. So a lot of people deliberately set aside the time to do it, even if it comes at the expense of greater levels of productivity.
I basically realized this when I was at an internship talking to a buddy about a compilers course I could be taking and his language he was making for fun. He was talking about a couple topics I'd probably go over in the course.
Then a more senior coworker came over to join the convo and mentioned a few similar words that were clearly jargon related to compilers etc. He spoke with such confidence that I didn't want to admit I didn't know about them, but figured I shouldn't be ashamed at not knowing stuff. I asked him what it meant and he said he didn't really know and wasn't entirely sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I once mentioned off-hand that I was a SIGPLAN member so that I could get the proceedings and learn about future tech in compilers and JITs and GC.
One person did a double-take, looked at me, and said, "You can understand those?" I knew exactly what he meant, and consoled him by saying "only about 2/3rds," at which point all of the tension drained out of his shoulders. I had communicated that yes, some of it is just bullshit not fit for consumption, and that he was not an idiot.
As a Feynman dilettante, if you can't have a human conversation about a subject (note: conversation, not 'curing cancer'/winning the Nobel) then you don't really know the subject. Or perhaps more generously: It doesn't matter if you know it because you can't pass that knowledge on. You are dead end as far as human progress is concerned.
I suspect Tech people feel this more than pure researchers, because we know that in a couple years we will be focusing on something else, and 5 years at most we will be gone. If we haven't passed on our knowledge, then there will be consequences that are readily apparent. In academia you get so many opportunities to connect and if you connect with 5 people, you probably feel like your work is done, and you forget about people like me who regret ever encountering certain teachers because they set me back or in one case, put me off a course I believed I would stay to the end.
Me, I have 10-15 people not of my choosing and I have to connect with 2 and 1/2 of them. It's a tempest in a teapot.
I've noticed that "I have no idea" as an answer is one of the boldest statements you can make in the workplace.
Most people are playing fake it till you make it most of the time (until shit hits the fan, then incompetence becomes dangerous and you get to see who's been swimming naked)
You and your senior coworker are allowed to not know things, and furthermore, allowed to talk about things that you don't know much about.
Was your role or the senior person's role related to compilers? You don't have to authoritatively know something to talk about it, and I never assume anyone knows anything authoritatively if they talk about it nonchalantly.
Readit News
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. I remember this sort of was true in the PHP documentation. The official documentation was always deeply flawed, but the comment thread attached to that documentation generally had the right info.
But that was a precursor to our current situation. To get correct info you had to read a lot of conflicting info and synthesis it yourself.
So I think we are seeing as good as the free ecosystem can get and what's sad is that we seem to have lost the paid ecosystem. It's not nearly as strong as it used to be.
What people probably don't know about O'Reilly back in the day is what went into a book.
The author was almost always a subject matter expert already. And their editor was also a subject matter expert. Then the book would go through tech review and those people were generally also pedantic luminaries. Then the book would be published and bugs would come into an errata tracking system. The vast majority of those bugs would get fixed between printings.
And then, on top of all that, there was a tech support number. And if the code in the book wasn't working for you, then you could get a live person to try to work through it with you.
That all costs a lot of money, but when you split the cost out across consumers it was only $30 or so per book.
I value my time. And there are many, many places where I wish I could pay for quality. Tech content is one of them.
I'm a big fan of books because that is where a lot of experts seem to prefer to publish their knowledge, and it's usually worth the price. Of course that's not always the case, but I feel like I get much higher quality content from books than Medium articles.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
Stack Overflow is great for quick reference to small questions.
The only ones I can say, that I’ve also read, are YDKJS and Secrets JavaScript Ninja (work in web, but willing to read anything, good information is good information regardless of the tech).
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I had a Safari Books subscription for a little while, but I got rid of it. I can't remember the exact pricing, but IIRC it was around $250 / year for the cheap option that let me "borrow" 10 books a month. The problem for me was that I'd typically buy 2-3 books per year ($100-$150) and I owned more than 10 books total, so the subscription seemed like a bad deal by comparison. The "unlimited" (with limited downloads IIRC) was $500+ / year. That's a lot of books.
