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Obviously the people who write for fb or airbnb or netflix might well be professional tech bloggers or people in tech-leadership positions that tell other peopl

Obviously the people who write for fb or airbnb or netflix might well be professional tech bloggers or people in tech-leadership positions that tell other people how to do the work. Or even researchers (I see the last one appear in ms tech blogs a lot). Or it might have been heavily edited. Brendan Gregg is a professional tech author. Not a hobbyist. Mr Vogels is a CTO, far from a programmer. That's not to disrespect any of their content. In fact i think its great that companies bother with it and that we have so many tech authors willing to put in the hours it takes to come up with something sellable. Arguably the people writing such things put their companies rep on the line so should be more trusted than the average grunt programmer who is still on the implementation level. But if these are the best counterexamples we can find, then I'd say OP has a point. That's not to say coders don't write blogs, I've written a few technical blogs myself and I am very much on the implementation level. But that's not something people will actually read because it's pretty low effort and not about work stuff (every work contract has a secrecy clause these days).

jedberg 6y ago
> Obviously the people who write for fb or airbnb or netflix might well be professional tech bloggers or people in tech-leadership positions that tell other people how to do the work. Not usually. Usually the way it works is the person who wrote the code and developed the technology decides to write a blog post about it and then writes it. Then they pass it around to their peers and other leadership for comments and edits. Then, at least at Netflix, the next step was usually to publish it yourself on the tech blog. Sometimes if it was a big new tech it might get reviewed by PR or legal but not often. At the other tech companies I don't know what their process is after that. But what I do know is that I know a lot of those authors personally and they are definitely implementers.
jedberg 6y ago
> Brendan Gregg is a professional tech author. He gets paid to write, yes, but that doesn't mean he's not also an engineer. I've worked with him, he does quite a lot of heavy engineering and then writes about it. His writing is so good sometimes he gets paid for it. But OP said that tech blogs aren't written by implementers, and that's not at all true.

jedberg 6y ago

> Obviously the people who write for fb or airbnb or netflix might well be professional tech bloggers or people in tech-leadership positions that tell other people how to do the work. Not usually. Usually the way it works is the person who wrote the code and developed the technology decides to write a blog post about it and then writes it. Then they pass it around to their peers and other leadership for comments and edits. Then, at least at Netflix, the next step was usually to publish it yourself on the tech blog. Sometimes if it was a big new tech it might get reviewed by PR or legal but not often. At the other tech companies I don't know what their process is after that. But what I do know is that I know a lot of those authors personally and they are definitely implementers.

jedberg 6y ago

> Brendan Gregg is a professional tech author. He gets paid to write, yes, but that doesn't mean he's not also an engineer. I've worked with him, he does quite a lot of heavy engineering and then writes about it. His writing is so good sometimes he gets paid for it. But OP said that tech blogs aren't written by implementers, and that's not at all true.