7 ms·

The most successful developers share more than they take

112 points by DelightOne 6y ago

the_jeremy 6y ago
When you define "great developer" as "top contributors on StackOverflow" (or the ones responsible for founding it), of course the overlap will be 100%. I understand that StackOverflow actively requires people to work on their platform for no compensation so they want to encourage the idea that contributing makes you a better developer, but this is even more of a puff piece than I expected.
- agustif 6y ago
  I haven't read the post. You could share like in open source code contributions or in a blogpost in your own blog / domain
- superpermutat0r 6y ago
  All of the great developers (or at least magnitudes more competent/experienced than me) I met spend very little time on the internet writing comments/answers.
  - m00x 6y ago
    This has been my experience as well. There are good developers that are out there helping others, but that usually doesn't require tremendous skill as most of the questions are simple and can mostly be resolved by looking at the documentation. The hard stuff usually comes from doing things that were never done before or going deep inside a system. This usually doesn't apply to many people and is hard to share.
- diehunde 6y ago
  That wasn't the point of the article at all. That was just an example of how some of these devs share knowledge.
- Tehchops 6y ago
  I feel like we read different articles. They do make mention of being actively engaged on SO, but this didn't at all read like a marketing piece for getting more SO users. The key point seemed to be one I've seen echoed repeatedly elsewhere: a lot of good developers write and share a lot. It doesn't have to be Stack Overflow. "Good" in this context I take to mean holistically good. Not just good on purely technical skills, but soft skills(particularly effective communication), organizationally dynamic, etc...
  - MauranKilom 6y ago
    I read the article prior to seeing it shared here. My conclusion was that it's just sampling bias. Of course you will hear proportionally more of "great" developers if they share more about themselves. And of course those are the ones you'll invite to a podcast. I don't even know what kind of statistical basis they want to put their claims on. A better title would be "the great developers that you hear from a lot share a lot". They make an effort not to promote "share your knowledge on SO" strongly, but it's one of the two actionable thoughts any developer reading this would have. "I should write blog posts" or "I should answer questions on SO".
webel0 6y ago
Wondering how much of this is convenience bias? If you want to make a podcast about great developers you’d probably start with the people you know, which is going to tend to be people with a substantial public presence.
- tomgp 6y ago
  Yeah some of the best, most creative and insightful developers I know have virtually no social media presence beyond git hub and a dormant twitter accounts
ilaksh 6y ago
Well again I would like to point out that popularity and merit are not the same thing. One thing I have found is that because my comments, answers and open source software has not been popular, I have stopped attempting to share. However, I know that some of my least popular projects have had the most merit.
dpc_pw 6y ago
Nice ad.
songzme 6y ago
I have a hard time sharing. For the past 10 years, I had been working on a side project to answer this question: can I teach anyone how to become a good software engineer? 10 years ago, I thought everyone should learn a certain skillset and I blogged about them actively. Some of the articles made it to HN front page. It made me feel great. But every year as I grew as an engineer, my views of what mades a good engineer changed. I realized that I need to thoroughly test my views first before sharing publicly. So to test my changing views, I mentor a group of student learners every day after work and during weekends. I observe their progress throughout their interview process and then how they perform in the software engineering world. To this day, I still don't have a concrete answer, so I haven't blogged since. It's particularly painful when my ideas are wrong and the students I mentored turned out to be the kind of engineers I wouldn't want on my team. It's not their fault and blogging about my failures would single them out and I don't have the heart to do it. So over the past 10 years, I eventually stopped shied away from being "Public by default" until I have experimented enough to be sure.
- jfim 6y ago
  Part of being a more senior engineer is to be able to admit that one was incorrect, learn a lesson, and move on. It's also a good lesson for more junior engineers that no one is infallible, and what matters more is how one reacts to being incorrect. As for teaching people to become good software engineers, there's a technical part to it (eg. being able to structure a program, decompose problems into smaller problems, etc.) but some innate traits (curiosity, perseverance, humbleness) are also pretty important. I'd argue (without any data!) that the latter are just as important as the former.
  - songzme 6y ago
    `Part of being a more senior engineer is to be able to admit that one was incorrect, learn a lesson, and move on.` I agree. The more I know, the deeper I go to validate my assumptions, the harder it is to share.
    - munificent 6y ago
