3 ms·

Heard at ISOJ 2012: "Making software is easy. It's the journalism that's hard" (13th International Symposium on Online Journalism) I can only speak of the Bue

by alecco 14y ago

Heard at ISOJ 2012: "Making software is easy. It's the journalism that's hard" (13th International Symposium on Online Journalism) I can only speak of the Buenos Aires startup scene. It's even worse than OP states. For example, this weekend an organization called "Palermo Valley" (claims to be non-profit but runs on a .com) organized a "Geeks on a Plane" meetup. If you see the about us pages and speakers it's full of marketroids, SEO "experts", journalists and douchy business types. A hacker friend was there and reports: "I just went to a palermovalley meetup and it was crawling with nontechnical people and too loud to talk". There was another conference-meetup oriented to startups recently, but not for programmers. One of the talks was about how to handle the "monkeys". It was basically how to manipulate and find ways to make junior programmers work overtime for free, and pay them less by giving away token gifts. And of course never hire people over 24 or "too experienced". Make sure you get paid fairly for every hour of your work. They need us more than we need them.

kragen 14y ago
I'm the hacker friend in question (thanks!) and I seem to recall that you've come to and enjoyed a couple of hackathons at my place :) I've also been disappointed with other nominally hacker-oriented events. I keep going to Argentine Bar Camps and keep being depressed at the lack of technical content other than infosec. (Argentina has a fantastic infosec community, which I have no interest in.) However, I've been positively impressed with RubyAr and PyAr events. JSConf this weekend was apparently good too. Any other recommendations? I think there are substantial realms of human endeavor where it's really true that "making software is easy," because they need software that's so easy that nonhackers can make it. I think that's a huge credit to all the hackers who have worked on software for making this stuff easy over the years. Unfortunately, it does result in some people thinking that that's all there is...

by alecco 14y ago

kragen 14y ago

I'm the hacker friend in question (thanks!) and I seem to recall that you've come to and enjoyed a couple of hackathons at my place :) I've also been disappointed with other nominally hacker-oriented events. I keep going to Argentine Bar Camps and keep being depressed at the lack of technical content other than infosec. (Argentina has a fantastic infosec community, which I have no interest in.) However, I've been positively impressed with RubyAr and PyAr events. JSConf this weekend was apparently good too. Any other recommendations? I think there are substantial realms of human endeavor where it's really true that "making software is easy," because they need software that's so easy that nonhackers can make it. I think that's a huge credit to all the hackers who have worked on software for making this stuff easy over the years. Unfortunately, it does result in some people thinking that that's all there is...