I am 100% part of those developers that is trying to improve their communication skills. Since February I have made it a big focus to try and find a voice.
It's super hard.
English is not my native language, and even if it were, I am not a good communicator. But I started writing tweets and a blog.
It's a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, I've had a lot of success, I have followers, readers etc... on the other hand, it's very hard to do it without compromising oneself and still finding an audience.
Twitter is also a world on its own. Hell, I don't believe I deserve the following I have and it's very hard to find a style of communication that works for developers on that platform. The result is that it's skews toward short, simple tweets, the simpler the better.
Being a good communicator is important, but it doesn't come without a cost.
I am really not the best person to answer this because I am still very unexperienced. But I had the luck of writing one blog post that got a lot of traction and to have a website that can generate a bit of traffic to the blog.
The actual writing was really the hard part for me. Putting my knowledge to words is tricky. I struggle with finding topics and how to express them. What worked for now was more of a "whatever, let's just do it" attitude and try different things.
> I am really not the best person to answer this because I am still very unexperienced.
Nah, that is exactly why I asked you, and I mean that in a positive way.
Someone very experienced might have very well forgotten how it was when they started, or they might have started when online writing landscape was quite different. Or, worse, they might say "well, I just sent an email to my 5000-member email list, how else would you start a blog?" :)
I've always felt that if a developer can put themselves in to the point of view of a naive person, (ie. a complete non-technical person, OR a developer who may not have all the same experiences, or perhaps one who is self-taught, and has gaps) - then they can shape how they conceive and explain things, and it's super helpful.
In fact, I think I learned this technique in Technical Writing 101.
Let's face it, it's not much to do with being a good communicator. People don't go on twitter because they want to be more effective at communicating, they go on twitter because that's where the audience is despite it being a terrible place for communicating complex issues. (Here, let me link you to that 27 tweet thread, which, inexplicably, is 27 separate posts instead of a single post because we're insane).
The whole post honestly just sounded like he was jealous of the attention the ‘thought leaders’ were getting. Not only is jealous a petty thing to be, but that’s a particularly petty thing to be jealous of.
Attention is power, even in the context of software development. Social media is where attention is abundant if you know how to look for it.
Devs should get better at communicating and self-marketing. It does not need to be an over the top marketing and self branding, in fact you shouldn't do that.
Recruiters, supervisors, founders, and everyone who need devs (and any other kind of specialists) need to up their bullshit filter game.
The best developers aren't putting out tons of content or courses. The people putting out popular courses are just the best course developers/marketers.
There are plenty of folks like Tom Christie, who has minimal social media following, but who built Django Rest Framework, which is used by tens of thousands of projects.
The best developers are leaders, whether or not they're thought leaders.
I agree. I remember there was a bit of criticism in the iOS twitter community about iOS development influencers giving bad advice, because they haven't worked on meatier projects.
Can't find much anymore but here's one example of a tweet:
What has happened to all the introverts who work alone? They're not working in tech. Tech is for extroverts who get paid to copy from public GitHub repositories and paste into private GitHub repositories and sell proprietary products built upon code ripped from open source projects.
But that's okay. Not everybody can be an extrovert who gets paid to pretend to code. RMS said it best:
> I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something else.
And then RMS was railroaded out of the free software movement he started by the social extroverts who replaced all the introverts in tech.
I'm an introvert. I'm a coder. I don't get paid to code. I do something else.
It your takeaway is that on the RMS debacle, then I find it rather sad. Without diminishing his achievements, the man is such a bad people person that he literally couldn't understand and respect other people's boundaries and sexually harassed several women.
No matter how good of an activist or a movement leader you are, if you can't stop yourself from being a huge creep, you should not hold a position of power and work with other people. Ever.
RMS achieved precisely because he is a bad people person. He did what he believed needed to be done to reform the software industry the way he wanted it and he succeeded without regard for what other people thought of him. Unfortunately capitalists adapted to make tons of money exploiting the results of his life's work and social influencers influenced him out of society.
