It's more about the tone itself that sounds posing some superiority due to the fact that you do systems programming. It seems that you have a huge experience a

It's more about the tone itself that sounds posing some superiority due to the fact that you do systems programming. It seems that you have a huge experience and knowledge, and it's nothing about those things but how you convey your ideas coming with a very strong background. I'm not offended by the post because I am not your target audience, but seeing other comments here I can highlight some pieces that others can think that you're patronizing. > We kernel and database people think this discussion about whether frontend or backend is harder is kinda cute.you're all adorable! Right at the start you pose as some kind of "hardcore outsider" that poses as some old uncle observing some children playing around. That's the same tone and words. Of course I understand that this is an irony/joke but here you start to lose some people, specially when you talk about "carrer advice" that supposed to be something bit serious. > There are other developers. The ones writing databases, operating systems, compilers, and foundational building blocks that, if they do their jobs right, end up becoming almost invisible to the average programmer. We got the point of the "unseen work", but to set some importance you do not need to conflate and contrasting that with the experience of an "average programmer". If the "average programmer" does his/her job right you will have your food delivered in your door, your airline tickets being booked correctly, your municipality having the scheduling systems working, etc. Again, here you lost the opportunity to highlight why is awesome to work with systems programming. > Lots of the advice that you see on Twitter (X?), is especially bad when it comes to systems level software. Strong affirmation and I think you can have a hard time to support that with data. I know that is a personal blog and you can do your hot takes on medium, but again, it's not about contrast and more about to elevate how nice is to work with systems programming. > There’s a certain level of “move fast and break things” that you would never accept from your OS Kernel. Big statement and it can be completely debatable. I can say anedotically that this was true on Facebook and small companies... in 2016. The entire world of Tech involved a lot since, and for lot of products outage can mean end of an entire day of revenue. > The whole discussion of whether or not you should write unit tests sound frankly quite stupid from the point of view of a compiler author or some core Open Source library. This ends the first paragraph of your topic "Advice for systems programmers". So far you made contrasts, call names, say that systems engineering advice in twitter is bad, but no substance; no red meat so far in terms of advice. ... I can go on, but again I am not your audience, but I think the tone matters in those days and the article has some good gems, but the start of the text and tone distracts. Having that writing attitude to "contrast -> call names -> conflate via superiority -> show advice from a self pedestalized standpoint" used to work, but now I think we're in another internet. Thanks for the text anyways.