Something about software development attracts people who are underconfident and anxious (or perhaps writing software makes people like that). There's very little support or mentoring, soft skills like kindness, helpfulness and giving constructive feedback are looked down on, and people's first introduction to software (games) is all about competitiveness and winning. The 'heroes' of software are people who have made incredible things and rarely talk about their mistakes. Consequently a lot of developers look for reasons to give up as early as possible because everything they've learned tells them failure is something to avoid at all costs.
Very sadly, in my opinion, the industry doesn't celebrate the effort. It's only about the results. Not having the first mover advantage is seen as a reason why you'll probably fail.
What's slightly odd is that this attitude isn't so common in actual software. Developers are falling over themselves to work on new libraries and frameworks regardless of how many exist already.
I have been trying to develop my own soft skills. I used to think things like small talk were a waste of time. I didn’t realize they were a way to open the lines of communication which you can then build up to something substantial. I don’t feel soft skills in this industry are frowned upon so much as people (like myself) are just a little ignorant about them. I’ve noticed devs can give some really blunt feedback and genuinely think they’re being helpful, and they are! But a person receiving the feedback who already isn’t confident can feel like they’re being criticized. The two people need to almost meet half way. Be confident enough to take the feedback, and be a little more careful with your words when you give it.
If your intention is to be "the" product or project that people use for their unmet desires, then when that goal is fulfilled by another project/product already, and considerably better, you end up wondering what all your time and energy is contributing to the task of solving the problem. It's solved already, and other people have put in all that time and effort refining the solution already, so you'll just feel like you're playing catch up.
The vast majority of the time I program because there is this thing I need to do but none of the software available allows me to do it at all. I don't mean buggily or with shareware popups or as a paid product, I mean at all. The only way for me to do the specific thing I want is to program a solution to do it for me.
So suppose someone else comes along and has the exact same problem and comes up with a solution. Usually I'll just use it instead of spending more time. The solution is all I needed.
In this case the programming is only a thing I have to get out of the way in order to accomplish what I want. I don't care about maintenance or if anyone else has the same problem or if anyone else even comes up with the same solution. All I care about is doing the thing.
In these cases I will accept any solution, whether or not it's mine. Some people are just better at programming given the same time constraints. It does wound my ego a little, but using their solution immediately instead of putting all the effort into an inferior solution means I do what I wanted to do and move on to more important things.
What actually wounds my ego is when the project is intended to be used by other people. This means those people might not choose the same solution as me collectively between multiple different options. So now I do have to care about maintenance and having something to offer above everyone else's solution, because otherwise nobody is going to care about all the effort I'm putting into this solution.
The author appears to be a mixture of both, if I'm understanding correctly. When another competitor came along that did everything he envisioned his product would do he grudgingly signed up for it - because the product allowed him to do the thing he wanted to do all along. And he also wanted to be understood, to be a somebody with specific domain knowledge about this specific problem he encountered, and not being able to be that person since someone else already filled that gap was devastating.
I mean, we can celebrate effort, but there's almost nothing more demotivating to me than spending years on a problem only to find that someone else did it and simply did it better than you, so you start thinking, "if only I could have learned about all these other things instead of spending years fumbling around with programming specifics in order to satisfy this one need, which would have been satisfied anyways if I was just patient enough."
And it's also so, so easy to just state "just use X" and make it so much worse for the formerly motivated person. This is why social media will never fundamentally nourish people like me. Nobody can understand the context of two years of hard work when you just ask a simple question about what you feel about problem X or Y. At the same time, you can't argue with measurable improvements in correctness or efficiency, so in those cases some people like me find no other option except to get depressed. Then you would ask: "can anyone blame me for feeling like this?" Well, they would. "Pay more attention next time," "git gud," etc, etc...
I think it might be impossible to avoid comparisons on a time or money basis when you have multiple solutions to the same problem that average people can choose from. They rarely just say "they're both good in different ways." At some point all I've learned is you just have to either deny reality or somehow get over the fact that some people are just better than you for inexplicable reasons. One mindset allows me to have a chance at accomplishing anything at all, the other leads to depression and never so much as attempting anything. I wish I knew better.
Because this mantra is being applied to a group of people who almost universally wait longer than they should. It is never going to get interpreted as "ship when all you have is hello world". It is going to act as a push to ship earlier, when it's uncomfortable, before you feel ready.
Basically it's relative rather than absolute "ship earlier than you think you should". And there is nothing wrong with a succinct formulation of that concept.
Honestly? I think people (in the general sense) are constrained to the amount of complexity they can handle and the world is a complex place so they fall back on picking a choice/hill to die on as a way of reducing the complexity.
Not a new thing, I work with a guy who is an excellent programmer but will argue for ever that OOP is the right way to build software and that he doesn't see the point in functional programming while writing code with map and reduce inside class methods..
The benefit of a dogmatic approach is you never have to question it (otherwise it wouldn't be dogmatic), small government good, efficiency of the market, nuclear bad, nuclear good, emacs better than vim, vim better than emacs, chrome better than firefox, linux better than windows, mac better than PC, religion good, religion bad - pick a side and never think again(TM).
In reality nearly all of life is some variant of "it depends" and there should be no shame in saying "I don't know enough to have an opinion" and if its important then you go look into it.