And don't worry about me. I prefer to work alone and I'm in the process of getting banned from your fine forum right now for expressing unpopular opinions.
Yeah, he might be a deeply unpleasant person, and perhaps he shouldn't be a leader, but when the histories of the 20th century and the Internet are written, he'll have a starring place.
It's a bit sad that although coding tends to attract introverts, most SW development (especially in a work environment) fundamentally needs to be more social than other engineering disciplines.
If you can find a job where you, and only you, are writing code, and not integrating it into a larger piece of SW, then everything is fine and you can work alone. This is incredibly rare.
There is very little in SW that is clearly objective. How to architect the code well, rules about when to reuse code, when to abstract, whether to use a global variable, how to name things, even whether to use GOTO are all opinions - not facts. As such, the SW world has to put in a lot more effort in campaigning for what they consider good design and good coding practices.
Look at code reviews. This is, at its very core, a social practice. In my experience, most of the discussions in code reviews do not involve bugs (which are very objective), but are dominated by style and design discussions, which are subjective.
In most other engineering disciplines, things are a lot more clear cut. There usually are not 20 different ways to achieve something, and the criteria for quality is much clearer.
I too am an introvert. But I also realize that complex SW development is at odds with introversion. I can lament the situation, but I cannot blame extroverts for this. They didn't come in and crowd things. It is inherent to the beast. As a SW developer, I do need to influence my fellow developers (as well as my customers). I have to learn those skills. One can do that while still being an introvert.
(Not meaning to invalidate your point about RMS and organizations and social movements. I agree with you on that. But for SW development, some level of social skills legitimately gives you an advantage)
There seems to have been something that happened between the 80s and 90s and today that caused any team doing something non-trivial to go from like 3-8 people to more like 100. Like, you look at a description of exactly what the project was and you ballpark what you'd need today, and it's like 100+ people. The team that actually did it was eight humans and an office cat, and in many cases not one of them is famous for being some superhuman-level programmer.
I'm not sure what caused it. You'd think the opposite would have happened, in fact, since our tools are supposed to be so much better now. But I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that part of it's something along the lines of changing interests and work styles for developers entering the field.
Oh, please. Don't pretend to speak for introverts. I am an introvert. I love my alone time. I have no social media presence. I also thrive on collaboration, mentoring, and generally building software with other humans. It is fun, it creates business value, and it leads to better code as well. There are many people in tech like this. We're not extroverts (although extroverts are great, too) but we recognize software engineering is a social discipline of which sitting on your own coding forms only a part.
Yes, of course, you're entitled to be a misanthrope and do whatever you want on your own. Fine. But your picture of tech is warped. There is no conspiracy of extroverts; it's just that you don't like working with other people.
Wozniak didn’t do anything significant after Apple. Not meant to be a judgmental, once you almost die it kind of changes your priorities and just by founding Apple he has done more in his life than most.
Jobs on the other hand, cofounded Apple, Next, and Pixar. The leaders at Next basically took over at Apple and the leaders at Pixar basically took over Disney’s animation division and ushered in a new era of animation.
Jobs of course didn’t do it by himself (my whole point). But he had some type of talent with finding the right people and getting them to do their best work. Was that the RDF? I don’t know.
Seems to me like Woz has lived a fullfilling life doing basically what he's wanted to do. I don't see how that's not significant. My impression is that he never made his life's mission the ostensibly virtuous path of making commodity products for the masses. Not at Apple and not elsewhere. If I were to admire someone for how they lived their life, I'd probably choose Woz, not Jobs, because it almost seems laughably unhealthy to do otherwise.
Wozniak did the Apple thing and got lucky purely down to Jobs' drive. Wozniak did the engineering and then left or took a hiatus. The was it and he did nothing else. I admire his technical ability for what he did but he didn't do much of note after Apple. I could be wrong.
The way i see it is Jobs ripped of Woz, without Woz Job's is nothing. On the other hand without Job's Woz would still been a successful engineer at a tech organization.
