4 ms·

Things like blogs and github are great learning resources but I think they're also starting to skew people's expectations of the average programmer. What? Care

Things like blogs and github are great learning resources but I think they're also starting to skew people's expectations of the average programmer. What? Care to elaborate?

gaius 16y ago
The demographics of the typical programmer-blogger are not representative of the typical programmer. And writing a blog is not correlated in any way with talent or productivity. Probably the vast majority of working programmers either don't write a blog, or don't blog about programming (but about their cats, kids, and steam-engine building hobby).
- euroclydon 16y ago
  I see where you guys are going with this, and that's a fine place to be, if you're comfortable there. But blogging and putting code up on GitHub IS directly correlated with letting people know who the heck you are, and not just sitting behind the corporate firewall, being a good little human-resource, hoping that your dedication gets noticed and yields good marks on your personnel file, so that you will continue to be employed, and be able to afford a new model steam engine. If you don't blog or use GitHub, or do something similar, then when that mid-life layoff happens, you'll may be at the mercy of recruiters and whatnot, to spice up your resume try to sell you.
  - gaius 16y ago
    I really, really doubt anyone's blog is ever a deciding factor in a hiring situation. Really. Maybe this is different in very web-oriented specialities. Also I am very amused that you think anyone without a blog is a "good little human resource", as if writing a blog was some great accomplishment of individuality. People who don't do it don't do it because they're simply not interested. Doesn't mean blogs are a waste of time or anything, but they are just a hobby. Like stamp collecting. FWIW I have my name on the cover of a book, that was in actual real bookstores, about the main technology I use. I mention it on my CV. Hasn't resulted in any more than a minute's conversation in the (admittedly very few) interview's I've done since then. And as an interviewer and hiring manager, I've never taken a blog into consideration. Apart from for the author him or herself, blogs just aren't important. The bloke I'm thinking of with the steam engines, BTW, is pretty talented. He built his first one with electric tools and his second with tools powered by the first. And he's a great developer. Hiring some blogger over him would be a serious mistake for any organization...
    - euroclydon 16y ago
      You're absolutely right in what you say, but I think we're talking past each other. Whether a blog exists or not is meaningless. It's what's in the blog that matters. And really, in this conversation, to me, blog is synonymous with self promotion. It's a topic I've been on the fence about for a while: how necessary, if at all, is self promotion? I think blogging and using github are just modern ways of networking and interacting with more people through technology. Writing a book is great, and so is being good at your work. Furthermore, I think the project nature of software development, lends itself more to developers being free-agents rather than employees, which was my original motivation for commenting here. I just hear so many recruiters and hiring managers pat themselves on the back for "finding a great developer", that I wish more developers would promote themselves in order to make it less of a talent search, and so that they could showcase their knowledge, talent, and capabilities to the widest audience.
- barrkel 16y ago
