You can't impress developers

Developers, in general, on average, chronically underestimate the time it takes to properly execute an idea and how many iterations and discovery of the exact needs of customers that requires.<p>I work at a company that sells a tool for model based testing and invariably, at every customer company, there are developers that think our tool isn't worth the money, because when we explain to them how it works and they think 'I could build that'. Yes, of course they could, just like they could also build a Reddit clone in a weekend. They just don't realize (and is hard to convince otherwise), just how much work it is and how much real world experience is necessary to make it actually useful. As the article says: developers are very hard customers and fortunately (for us, but not for the industry in general) the decision makers often distrust/discount the technical opinion developers have of tools they intend to purchase.<p>Tl;dr: developers too often say 'I can build that', when really, for practical purposes, they can't.

I've been active here for about 2 years now. I don't think there's been the dreadful decline people are talking about; I think it's mostly nostalgia talking. I know intellectually that I basically hated highschool and spent most of it alternatively depressed or bored out of my skull, yet somehow that period of my life has taken on a rosy tint.<p>Sometimes OPs are wrong or misguided and somebody with more experience or expertise is there to point out why.<p>That's valuable.<p>Often you hear from the creators of things. Folk who are at the coalface of some system, company or problem.<p>That's valuable.<p>So sometimes it comes with a bit of grunge and grump. I don't really care. The rest is worth it.

Took a break from HN (and others) for about 8 months at the end of 2012 and start of 2013. The HN I came back to feels very different. Everyone knows better and is eager to prove it by putting others down. Comments are no longer about the OP, but about how the <i>OP is laughable, let me tell you how to do it</i>. So sad.

You can't impress developers <i>on HN</i>. There's something about the social dynamics of large groups of developers online that causes relatively-uninteresting criticisms to dominate. But when somebody's actually trying something out, rather than just kibitzing? They're a lot friendlier.<p>If you couldn't impress developers we'd never switch to new technologies. And yet here we are, with rack and sinatra and cucumber and node and clojure.

Appreciation and valuable feedback are two different things. What value does "this is great; let me buy you a pretty unicorn!" add to the discussion? Criticism and disagreement are central to growth. We are not here satisfy each others' egos or make each other feel loved; we're here to criticize software and make it better. Constructive criticism is our way of saying: "I have spent time reading your code, and here is how you can make it better" -- I don't have the time to read everything, so the very fact that I took the time to read your code and write about it should make you feel appreciated.<p>That said, it is possible to go overboard and criticize something based on irrational hatred. At that point, you're just talking about trolls: it has nothing to do with developers not appreciating each others' work. Internet trolls have existed since the dawn of the internet, and there are plenty of resources on how to deal with them.<p>How you communicate your criticism is also important: there is no need to be overtly negative. Just point out what's wrong, and how to correct it; your job is done. Here's a recent instance where I've been overtly negative: the correct response is criticism of my style, as Junio has done [1].<p>[1]: <a href="http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/225354/focus=225388" rel="nofollow">http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/22535...</a>

It seems a lot of people in the comments here are complaining about a decline in the value of discussions on HN. Although I've noticed this I don't think it's the fault of the people commenting. The quality of links posted to HN has declined.<p>Rather than fact-based technical articles, useful new tools, and cool side projects there are a lot of crappy articles repeating the same things we've heard thousands of times about productivity, standing desks, work/life balance, meditation. The articles rarely present anything new, they are mostly anecdotes presented as fact.<p>I still find great things on HN and participate in interesting discussions but sometimes when I look at the front page it seems more like a site for people interested in self-help guides.

This conversation reminds of the old programmer joke:<p>How many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb?<p>Five. One to screw in the light bulb and four to say, "I could have done that."

I become impressed when I see utility. Anyone can mock up a poorly featured demo. Programmers tend to be a lot more receptive when someone says:<p>We created X, and here's the successful, maintainable, real world product we used to implement it called Y<p>than:<p>We created X, here's a 10 line incomplete demo that isn't really useful for anything and that we didn't explain well

Developers are critical thinkers. If the person hasn't evolved enough to account for the notion of being human; or if the context is such that critical thinking implies critiquing without appreciation, you get what the OP is complaining about. HN is definitely the latter since comments in this community are largely reserved for criticism while the appreciation is (usually) limited to upvotes.<p>I want to say it's the nature of the game but that's simply not true, we take pride in being assholes. For Brython, while I was appreciated the amount of work and the complexity that went into it, I was unimpressed by the methodology.