Can we stop with "medium.com" links here? They reward read-time which means it's in a dev's interest to write click-bait and stretch content.
It also might just be me, but always something off about a dev not hosting their own blog, leading to a company being able to throw a pay-wall over your content.
I wish we could stop complaints about Medium from showing up on every post from Medium. It's a distraction from the content, and off topic, and yet the complaint shows up with remarkable regularity.
Maybe hn should have a dedicated "metacontent discussion" comment which collects all the discussion topics like this under a single collapseable top level thread.
Whether it's about gdpr/cookies, paywalls, noscript behavior, twitter-thread rant, there can sometimes be more metacontent discussion than content discussion.
Ok. I'm going to do it. The (m/M)edium is the message. It's relevant whether you're delivering your message on twitter or medium or god forbid facebook.
Maybe you could point out how this article is click-bait and stretched out. Fairly ridiculous to ban an entire popular domain because it doesn't meet your standard on average. We should be judging articles on their merits.
This problem isn't unique to Medium. Content itself performs optimally in the current web ecosystem when it is click-baity and stretched out. I've seen just as bad stuff from developers who create their own #learntocode[0] blogs.
[0] Referring to the current trend of developers creating YouTube channels and blogs that funnel people into their "crack the Google interview" subscription course that is basically just them solving a bunch of leetcode questions.
I have more of a chance of making money doing this than passing a leetcode interview, so I understand the appeal. It's hard to get mad at them for doing what makes money.
I'm not mad or anything. It's a market need. Software engineering is filled with some sort of mysticism apparently, and teachers and guides are always welcome. I'm more just pointing out the fact that this is currently trending. Eventually the pool of needed teachers will get saturated and it will no longer be profitable to create your own series unless you have some teaching edge.
> This problem isn't unique to Medium. Content itself performs optimally in the current web ecosystem when it is click-baity and stretched out
It's true of content where “performance” is based on driving attention, whether it's directly paid that way (Medium) or indirectly paid that way (anything advertising supported).
Content that is intended to “perform” by serving the interests of a direct audience or sponsors (direct subscriptions without ads, patronage model, nonprofit backed mission-oriented content not supported by ads, or, for that matter, most for-profit backed content published to support corporate interests rather than as a direct revenue source) doesn't share the problem, though some of those categories may have their own different performance-model based problems.
I don't mind, but i'd love to see more people create blogs on their own webspace. I enjoy looking at others' portfolio/ self-made blogs, it makes me more willing to tip
I think this definition of success can be quite entrapping. Certainly, the pool of outstanding developers that do not fit these criteria is huge (in fact, the absolute dominant one, considering how narrow the definition is). As such, if you are a young developer, examine whether this definition suits your career aspirations (it seems to do so for author, which is OK of course), and know that there are many roads to "success".
I used to think the same thing for the better part of my 20s, but not anymore. I am also virtually non-existent online (in the author's sense), but I am quite satisfied with my career. I am of course one data point, but I have many colleagues and ex-colleagues in the same boat.
As Homer Simpson noted^, jealousy and envy mean different things. If you're jealous, you're worried someone will take something away from you, whereas an envious person just wants to get other people's success for themself.
That's only one of several meanings of "jealousy".
Excerpted from the OED:
> 3. Solicitude or anxiety for the preservation or well-being of something; vigilance in guarding a possession from loss or damage.
> 4. The state of mind arising from the suspicion, apprehension, or knowledge of rivalry:
> b. in respect of success or advantage: Fear of losing some good through the rivalry of another; resentment or ill-will towards another on account of advantage or superiority, possible or actual, on his part; envy, grudge.
You're focusing on definition (3), but ignoring other aspects found in (4.b).
Where did this idea come from and why is it so often claimed? Never in my life have I heard someone use 'jealousy' in that context, yet it seems to be widely accepted fact on the internet.