The fundamental problem is "reasonably informed opinion held until presented evidence one way or the other" is more work than "strong opinions, loosely held".
reality: this is too complex for me rationalization: I didn't think there was market fit
reality: It's hard to learn technology x rationalization: OOP / framework / language sucks
And by that I mean, can't we all just gang up on nano?
one it is very simple and intuitive
And two, it has the (two? It has been a few years) row footer that literally tells you what buttons to push to save or exit. I didn't know how to exit vim when I first started with git, as is tradition.
I've introduced a few people to Vim and I have to start out with an apology for how annoying it is to close. If the user hammers the Esc key, it should at least flash up with a hint of how to quit.
It does this if you press ctrl-c, so it's not as if it can't be done.
(gVim Easy seems to just be gVim restricted to insert mode. Not sure I see the sense in that - isn't that just Notepad++ but worse?)
If I could change one thing about curl, it would be for -L to be the default behaviour, so that it would just do the right thing regarding redirects. Instead, wget does the right thing by default, but curl always needs the flag.
If they're already comfortable with the command-line, but don't know Vim or Emacs, I'd keep encouraging them to take the dive.
Of course, there's also gVim, so perhaps that's not quite the right way to think about it.
(I'm also fond of Escape Meta Alt Control Shift.)
It doesn't help that when you come to HN or Reddit releasing something, the comments are quick to point out other competing products in a seemingly snarky way.
"I use X. It has that feature plus these other ones. Why would I switch to yours?" I get the spirit of why someone would say that, but it's really hard to read tone in a forum post.
I don't know, man? Don't?
Maybe I'm naïve but don't see it as snark most of the time. I see those posts as "here is some springboard for you to share the product or your vision and goals.
Sometimes it is genuine snark but I like to believe it is usually curiosity even if it isn't true.
I mean look at Dropbox. The basic idea is so simple. If you've used rsync/robocopy you might think it is ridiculous this product even exists. Doubly so if you're aware of how cloud providers charge so much for network traffic. Even Google Drive unlimited has to cap the amount of data transfer in a day. But there are always ways. For example, I think Dropbox has now limited free users to three syncing devices.
Or gitlab. Like huh? But GitHub exists. And surely git-web or gitea is better suited for a web interface for git? But then gitlab has almost nothing to do with git. As far as I understand, the goal of gitlab has always been to be a complete product.
I bring up these two examples because maybe the comments were snark but the founders seemed to handle it pretty well in both cases (at least publicly). I think their self-confidence shows in the product.
I mean, only if you also have no understanding of other people having different backgrounds, skillsets and experiences?
An undercurrent that runs through a lot of Software Developers is that they have to be “clever”. We’re not making shitty toasters, we’re writing products that shake industries and build powerful competitive advantages.
Therefore, if you copy something that already exists, you’re not clever, you’re an imposter, a copycat, shame on you.
It is not enough to be successful, you must be successful and unique, otherwise you might as well go build chairs or something.
I guess programmers usually avoid pitching. That's why they choose the "easy" path - develop something that's never been done before. But it's actually the hardest thing to do.
"just start a monopoly" the literature says... implying every venture that's not would surely be a waste of time
but even (and especially) if you're the first mover, sharks will come
will you use their presence as a convenient excuse? or are you up for the fight?
How many times has someone mentioned an app and you say I've already looked at it and it's a piece of junk? Or gotten an email saying we just shipped version 2 and you're really going to like it and you just hit delete?
That's why I personally think you're better off starting slow and getting a small base of customers. Save the press announcements or Product Hunt posting until you've got product market fit and have at least a bit of polish on your project.
People don't care so much about small bugs, developers do. People care about bugs that stop them doing what they need to do.
To further elaborate, if you're first you can have an unpolished product which grants you gratification sooner and with less effort. If you want to enter an existing market you have to gain customers with much effort and risk (the competition can react).
Side note: the better toaster was sold first in the 50s and doesn't stop anyone of selling worse toasters :D [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage (1) The first iPhone was the first smartphone as defined today. [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y
There are plenty of ways to compete with existing products, especially if they haven't achieved market dominance. The key thing is can you offer anything they don't. Quality, cost, features, ease of use, etc. What part of the market does their product not address, preferably in a way it's hard for their product to be adapted for.
Two reasons why not.
1. Wasn't first, e.g. HTC Touch was very close in terms of UX and form factor, released a month before iPhone.
2. Wasn't a smartphone as defined today. At launch it didn't have app store nor any user-installable apps at all, these features arrived much later.
Mentally speaking: I have optimized my thinking on not doing things twice, not being wasteful, lean, reusing components etc.
If it is solved, there is little reason why i would/should solve it again and yes from a pure thinking perspective, it would make sense to pool all resources together to have one car brand.
The same with a Toaster. Make one good Toaster, make it slightly configurable so you have choices in color and thats it.
This type of efficient thinking is why i get paid.
Are they precisely equally dumb according to measurements, or did you oversimplify to make a point?
If you think that's an oversimplified polarization, click on this blog post at the bottom.
"You're either a Zero or a One"
"You have either reached your goal, or you haven't"
In other words, life is a destination, not a journey. Yeah, nah.
Also, if I learned anything over the last few decades it is that the market supports many solutions to the same problem. Why do software developers believe that if someone gets there first that's it it's done? Someone invented and sells a toaster? Done. Someone started selling bikes? Better ditch my step design. Cars? Just one brand, obviously.
People release apps into oversaturated markets every day. Most fail, some do well, and not because they were better in every way than the competition, just because they were different, they were tried, and some people found them to be 'Good Enough'.