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Is this the new trend? Somebody relatively new to the tech industry who seems to have time to write tons of "expert opinions"? I have seen more and more of th

Is this the new trend? Somebody relatively new to the tech industry who seems to have time to write tons of "expert opinions"? I have seen more and more of these sorts of articles coming on HN, and other tech orentend places on the internet. I am starting to question if coding is the right path for anybody doing tech, and simply skip stratit to being a expert in field that takes decades to master even a small segment. It's not every single post. The ones I am talking about are ones where they have worked a hand full of a jobs -- about a year each and yet find themself speaking at conferences and writing grand articles as if they are somehow a proven expert in the topic they are talking/writing on, but lack the actual experience to justify their stance. To me, the real experts who have something valuable to say are probably too busy writing code and solving problems. It is not until much later in their career can they even begin to connect the dots of their mistakes and success to be able to talk about them. I think people should be leery of advice given by those with no real track record to support their views and positions. Yes, I know this is a bit of rant, but it seems to me that the industry is starting to look a lot like other industries where a class of people who actually can DO things are getting left at the sidelines while those who only talk about things are being trumpited as superstars and leaders of the industry -- without ever writing any significant amount of code or being a valued team member. Please feel free to correct my thought process on this, I am open to other interpretations of what is going on.

Isamu 8y ago
>as if they are somehow a proven expert This article isn't that, though. It's some common sense recommendations from a person consuming software. Almost anybody can write that, and if it's actionable advice, so much the better. Shallow topics can afford to have new people come in and give their opinion. I've got to say though, I'm not reading lots of those articles. I'm reading the articles that have technical depth. Just my preference.
hasperdi 8y ago
I agree with you. Conferences these days for example, they are more focused on passing their inclusivity quotas than making sure speakers are expert in their subjects. That is disappointing.
- hasperdi 8y ago
  Downvotes as I expected. As it is not politically correct on HN to critize inclusivity.
  - mdpopescu 8y ago
    I'm actually surprised you haven't been banned.
    - mdpopescu 8y ago
      And of course both your comments are now gone. Yay, feelings defended! /sarc
hyperpape 8y ago
I don't know much about her subfield (graphics compression), but she cofounded what appears to be a successful company selling a dev-tool.
sbjs 8y ago
I was told that I should start speaking at conferences right away, because "teaching is the best way to learn". I guess it's supposed to motivate me to learn "faster" if I have a deadline and the pressure of regurgitating that new knowledge to a crowd? But I already learn as fast as I can. Software is my passion! All it would accomplish is making myself look foolish, and wasting an hour of a few hundred people's time.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  I don't think it has anything to do with learning speed, as learning "faster" isn't necessarily better, and can often be worse. The idea behind "teaching is the best way to learn" is to help reinforce the concepts, because you can't really explain them satisfactorily to someone else unless you understand it pretty well yourself.
Jasper_ 8y ago
Stephanie Hurlburt cofounded Binomial, which builds Basis, an image compression system that's licensed to Netflix because of its quality. She's very much an expert in her field, and she indeed writes a lot of code.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  Thanks for stating the Netflix thing, I didn't know that. I was always curious why people seemed to really follow Stephanie for what seemed to be (from the website) to be a commodity product. Now it makes more sense.
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  First off, all text available seems to indicate Basis is a WIP. Everything talks about what it will be, or how it would work, and if GPU manufacturers did X. Furthermore Basis seems based off the open source work of Richard Geldreich. The company seems to be attempt to license this work, or license derivatives of this work. Richard appears to still be involved.
  - Jasper_ 8y ago
    Binomial was founded by Stephanie Hurlburt and Rich Geldreich. They both work on Basis. Basis it not a WIP, it is used by games today (and also Netflix). All of this information is available on the single page that is their homepage. http://www.binomial.info/ http://www.binomial.info/
    - mbrumlow 8y ago
      > making Basis I nearly watched/listen to everything posted by this company. Every wording in in future tense, with the exception to crush which is the free version, that had been available before the company existed, and was written by Rich Geldreich. There seems to be no information on the different between the free crush -- that existed before the founding of the company -- and the Basis, nothing you can tell from the there website anyways. There is no doubt that people are using crush, and that even some people did buy licenses to the crush taken private version. The slides seem to indicate -- again crush is what is in use, and Basis "will" do x y or z. It seems they are using crush and basis interchangeably. But even so, the slides clearly state that Rich wrote the software, and it seems to do so in such a way to make it clear that it was Rich. But that doesn't even matter. The point of my comments was not to argue about what somebody has or has not done. But none of that actually matters, if I took everything the site said, and everybody else is saying here at face value the company, the people involved with maybe the exception of Rich are not industry experts on starting companies, running companies, or pioneering technology yet. Simply having a one big named customer is like winning the lottery, so any advice anybody there would have about that would be a waste on the vast majority of people trying to start a company. If you simply dug deeper you would see what Binomial is. The history goes a bit like this. 1) Hated interviewing (interview processes seemed to be rated if there was a job offer or not) 2) Hated working with people. 3) Found Rich. 4) Liked working with Rich, and Rich with Stephanie 5) Both decided they hated working with people and that people seem to be the problem. 6) Both decide to start working together as contractors. 7) Rich had crush, which was a successful piece of software. 8) Idea!!! Take free software and make a for pay software company out of it to pay the bills! None of this is really up for speculation, she blogged all about it over the past 5 years. Stephanie and Rich are super smart and talented people, and are doing some cool things.I look forward to seeing if they do become the type of people I think should be having blog post and articles posted on sites like HN. But as my main point is scuessess is not a switch, it does not happen instantly. The company, is too new, and at least the main member of it speaking at conferences and simply lack a history that suggest that they have consumed enough of information to really understand how they got to where they are and if there is anything they could say that would help others. No I am not trying to stop people from writing about their experiences, but what I am concerned about is how HN and sites like HN seem to get flooded with tech and business articles from people who -- again -- seem to have a ton of time to write about things on a constant bases -- but lack a history around them that supports their views and thoughts on subject matters. I have a lot more to say but don't have time time. But I should make it clear that the issues I have are with the poster, and that stupid site that concatenates tweets into articles. Things like that I feel are a plight on getting ture information transfer from those who know to those who don't know. I expect the bar to be a bit higher.