hyperpape 6y ago
Maybe. The example that popped into my head, however, was Fabrice Bellard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard. To the best of my knowledge, he shares in one way: a dump of his amazing code appears from time to time. However, I have never read a comment, tweet, blog post, or mailing list post by him. They may exist and I have crossed paths with them. Or perhaps he's an incredibly helpful guy to work with. But that's not the foundation of his excellence.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Says a thing or two about communication and web scale medias. I kinda interpreted this notion when following mailing lists of some projects. People there speak few but deep. The complete opposite of the web 2.0 (microblog, tweet.. it's all high frequency low depth). Good things require a good deal of patience and thinking ? I suppose that's what F.Bellard spends most of his day on.
- acdha 6y ago
  That's an interesting example: the projects where he's had the greatest impact (QEMU, ffmpeg) are fairly normal open-source projects, with Fabrice participating with other people on mailing lists or bug trackers, not to mention successfully handing maintainership over to a larger community.
  - hyperpape 6y ago
    Fair. I don't follow those projects, so I guess I don't see that public participation. What I meant is that from the outside, it appears like he's just focused on the work.
k__ 6y ago
Pro tip: There are more junior than senior devs, there are more beginners than junior devs. The more basic the stuff is you share, the more people can do something with it.
neonate 6y ago
Where by "successful" is meant: the ones who get attention. In other words this is a tautological claim. Everyone else has already pointed this out, but as a non-self-promoting developer I have to add my bit. Often the best programmers have zero self-promotion instinct, and this has nothing to do with not wanting to share. "Share" in this article means something like "publish", and that's both a different skill and a different desire.
runawaybottle 6y ago
Our gates are open, and we should adhere to that principle, but similar to free speech, we should make clear reasonable conduct. In other words, do not think your sharing is acceptable without some merit. A good example of this was a recent 15 year old that wrote a blog post about lessons in being a developer that really should only have been written by someone with a minimum of five years of professional experience (and I’m being lenient, probably should be 7-8). By principle we encourage the open gate, but If the growing trend is you are fresh out of college or a bootcamp graduate and write up a whole article on microservices and why or why not a business should use them, then our implicit guidelines are too ignorable. The community should want sharing, but with integrity. We don’t want people sharing because of the concocted identity of a developer who must surely also write authoritative/instructor blog posts. This should be discouraged implicitly, and given the climate of lack of integrity based sharing (eg I worked 5 years, let me show you how to set up a scalable business model), then we must be more explicit until those behaviors change. Open gate regardless.
seemslegit 6y ago
SO quality participation is in decline as it transformed itself into yet another online shredder of good will and "great developers" realize they're being exploited, cue content like this to try and goad them back.
whattheyong 6y ago
Personally, that was something that truly believes in. Writing and putting them in public helps accelerate your personal development. As you write, you find yourself faced with a world of readers whom you have to be prepared to articulate your thoughts clearly, least not to lose the reader along the way. That clarity of thought is what deepen the roots of your domain knowledge. Personally, I feel you do not have to perfect the writing before it can start facing the world. Share as it comes and just makes sure you are better the next time around. Failure is part of the growth process! (: Here's my blog sharing about some learnings I've had regarding architecture design patterns! Hope you will learn something from it! Do leave your comments as well, appreciate them! https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-03-3-more-cloud-design-pattern https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-03-3-more-cloud-de... In relation to the post, I've also shared some of my personal thoughts on this: https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-14-first-half-of-may-articles https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-14-first-half-of-m...
wasureru 6y ago
One of the questions I always ask successful bloggers is: what motivated you to start? The answer is always the same: I did it for myself. This is an example of survivor bias; those who start a blog with the aim of attracting a following will lose motivation and grow impatient with the short term results. Successful bloggers have the personal confidence and passion for the topic to document and share stuff they think is cool. I feel like a step is missing here. Is the survivor bias related to a similarly named logical error (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)? Or is it the “good” kind of bias in the sense that survivors are predisposed to have certain traits compared to non-survivors?

