You can't impress developers. So don't try

There are countless comments on Hacker News by a developer impressed with something. So this headline is wrong. What you can't do is impress all developers. But neither can you please all people. So the article's advice to "focus on impressing your users" could also lead to a very special kind of hell, about which more ink hath been spilt.

What the writer was really writing about, though, was that there is little acknowledgment of the effort that went into something, even if in the end it's not for you. Someone wrote a Python interpreter in JavaScript, and in that there is skill, even if overall you reject the effect. What the writer may be asking for is the attitude of a coach: "That was a fast throw, kid, now next time just see if you can aim it more over the plate." That is a legitimate want, and I think the forum would be better if there were more of it. But again, this isn't a deficiency endemic to developers, it's endemic to People on the Internet.

Key takeaway: seeking encouragement from anonymous or semianonymous people on the internet could be harmful.

Part of it is that responses rarely seem to take into account the reason something was built. Someone building a Python interpreter in JS to learn about languages and interpreters often gets the same response that Facebook would get it they released the same code as an open source library, even though in the first case a Dev isn't saying it's perfect, just that they made something cool and want to show off work they're proud of.

Oftentimes effort alone is commendable, even if it misses the mark, as long as it's not hurting users. We so easily forget that though when judging others' work.

I think you can impress them more when your feat of good programming is also useful to others. "Ive done this trick to make Rust compiler faster", "I've improved a frequently used function in the core libary of C#", "I've made a cross platform gui library that is easy to use and efficient", "I've found a faster way to hash in certain use cases"

Telling people about your feat of programming that was very difficult but was a (probably) non-useful learning exercise probably won't be interesting unless they are a friend or also happening to be wanting to learn about the same thing.

My gut feeling is that this is right. Some devs really do seem to have little respect for "code on the ground", and the problem is magnified in places without any DevOps culture / a sense of developer responsibility towards operations (ie, Devs who won't do oncall or refuse to write RCAs).

I think it stems from a culture where people want strive to adopt the most "elite" way of doing things (ie, running Kubernetes for everything, because Google) because it lets them show they're capable and knowledgeable, and nobody is going to say Google is doing it wrong. The downside to this is that cheaper, faster, and more practical solutions get thrown aside as "hacks" because they don't scale to google level. When really, a lot of places don't need that kind of scale, and having too much complexity can be a risk of it's own. I'm not saying scalability isn't important, it can be critical for some things, but I rarely see devs give the same attention to usability or monitoring in their designs (there are lots of misconceptions that using orchestration solves monitoring, when really it can make it harder if you don't plan for it up front).

So I say let google and co worry about impressing people, and just spend your time on making things that solve problems. And maybe, in OPs case, (this may be unpopular) you don't have to share everything you write, especially if it's not something that solves a problem for other people. Put it on your github and resume, but if it's not solving real problems, it's just for your learning.

I would interpret it as a push back to using Javascript for everything and anything, unless it's clearly marked as this is for fun and a learning experience. People will easily jump in and say but why Javascript? and the answer is almost always that's the only language I know how to use. Using one language for everything doens't impress good engineers (or developers). Not my opinion, but that's what I felt in the comments of the linked post.

It's not really developers who are hard to impress - it's just anonymous developers on internet forums

Does any know of a community of practitioners in a field or discipline who are by and large usually impressed by output of the members of that field on a regular basis.

Not rhetorical, asking for myself. I guess, I want to know how much more toxic are we as a community (to the degree you can talk about all folks who read or might read HN as a single monolithic community).

I mean, I know a few artists, they are absolutely savage when it comes to the work of others. Is this a dev problem or human one?

I believe the number of good software engineers numbers in the thousands. This is completely anecdotal, and I have no studies to back up this claim. The longer I've been in industry, the more I've come to believe that the number of good software engineers seems to remain fairly constant over time. I also contend that more than fifty percent of developers are bad, and shouldn't be programming.

Given those margins, finding someone who actually is impressive is difficult. Most projects are not that interesting, are rehashes of something that's already been done, or are just poorly designed and executed.

I'm not sure about that. Instances of code that I know impressed lot of developers: several sections of the original Doom code, at least one entry in Gamasutra's old article "Dirty Coding Tricks", their first time groking functional programming (a functional declaration of quicksort, for instance).

Then again, I'm not really impressed by "X in Javascript" anymore, so I'm definitely biased.

I'd postulate it is because we are intimately familiar with how the sausage is made, so we can identify the problems (perceived or otherwise) with ease. Since everyone thinks a little bit differently, even if we do make something impressive, everyone who sees it will think of how they would do it instead. Either that or we think "why the hell did you think this was a good idea?"

This seems to extend into any community where nobody has any skin in the game yet the topic has superficial qualities in which it can be knee-jerk judged (unlike, say, a book).

Some of the most unsettling behavior I've seen online is a thread on Reddit where an indie developer shared their game with /r/gaming. The reactions: "Looks like dogshit", "This really took you two years to build? lol", "Doesn't even work on Android? lol miss me with that garbage."

Like that /r/gaming thread, we on HN do the same thing with the superficial qualities of a project.

"Python in JS? Who the fuck would want this lol. It took you how long to build this dogshit? Yet another web developer who refuses to learn anything beyond JS." Our analysis goes no deeper than whatever was summed up in the Show HN title where the author is lucky if anybody even navigates to the Github repo and looks at the work involved.