O'Reilly could have been the Spotify of tech books, but old school publishers were too scared to reassess their pricing. When the cost of distribution plummets, but results in a worse (ie: more expensive), product for your customers, it's not a shock to see those businesses struggle IMO, especially when the competition is free and "good enough".
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 since then.
Really, there's not much of a reason to have physical programming books anymore; it's just not practical, whatever the level of quality you get elsewhere. And you seem to have left out official documentation and stuff, which is getting really good imo.
The only reason for having a physical programming book is for totally timeless ideas, like algorithms and data structures textbooks, or introductory books to concepts like compilers.
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.
For me it comes down to scale. The chances I find precisely what I'm looking for on stack overflow is much higher than even the best curated content of all kind, just because SO is much bigger.
I can't talk about book publishers like O'Really, and probably the market for books shrank. But I have several competitors that sell self published ebooks.
The plethora of free content you find online is not always a good thing for everyone. As the author of the article says, most tech content is bullshit. Most people don't care, but there are plenty of people that realize that and are willing to pay.
I’ve never been so productive as I was in those days. Good quality documentation and no distractions. A golden age that we didn’t even know we were in. The modern development paradigm is a dumpster fire in comparison. Thanks for the good work you did back then producing those materials.
Having been involved in publishing tech books, that is a beautiful way of describing tech reviewers.
I too miss the paid ecosystem. And not just in tech books. Music too. Paying someone for curation had definite value to me.
It may well be a bad habit, but I frequently don't learn new technologies through a concerted effort. Instead, there's just something I want to do, and I google it, and after doing that a bunch I eventually learn a lot.
And yes, books not being searchable is basically THE reason I never use programming books.
The problem is that "timely" bit.
A good book take 3-6 months to write, edit, review, and publish.
In that time we could have as many releases with the info in the book radically out of date.
Only solution is to go online, but that doesn't help the traditional write/edit/review cycle much.
Things change so fast, I don't see much option to Stack Overflow... Not really.
Nowadays anyone can publish a book on Amazon, digitally and get published. It's reflected a lot in their Kindle bookstore.
Sometimes, having a good barrier to entry, brings out the best and the most dedicated.
Dead Comment
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 situation. You may not be working on soft real time systems. You may not be working with big data. You may not be running a company.
I should know—I'm certainly guilty of assuming that because I read about software development, I'm a better software developer. When really there's a big big big difference between reading about development and actually practicing the craft. Especially if you've only been programming casually. There's a massive difference between writing code for fun and writing code that needs to be a value-add for the company.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogi_Bear
Quiet, or at-arms-length, dismissal hurts self-confidence and reinforces this blogpost-driven defense mechanism.
They also often drive away any possibility of meaty conversation because everyone worth hearing from is drowning under a sea of underinformed responses written in a way that sounds like a convincing in-depth discussion to the even less informed passerbys.
I'm no sage, but it doesn't take a genius to see when Hacker News and /r/programming get swept away by a new silver bullet in software development. Then we all have to wait years before the enthusiastic youngsters are ready to hear a realistic conversation about the prima facie limitations of the new magic beans.
I try to take their opinions with a grain of salt and find my own balance of considerations/tradeoffs. A common sentiment between them that I agree with is that software is a lot of commercial software is often an order of magnitude too slow in important places and that object oriented programming is almost always taken far too far.
I also look up to a few senior programmers I work with who have in-the-same-ballpark values as them.
On a whole, I think reading and listening to them has made me a better developer than if I just fumbled around to draw my own opinions completely from scratch.
I think being that type of young dev is probably fine so long as you keep your dogmatism and humility in check, and ensure your mentors are a spread of different individuals.
I think that's better than other young devs not seeking out information to try and grow.