When I google "define jealous" and "define envy", I read it the same as Homer. I think it's one of those pre-internet "facts" people learned in school.
If you're not aware, "literally" also now literally means "figuratively".
To me that meaning checks out, but is a bit archaic. It’s how you might see it used in an older translation of the Bible, or a 19th century translation of the Greek tragedians, or maybe Tolkien, or something like that.
Modern, and especially colloquial, usage tends to be as a synonym of “envious”, so far as I know. “I’m jealous of her hair”. “His Instagram posts of his beach house make me so jealous”. “Stop mocking her car—you’re just jealous”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard or seen the older meaning intended in colloquial speech or all but the stuffiest of writing in the last 20+ years.
So, as is typical, two useful words have become one word through misuse.
You can improve your communication and inspire communities, without stagnating, by de-coupling it from your day-to-day; for example:
- I'm a developer organizing indie conferences [0]. I'm always described as an "organization kind of guy." I don't go out of my way to influence on programming techniques.
Alternatively there are:
- Developers who stream their projects, commercial or otherwise. They're well-known because people value insights from seeing someone do technical work.
I'm probably missing other cases of "influencers" who don't slowly stagnate by focusing too much on courses and marketing.
> They stream themselves coding at the same time each week without fail.
Nope. Anybody who streams themselves coding is not a real coder. Coding is not rapid fire typing memorized boilerplate code to techno background music. Real life is not Mr Robot. When they do it at the same time each week that's the reddest of red flags that they're performing an act. It's all staged. As staged as professional wrestling is kayfabe.
Real coding doesn't happen on a strict schedule. There's research, design, and testing to be done and mistakes to be made and corrected. Typing out the code is the least important part of coding and by far the least interesting. But real work doesn't hold the attention of techbro posers long enough to sell ads now does it.
No. This is gatekeeping at it's finest. You can say that while they stream they are working on their social media presence more than the codebase, but streaming per-se doesn't stop them from being "real coders".
Everyone codes however they want. What works for you might be different for someone else. And wanting to do it while interacting with an audience or streaming themselves creating something they already know how to do are all completely fine things.
Yes. It's gatekeeping borne of jealousy. Keep introverted nerds in tech. Extroverted marketeers took our technology and perverted it into social media.
Woz said of his time building blue boxes purely motivated by intellectual curiosity:
> I was so pure. Now I realize others were not as pure, they were just trying to make money. But then I thought we were all pure.
Tech is so impure today it reeks. Bring back the hackers who build things for fun. Bring back the nerds who don't care to make money.
I stream myself writing code on roughly the same schedule once a week and I certainly disagree with what you're saying here. One of the reasons people like to watch streams is for the problem solving aspect and seeing how someone else researches then solves a problem, that might involve a person going to a documentation site, reading Stack Overflow or just playing around with something. As long as the audience is still engaged and the streamer is thinking out loud then the audience will enjoy it. The streamer might research things before hand or broadly think of a solution to something but I don't think that makes it any more staged than someone on a live TV segment thinking what they're going to say.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadIt's super hard.
English is not my native language, and even if it were, I am not a good communicator. But I started writing tweets and a blog.
It's a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, I've had a lot of success, I have followers, readers etc... on the other hand, it's very hard to do it without compromising oneself and still finding an audience.
Twitter is also a world on its own. Hell, I don't believe I deserve the following I have and it's very hard to find a style of communication that works for developers on that platform. The result is that it's skews toward short, simple tweets, the simpler the better.
Being a good communicator is important, but it doesn't come without a cost.
How did you get started? Any tips on getting dev blog readers (not that I have one yet)?
The actual writing was really the hard part for me. Putting my knowledge to words is tricky. I struggle with finding topics and how to express them. What worked for now was more of a "whatever, let's just do it" attitude and try different things.
Nah, that is exactly why I asked you, and I mean that in a positive way.