dahart 8y ago
> Please feel free to correct my thought process on this Okay. - It's not a new trend. People at all levels of experience have been sharing good & bad advice for as long as talking has existed. - Are you certain the author is inexperienced? She appears to own a functioning software company, which alone is more than most developers can say. - So what if someone has less experience than you? This is an ad hominem argument. How much coding experience should one need before they're allowed to talk? Because the field of software development is growing, the majority of developers are newer. That will remain true until the day software development starts shrinking. What about her experience disqualifies her from sharing useful advice? - She's right, many OSS devs complain about lack of exposure while at the same time not making it easy to understand or explain what they're doing. Programmers as a group have this problem, even very experienced programmers. She's right, the way to get attention is to spend some time making your project easy to find and easy to understand. - She's right in a broader sense too. Good marketing is valuable, and it takes time and effort that is not programming. This applies to communication within a team, and it applies to starting businesses. This is something that took me personally a long time to learn. My decades of programming experience, surprise, didn't make me an expert in communicating the value of my software to other people.
detaro 8y ago
Someone running a company selling developer tools (in the widest sense) for millions probably has spent more time and effort thinking about "how to get people to use my software", and talked with more other developers (and customers) about it than "experts too busy writing code". What does qualify those "experts" to talk about it with more authority, even if we ignore the fact that someone making specialist graphics tooling probably isn't a bad programmer either, and solving problems companies are willing to pay for.
WhitneyLand 8y ago
I would disagree in many cases, and even consider it a potentially dangerous philosophy. Doesn’t this come close to veering into what WP says is a “well known as a fallacy”? (and what we all learned in whatever class that was in college? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority). Does this fit your example: My first job out of school was as a developer on WordPerfect for Windows. In short order I came to believe there were strategic mistakes being made (not the mistakes we made in code, mistakes at the exec level), as if there were a bubble or echo chamber around certain decisions, and that these strategic errors were an existential threat to the company. Dozens of highly paid people working on OS/2 ports, and other non mainstream platforms. Not paying enough attention to performance even as it started to hurt product reviews, because Microsoft steadily invested tons of time into optimization. Many other similar things. I asked for sit downs with some execs to offer alternative viewpoints on a few of these issues as food for thought. They listened, and watched, a early 20’s kid who looked 18, articulate these points. Should I have not tried to be an “expert” with three months of experience? Should they have at least allowed a second, broader meeting with key people to air out contrarian ideas? Surely I wasn’t the only one who saw these things. Could they have avoided wiping a billion dollars in value off the books if they had more seriously listened to a more diverse set of opinions and ideas? To be clear, sometimes less experienced people come with crazy, clearly impractical, even arrogant ideas that are not fully thought through. These should be constructively criticized and usually dismissed. Just remember, it’s not that unusual for experienced professionals to do the same thing. How is experience relevant at all except probabilistically? Ideas and approaches speak for themselves. They either have merit or they don’t. Should we ignore someone who keeps talking about how he can make a strong case for redefining our fundamental knowledge of physics? I mean the hell he’s not even a physicist he’s just a patent clerk without a PhD (not 100% certain but if I recall correctly there were interesting results before that degree was earned). More than one person had a chance to listen and didn’t. Of course my experiences and biases over the years have lead to this opinion, but I will never dismiss out of hand an argument that at first glance seems to be made in good faith, and appears to have had careful thought put into it. Moreover, if the argument has these attributes, and is also contrary to what I believe while a being business critical.topic, I’m more likely to read or hear it, at least until I’m sure it’s not a perspective I have already thoroughly considered.
ouid 8y ago
As my piano teacher liked to say, 'practice makes permanent'. It's just as important to evaluate the way you do things as it is to actually do them. Just because a method is battle tested doesn't mean that it's optimal, or even close. It's not a convex space, and it's certainly not a solved problem. That said, I don't think that there's any particular dearth of the experts that you talk about writing about the industry. Maybe you only click on essays written by fresh talent, for some reason?
emddudley 8y ago
On occasion you may encounter a young person who is more talented and successful than you. It can be difficult to accept. Instead of attacking the author, why not consider her thoughts and ideas? You've set up a strawman with some asinine assumptions about the author: "relatively new to the tech industry", "lack the actual experience to justify their stance", "without ever writing any significant amount of code or being a valued team member".
- mbrumlow 8y ago
  Please go read my comment again. I chose my words carefully not to attack the author. But to question the community in valuing a very specific type of social engineering that is occuring in the tech industry. I am positive that Stephanie Hurlburt is smart and talented. I never intended to question those things. But question the onslaught of speakers who have don't appear to have a good backing for why they are experts other than "they spoke at conference X, therefor...". Making a single accomplishment does not automatically make you a expert. Experts are those who have spent years honing their skills and demonstrated success time and time again. An expert is not somebody who is mirly smart and talented and driven. Those qualities combined with time, successes and failures is what makes an expert an expert. Upon second look I seem to be mostly agitated that HN has resorted to links to tweets concatenated into articles format, then suggesting buying PDF versions of said tweets.
boomlinde 8y ago
What does this have to do with the article itself? Reads like a vague ad hominem not pointed at anyone in particular. Is this a new trend?
damagednoob 8y ago
I share your sentiment but I don't think this is the best example of it.
skgoa 8y ago
The core issue is that most true experts self-select themselves out of blogging, giving speeches etc. Instead, most experts are busy doing the work they are experts in. So what you get is mostly non-experts writing/speaking authoritatively, which unduly misrepresents majority opinion in a field. This concept is called The Silent Majority of Experts.