I have a fair amount of respect for game developers. However at the same time I feel they can make the assumption that all development should follow their practices. That everybody should be writing in C++/Zig/Jai/Rust, using data oriented programming and avoiding objects like the plague. That if other developers were just smart enough they'd make everything ridiculously fast and awesome. Not every game developer thinks this way, obviously, but there is a subset.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes all developers have the same priorities. In actuality game development is an extremely rare area where there are close-to real time requirements. Not painting the screen every 1/24th of a second is a disaster in game dev. Meanwhile GitHub uses Rails in all of its object oriented, garbage collected, interpreted horror. And nobody cares!
I suspect if a troop of elite game developers were dropped into your average web development job, they'd spend an unreasonable amount of time optimizing perf, only to have their lunch eaten by someone who focused on user facing issues. Not that web development is hard or anything. It's just a different set of requirements.
Watching jblow et al is definitely great! But there might be a point where you're put on a team using OOP and asking them to refactor to DOP with bulk allocation because you gotta get that cache utilization will just earn you stares and no buy-in. Or you might be running a startup and realize that all the time you spent getting all requests under 100ms could have been spent writing features.
I believe a lot of people (myself included) don't realize they read a lot of blog posts and articles about a topic they are interested in, but have no time trying out, and feel they know something about the subject when most of these articles are copying each other to gain popularity.
There are very effective ways to get high quality recommendations, with minimal effort on your part. Want to get good medical advice? Find two highly regarded medical specialists and ask them independently for a diagnosis and treatment plan. Not two doctors next door. Not two doctors who published random blogs. Two doctors who are highly regarded by their peers and by the wider industry.
Want to get good financial advice? Do the same thing with financial advisors. Looking for good fitness advice? Do the same with fitness trainers or nutritionists. Looking for good software engineering advice? Do the same thing with developers.
Eventually the day will come when you have learnt and grown so much, that you are just as capable as the "highly regarded" experts. When that day comes, feel free to debate the merits of their arguments. But until then, don't try to be an expert at everything. Don't feel pressured to derive every single thing from first principles. That's just not scalable.
The number one characteristic that makes a developer great is their critical thinking ability. These developers don't blindly adopt tools and business processes based on popularity. They are always able to justify their decisions with strong arguments which convincingly explain why their chosen option is better than all the other possible options. This applies to every decision they make.
Writing software is more like chess than checkers - You need to consider every reasonable option many steps ahead.
IMO software development is a complex area - Following common industry patterns and best practices without thinking about whether or not they actually apply to your particular use case is almost always the wrong approach. There are nuances in essentially every single software project which would warrant deviating from industry norms in at least some ways.
To always follow best practices blindly without questioning them or adapting them to your use case is in itself a terrible practice.
Also, the problem with trusting experts in complex domains is that the line between an expert and snake oil salesman is incredibly blurry. Sometimes even moderately skilled insiders with domain expertise don't know how to tell apart an expert from a conman.
The software industry has grown extremely fast and now the situation is that there are a huge number of highly vocal novices who pose as experts and who are silencing the real experts.
I don't think that's true. Lots of global warming sceptics point to some subset of experts who are themselves sceptics. Even subject matter experts have biases. If we ignored those, we'd probably still be unlikely to find many global warming sceptics who had done their own in-depth research. It seems to me that most people in this category (whether it's global warming scepticism, anti-vax, 5G death rays or something else) merely seek to confirm already held beliefs and end up rejecting the opinions of actual experts in favour of misinformation from the kinds of people the blog post is talking about.
Beyond that there are also people with deeper issues than just a disregard for subject matter experts. If you look to extremes (e.g. flat Earth believers), some won't change their mind even when they do the experiments themselves and find proof to the contrary.
Yes, this is exactly why you should:
1. Consult more than one expert, until you've found a clear majority. And then trust in that majority
2. Pick either a couple experts who are the most highly regarded in their field. Or use random sampling to pick a couple experts from among a pool of equally qualified experts
As you yourself pointed out, people who fall for fallacies often form their own judgement first, and then cherry-pick experts to lend more support to their argument. This is precisely the danger in telling lay people to trust in their own judgement.