  I'd be willing to bet that writing a blog about programming is positively correlated with programming talent and productivity, for at least one reason: it shows interest in the subject, and the extra attention compounds over time. The typical programmer has little interest in the profession other than as a monthly salary, and spends most of their life doing copy & paste-level implementation and reimplementation of business rules into straightforward code and UI. Domain knowledge is usually (a lot) more valuable than coding ability for these people. Sure, the kernels and architectures of the systems these typical programmers work with are designed and implemented by people you would probably more recognize as hackers, but there is so much more drudgework that needs to be done to make it all a useful piece of corporate IT infrastructure. There are armies of these people doing it, and the work isn't interesting code-wise. These typical programmers, as a rule, don't blog about their work.
  - smokinn 16y ago
    Rather than just believe in an unproven hypothesis why don't you test it out? Find the interesting-code projects you actually use or have heard about (maybe Apache, Cassandra, Google's Bigtable, etc), find out who did the majority of the coding and then try to find their blog. How many people work on Apache? How many of them have blogs? Do you even care that they blog? Wouldn't you hire any of them anyway? Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik were the guys that wrote Cassandra when it was still an internal Facebook project. I can't find blogs for either of them. (Though they did write one blog post on the Facebook Engineering blog.) Doug Cutting wrote a lot of great code for Hadoop. He has a blog here: http://cutting.wordpress.com/ http://cutting.wordpress.com/ but hasn't touched it in nearly a year. Jeff Dean has done some amazing work at Google ( http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html Now THAT is one hell of a resume) and I can't find a blog for him either. To me, it seems mostly random whether the person has a blog or not. It would be an interesting project to catalog and analyze how many do and don't. Then you'd have a real answer rather than a wild guess you believe religiously rather than scientifically.
    - barrkel 16y ago
      You have it backwards. You are looking at the cream of open source developers, and then asking whether they have blogs. But the question isn't whether blogging is correlated with coding excellence (i.e. whether top tier of devs blog or not); it's whether coding ability is correlated with blogging (i.e. is blogging more associated with above median devs or not). There are over two million programmers in the US alone. My proposition would be true if more people in the top half of that distribution blogged about coding than in the bottom half, and I don't think that's an unlikely suggestion. Even if you think whether someone blogs or not is random, the subject of the blog is not. People's estimation of their ability is correlated with their ability (Dunning-Kruger effect notwithstanding, check the paper's graph - perception is compressed but not inverted), and I think it's conservative to say that people who think they know more about a subject are more likely to talk about it. To make it clear, I'm talking about blogging as a signal of ability, not ability as a signal of propensity to blog (which is what you suggest measuring). Since there are a lot more people coding than blogging about coding, it would be unlikely in any case to find a high proportion of bloggers at any level of the ability scale.
cageface 16y ago
If you spend much time on HN or reading programmer blogs or on github you're going to be exposed to a lot of exceptionally talented and/or motivated programmers, because those are the people that take the trouble to maintain this kind of online presence. It doesn't take long for your conception of what it means to be a professional programmer to start to skew in this direction. To put it another way, almost all the job listings I see these days ask for github account info and if you don't have a pretty impressive github portfolio you look like a scrub. There are some upsides to this but, compared to the job market of even ten years ago, it's less forgiving.