Isamu 8y ago

>as if they are somehow a proven expert This article isn't that, though. It's some common sense recommendations from a person consuming software. Almost anybody can write that, and if it's actionable advice, so much the better. Shallow topics can afford to have new people come in and give their opinion. I've got to say though, I'm not reading lots of those articles. I'm reading the articles that have technical depth. Just my preference.

hasperdi 8y ago

I agree with you. Conferences these days for example, they are more focused on passing their inclusivity quotas than making sure speakers are expert in their subjects. That is disappointing.

hasperdi 8y ago
Downvotes as I expected. As it is not politically correct on HN to critize inclusivity.
- mdpopescu 8y ago
  I'm actually surprised you haven't been banned.
  - mdpopescu 8y ago
    And of course both your comments are now gone. Yay, feelings defended! /sarc

hyperpape 8y ago

I don't know much about her subfield (graphics compression), but she cofounded what appears to be a successful company selling a dev-tool.

sbjs 8y ago

I was told that I should start speaking at conferences right away, because "teaching is the best way to learn". I guess it's supposed to motivate me to learn "faster" if I have a deadline and the pressure of regurgitating that new knowledge to a crowd? But I already learn as fast as I can. Software is my passion! All it would accomplish is making myself look foolish, and wasting an hour of a few hundred people's time.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
I don't think it has anything to do with learning speed, as learning "faster" isn't necessarily better, and can often be worse. The idea behind "teaching is the best way to learn" is to help reinforce the concepts, because you can't really explain them satisfactorily to someone else unless you understand it pretty well yourself.