Cherry-picking of experts is the opposite of expert-guided decision making, because the cherry-picking part is being driven by lay judgement, not expert recommendation. A truly expert-driven approach would rely either on the most highly regarded experts, or random sampling from a pool of equally qualified experts. This leaves minimal room for cherry-picking and confirmation bias.
Knowledge from experts should feed into "think critically and figure it out", rather than replacing either with the other.
Software has an added bonus of the "works or doesn't" test, so it's easier to (in)validate the results of that thinking than, say, something on the scale of a planet and decades.
This is true, but I think the new problem that our industry is facing now is "How much effort and how many resources are required to make this software work" - This leaves a lot of room for manipulation and people do exploit it in most companies (especially large corporations). These are many tech companies these days where it takes 20 developers to produce results which could in fact have been done by just 1 developer in the same amount of time. I'm not exaggerating the numbers here.
I think the problem lies in perverse corporate incentives (or rather, the absence of meaningful incentives) and the way in which it affects how people pick their battles. Most employees pick all the wrong battles for all the wrong reasons.
The more money a company has and the more solid their monopoly is, the more employees will be focused on internal politics rather than value production.
This is a tangent, but I'm currently in the situation where I really need to find these two doctors, after years of suffering from a rare (combination of) medical issues. I've been searching for a doctor who has experience with treating my (or similar) conditions, for decades now, and I just can't seem to find it. Meanwhile, my problems become more and more disturbing, with me being unable to work anymore in the near future.
So please, if you know how to find the "highly regarder medical specialists", please tell me. Especially if it would take "minimal effort", because I'm steadily losing strength and soon the minimal effort will be the most I can exert.
In your case I would ask doctors for doctors recommendations, and test alternatives - through recommendation only - outside of the common doctor. The former since doctors know other doctors, the latter due to most alternatives being non invasive, and with no side effects except the perpetual disappointment you've experienced so far.
The real kicker is it seems to be self-fulfilling. If experts are no longer trusted or respected, the market / margin for expertise shrinks. You get lots of self-proclaimed experts to fill in the gaps with less investment (lower margin == lower investment, clickbait), and then the individual is justified in thinking most expertise is crap... because it is now crap (advertiser supported business model).
Maybe we wake up some day and say "Holy shit, it's all just bullshit!" and then expertise can again attract an audience that's willing to pay for it.
Old books that are still read will continue to be relevant while the current NYT best seller is more likely to fall into obscurity.
> Looking for good software engineering advice? Do the same thing with developers.
Which brings us back to the OP:
> Most tech content is bullshit
So we've now come full circle. Hence I would point you to another post that came out recently that would be useful to understand what you wrote: https://nibblestew.blogspot.com/2020/04/your-statement-is-10...
50 years ago was the beginning of Unix sure but programmable computers were already 25 years old by then, and the concepts were even older.
Except that the "subject matter experts" have a horrible track record. Also, global warming proponents misrepresent the skepticism. Nobody is really questioning the warming of the earth. People are questioning how much man is responsible for it. After all, the "globe" has been warming for thousands of years before industrialization. There are "subject matter experts" who believe the warming is mostly a natural phenomenon. There are even fringe "subject matter experts" who believe the earth will cool. You aren't a cynic, you are just agenda driven.
> Want to get good medical advice? Find two highly regarded medical specialists and ask them independently for a diagnosis and treatment plan.
Where and which ones? The one's that say you don't need to wear masks or the one's that say you need to wear masks?
I won't bother with the rest. All you are saying is believe and trust authority. But the problem with that was a time when "experts" believed in global cooling, medical experts believed in blood letting, political experts believe in racism, financial experts believe in subprime loan derivatives, etc. Blindly believing authority also tends to cause a lot of problem. The problem with the "experts" in your list is that it has become so politicized and corporaticized that one has to be skeptical by default.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23417790
The value of a healthy established pedagogy, curriculum, and canon is that these distribute the bullshit-sifting role and guard and promote the jems.