112 points by DelightOne 6y ago

When you define "great developer" as "top contributors on StackOverflow" (or the ones responsible for founding it), of course the overlap will be 100%. I understand that StackOverflow actively requires people to work on their platform for no compensation so they want to encourage the idea that contributing makes you a better developer, but this is even more of a puff piece than I expected.

agustif 6y ago
I haven't read the post. You could share like in open source code contributions or in a blogpost in your own blog / domain
superpermutat0r 6y ago
All of the great developers (or at least magnitudes more competent/experienced than me) I met spend very little time on the internet writing comments/answers.
- m00x 6y ago
  This has been my experience as well. There are good developers that are out there helping others, but that usually doesn't require tremendous skill as most of the questions are simple and can mostly be resolved by looking at the documentation. The hard stuff usually comes from doing things that were never done before or going deep inside a system. This usually doesn't apply to many people and is hard to share.
diehunde 6y ago
That wasn't the point of the article at all. That was just an example of how some of these devs share knowledge.
Tehchops 6y ago
I feel like we read different articles. They do make mention of being actively engaged on SO, but this didn't at all read like a marketing piece for getting more SO users. The key point seemed to be one I've seen echoed repeatedly elsewhere: a lot of good developers write and share a lot. It doesn't have to be Stack Overflow. "Good" in this context I take to mean holistically good. Not just good on purely technical skills, but soft skills(particularly effective communication), organizationally dynamic, etc...
- MauranKilom 6y ago
  I read the article prior to seeing it shared here. My conclusion was that it's just sampling bias. Of course you will hear proportionally more of "great" developers if they share more about themselves. And of course those are the ones you'll invite to a podcast. I don't even know what kind of statistical basis they want to put their claims on. A better title would be "the great developers that you hear from a lot share a lot". They make an effort not to promote "share your knowledge on SO" strongly, but it's one of the two actionable thoughts any developer reading this would have. "I should write blog posts" or "I should answer questions on SO".

webel0 6y ago

Wondering how much of this is convenience bias? If you want to make a podcast about great developers you’d probably start with the people you know, which is going to tend to be people with a substantial public presence.

tomgp 6y ago
Yeah some of the best, most creative and insightful developers I know have virtually no social media presence beyond git hub and a dormant twitter accounts

ilaksh 6y ago

Well again I would like to point out that popularity and merit are not the same thing. One thing I have found is that because my comments, answers and open source software has not been popular, I have stopped attempting to share. However, I know that some of my least popular projects have had the most merit.

dpc_pw 6y ago

Nice ad.

songzme 6y ago

I have a hard time sharing. For the past 10 years, I had been working on a side project to answer this question: can I teach anyone how to become a good software engineer? 10 years ago, I thought everyone should learn a certain skillset and I blogged about them actively. Some of the articles made it to HN front page. It made me feel great. But every year as I grew as an engineer, my views of what mades a good engineer changed. I realized that I need to thoroughly test my views first before sharing publicly. So to test my changing views, I mentor a group of student learners every day after work and during weekends. I observe their progress throughout their interview process and then how they perform in the software engineering world. To this day, I still don't have a concrete answer, so I haven't blogged since. It's particularly painful when my ideas are wrong and the students I mentored turned out to be the kind of engineers I wouldn't want on my team. It's not their fault and blogging about my failures would single them out and I don't have the heart to do it. So over the past 10 years, I eventually stopped shied away from being "Public by default" until I have experimented enough to be sure.

jfim 6y ago
Part of being a more senior engineer is to be able to admit that one was incorrect, learn a lesson, and move on. It's also a good lesson for more junior engineers that no one is infallible, and what matters more is how one reacts to being incorrect. As for teaching people to become good software engineers, there's a technical part to it (eg. being able to structure a program, decompose problems into smaller problems, etc.) but some innate traits (curiosity, perseverance, humbleness) are also pretty important. I'd argue (without any data!) that the latter are just as important as the former.
- songzme 6y ago
  `Part of being a more senior engineer is to be able to admit that one was incorrect, learn a lesson, and move on.` I agree. The more I know, the deeper I go to validate my assumptions, the harder it is to share.
  - munificent 6y ago

hyperpape 6y ago

Maybe. The example that popped into my head, however, was Fabrice Bellard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard. To the best of my knowledge, he shares in one way: a dump of his amazing code appears from time to time. However, I have never read a comment, tweet, blog post, or mailing list post by him. They may exist and I have crossed paths with them. Or perhaps he's an incredibly helpful guy to work with. But that's not the foundation of his excellence.

