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There are too many bullshitters in the software industry. Years of experience helps but it's not sufficient to be a good developer. There are many terrible deve

There are too many bullshitters in the software industry. Years of experience helps but it's not sufficient to be a good developer. There are many terrible developers with 20+ years of experience and there are some great developers with only 10 years of experience. The number one characteristic that makes a developer great is their critical thinking ability. These developers don't blindly adopt tools and business processes based on popularity. They are always able to justify their decisions with strong arguments which convincingly explain why their chosen option is better than all the other possible options. This applies to every decision they make. Writing software is more like chess than checkers - You need to consider every reasonable option many steps ahead. IMO software development is a complex area - Following common industry patterns and best practices without thinking about whether or not they actually apply to your particular use case is almost always the wrong approach. There are nuances in essentially every single software project which would warrant deviating from industry norms in at least some ways. To always follow best practices blindly without questioning them or adapting them to your use case is in itself a terrible practice. Also, the problem with trusting experts in complex domains is that the line between an expert and snake oil salesman is incredibly blurry. Sometimes even moderately skilled insiders with domain expertise don't know how to tell apart an expert from a conman. The software industry has grown extremely fast and now the situation is that there are a huge number of highly vocal novices who pose as experts and who are silencing the real experts.

AmericanChopper 6y ago
Median competency in most professions will typically be quite low. In software this is exacerbated by the high pay, which attracts a lot of charlatans, and the fact that our industry has almost no professional standards (unlike say structural engineering). I’ve never thought it was much of a problem though, because it just makes it easier for the sufficiently competent to distinguish themselves.
- cryptica 6y ago
  >> because it just makes it easier for the sufficiently competent to distinguish themselves Having worked in the blockchain space... I have seen seen the future and it looks nothing like you think. When a company has too many conmen. The most rewarded skill becomes conmanship.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    I have also worked in the blockchain space, and none of the blockchain companies I previously worked with still exist. I am most certainly not worried about fraudulent blockchain companies becoming a major part of the economy.
    - cryptica 6y ago
      >> I am most certainly not worried about fraudulent blockchain companies becoming a major part of the economy. I struggle to think of a single blockchain project which is not at least partly a scam. You can start at the top with Bitcoin. Bitcoin handles 3 to 4 transactions per second max (this is tiny), consumes the electricity of Ireland but it's the most valuable blockchain. I get it, PoW is more decentralized. But is it worth the entire electricity of Ireland? No. Even Ethereum aren't deluding themselves about this; that's why they're moving to PoS. But even Ethereum is kind of scammy... How many times did they say that sharding would be ready soon? Seems like years ago now. Lightning network is brittle and not practical. In real life, most financial transfers are unidirectional so you constantly have to re-open new channels after they become depleted. Also it locks up most of your funds. Also Lightning requires high availability - Without it, scammers can roll-back channels to an earlier state. Lightning is so complex that if something does go wrong, it will be extremely challenging to understand what went wrong. And no, Bitcoin is not more valuable because it costs more money to run. If a car consumes more fuel than all other cars, that car is clearly less valuable than the others. If I can complete the same work twice as fast and same quality as someone else, then I should get paid twice as much. Economic value is rooted in efficiency, not in inefficiency. Technology which does basically the same thing but which does it more cheaply should be more valuable. Why are the top 2 projects both PoW? I could go on about pretty much any cryptocurrency project from the top 100. Just because some project has been legitimized and is valuable, it doesn't mean that it's not a scam.

AmericanChopper 6y ago

Median competency in most professions will typically be quite low. In software this is exacerbated by the high pay, which attracts a lot of charlatans, and the fact that our industry has almost no professional standards (unlike say structural engineering). I’ve never thought it was much of a problem though, because it just makes it easier for the sufficiently competent to distinguish themselves.

cryptica 6y ago
>> because it just makes it easier for the sufficiently competent to distinguish themselves Having worked in the blockchain space... I have seen seen the future and it looks nothing like you think. When a company has too many conmen. The most rewarded skill becomes conmanship.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  I have also worked in the blockchain space, and none of the blockchain companies I previously worked with still exist. I am most certainly not worried about fraudulent blockchain companies becoming a major part of the economy.
  - cryptica 6y ago
    >> I am most certainly not worried about fraudulent blockchain companies becoming a major part of the economy. I struggle to think of a single blockchain project which is not at least partly a scam. You can start at the top with Bitcoin. Bitcoin handles 3 to 4 transactions per second max (this is tiny), consumes the electricity of Ireland but it's the most valuable blockchain. I get it, PoW is more decentralized. But is it worth the entire electricity of Ireland? No. Even Ethereum aren't deluding themselves about this; that's why they're moving to PoS. But even Ethereum is kind of scammy... How many times did they say that sharding would be ready soon? Seems like years ago now. Lightning network is brittle and not practical. In real life, most financial transfers are unidirectional so you constantly have to re-open new channels after they become depleted. Also it locks up most of your funds. Also Lightning requires high availability - Without it, scammers can roll-back channels to an earlier state. Lightning is so complex that if something does go wrong, it will be extremely challenging to understand what went wrong. And no, Bitcoin is not more valuable because it costs more money to run. If a car consumes more fuel than all other cars, that car is clearly less valuable than the others. If I can complete the same work twice as fast and same quality as someone else, then I should get paid twice as much. Economic value is rooted in efficiency, not in inefficiency. Technology which does basically the same thing but which does it more cheaply should be more valuable. Why are the top 2 projects both PoW? I could go on about pretty much any cryptocurrency project from the top 100. Just because some project has been legitimized and is valuable, it doesn't mean that it's not a scam.