But seriously I hate working with non self critical developers because it’s exhausting trying to refute what they say. Although “asking questions” can help.
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.
[0] https://blogs.oracle.com/javamagazine/book-review-archive
I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on.
Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content, but in reality copying from someone else and modifying a little and trying to get lots back links. I remember when Quora had quality content, now everything is sales pitch. I feel like people are not trying to create quality content, they are trying to sell and to sell you need more back links.
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 source code files embedded as GitHub gists one file at a time. I just want to skip to the documentation and get to work.
I’m not trying to be elitist, but what I enjoy about HN is seeing truly novel and interesting content, and every “crappy” article on the front page bumps an interesting one downwards into oblivion.
I remember feeling it while I was working with Swift (50 articles titled: "What is a Protocol?" Give me a break!) and lately I keep running into all kinds of bizarre, complicated behaviors with Jackson in my Kotlin project. It's a new kind of hell to sift through every article that describes the "hello, world" of writing a single data class and having Jackson magically turn it into JSON.
P.S., if you can avoid mixing Jackson with Kotlin, save yourself the trouble.
...
There is no greater mistake than to suppose that the last work is always the more correct; that what is written later on is in every case an improvement on what was written before; and that change always means progress....
If the reader wishes to study any subject, let him beware of rushing to the newest books upon it, and confining his attention to them alone, under the notion that science is always advancing, and that the old books have been drawn upon in the writing of the new. They have been drawn upon, it is true; but how? The writer of the new book often does not understand the old books thoroughly, and yet he is unwilling to take their exact words; so he bungles them, and says in his own bad way that which has been said very much better and more clearly by the old writers, who wrote from their own lively knowledge of the subject....
It often happens that an old and excellent book is ousted by new and bad ones, which, written for money, appear with an air of great pretension and much puffing on the part of friends. In science a man tries to make his mark by bringing out something fresh. This often means nothing more than that he attacks some received theory which is quite correct, in order to make room for his own false notions. Sometimes the effort is successful for a time; and then a return is made to the old and true theory. These innovators are serious about nothing but their own precious self: it is this that they want to put forward, and the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to start a paradox. ... Hence it frequently happens that the course of science is retrogressive.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10714/10714-h/10714-h.htm#li...
Don't forget emojis! Such a waste of time! ⌛⌛⌛
And yes, sometimes they only serve the purpose of entertainment or emotional tone setting. Other times they’re actual part of the content.
Gifs are great
Edit: you downvote and yet I often get comments appreaciating how the gifs make my 2000 word emails feel like a quick short read.
It's almost like trying to find recipes on the internet in the age of SEO and 'personal brand building'.
To get to the content you want (ingredients and method), you have to scroll through a mess of unrelated, low quality, insincere blog-like content with pictures etc..
When you actually find the recipe, half the method (always the bits you don't bloody know) is interwoven into the irritating blog content or on a separate 'blog' entry page entirely.
By the time you realise there's nothing of value and decide to turn back, it's too late; they've already won. You've given them a page view, interacted with the site, and maybe their ads have loaded, too.
At least you can find good cookbooks in op shops! Tech books are great, but they're not always the best resource when you're curious about a tool and want something like an implementation or configuration guide, or a post-implementation review.
I have random blogs to thank for clear guides with great explanations on implementing and configuring loads of things, like early versions of webpack. It seems that in only a few years, quality content has rapidly become so much harder to find amidst the mass of low quality SEO bait.
Experienced developers usually aren't busy writing blog posts. Nor are they engaged on HN. As the old saying goes, those who can are out doing, those who can't `teach'.
This touched a nerve, but sorry it's spot on. The more faltering the career, the less certain the skills, the more likely the person has a vigorous social media and blog presence.
Maybe I'm so used to it for programming queries, but I've gotten back into electronics and ham radio after a long time, and have always dreamed of owning a decent oscilloscope. Googling 'good digital hobbyist oscilloscope' just now was a frustrating waste of time. It's just pages and pages of regurgitated specs and affiliate links, no useful _actual_ reviews or anything...
