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Comment by tnolet | Hacker News Reader

This is hilarious and sad at the same time. However, most of these write ups are aimed at attracting talent. Even more, some tech stacks are deliberately built to attract talent when the core domain is just too simple or boring. "We serve user subscriptions and recipe data from an SQL database using Rails" just doesn't sound as snappy as the infra-porn on the blog.

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Isn't that kind of thing a real red flag for the kind of talent you'd want to attract? If someone told me they'd built a GPU compute cluster for their phpbb based social club forum, I'd think they were an idiot and not want to work with them.

I am sorry if I'm completely off base but I'm still thinking about the danluu page on options v cash which quotes this

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11200296

Maybe startups don't want the absolute best of the best but rather the best of the gullible?

Edit and or poor

So you're thinking that kind of technical mark-missing is the startup equivalent of the typos and other glaring errors in email scams? They're to weed out the people smart enough to be a problem?

Absolutely. I'm running into this problem constantly in the front-end dev world. Most developers I talk to are way too eager to list off a million cool techs that they're familiar with, most of which are completely inappropriate for the job at hand.

If I'm interviewing a candidate, I'm not interested in which tools they know how to use. I'm interested in whether they understand the problem those tools solve and when to apply them. Over-engineering is problem #1 with the community at large in front-end dev at the moment and you'll go a long way as an engineering team if you make it your priority to defeat that mentality.

If I'm ever in a position when I'm needing to attract talent, that would not the kind of talent I want to attract.

I'd want grumpy, paranoid sysadmins who really don't want to be woken up late at night because something has gone wrong.

Your attitude frankly sucks.

How can it be a bad thing for developers to write about what they are working on ? Not all developers are genius experts who suddenly woke up one day and instantly knew how to perfectly architect a system. People learn, people grow, people make mistakes and most importantly people need feedback.

Blogs like this are fantastic to (a) learn what other people are doing and (b) for developers to have an opportunity to show off and be proud of what they are working on. Especially since the rest of the company in most cases isn't going to care less.

It's great to write about your tech. But unless blogging is your business model, it's not great to pick your tech so you can write about it.

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