Technical media as a bazaar
This article is part of a series of tips for novice programmers.
Hacker News homepage example
A surprisingly large number of errors beginner programmers make under the influence of technical media.
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While studying at school or college, you get most of the programming information from technical media such as Hacker News , meetings, conferences, Free Code Camp courses, and Hacker Noon . Then your arsenal of tools in abundance is filled with technologies that are vigorously discussed there - say, microservices, some kind of frontend framework or blockchain.
The most common mistake is to view these sources as a mirror of the industry. In fact, they are more like a bazaar .
Imagine a giant bazaar in ancient times. Thousands of merchants fill the shelves selling goods from around the world. The bazaar owner finds the most unique merchants and gives them the best places. This analogy for technical media works on several levels.
First, in the bazaar, sellers must convince you of one thing: to buy their product. In technical media, vendors are tooling companies, training courses, open source projects, and companies that are looking for developers. Given the extreme dependence on the choice of employees, these organizations are most motivated to create and distribute content.
As in ancient times, traders are trying to get into trust. In software development, this is similar to content marketing, where advertising is disguised as useful content . Moreover, many excellent engineers are busy developing, not writing articles and comments, which limits their contribution to important debates (and the fact that someone is developing open source software does not automatically mean that his goals correspond to yours).
At the bazaar merchants set the tone. Technical media is dominated not by thoughtful engineers, but by having a specific personal interest and a more peremptory opinion. Proven and real technologies often have few supporters or rabid followers, while newer ones have a motivated group of supporters.
Secondly, the market attracts buyers of all stripes. Hacker News is visited by developers from startups, system administrators, database administrators, data specialists, cryptographers, and interface engineers. By defining technology choices based on popular posts, you can confuse the needs of one community with your own. Even within a single community — say, a web — the needs of a startup can be very different from the needs of a consulting agency that creates many websites. Instead, the media spreads the opinion that the new technology solves any problem.
Third, the owner manages the bazaar with a view to maximizing sales, mercilessly favoring successful merchants. In social networks and technical blogs, this means an increase in involvement, number of views and rating. At conferences and meetings - occupancy of the hall, that is, the number of visitors. The organizer seeks to attract the "right" speakers and show content that is most in demand by the target audience and sponsors. Accordingly, it changes the behavior of every merchant who wants to survive.
In addition to misinformation, this involvement manipulates our desire to keep up with progress. It seems to the developer that he should use the most discussed technologies so that his skills are not outdated. In traditional media, the maximum number of views is caused by death messages ; in software development these are new technologies.
Source: Free Code Camp 2014 blog post
Compare, as the topic of technical media explains, and how it is done by a computer science professor or an objective engineer.
Today, Hacker News is one of the most popular resources for software engineers.
In startups, Y Combinator, like mine, was a particularly valuable tool where you could communicate with the brightest minds. When used correctly, it shows a variety of community opinions. This is especially important for novice developers and small teams, where the mature community is often missing. But he has several critical flaws.
As in the market, each post depends on the rating. If we compare an ancient but important build system, such as the Webpack, then on average there is much more content and hype around the latest technologies. This creates a false impression that people actually use in their daily work. As Paul Graham noted , “the number of ... articles on a problem does not speak about how serious it is, but about how much demand is required for articles stating this."
Reddit-like communities like Hacker News often give very little power to experts. As in any democracy, motivated citizens receive power, which does not always make sense in highly specialized matters. In this environment, the world's smartest database expert has only one vote.
Motivated development companies are strategically interested in distributing their content on these sites. They hide their guise behind supposedly objective intermediaries. For example, MongoDB used its portfolio companies that received venture financing from it: they publicly stated how much they valued MongoDB. Vendors are well versed in astroturfing, that is, managing public opinion through intermediaries. In Y Combinator, you can create voting rings to increase the rating of posts, ask friends to write the first comments to correctly form the discussion discourse.
Conferences and meetings are another key way for a developer to stay informed.
Conferences are a very profitable business. But for success, you need to focus on the HYIP trends, which have a latent interest. Therefore, hundreds of cryptocurrency and React conferences are held, but very few about important tools such as C.
Many speakers at the conference also have their own interest. As noted by MongoDB , which held its own conferences, speakers are attracted by the following factors:
Please note that none of these reasons has anything to do with helping the audience.
And when the media regularly holds conferences, it becomes much more difficult to criticize potential speakers who will have to be invited in the future to make the conference successful.
Maybe someday we can form the right environment.
This can encourage the publication of meaningful content and encourage the community to criticize any conflicts. On Hacker Noon or Free Code Camp content will be rated by sober-thinking engineers.
At the same time, technical media should be viewed as just one data point, complementing the information with experienced developers (let's not go to extremes, like Thomas Jefferson, who owns the famous words: “I’ll add that a person who never looks at newspapers has better knowledge than the one who reads the newspaper "). Technical media should not be the main window through which you look at the world.
It is also useful to critically evaluate any content by asking a few questions:
Hacker News homepage example
A surprisingly large number of errors beginner programmers make under the influence of technical media.