Take this top 10 result. It's on Medium which is new and hip and nice so must be of high quality...
https://medium.com/@Amyperlman/best-buying-oscilloscope-for-...
Oh cool, hmm ok - what else does the author write about? "Things to consider before buying a camera for hunting" - "Drug Rehab for Married Couples" - <<Several>> Reviews for a particular line of vaccum cleaner, Baltimore Security Cameras and Interior Design in India. I mean sure they could genuinely have diverse interests and a chaotic and international personal life - but these articles are just keyword stuffing for another bunch of 'content' that will helpfully let you 'check the price on Amazon' for just about anything...
If you don't actually recognize the channel, you can usually tell if it's worthwhile by subscriber count, the other (types of) videos they've posted, and usually just by watching for tens of seconds. Most paid reviews seem to say so (unlike written blogs), and you can judge their bias appropriately. Plus for many things, seeing it in action is much, much better than written descriptions or (carefully chosen) pictures.
For example, it's hard to disguise a crappy oscilloscope UI in a video (and if the reviewer doesn't show that, be suspicious!)
> Best Oscilloscopes are not a common field where people would choose to spend their spare time relaxing. However, analyzing and measuring signals might be an interesting fact for most engineers or people looking for complexity, isn’t it? That’s what we actually thought about before doing our research.
Reads like it went through Google translate twice.
• Available only in Grey. [Rigol]
• The color available is Grey. [Siglent]
• The devices comes only in blue. [LIUMY]
Yes, one of the main things I look for in a scope is what color it comes in!
• Works with both laptop and desktop PC. [Hantek]
Uh, why would any USB device not work with both a laptop and desktop PC?
This and the fact that Google search is actually as dumb as a sackful of hammers.
Don't get me wrong, for the longest time Google's results were "good enough", but Google has no real concept of the quality of a result (they've tried and it worked for a while - e.g., PageRank). Still, fundamentally their algorithms aren't smart enough to figure out whether any given piece of content is intrinsically worthwhile.
That's really important in a world where most content is, regardless of Google's guidelines, primarily written for the benefit of GoogleBot, to harvest clicks or drive traffic.
Unfortunately Google has literally zero incentive to change this situation (because they're making an insane amount of money off the back of the status quo), so they won't[1].
Logically then, the time is ripe for a new search engine to disrupt but the problem - that of determining intrinsic worth - is really hard to solve, so as yet nobody has, and Google still reigns supreme as the most popular search engine.
[1] It is also possible that I'm being too harsh here: they might be trying to change it - perhaps because they're worried about eventually being disrupted - but, as noted in the following paragraph, the problem is REALLY hard.
I'm sort-of trying to solve this with a recommender system approach.[1] Search isn't my primary objective; I'm mainly focusing on the case where you want to be made aware of relevant information on an ongoing basis but you aren't necessarily looking for something specific.
But that involves building up a ratings database of lots of different URLs. If it becomes really popular, I'd like to experiment with search. It could start with a "normal" search algorithm but then adjust the results based on rating data. E.g. "the top result for this query is X, but people with similar rating data to you always down vote that link, so we'll move that result down".
I've heard people complain about how Google gives you personalized search results sometimes, but I'm not sure if the approach is actually bad. Perhaps it could work if it was focused on from the start instead of bolted on.
[1] https://findka.com
Maybe this does happen but it not weighted highly enough against SEO.
* 21 years old marketer writing about life crisis in 40s
* fashion blogger explaining is Teflon harmful or not (come on, fashion and chemistry?)
* 18 years old student who never immigrated to another country or studied abroad writing about how difficult is immigrant life and what to look for in different country and many more similar content.
Our current solution is to rely on magical black box algorithms to give us the diamonds, but it's been creaking for a while.
I'm not sure how to make this better: one person's turd is another person's diamond, and people trying to game the system will always be a problem.
As a side effect, it should really help Google and other search engines to rank those websites. External links of good quality still the best SEO.