agumonkey 6y ago
Says a thing or two about communication and web scale medias. I kinda interpreted this notion when following mailing lists of some projects. People there speak few but deep. The complete opposite of the web 2.0 (microblog, tweet.. it's all high frequency low depth). Good things require a good deal of patience and thinking ? I suppose that's what F.Bellard spends most of his day on.
acdha 6y ago
That's an interesting example: the projects where he's had the greatest impact (QEMU, ffmpeg) are fairly normal open-source projects, with Fabrice participating with other people on mailing lists or bug trackers, not to mention successfully handing maintainership over to a larger community.
- hyperpape 6y ago
  Fair. I don't follow those projects, so I guess I don't see that public participation. What I meant is that from the outside, it appears like he's just focused on the work.

k__ 6y ago

Pro tip: There are more junior than senior devs, there are more beginners than junior devs. The more basic the stuff is you share, the more people can do something with it.

neonate 6y ago

Where by "successful" is meant: the ones who get attention. In other words this is a tautological claim. Everyone else has already pointed this out, but as a non-self-promoting developer I have to add my bit. Often the best programmers have zero self-promotion instinct, and this has nothing to do with not wanting to share. "Share" in this article means something like "publish", and that's both a different skill and a different desire.

runawaybottle 6y ago

Our gates are open, and we should adhere to that principle, but similar to free speech, we should make clear reasonable conduct. In other words, do not think your sharing is acceptable without some merit. A good example of this was a recent 15 year old that wrote a blog post about lessons in being a developer that really should only have been written by someone with a minimum of five years of professional experience (and I’m being lenient, probably should be 7-8). By principle we encourage the open gate, but If the growing trend is you are fresh out of college or a bootcamp graduate and write up a whole article on microservices and why or why not a business should use them, then our implicit guidelines are too ignorable. The community should want sharing, but with integrity. We don’t want people sharing because of the concocted identity of a developer who must surely also write authoritative/instructor blog posts. This should be discouraged implicitly, and given the climate of lack of integrity based sharing (eg I worked 5 years, let me show you how to set up a scalable business model), then we must be more explicit until those behaviors change. Open gate regardless.

seemslegit 6y ago

SO quality participation is in decline as it transformed itself into yet another online shredder of good will and "great developers" realize they're being exploited, cue content like this to try and goad them back.

whattheyong 6y ago

Personally, that was something that truly believes in. Writing and putting them in public helps accelerate your personal development. As you write, you find yourself faced with a world of readers whom you have to be prepared to articulate your thoughts clearly, least not to lose the reader along the way. That clarity of thought is what deepen the roots of your domain knowledge. Personally, I feel you do not have to perfect the writing before it can start facing the world. Share as it comes and just makes sure you are better the next time around. Failure is part of the growth process! (: Here's my blog sharing about some learnings I've had regarding architecture design patterns! Hope you will learn something from it! Do leave your comments as well, appreciate them! https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-03-3-more-cloud-design-pattern https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-03-3-more-cloud-de... In relation to the post, I've also shared some of my personal thoughts on this: https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-14-first-half-of-may-articles https://blog.phuaxueyong.com/post/2020-05-14-first-half-of-m...

wasureru 6y ago

One of the questions I always ask successful bloggers is: what motivated you to start? The answer is always the same: I did it for myself. This is an example of survivor bias; those who start a blog with the aim of attracting a following will lose motivation and grow impatient with the short term results. Successful bloggers have the personal confidence and passion for the topic to document and share stuff they think is cool. I feel like a step is missing here. Is the survivor bias related to a similarly named logical error (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias)? Or is it the “good” kind of bias in the sense that survivors are predisposed to have certain traits compared to non-survivors?