Jasper_ 8y ago

Stephanie Hurlburt cofounded Binomial, which builds Basis, an image compression system that's licensed to Netflix because of its quality. She's very much an expert in her field, and she indeed writes a lot of code.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago
Thanks for stating the Netflix thing, I didn't know that. I was always curious why people seemed to really follow Stephanie for what seemed to be (from the website) to be a commodity product. Now it makes more sense.
mbrumlow 8y ago
First off, all text available seems to indicate Basis is a WIP. Everything talks about what it will be, or how it would work, and if GPU manufacturers did X. Furthermore Basis seems based off the open source work of Richard Geldreich. The company seems to be attempt to license this work, or license derivatives of this work. Richard appears to still be involved.
- Jasper_ 8y ago
  Binomial was founded by Stephanie Hurlburt and Rich Geldreich. They both work on Basis. Basis it not a WIP, it is used by games today (and also Netflix). All of this information is available on the single page that is their homepage. http://www.binomial.info/ http://www.binomial.info/
  - mbrumlow 8y ago
    > making Basis I nearly watched/listen to everything posted by this company. Every wording in in future tense, with the exception to crush which is the free version, that had been available before the company existed, and was written by Rich Geldreich. There seems to be no information on the different between the free crush -- that existed before the founding of the company -- and the Basis, nothing you can tell from the there website anyways. There is no doubt that people are using crush, and that even some people did buy licenses to the crush taken private version. The slides seem to indicate -- again crush is what is in use, and Basis "will" do x y or z. It seems they are using crush and basis interchangeably. But even so, the slides clearly state that Rich wrote the software, and it seems to do so in such a way to make it clear that it was Rich. But that doesn't even matter. The point of my comments was not to argue about what somebody has or has not done. But none of that actually matters, if I took everything the site said, and everybody else is saying here at face value the company, the people involved with maybe the exception of Rich are not industry experts on starting companies, running companies, or pioneering technology yet. Simply having a one big named customer is like winning the lottery, so any advice anybody there would have about that would be a waste on the vast majority of people trying to start a company. If you simply dug deeper you would see what Binomial is. The history goes a bit like this. 1) Hated interviewing (interview processes seemed to be rated if there was a job offer or not) 2) Hated working with people. 3) Found Rich. 4) Liked working with Rich, and Rich with Stephanie 5) Both decided they hated working with people and that people seem to be the problem. 6) Both decide to start working together as contractors. 7) Rich had crush, which was a successful piece of software. 8) Idea!!! Take free software and make a for pay software company out of it to pay the bills! None of this is really up for speculation, she blogged all about it over the past 5 years. Stephanie and Rich are super smart and talented people, and are doing some cool things.I look forward to seeing if they do become the type of people I think should be having blog post and articles posted on sites like HN. But as my main point is scuessess is not a switch, it does not happen instantly. The company, is too new, and at least the main member of it speaking at conferences and simply lack a history that suggest that they have consumed enough of information to really understand how they got to where they are and if there is anything they could say that would help others. No I am not trying to stop people from writing about their experiences, but what I am concerned about is how HN and sites like HN seem to get flooded with tech and business articles from people who -- again -- seem to have a ton of time to write about things on a constant bases -- but lack a history around them that supports their views and thoughts on subject matters. I have a lot more to say but don't have time time. But I should make it clear that the issues I have are with the poster, and that stupid site that concatenates tweets into articles. Things like that I feel are a plight on getting ture information transfer from those who know to those who don't know. I expect the bar to be a bit higher.

dahart 8y ago

> Please feel free to correct my thought process on this Okay. - It's not a new trend. People at all levels of experience have been sharing good & bad advice for as long as talking has existed. - Are you certain the author is inexperienced? She appears to own a functioning software company, which alone is more than most developers can say. - So what if someone has less experience than you? This is an ad hominem argument. How much coding experience should one need before they're allowed to talk? Because the field of software development is growing, the majority of developers are newer. That will remain true until the day software development starts shrinking. What about her experience disqualifies her from sharing useful advice? - She's right, many OSS devs complain about lack of exposure while at the same time not making it easy to understand or explain what they're doing. Programmers as a group have this problem, even very experienced programmers. She's right, the way to get attention is to spend some time making your project easy to find and easy to understand. - She's right in a broader sense too. Good marketing is valuable, and it takes time and effort that is not programming. This applies to communication within a team, and it applies to starting businesses. This is something that took me personally a long time to learn. My decades of programming experience, surprise, didn't make me an expert in communicating the value of my software to other people.

detaro 8y ago

Someone running a company selling developer tools (in the widest sense) for millions probably has spent more time and effort thinking about "how to get people to use my software", and talked with more other developers (and customers) about it than "experts too busy writing code". What does qualify those "experts" to talk about it with more authority, even if we ignore the fact that someone making specialist graphics tooling probably isn't a bad programmer either, and solving problems companies are willing to pay for.