Do you have an example? I’m getting strong “century of the self” vibes from this post.
If you’re referring to “fake news”, you should also acknowledge that the current protests across the nation would not exist at all without social media. People who want to characterize the effects as monolithically positive or negative leave me scratching my head, and I certainly don’t want to return to getting all my news via AP.
2) Get a subset of blogs to follow and stick to it. If you want to search in specific sites google has "site:" operator, you can search on specific sites.
3) by following 1 and 2 you can easily stop visiting shitty blogs made only for SEO, when they won't see any traffic they will fold because they will see no one is caring about what they write.
I am in process of implementing that. Got some books from humble bundle in topic that I am interested in, so no browsing crap until I get through those.
I've seen lots of articles on hacker news (and other places) that is "PART 1 of..." which does the introduction to what they plan on teaching, and then it just dies right there in the land of "PART 1's"
With a book, if you stop at part 1, no one is going to publish your book.
Another thing about books/web, is books go MUCH deeper into topics. It seems like 99% of the content on the web is "INTRO to xyz" but never "Advanced xyz"
Books are also broken into logical section so you have a learning path you can progress through; not just random content that you are to piece together yourself.
So, yes, very good advice; if you want to learn something, read the book.
blog posts are more just advertisements for buying an actual book.
If I read a really great piece of tech content it's not going to help me to use that domain in a site: query later when it's so often going to be medium.com or dev.to (which is starting to fill up with this same kind of bullshit content in the article).
Many books are not much better. While blog posts are bloated for SEO purposes, books are bloated to reach their target page count.
I'm not saying everyone should be an expert, but I would want the whole spectrum of experience represented. Now I don't invest time in meetups any more.
I don't think it is particularly wrong, but more experienced people tend to be older and less likely to have inclination or time to prepare talk or go to pub every week or so.
Do you think it would be possible for us to have any transparency into how hard a web page has been 'advertised' and use that to inform our decision processes? I've no idea what that would even look like.
That's the real problem. There is a market for short-form clickbait crap. One can make a living writing that. There is not much of a market for long-form accurate technical material.
Marketing is fact mixed with coercion.
But this is about plagiarism.
The author of the article, in just under 800 words, is addressing the "copypasta" nature of a specific discipline: programming. I like the author's characterization of lazy or necessary plagiarism as "consumer" mentality. That's an interesting twist.
Was this not the 1970's American Auto Industry attempting to implement Japan's earliest implementation of lean manufacturing? Is the same to be said of any "ripoff" product that cheaply imitates the original: e.g., an off-brand version of an Eames Lounger, or cheaply made webcam off Amazon which is a faulty copy of a Logitech?
His observation is a reflection of complex constraints, and while I completely agree individuals should strive for a deep understanding and mastery of what they spend their lives doing, as it benefits us all directly or indirectly by making us conscious citizens (my opinion), I think this is a largely metaphysical reflection lacking contextual nuance rather than a call to action: we've all been in the shoes of his hypothetical individual committing the sin of programmer consumerism, and for good reason.
However, I do appreciate the clarity his transformation applies to a scenario we are all intimately engaged in.
[1] "We know they are idiots, the question is, 'What kind of idiots?'"
What’s the main problem with this in the tech community? We need a lot of credible content that is downright technical. It hurts our community if we let the modern condition permeate into this domain too much.
None come immediately to mind but I've definitely come across some before on the web. Basically they kind of go "here is my problem, here's what I tried first, that didn't quite work so I tried that, but then I learnt about super_mega_amazing_tech and I wrote my code like this and it seems to work."
I find those kind of things quite interesting to at least skim through if not read in full if it's well-written.
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 2016, for example, not realizing we were just seeing the wave form when I felt like it was cresting.
I think that's a really sad and cynical view. I assume you don't spend 16 hours a day writing code. I assume you have hobbies and other interests. For some people, educating others about their favorite topics is their hobby. Writing about their projects is their hobby.