Things like blogs and github are great learning resources but I think they're also starting to skew people's expectations of the average programmer. What? Care to elaborate?

gaius 16y ago

The demographics of the typical programmer-blogger are not representative of the typical programmer. And writing a blog is not correlated in any way with talent or productivity. Probably the vast majority of working programmers either don't write a blog, or don't blog about programming (but about their cats, kids, and steam-engine building hobby).

euroclydon 16y ago
I see where you guys are going with this, and that's a fine place to be, if you're comfortable there. But blogging and putting code up on GitHub IS directly correlated with letting people know who the heck you are, and not just sitting behind the corporate firewall, being a good little human-resource, hoping that your dedication gets noticed and yields good marks on your personnel file, so that you will continue to be employed, and be able to afford a new model steam engine. If you don't blog or use GitHub, or do something similar, then when that mid-life layoff happens, you'll may be at the mercy of recruiters and whatnot, to spice up your resume try to sell you.
- gaius 16y ago
  I really, really doubt anyone's blog is ever a deciding factor in a hiring situation. Really. Maybe this is different in very web-oriented specialities. Also I am very amused that you think anyone without a blog is a "good little human resource", as if writing a blog was some great accomplishment of individuality. People who don't do it don't do it because they're simply not interested. Doesn't mean blogs are a waste of time or anything, but they are just a hobby. Like stamp collecting. FWIW I have my name on the cover of a book, that was in actual real bookstores, about the main technology I use. I mention it on my CV. Hasn't resulted in any more than a minute's conversation in the (admittedly very few) interview's I've done since then. And as an interviewer and hiring manager, I've never taken a blog into consideration. Apart from for the author him or herself, blogs just aren't important. The bloke I'm thinking of with the steam engines, BTW, is pretty talented. He built his first one with electric tools and his second with tools powered by the first. And he's a great developer. Hiring some blogger over him would be a serious mistake for any organization...
  - euroclydon 16y ago
    You're absolutely right in what you say, but I think we're talking past each other. Whether a blog exists or not is meaningless. It's what's in the blog that matters. And really, in this conversation, to me, blog is synonymous with self promotion. It's a topic I've been on the fence about for a while: how necessary, if at all, is self promotion? I think blogging and using github are just modern ways of networking and interacting with more people through technology. Writing a book is great, and so is being good at your work. Furthermore, I think the project nature of software development, lends itself more to developers being free-agents rather than employees, which was my original motivation for commenting here. I just hear so many recruiters and hiring managers pat themselves on the back for "finding a great developer", that I wish more developers would promote themselves in order to make it less of a talent search, and so that they could showcase their knowledge, talent, and capabilities to the widest audience.
barrkel 16y ago
I'd be willing to bet that writing a blog about programming is positively correlated with programming talent and productivity, for at least one reason: it shows interest in the subject, and the extra attention compounds over time. The typical programmer has little interest in the profession other than as a monthly salary, and spends most of their life doing copy & paste-level implementation and reimplementation of business rules into straightforward code and UI. Domain knowledge is usually (a lot) more valuable than coding ability for these people. Sure, the kernels and architectures of the systems these typical programmers work with are designed and implemented by people you would probably more recognize as hackers, but there is so much more drudgework that needs to be done to make it all a useful piece of corporate IT infrastructure. There are armies of these people doing it, and the work isn't interesting code-wise. These typical programmers, as a rule, don't blog about their work.
- smokinn 16y ago
  Rather than just believe in an unproven hypothesis why don't you test it out? Find the interesting-code projects you actually use or have heard about (maybe Apache, Cassandra, Google's Bigtable, etc), find out who did the majority of the coding and then try to find their blog. How many people work on Apache? How many of them have blogs? Do you even care that they blog? Wouldn't you hire any of them anyway? Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik were the guys that wrote Cassandra when it was still an internal Facebook project. I can't find blogs for either of them. (Though they did write one blog post on the Facebook Engineering blog.) Doug Cutting wrote a lot of great code for Hadoop. He has a blog here: http://cutting.wordpress.com/ http://cutting.wordpress.com/ but hasn't touched it in nearly a year. Jeff Dean has done some amazing work at Google ( http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html Now THAT is one hell of a resume) and I can't find a blog for him either. To me, it seems mostly random whether the person has a blog or not. It would be an interesting project to catalog and analyze how many do and don't. Then you'd have a real answer rather than a wild guess you believe religiously rather than scientifically.
  - barrkel 16y ago
    You have it backwards. You are looking at the cream of open source developers, and then asking whether they have blogs. But the question isn't whether blogging is correlated with coding excellence (i.e. whether top tier of devs blog or not); it's whether coding ability is correlated with blogging (i.e. is blogging more associated with above median devs or not). There are over two million programmers in the US alone. My proposition would be true if more people in the top half of that distribution blogged about coding than in the bottom half, and I don't think that's an unlikely suggestion. Even if you think whether someone blogs or not is random, the subject of the blog is not. People's estimation of their ability is correlated with their ability (Dunning-Kruger effect notwithstanding, check the paper's graph - perception is compressed but not inverted), and I think it's conservative to say that people who think they know more about a subject are more likely to talk about it. To make it clear, I'm talking about blogging as a signal of ability, not ability as a signal of propensity to blog (which is what you suggest measuring). Since there are a lot more people coding than blogging about coding, it would be unlikely in any case to find a high proportion of bloggers at any level of the ability scale.

cageface 16y ago

If you spend much time on HN or reading programmer blogs or on github you're going to be exposed to a lot of exceptionally talented and/or motivated programmers, because those are the people that take the trouble to maintain this kind of online presence. It doesn't take long for your conception of what it means to be a professional programmer to start to skew in this direction. To put it another way, almost all the job listings I see these days ask for github account info and if you don't have a pretty impressive github portfolio you look like a scrub. There are some upsides to this but, compared to the job market of even ten years ago, it's less forgiving.