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I'm not condescending towards web developers - see also my other comments here. I tried explicitly to make it clear that I wasn't, yet I kind of feel like peopl

I'm not condescending towards web developers - see also my other comments here. I tried explicitly to make it clear that I wasn't, yet I kind of feel like people are taking the liberty to read things in my comment that just aren't there. If you want me to give a tl;dr: it was a comparison based mostly on statistics; it's not that doing web development makes you a bad programmer, or that bad programmers are particularly driven to web development; it's that because the barrier to entry in web development is relatively low and there's a lot of web developers, the average web developer is going to be worse than the average lisper, because there's far fewer lispers and lisp is an obscure language that for the most part only passionate programmers would be interested in. I stand by knowing lisp being a good indicator of programmer quality, but it's pretty one-sided: knowing lisp is a very good indicator that one is a reasonably good programmer, but not knowing lisp isn't really an indicator of anything; the vast, vast majority of people don't know lisp, after all. College is the same way of course: having been to college is a reasonable indicator of competence (though not as good as knowing lisp inside-out), but not having gone to college is not an indicator of incompetence - yet nobody would doubt that a college as a whole is an indicator of competence, because if they did, college degrees would be worthless - which they aren't.

WhitneyLand 10y ago
I'm glad to hear you weren't intending to do so, but unfortunately the inference of condescension is just as important as the implication, and I'm sure not all web developers would love the comment. Regarding correlations, I understand your logic. My point is that correlations, or generalizations about large groups of people usually do more harm than good. Forget the morality of it; In most real life situations it's simply more productive to use other metrics. For example, some companies use having a college degree as a coursely grained filter, when other approaches can be just as time efficient, and more productive because they don't incorrectly screen out the negatively correlated candidates. Of course I don't mean general indicators are inherently bad or useless, just that they are often given too much weight against people, especially when better information is available. It turns out ~99% of violent murders are committed by men. Luckily, most people don't hold this against me personally.

WhitneyLand 10y ago

I'm glad to hear you weren't intending to do so, but unfortunately the inference of condescension is just as important as the implication, and I'm sure not all web developers would love the comment. Regarding correlations, I understand your logic. My point is that correlations, or generalizations about large groups of people usually do more harm than good. Forget the morality of it; In most real life situations it's simply more productive to use other metrics. For example, some companies use having a college degree as a coursely grained filter, when other approaches can be just as time efficient, and more productive because they don't incorrectly screen out the negatively correlated candidates. Of course I don't mean general indicators are inherently bad or useless, just that they are often given too much weight against people, especially when better information is available. It turns out ~99% of violent murders are committed by men. Luckily, most people don't hold this against me personally.