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StackOverflow is more tilted towards "dark matter developers"[1] than many other places - the unseen, the unheralded, those that are toiling away at LOB apps in

by douche 10y ago

StackOverflow is more tilted towards "dark matter developers"[1] than many other places - the unseen, the unheralded, those that are toiling away at LOB apps inside of companies. Often they're using PHP or Java or C#, or god help them, Visual Basic, still. Those are not necessarily the kind of people that are going to be seen at dev conferences, but there is a huge number of them, and they use StackOverflow hard. [1] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen99.aspx https://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen...

Baeocystin 10y ago
Heh. Two of my clients are still using VB Apps I wrote for them in VB6. I'm not ashamed. They work, and they've worked well for 12+ years, with only the most minor of updates. Not every business follows the 'innovate fast and break things' mold. Thankfully.
- sremani 10y ago
  Exactly, we should be proud of creating Software that works and works great. Not the languages we develop in. The one main lesson if there is I learnt from 13 years of development is, keep the dev stack boring!
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Whenever a kid comes around with the cool idea lets rewrite this in X, they need to explain me the business value of the proposal, like in, how will that change the monetary outcome of a project.
    - notduncansmith 10y ago
      Isn't the implicit argument for any refactor/rewrite essentially increased velocity? "This change will allow us to do X in Y days when normally it would take some multiple of Y." It sounds like what you want is a more salient list of pain points in the current development environment and exactly how the proposed new thing would address them. Additionally, you'd want to hear the new set of pain points that the new thing will impose (cue the quote about some devs knowing the value of everything and the cost of nothing). You may also, for their benefit, direct the next kid with the cool idea towards a link that's commonly thrown around here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence I'm going to pull the more direct section "What this means on Wikipedia": > If you're considering nominating something for deletion, or changing a policy, because it doesn't appear to have any use or purpose, research its history first. > You may find out why it was created, and perhaps understand that it still serves a purpose. > Or if you do feel the issue it addressed is no longer valid, frame your argument for deletion in a way that acknowledges that.
      - Baeocystin 10y ago
        It's the implicit rationalization. New software engineers in particular suffer from "Ohh Shiny" when choosing their toolset more than just about any other group I've worked with. To the detriment of the profession, IMO. (Nice link. I was unaware of the name for that heuristic.)
bostand 10y ago
Have you considered maybe you are living inside a bubble? After all, you consider C# an uncool language.
- douche 10y ago
  > After all, you consider C# an uncool language. That couldn't be further from the truth... I love slinging C#, it's far and away my favorite. It doesn't have that HN hot-shit cachet that Go or Rust or Scala or Lisp-likes or ML-variants have, however.
sjellis 10y ago
> StackOverflow is more tilted towards "dark matter developers"[1] than many other places - the unseen, the unheralded, those that are toiling away at LOB apps inside of companies. Often they're using PHP or Java or C#, or god help them, Visual Basic, still. Those are not necessarily the kind of people that are going to be seen at dev conferences, but there is a huge number of them I think that is a really important thing to bear in mind when reading Hacker News, or pretty much any online venue. People who contribute or even post comments are not the majority. SO rates me in the top 20% of Ruby developers, because I answered a few questions on the site.

by douche 10y ago

Baeocystin 10y ago

Heh. Two of my clients are still using VB Apps I wrote for them in VB6. I'm not ashamed. They work, and they've worked well for 12+ years, with only the most minor of updates. Not every business follows the 'innovate fast and break things' mold. Thankfully.

sremani 10y ago
Exactly, we should be proud of creating Software that works and works great. Not the languages we develop in. The one main lesson if there is I learnt from 13 years of development is, keep the dev stack boring!
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Whenever a kid comes around with the cool idea lets rewrite this in X, they need to explain me the business value of the proposal, like in, how will that change the monetary outcome of a project.
  - notduncansmith 10y ago
    Isn't the implicit argument for any refactor/rewrite essentially increased velocity? "This change will allow us to do X in Y days when normally it would take some multiple of Y." It sounds like what you want is a more salient list of pain points in the current development environment and exactly how the proposed new thing would address them. Additionally, you'd want to hear the new set of pain points that the new thing will impose (cue the quote about some devs knowing the value of everything and the cost of nothing). You may also, for their benefit, direct the next kid with the cool idea towards a link that's commonly thrown around here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence I'm going to pull the more direct section "What this means on Wikipedia": > If you're considering nominating something for deletion, or changing a policy, because it doesn't appear to have any use or purpose, research its history first. > You may find out why it was created, and perhaps understand that it still serves a purpose. > Or if you do feel the issue it addressed is no longer valid, frame your argument for deletion in a way that acknowledges that.
    - Baeocystin 10y ago
      It's the implicit rationalization. New software engineers in particular suffer from "Ohh Shiny" when choosing their toolset more than just about any other group I've worked with. To the detriment of the profession, IMO. (Nice link. I was unaware of the name for that heuristic.)

bostand 10y ago

Have you considered maybe you are living inside a bubble? After all, you consider C# an uncool language.

douche 10y ago
> After all, you consider C# an uncool language. That couldn't be further from the truth... I love slinging C#, it's far and away my favorite. It doesn't have that HN hot-shit cachet that Go or Rust or Scala or Lisp-likes or ML-variants have, however.

sjellis 10y ago

> StackOverflow is more tilted towards "dark matter developers"[1] than many other places - the unseen, the unheralded, those that are toiling away at LOB apps inside of companies. Often they're using PHP or Java or C#, or god help them, Visual Basic, still. Those are not necessarily the kind of people that are going to be seen at dev conferences, but there is a huge number of them I think that is a really important thing to bear in mind when reading Hacker News, or pretty much any online venue. People who contribute or even post comments are not the majority. SO rates me in the top 20% of Ruby developers, because I answered a few questions on the site.