We see the effects of that throughout our industry and yet it's never publicly acknowledged.
> And remember, hotshots are equally ungrounded. Lots of good engineers you meet at Google were hired at straight out of college. They have no idea how the sausage is made anywhere else.
One of the most eye opening experience one can do is 3x the compensation for a software role and see what caliber of engineers it attracts. I remember one company who did that for college hires and they were shocked. They had been whining for a while about the "talent shortage" and that it was hard finding folks in the local market. Turns out the folks they really wanted to hire were there all along, just invisible.
Does HN really upvote the “smartest” content? Citation needed, please.
The amount of pretense and smug here isn't any less about its domain than any other self-selected community.
HN is a financially-oriented tribe. It's like in the Bitcoin community. Only the pro-Bitcoin content gets upvoted and anti-Bitcoin content gets downvoted. The smartness of the content hardly matters at all. Sometimes the smartest content is at the bottom of the list.
Usually, I read both the top and bottom parts of HN then I get some of the best arguments on both sides.
Also, user ailmanki (also last page) said:
>> Every system requires sooner or later another system on top. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
That would explain what is happening.
The user narrator (also last page) also raises an interesting point:
>> I'm surprised this article didn't mention test driven development for building large pieces of software!
^ He then makes a good case for TDD.
TBH I don't see much improvement in quality at all reading the top comments. Some are dead wrong, for example, the user snidane says (which is/was in the top three on the first page if you ignore nested sub-comments):
>> The tooling is simply not there, so every software project keeps pushing the boundary of what is possible in its own unique fragile way.
Not only is that comment dead wrong (the tooling is definitely there, I've worked on some of these scalability open source tools), it contradicts another comment just above it (by user the_duke) which received just a few more votes:
>> At scale software stops being a technology problem and becomes a people problem. And groups of humans don't scale.
Probably not; across both the world as a whole and the profession specifically, a power law distribution is a lot more believable.
Even in a particular firm, its probably closer to a power law, or maybe an offset bell-like curve where the median is above the mode and there is a much longer high tail, then a common bell curve.
HN attracts a broad range of ability, but generally upvotes the smartest content. So if you sample from “upvoted HN articles and comments”, the content you read is heavily biased toward things written by unusually smart people. But there’s a range.
By contrast, most companies will attract and hire people like their current employees. So the variance at any particular company is much smaller than in the general pool. Everyone ends up working alongside people like them.
So if you work at a big bank or something, you probably don’t interact with many people like the super geniuses who write interesting articles that get upvoted a lot on HN. They’re over represented amongst HN content, but most programmers are average and getting by just fine. And remember, hotshots are equally ungrounded. Lots of good engineers you meet at Google were hired at straight out of collage. They have no idea how the sausage is made anywhere else. Lots of folks here don’t have your experience. They have no idea what it takes to do software at a company that sees their job as a cost centre. Or what it takes to get good work done in spite of political pressure to stagnate.
Having a variety of voices gives all of us something to learn and something to teach.