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Comment by cjbgkagh | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much of catering to the lowest common denominator / being a team player is an internalizing of corporatisms reduction of the worker to a fungible interchangeable cog.

As a solo dev it is a massive advantage to use sophisticated languages and tools without worrying if the dumbest person on my team can use them. It’s a strategic advantage and I run rings around far larger companies.

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I agree with you that it is sad there isn't more diversity in languages and tools, and that generally organizations are using the same terrible slop. We could have such nice things

You lose me with the smugness. Make no mistake, you aren't smarter or better than someone else purely by virtue of your willingness to hack on BEAM languages or smlnj or Racket or whatever languages you like. There are probably people smarter than you working in sales at $bigcorp or writing C# on Windows Server 2008 at your local utility. Novice programmers often have an instinct to rewrite systems from scratch when they should be learning how to read and understand code others have written. Similarly, I associate smugness of this form with low capacity for navigating constraints that tend to arise when solving difficult problems in the real world. The real world isn't ideal, sorry to say

That sounds like post facto rationalization, sour grapes, and perhaps a bit of learned helplessness. To paraphrase you ‘We can’t have nice things because nice things are in reality bad and unrealistic. People who do have nice things are not special.’

I could readily believe that your stated reality is true of the majority of solo devs, but it’s not true for me or those that I know. I understand that my sampling is biased and probably not the normal experience. I don’t seek to show off for my anonymous HN account and instead wanted to say that sometimes we can have nice things and it can work out successfully.

It's not learned helplessness et al, just a plea to drop the smug elitism if you want people to take you seriously. I actually want nice things, I hate writing brittle systems in languages that offer no meaningful guardrails, and setting up Rube Goldberg contraptions to get a poor approximation of e.g. basic BEAM runtime functionality.

Any success I have had in getting very boring companies to adopt nice things at all has not come from insulting people's intelligence and acting like I'm the smartest person in the room. I despise this kind of elitism that is rampant in certain technical communities. It turns people off like nothing else and serves no purpose other than to stroke your own ego -- it's pointless meanness.

I worked applied research at a few very big companies and did have a measured amount of success getting some advanced tech adopted so I know what it takes to move the needle. My lesson, and one I wish I learned sooner, was that the effort was not worth it. I had assumed that the lack of adoption was due to lack of exposure to ideas but having exposed these ideas to a large number of people I reluctantly came to the conclusion that it more of a lack of innate intelligence. I honestly wish it wasn’t so.

My goal has not been to fix big companies for a long time, I was just musing on the rational and commented to see what other people think on the topic.

    > reduction of the worker to a fungible interchangeable cog

I see this trope a lot on HN, and I don't understand it. All of the highest skilled developers that I have met are the quickest to adapt to new projects or technologies. To me, they look like a "fungible interchangeable cog".

And every solo dev that I ever met thinks they are God's gift to the world -- "tech geniuses". Most of them are just working on their own Big Ball o' Mud, just like the rest of us working on a team.

If only the highest skill devs could quickly learn new projects then they are no longer interchangeable.

Your sampling of solo devs could very well be biased, similarly so could my sampling. Not working on a big ball of mud is a massive perk of being solo dev. It’s my company and I’ll refactor if I want to.

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