Someone very experienced might have very well forgotten how it was when they started, or they might have started when online writing landscape was quite different. Or, worse, they might say "well, I just sent an email to my 5000-member email list, how else would you start a blog?" :)
What is your blog? I dug out https://duiker101.net/ but that is returning 404 for me.
In fact, I think I learned this technique in Technical Writing 101.
Devs should get better at communicating and self-marketing. It does not need to be an over the top marketing and self branding, in fact you shouldn't do that.
Recruiters, supervisors, founders, and everyone who need devs (and any other kind of specialists) need to up their bullshit filter game.
There are plenty of folks like Tom Christie, who has minimal social media following, but who built Django Rest Framework, which is used by tens of thousands of projects.
The best developers are leaders, whether or not they're thought leaders.
Can't find much anymore but here's one example of a tweet:
https://twitter.com/alex_v_bush/status/1277002102351499265
At the end he had some advice and one thing he said went against all popular advice but sort of agreed with my internal dialog.
It was basically "work alone".
EDIT: "Artists work best alone. Work alone."
What has happened to all the introverts who work alone? They're not working in tech. Tech is for extroverts who get paid to copy from public GitHub repositories and paste into private GitHub repositories and sell proprietary products built upon code ripped from open source projects.
But that's okay. Not everybody can be an extrovert who gets paid to pretend to code. RMS said it best:
> I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something else.
And then RMS was railroaded out of the free software movement he started by the social extroverts who replaced all the introverts in tech.
I'm an introvert. I'm a coder. I don't get paid to code. I do something else.
No matter how good of an activist or a movement leader you are, if you can't stop yourself from being a huge creep, you should not hold a position of power and work with other people. Ever.
And don't worry about me. I prefer to work alone and I'm in the process of getting banned from your fine forum right now for expressing unpopular opinions.
Links please with specifics. Also is there reasonable evidence?
If you can find a job where you, and only you, are writing code, and not integrating it into a larger piece of SW, then everything is fine and you can work alone. This is incredibly rare.
There is very little in SW that is clearly objective. How to architect the code well, rules about when to reuse code, when to abstract, whether to use a global variable, how to name things, even whether to use GOTO are all opinions - not facts. As such, the SW world has to put in a lot more effort in campaigning for what they consider good design and good coding practices.
Look at code reviews. This is, at its very core, a social practice. In my experience, most of the discussions in code reviews do not involve bugs (which are very objective), but are dominated by style and design discussions, which are subjective.
In most other engineering disciplines, things are a lot more clear cut. There usually are not 20 different ways to achieve something, and the criteria for quality is much clearer.
I too am an introvert. But I also realize that complex SW development is at odds with introversion. I can lament the situation, but I cannot blame extroverts for this. They didn't come in and crowd things. It is inherent to the beast. As a SW developer, I do need to influence my fellow developers (as well as my customers). I have to learn those skills. One can do that while still being an introvert.
(Not meaning to invalidate your point about RMS and organizations and social movements. I agree with you on that. But for SW development, some level of social skills legitimately gives you an advantage)
I'm not sure what caused it. You'd think the opposite would have happened, in fact, since our tools are supposed to be so much better now. But I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that part of it's something along the lines of changing interests and work styles for developers entering the field.
Yes, of course, you're entitled to be a misanthrope and do whatever you want on your own. Fine. But your picture of tech is warped. There is no conspiracy of extroverts; it's just that you don't like working with other people.
Jobs wouldn’t have succeeded when he came back without Schiller, Forstall, Cook, Fadell, etc.
Jobs on the other hand, cofounded Apple, Next, and Pixar. The leaders at Next basically took over at Apple and the leaders at Pixar basically took over Disney’s animation division and ushered in a new era of animation.
Jobs of course didn’t do it by himself (my whole point). But he had some type of talent with finding the right people and getting them to do their best work. Was that the RDF? I don’t know.
once you almost die it kind of changes your priorities and just by founding Apple he has done more in his life than most.
