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Comment by cjbgkagh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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