I think this underlines what Hacker News has become. At first, Hacker News was about people discussing technology, but also about building things and sharing them, and it was a very supportive community that would actually give useful feedback. Now we're more interested in being hypercritical dicks and gossiping about the tech industry.

Brython has bubbled up on HackerNews several times. It might not be "not impressed", just "not impressed anymore."<p>Edit: Added quotation marks.

I'm easily impressed by:<p>- Huge projects which are still understandable within minutes,<p>- Products which handle special cases, which in turn amaze its users (when the dev has managed to get beyond her own use cases),<p>- and devs who write more elegant code than me (clever use of patterns, readability, yadayada).<p>It's easy to sniff at another dev's code, since nobody's perfect, and code is often a compromise of a conflict of various factors (and each conflict can be solved in various ways). But, this loop which has a workaround for a off-by-one error which is caused elsewhere - has likely been written under time pressure, and I might someday make the same mistake. I think it all boils down to dev compassion.

I think the OP misses the fact that of a few hundreds people who may view and read an article, only a few will put forth effort to comment on it. So, there's definitely some sampling bias. And, typically people put forth effort only if they have motivating opinions, one way or the other. Adding the fact that comments like 'awesome post!' tend to create a lot of noise and get down-voted quickly, it's not surprising that many comments may seem negative. It's the unfortunate nature of online forums. Oftentimes a few negative pieces of feedback will hide substantial amounts of muted support.

Well since you can have hardware emulator in javascript, we surely became less impressed in what you can run in the browser. example that come in mind <a href="http://bellard.org/jslinux/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://bellard.org/jslinux/index.html</a>

I agree with this OP to a level, that it isn't limited to developers. I had a couple contractors in our house, and I swear they went at each others throats nitpicking different ways each other could do a job better.<p>In regards to devs, I am a hacker (my criminal record proves it), but you'll always come across people who are ignorant in what they know and unwilling to be open to change or something they didn't have a hand in.<p>ALL OF US as coders need to be open to new libraries, code bases, languages, and always willing to learn, but I think it's inherited with our skills that we look for holes, errors, and other ways to optimize...to the point that it comes off as an attack instead of criticism.<p>If you link on HN, EXPECT criticism (constructive hopefully), and just ignore the ignorant trolls. A real coder knows how to give supportive criticism, and credit where credit is due....Not sure if this validates my opinion, but I'm easily impressed though :)

HN comments are heavy on critique. Maybe that's a side effect of an aggregator and a culture that discourages trivial chatter.<p>A year of keeping up with HN has been a crash course on how to build things for the internet. I don't know what my stack would look like without all the unimpressed developers picking apart the industry news. Keep it up.

&#62; So don't try.<p>Stop! Don't tell people not to try. There's always going to be the vocal peanut gallery at HN (and anywhere online) that will do whatever they can to disparage projects.<p>But, this doesn't make up the majority of people reading. There are millions of developers, hackers, designers, builders reading and benefiting from the projects, code, and products that people post. These are the people who get inspired or utilize the projects and blog posts about that cool new thing you made in node.js, or the neat hack you did with Ruby and realtime sockets, or that awesome new CSS technique.<p>The minute we stop showing the things we make, the trolls win.<p>So I say: TRY! Keep trying! Keep pushing out things that you made. Ignore the trolls and focus on the constructive feedback.<p>HN is a beautiful thing, and it had a huge hand in pushing me to start a startup. And, yes, it was a developer product. If I didn't try, it wouldn't have existed.

Yes you can, if you are good.<p>I went to a mountain Bike trail competition, and watched the biggest masters in the world in this. Everybody there knew how to balance over the rear wheel(manuals), over the front(endos) and jump over a meter hight any obstacle, more than 3 meters with a ramp.<p>There it was a kid, 16 years old or so. He was not as good as the much older guys, but all of them were impressed about the guy. They knew that guy was good just looking at him.<p>If you want to impress devs you have to be better than them, and this is very hard on technical matters.<p>But you don't need to, because what makes a good product is not tech alone, but how this tech applies to human beings. Things like design or human interface, or understanding the market or people are also essential.<p>Quite often the tech experts are totally ignorant in those areas(no wireless, less space than a nomad.lame)

I'm getting a "Not Found" on the link. Looks like the url changed slightly to:<p><a href="http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/" rel="nofollow">http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/</a><p>(its not a cache, but i'll say cached here for those searching the comments for a link to the google cache)

&#62; <i>Brython is designed to replace Javascript as the scripting language for the Web.</i><p>Starting like this, what did you expect? Boring mannered small talk?