I think it comes down to modern entitlement culture where we see the world as our personal buffet. Now combine that with the ease of sharing your opinion with the world.

"Experienced developers make the difficult seem easy. New developers often make the routine look hard."

Well said.

You can impress your friends by learning to juggle 3 balls. You won't impress a circus performer who can juggle 5 is working on 7 and spends every workday with people they don't feel like they measure up to.

There are ways to impress developers, but you won't get then to see the magic regular users do. We all work behind the curtain, and nobody online knows you well enough to understand when your accomplishments are personal milestones.

Here's a decent example of the attitude described in the post (it was a conversation I was involved in recently):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18330162

Of course, a random person on the internet thinks s/he can architect systems of unprecedented global scale without knowing any of the context or goals of the systems involved.

That entire work of Shakespeare in a jpeg was kinda impressive.

I was expecting a rant about job ad filler. "Join a world-class team of architects, we are changing the world and ushering in the age of Aquarius with our revolutionary CAAS (CRUD-As-A-Service) model, endorsed by Mark Zuckerburg's freshman biology classmate!"

It's actually about people posting personal code projects on HN, and I disagree, personal code projects quite frequently get quite a lot of recognition here.

Extra context: this article, and the event it references, took place in 2013

Sorry, but yes you can. Watch:

"Hey guys, ES6 and Node have their problems, so we ratified a new standard that fixes all their shortcomings and bugs. Download it today and start your new project in a few mins".

Or:

"Hey guys, I know the whole point of keeping source code is for the next guy, but check out how I totally obfuscated, er wrote, this complicated algorithm I'm .5 lines of code"

I think maybe it's always hard to impress your peers, regardless of industry. Peers tend to be impressed by practical knowledge they can leverage to increase their own skills, tools that help them speed up work, or successes within their industry that have been achieved.

I generally agree that HN commenters tend not to get impressed by things.

That said, I don't agree with this:

>The Google search engine brings in $billions each year, and is one of the most important software projects in history, but I guarantee there are developers at Google right now complaining about how crappy the core code base is.

You can appreciate the performance of the Google search engine at scale, while still being annoyed by how crappy the core code base is. (I have zero knowledge of what the codebase is actually like, but I would guess that like most legacy code written in a legacy language without algebraic data types, it's probably a bit of a mess at this point).

> Instead focus on impressing your users (if your users are developers, I wish you luck).

Funnily enough I think everyone's impressed with Jetbrains. I rarely meet devs who don't like their tools. Or Kotlin.

It's mostly because HN is one of the most rigorous communities online. And it's worth it, it's the only website where you learn more from the comments than from the article itself.

Or maybe rephrase to "if you're looking for praise..." as i think it may be misplaced to expect it in mass unless you have had tons of user testing/feedback and iterations to move it that way. Opinion is just consensus anyway and sometimes having a niche of people that love what you do is all that matters. In this case in particular, python on the web isn't necessary well liked in mass from the beginning so you are starting an uphill climb.

I don't think this is necessarily a developer-specific issue. You show something off to the internet-at-large and they probably won't have nice things to say about it.

This isn't necessarily because they're unimpressed though. There's only so many different ways you can say "great job", compared to the potentially infinite ways in which you could find a flaw in someone's work and highlight it in a constructive or unconstructive manner.

> There is a time and place for review, but code on the ground deserves respect.

I think the post mixes the respect / approval / praise a bit. You can at the same time respect that someone produced something that solves what they needed and think that the project is a steaming pile of poop from the technical / design side. Maybe the comments should mention the first part more often. I'll definitely try when criticising some tech in the future.

After reading your article I'm reminded of an article I read sometime ago about Lennart Poettering, author of systemd for whom users actually were collecting money to hire a hitman to kill him [1]. I don't think anything can top this level of hate for free software.

[1] https://www.linuxinsider.com/story/81162.html

> if your users are developers, I wish you luck.

Lol sounds like my experience working at a SaaS company. It can be hard to get them to pay for your services.

> There is a time and place for review, but code on the ground deserves respect.

This is one of the reasons for which I think that refactoring a code base, in the original sense by Martin Fowler, where a program is changed without modifying its functioning, but only extracting its structure, is a severely underused practice, and one for which there would be a lot of space in the industry.

You can't impress those that know more than you. I'm not impressed by half of the showHN that I see, but then I'm equally impressed by the other half. I sent an email a few hours ago to someone that had a showHN because I was impressed by the quality of work, not just in what was done, but code, documentation & organization.

I don't believe anything really impresses developers. Developers look at something and think, wow how did they do that followed by I can do that so this can be ignored.

People are more likely to speak up when they're unhappy than when they're happy.

If they agree with everything you said, they'll typically upvote in silence.

It has nothing to do with developers.

I don't think people expect to be impressed they just want their future pain when working with a given codebase to be minimized.

I was impressed by the audacity of the title even without reading the article. That can't be right

I hate when people speak on my behalf

dang: please add (2013) to the title.

This is just a gross generalization

Funny.Having been closely working with world class scientists as an engineer, I’m (and the whole team) being impressed every day, to the extent that I feel I’m such an underachiever

Their first mistake was posting about JavaScript on this site. This site has an unusually high volume of anti-JavaScript people.