WhitneyLand 8y ago

I would disagree in many cases, and even consider it a potentially dangerous philosophy. Doesn’t this come close to veering into what WP says is a “well known as a fallacy”? (and what we all learned in whatever class that was in college? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority). Does this fit your example: My first job out of school was as a developer on WordPerfect for Windows. In short order I came to believe there were strategic mistakes being made (not the mistakes we made in code, mistakes at the exec level), as if there were a bubble or echo chamber around certain decisions, and that these strategic errors were an existential threat to the company. Dozens of highly paid people working on OS/2 ports, and other non mainstream platforms. Not paying enough attention to performance even as it started to hurt product reviews, because Microsoft steadily invested tons of time into optimization. Many other similar things. I asked for sit downs with some execs to offer alternative viewpoints on a few of these issues as food for thought. They listened, and watched, a early 20’s kid who looked 18, articulate these points. Should I have not tried to be an “expert” with three months of experience? Should they have at least allowed a second, broader meeting with key people to air out contrarian ideas? Surely I wasn’t the only one who saw these things. Could they have avoided wiping a billion dollars in value off the books if they had more seriously listened to a more diverse set of opinions and ideas? To be clear, sometimes less experienced people come with crazy, clearly impractical, even arrogant ideas that are not fully thought through. These should be constructively criticized and usually dismissed. Just remember, it’s not that unusual for experienced professionals to do the same thing. How is experience relevant at all except probabilistically? Ideas and approaches speak for themselves. They either have merit or they don’t. Should we ignore someone who keeps talking about how he can make a strong case for redefining our fundamental knowledge of physics? I mean the hell he’s not even a physicist he’s just a patent clerk without a PhD (not 100% certain but if I recall correctly there were interesting results before that degree was earned). More than one person had a chance to listen and didn’t. Of course my experiences and biases over the years have lead to this opinion, but I will never dismiss out of hand an argument that at first glance seems to be made in good faith, and appears to have had careful thought put into it. Moreover, if the argument has these attributes, and is also contrary to what I believe while a being business critical.topic, I’m more likely to read or hear it, at least until I’m sure it’s not a perspective I have already thoroughly considered.

ouid 8y ago

As my piano teacher liked to say, 'practice makes permanent'. It's just as important to evaluate the way you do things as it is to actually do them. Just because a method is battle tested doesn't mean that it's optimal, or even close. It's not a convex space, and it's certainly not a solved problem. That said, I don't think that there's any particular dearth of the experts that you talk about writing about the industry. Maybe you only click on essays written by fresh talent, for some reason?

emddudley 8y ago

On occasion you may encounter a young person who is more talented and successful than you. It can be difficult to accept. Instead of attacking the author, why not consider her thoughts and ideas? You've set up a strawman with some asinine assumptions about the author: "relatively new to the tech industry", "lack the actual experience to justify their stance", "without ever writing any significant amount of code or being a valued team member".

mbrumlow 8y ago
Please go read my comment again. I chose my words carefully not to attack the author. But to question the community in valuing a very specific type of social engineering that is occuring in the tech industry. I am positive that Stephanie Hurlburt is smart and talented. I never intended to question those things. But question the onslaught of speakers who have don't appear to have a good backing for why they are experts other than "they spoke at conference X, therefor...". Making a single accomplishment does not automatically make you a expert. Experts are those who have spent years honing their skills and demonstrated success time and time again. An expert is not somebody who is mirly smart and talented and driven. Those qualities combined with time, successes and failures is what makes an expert an expert. Upon second look I seem to be mostly agitated that HN has resorted to links to tweets concatenated into articles format, then suggesting buying PDF versions of said tweets.

boomlinde 8y ago

What does this have to do with the article itself? Reads like a vague ad hominem not pointed at anyone in particular. Is this a new trend?

damagednoob 8y ago

I share your sentiment but I don't think this is the best example of it.

skgoa 8y ago

The core issue is that most true experts self-select themselves out of blogging, giving speeches etc. Instead, most experts are busy doing the work they are experts in. So what you get is mostly non-experts writing/speaking authoritatively, which unduly misrepresents majority opinion in a field. This concept is called The Silent Majority of Experts.