It also might just be me, but always something off about a dev not hosting their own blog, leading to a company being able to throw a pay-wall over your content.
https://dev.to/dangoslen/i-ll-admit-it-i-m-a-jealous-develop...
Spoiler: nothing especially insightful inside; really surprised it raised to the front page.
[0] Referring to the current trend of developers creating YouTube channels and blogs that funnel people into their "crack the Google interview" subscription course that is basically just them solving a bunch of leetcode questions.
It's true of content where “performance” is based on driving attention, whether it's directly paid that way (Medium) or indirectly paid that way (anything advertising supported).
Content that is intended to “perform” by serving the interests of a direct audience or sponsors (direct subscriptions without ads, patronage model, nonprofit backed mission-oriented content not supported by ads, or, for that matter, most for-profit backed content published to support corporate interests rather than as a direct revenue source) doesn't share the problem, though some of those categories may have their own different performance-model based problems.
I used to think the same thing for the better part of my 20s, but not anymore. I am also virtually non-existent online (in the author's sense), but I am quite satisfied with my career. I am of course one data point, but I have many colleagues and ex-colleagues in the same boat.
^ https://youtu.be/Tmx1jpqv3RA
I'm not a native speaker, but my (Apple) dictionary definition doesn't match Lisa's.
jeal·ous | ˈjeləs | adjective feeling or showing envy of someone or their achievements and advantages: he grew jealous of her success.
Excerpted from the OED:
> 3. Solicitude or anxiety for the preservation or well-being of something; vigilance in guarding a possession from loss or damage.
> 4. The state of mind arising from the suspicion, apprehension, or knowledge of rivalry:
> b. in respect of success or advantage: Fear of losing some good through the rivalry of another; resentment or ill-will towards another on account of advantage or superiority, possible or actual, on his part; envy, grudge.
You're focusing on definition (3), but ignoring other aspects found in (4.b).
If you're not aware, "literally" also now literally means "figuratively".
It's memes all the way down.
Modern, and especially colloquial, usage tends to be as a synonym of “envious”, so far as I know. “I’m jealous of her hair”. “His Instagram posts of his beach house make me so jealous”. “Stop mocking her car—you’re just jealous”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard or seen the older meaning intended in colloquial speech or all but the stuffiest of writing in the last 20+ years.
So, as is typical, two useful words have become one word through misuse.
(envy is when you desire something that someone else has. jealousy is when you're afraid you'll lose something you have to someone else)
- I'm a developer organizing indie conferences [0]. I'm always described as an "organization kind of guy." I don't go out of my way to influence on programming techniques.
Alternatively there are:
- Developers who stream their projects, commercial or otherwise. They're well-known because people value insights from seeing someone do technical work.
I'm probably missing other cases of "influencers" who don't slowly stagnate by focusing too much on courses and marketing.
[0] https://www.handmade-seattle.com
(Forgive the plug; hoping it's relevant.)
Nope. Anybody who streams themselves coding is not a real coder. Coding is not rapid fire typing memorized boilerplate code to techno background music. Real life is not Mr Robot. When they do it at the same time each week that's the reddest of red flags that they're performing an act. It's all staged. As staged as professional wrestling is kayfabe.
Real coding doesn't happen on a strict schedule. There's research, design, and testing to be done and mistakes to be made and corrected. Typing out the code is the least important part of coding and by far the least interesting. But real work doesn't hold the attention of techbro posers long enough to sell ads now does it.
Everyone codes however they want. What works for you might be different for someone else. And wanting to do it while interacting with an audience or streaming themselves creating something they already know how to do are all completely fine things.
Woz said of his time building blue boxes purely motivated by intellectual curiosity:
> I was so pure. Now I realize others were not as pure, they were just trying to make money. But then I thought we were all pure.
Tech is so impure today it reeks. Bring back the hackers who build things for fun. Bring back the nerds who don't care to make money.
I’ve seen streamers do exactly this (while interacting with their audience through chat).
Why did you interpret “stream themselves coding” as “typing code flawlessly on stream”?