Here are entire blogs by people who are "doing":
http://www.brendangregg.com
https://perspectives.mvdirona.com
https://netflixtechblog.com
https://www.allthingsdistributed.com
https://airbnb.io
https://engineering.fb.com
Those are just a few I can think of in one minute. If I went through my RSS feeds and bookmarks I could find more.
It doesn't matter if it's sad and cynical, it matters if it's true.
That there is a certain number of engineers who have a mix of talent and resources (=time), so that they can exercise software engineering and high quality technical writing?
They are an exception. Almost all the engineers I know (with one exception), who also have a regular life (roughly 40 hours engineering/week), have little time to dedicate to technical writing. As a consequence, it's not unreasonable to state that, in general and in practice, software engineering and (regular) technical writing are mutually exclusive.
Not only this, but the most accurate business advice tends to be too boring to attract views and clicks anyway.
Link-sharing sites favor controversial opinions and stances that make the reader feel superior to their peers, so that's what the content producers deliver.
This is one of the most poisonous attitudes I have ever seen when it comes to tech content, and unfortunately it is really prevalent in the largest tech companies.
No wonder nearly all the documentation created by the tech giants is complete garbage and often out of date, with almost zero regard for people who actually read the documentation.
A natural consequence of documentation being a "good beginner task" in open source or being assigned to whoever cannot get out of it on the project team.
There are plenty talented, productive people also writing articles and giving talks. Hell, most of what I watch/read (not just skim) is content either from the main drivers of a given tech or people who are experts.
It isn’t that hard to differentiate.
I have a tendency to drop my nuggets of wisdom/analysis in chatrooms in Discord and Slack (and IRC prior) and let others adopt/evangelize them on their own if it makes sense for them to. I'm ok being in the background while my true value is appreciated by those who matter for my own career.
Paradoxically when NOT doing work I share less
Do you code 16 hours every day? Or do you do other things with your time in addition to coding? It's possible to spend your "free time" writing about coding instead of writing code. Humans can do both well if they choose to.
I can't really agree with this. I think it's worth noting that writing about something you have just learned is a really good way to solidify that knowledge, especially if you are able to get feedback from others. So a lot of people deliberately set aside the time to do it, even if it comes at the expense of greater levels of productivity.
How would you feel if I write a cookbook the first time my bread rolls didn't catch fire? ... to solicit feedback?
Then a more senior coworker came over to join the convo and mentioned a few similar words that were clearly jargon related to compilers etc. He spoke with such confidence that I didn't want to admit I didn't know about them, but figured I shouldn't be ashamed at not knowing stuff. I asked him what it meant and he said he didn't really know and wasn't entirely sure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One person did a double-take, looked at me, and said, "You can understand those?" I knew exactly what he meant, and consoled him by saying "only about 2/3rds," at which point all of the tension drained out of his shoulders. I had communicated that yes, some of it is just bullshit not fit for consumption, and that he was not an idiot.
As a Feynman dilettante, if you can't have a human conversation about a subject (note: conversation, not 'curing cancer'/winning the Nobel) then you don't really know the subject. Or perhaps more generously: It doesn't matter if you know it because you can't pass that knowledge on. You are dead end as far as human progress is concerned.
I suspect Tech people feel this more than pure researchers, because we know that in a couple years we will be focusing on something else, and 5 years at most we will be gone. If we haven't passed on our knowledge, then there will be consequences that are readily apparent. In academia you get so many opportunities to connect and if you connect with 5 people, you probably feel like your work is done, and you forget about people like me who regret ever encountering certain teachers because they set me back or in one case, put me off a course I believed I would stay to the end.
Me, I have 10-15 people not of my choosing and I have to connect with 2 and 1/2 of them. It's a tempest in a teapot.
Most people are playing fake it till you make it most of the time (until shit hits the fan, then incompetence becomes dangerous and you get to see who's been swimming naked)
Was your role or the senior person's role related to compilers? You don't have to authoritatively know something to talk about it, and I never assume anyone knows anything authoritatively if they talk about it nonchalantly.