')
While studying at school or college, you get most of the programming information from technical media such as Hacker News , meetings, conferences, Free Code Camp courses, and Hacker Noon . Then your arsenal of tools in abundance is filled with technologies that are vigorously discussed there - say, microservices, some kind of frontend framework or blockchain.
The most common mistake is to view these sources as a mirror of the industry. In fact, they are more like a bazaar .
Technical media as a bazaar
Imagine a giant bazaar in ancient times. Thousands of merchants fill the shelves selling goods from around the world. The bazaar owner finds the most unique merchants and gives them the best places. This analogy for technical media works on several levels.
First, in the bazaar, sellers must convince you of one thing: to buy their product. In technical media, vendors are tooling companies, training courses, open source projects, and companies that are looking for developers. Given the extreme dependence on the choice of employees, these organizations are most motivated to create and distribute content.
As in ancient times, traders are trying to get into trust. In software development, this is similar to content marketing, where advertising is disguised as useful content . Moreover, many excellent engineers are busy developing, not writing articles and comments, which limits their contribution to important debates (and the fact that someone is developing open source software does not automatically mean that his goals correspond to yours).
At the bazaar merchants set the tone. Technical media is dominated not by thoughtful engineers, but by having a specific personal interest and a more peremptory opinion. Proven and real technologies often have few supporters or rabid followers, while newer ones have a motivated group of supporters.
Secondly, the market attracts buyers of all stripes. Hacker News is visited by developers from startups, system administrators, database administrators, data specialists, cryptographers, and interface engineers. By defining technology choices based on popular posts, you can confuse the needs of one community with your own. Even within a single community — say, a web — the needs of a startup can be very different from the needs of a consulting agency that creates many websites. Instead, the media spreads the opinion that the new technology solves any problem.
Third, the owner manages the bazaar with a view to maximizing sales, mercilessly favoring successful merchants. In social networks and technical blogs, this means an increase in involvement, number of views and rating. At conferences and meetings - occupancy of the hall, that is, the number of visitors. The organizer seeks to attract the "right" speakers and show content that is most in demand by the target audience and sponsors. Accordingly, it changes the behavior of every merchant who wants to survive.
In addition to misinformation, this involvement manipulates our desire to keep up with progress. It seems to the developer that he should use the most discussed technologies so that his skills are not outdated. In traditional media, the maximum number of views is caused by death messages ; in software development these are new technologies.
Free Code Camp Blog
Source: Free Code Camp 2014 blog post
Compare, as the topic of technical media explains, and how it is done by a computer science professor or an objective engineer.
Hacker news
Today, Hacker News is one of the most popular resources for software engineers.
In startups, Y Combinator, like mine, was a particularly valuable tool where you could communicate with the brightest minds. When used correctly, it shows a variety of community opinions. This is especially important for novice developers and small teams, where the mature community is often missing. But he has several critical flaws.
As in the market, each post depends on the rating. If we compare an ancient but important build system, such as the Webpack, then on average there is much more content and hype around the latest technologies. This creates a false impression that people actually use in their daily work. As Paul Graham noted , “the number of ... articles on a problem does not speak about how serious it is, but about how much demand is required for articles stating this."
Reddit-like communities like Hacker News often give very little power to experts. As in any democracy, motivated citizens receive power, which does not always make sense in highly specialized matters. In this environment, the world's smartest database expert has only one vote.
Motivated development companies are strategically interested in distributing their content on these sites. They hide their guise behind supposedly objective intermediaries. For example, MongoDB used its portfolio companies that received venture financing from it: they publicly stated how much they valued MongoDB. Vendors are well versed in astroturfing, that is, managing public opinion through intermediaries. In Y Combinator, you can create voting rings to increase the rating of posts, ask friends to write the first comments to correctly form the discussion discourse.
Conferences and meetings
Conferences and meetings are another key way for a developer to stay informed.
Conferences are a very profitable business. But for success, you need to focus on the HYIP trends, which have a latent interest. Therefore, hundreds of cryptocurrency and React conferences are held, but very few about important tools such as C.
Many speakers at the conference also have their own interest. As noted by MongoDB , which held its own conferences, speakers are attracted by the following factors:
- increase network of dating
- increasing self-worth
- recruitment for your company
- marketing your company
Please note that none of these reasons has anything to do with helping the audience.
And when the media regularly holds conferences, it becomes much more difficult to criticize potential speakers who will have to be invited in the future to make the conference successful.
Tips
Maybe someday we can form the right environment.
This can encourage the publication of meaningful content and encourage the community to criticize any conflicts. On Hacker Noon or Free Code Camp content will be rated by sober-thinking engineers.
At the same time, technical media should be viewed as just one data point, complementing the information with experienced developers (let's not go to extremes, like Thomas Jefferson, who owns the famous words: “I’ll add that a person who never looks at newspapers has better knowledge than the one who reads the newspaper "). Technical media should not be the main window through which you look at the world.
It is also useful to critically evaluate any content by asking a few questions:
- Motive : what is the author's motive? How does this affect the article?
- Background : what is the technical preparation of the author? What technology stack did it work with? What projects?
- Relevance : how relevant are the problems that technology solves for you personally? What are the disadvantages?
useful links
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/457526/
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