> Yes, there are many people who blog and otherwise publicly discuss development methodologies and what they're working on, but there are even more people who don't. Blogging takes time, for example, and not everyone enjoys it. Other people are working on commercial products and can't divulge the inner workings of their code.
There’s a subset of this silent majority who tried to contribute to discussion platforms but gave up when they saw prominent voices that had next to no idea what they were talking about being promoted, hailed, and so on. The loudest voice is rarely the most articulate, and for subject matter experts articulation, nuance, and other learned-through-experience things count for a lot, one would assume.
Almost certainly if you're good at blogging, speaking, self-promotion you're not the most expert in some other field. The cases where there's a cross-over are perhaps not surprisingly rare (Raymond Chen is a good one, John Carmack) or are indirect (Linus doesn't "blog" per se but some of the mailing list emails are as good as one).
And if there's not something to "verify" the writer/performer, it can get wildly out of control. The streamers that claim to be good at the game they're playing can be verified (and many don't even need to be, it is entertainment after all) but the agile evangelist doesn't have the same way to prove it.
If you try to say something that's not the "defacto thought" of the group, you have to be even better at all the above, which makes it even more likely that those who go against the grain remain silent.
Here's a comment I made a few days ago here on HN about a blog post, it may be relevant:
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The author is relating second-hand information. That’s useful, it’s good to have people who have a skill of curating business advice and pointing us in good directions. But my first-hand advice is to recognize the difference between:
Alice: “I’m making five figures a month for five hours a week reselling five products.”
And Bob: “People like Alice make as much as five figures a month for five hours a week reselling five products.”
In the first case, Alice has direct experience with success. In the second case, the incentives are such that Bob is someone whose experience and expertise is in selecting stories that have verisimilitude, that is, things that sound true.
And what makes something sound true? Quite often, something we want to be true sounds true even if it isn’t, and something we don’t want to be true doesn’t sound true, even if it is.
Bob nearly always sounds more authoritative than Alice, because Bob’s business is sounding authoritative, whereas Alice’s business is being authoritative. Why doesn’t Alice always sound authoritative? Because she speaks the truth whether it appeals to our biases or opposes them, whether we want her truth to be true or not.
Bob, on the other hand, is an authority on what people want to hear. Bob is just as expert in Bob’s business as Alice is in hers. Bob uses metrics and data to write headlines and even choose the most compelling adjectives to use in his posts. Bob sounds authoritative to people lacking expertise in whatever Bob is talking about.
The Bobs of this world can (but don’t always) become “a poor man’s idea of a rich man, and a failure’s idea of a success,” because their customers are people early in their lives and careers.
So what to do when a Bob suggests something is true? Well, we shouldn’t dismiss it. But let’s think of it the way we’d think of Bob referring a candidate for a job in our businesses.
We might fast-track them into an interview, but we’d still interview the candidate. And so it must be with business advice. Bob pointing us to an idea is Bob referring an idea to us.
Our job is to take Bob’s referral and still validate the idea by seeking original, authoritative expertise. Bob’s value is suggesting ideas to think about, not teaching us about business.
p.s. I say all of the above as an authority on the subject: I’m a Bob.
The flip side of that is: the Bobs of this world sometimes have seen enough to (i) not be fooled by survivorship bias into believing their way is the best way and (ii) spot patterns in what many Alices do and many people trying to be like Alices don't
And there are a lot of fake Alices. I mean, I'm bombarded with ads from people who apparently spend five hours a week making five figures per month... and then apparently spend the rest of their life promoting their ability to offer one on one "coaching" sessions to be just like them at rates which don't really make much sense if they're making $x,xxx per hour on their real gig.
Which links back to the original post: the people who do make five figures per month for five hours a week reselling stuff tend to not talk about it. Or at least not nearly as much as the people cosplaying that lifestyle or the people whose interest in such businesses is purely academic.
The other huge hidden danger is the Bobs of the world can generalize, intentionally or accidentally, a situation and make it seem that anyone can be an Alice; but it may be (and Alice may openly admit if you ask) that there's only room for one Alice, and her mechanism simply will not work for anyone else.
The biggest example of this is in things that involve large amounts of luck (or are even totally luck-driven); think gambling or stock market picks or startups - the "winners" have a hard time distinguishing what they did from the luck involved, and often give too little to luck.
If the Bobs are not drawing out the luck side of things but instead amplifying the apparent skills, it can be a huge disservice, but, hey, it's usually more popular than saying "it's luck".
In this it is a writer who is arguably knowledgeable in one programming language (BASIC) writing a book about another (C) and getting fundamental things wrong. Being a domain expert in one even relatively close area doesn't mean it automatically applies in another.
You're absolutely right and this problem is getting worse and worse.
As one example, Twitter has this concept of "Topics", which you can kind of see as a sub community. Take a topic like "Web development" and the grifters are constantly on top.
They know exactly how to work the algorithms. They'll post something stupid like "HTML is not a programming language" to get maximum engagement. There's a rich playbook of such engagement patterns to win the game. And they do win.
Same situation on Medium, where there's "Categories". They're all gamed and corrupted like this.
The value adding voices are not heard, and will therefore give up.
I know a number of "secret experts" -- one of which has been a good friend of mine for more than 20 years. He is an expert you have never heard of, but you have interacted with his efforts in everything from VoIP, streaming, ads, all sorts of stuff...
He is a cowboy from texas with a stereotypical texas accent, looks like he works at a gas station, but can look at a PCB, take the labels of the chips on the board and the layout, and actually write linux drivers for said board. (HE ACTUALLY DID THIS) - but he will regularly tell me "goin hog huntin" in the most deadpan texas drawl... and this week was "went deep sea fishin. back in dallas."
I am really lucky to be on a firstname call any time basis with this guy.
Although it's not a popular term, he truly is a super architect and 10 x coder. You can throw any problem at him and he'll solve it, fast and with quality. As part of this, he explores new technologies and seems to master them in hours or days at most, and it all looks so effortless. Even more rare for such a powerhouse of tech skill, he's no nerd. An excellent communicator with deep business insight.
I often wonder about him, if you can do all that...if you can manage such absurd scope and complexity in your mind whilst it seems you're not even breaking a sweat...doesn't that mean you can do anything? Anything at all?
Anyway, his online exposure: he has an email address, but don't expect a response. He has a smartphone but I never see him use it. He has no social media.
If he would post online, he'd inevitably be recognized as a guru. But he won't, he goes home to his family. Not just smart, also wise.
i grew up in the south but lived on the east and west coasts as an adult. my experience is that intelligence and aptitude are more evenly distributed than insecure city slickers would love to believe. there are homeless people in LA who can rejigger electric scooters for free rides in 2 minutes flat, and they didn't watch youtube to figure it out.
I still recall the first time I worked on a successful project where the manager started talking about writing articles or a book about it. How important it is that we do X.
Yes, X is important, but what's really saving our bacon is all of the people doing Y. The more you focus on X, the more the Y-focussed people are going to start wonder why they're here, since you don't appreciate their efforts. I mean you didn't even mention it in any of your articles... Let's see what happens when nobody does Y anymore, smart guy.
There’s a subset of this silent majority who tried to contribute to discussion platforms but gave up when they saw prominent voices that had next to no idea what they were talking about being promoted, hailed, and so on. The loudest voice is rarely the most articulate, and for subject matter experts articulation, nuance, and other learned-through-experience things count for a lot, one would assume.