Isn't that @holman's theme on your website? I don't recall him open sourcing it. (Unless it's the other way round, which I doubt.)

The same holds true in virtually every content-oriented field: try making a room full of comedians laugh.

I am a developer and I was impressed.

I find it way harder to impress users. They expect things just to magically work and don't realize how much work is required even for the most mundane feature.

Actually I'm impressed that all these 'look what I implemented in a Turing complete language' posts got so much attention for so long.

I can quickly enumerate a list of things that impressed me from other developers. If others in the HN can do the same would be a better answer to this article.<p>- <a href="http://bellard.org/jslinux/" rel="nofollow">http://bellard.org/jslinux/</a> - Google: impressed from the engineering and scale side. - Demo scene - Exploiting difficult security vulnerabilities

Hacker News is going through a predictable evolution.<p>In the early days it's a wonderful community of supportive collaborators. These are the people who start unmoderated mail lists and discussion groups, at least the ones that grow to the next stage.<p>It attracts people who want to be part of an unmoderated mail list or discussion group. It doesn't matter what the topic is, they always show up. They feel a sense of empowerment. They have arrived at the place where decisions are made, and they have an equal voice! They will express themselves.<p>Then it becomes about governance. How will we make decisions (even though the decisions are about nothing).<p>Then even those people leave, because the atmosphere is so poisoned by the negative people who say they hate everything and anything.<p>The good folk who started the community are long-gone, probably dreaming about new communities where everyone gets along and is supportive and has good ideas and doesn't get in anyone's way! Only to do it again, and again...

There is a huge amount of value in constructive criticism, and really very little value in praise. In order to reach your full potential you must be able to handle criticism of your work. If you simply praise a person you are really not doing them any favors, in fact you might be hurting their development by creating a false sense of superiority that causes them to stop pushing themselves as hard to succeed. However, you really are doing a person a favor when you take the time to read through their work and offer constructive criticism, because then you are helping them to achieve their full potential.<p>In fact, it's a sign of respect to give constructive criticism because the implied message is: I found your work interesting enough to spend time looking over it and thinking about; and I'm not going to treat you like a child who needs to be coddled, but rather like a peer who is capable of handling criticism.

I had missed the first link about a Python interpreter in JS. I too find it incredible and very exciting.<p>I'm not sure I want to manipulate the DOM in Python instead of JS/jQuery, but it could prove super cool to write web workers in Python for instance.<p>The more you can compute in the browser the better. The client is where CPU cycles go to die, we need to change that.

I'm impressed by the stuff I see here, all the time. I've only been using HN for a couple of months but I, too, have noticed a decline in the quality of comments. The comments used to be about how amazing the information in the link is, what's so amazing about it, how it can be used, how it can be improved concluded with brownie points for the OP. Now, all I read about is how dumb the post is. Author wrote too much/little and doesn't know what they're talking about. Just look at the comments for the 'Mistakes designers make over and over again' post that's currently on the front page.<p>Someone should research this. Every-single-time a nice little community starts expanding rapidly all the construction is gone and all we're left with is the destruction. Reddit and HN being the most recent examples I can think of. For a throw back: Anyone remember GameFAQs of 1998? Go check it now.

While I can empathize with Olemis on the reception of Brython on Hacker News, I'm not sure one can infer from that exchange (or the admittedly high number of similar conversations) that developers are incapable of being impressed. This just doesn't jive with my experience at all.<p>From the dozen Hack and Tells (<a href="http://hackandtell.org/" rel="nofollow">http://hackandtell.org/</a>) held around the world to the hundreds of stories developers have of their first time looking at ffmpeg's source to the growing number of live Javascript console demos (great one here: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jArKzo-h3R0" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jArKzo-h3R0</a>) to Dan Kaminsky's DNS bug discovery - I feel developers are very clearly capable of being impressed. It is a pretty regular thing.<p>It is, I will say, a very, <i>very</i> hard thing to do. I encounter it each day in my gig serving developer communities at Twilio. I have to bring my best work to them every time I ask for their attention - anything less ends in derision or, even worse, dismissal. Developers are natural skeptics whose daily work's default state is broken. This engenders a very high velocity needed to escape that skepticism.<p>Further, while HN certainly qualifies as a representative set, it is a specific demo of developer. There is a wide swath of developers who don't participate in this forum - poor reception here rarely means poor reception everywhere developers live.<p>Finally, I would submit that if impressing developers is one's goal in a project, one is probably set up for disappointment from the start. Amazement is an extrinsic factor that makes a poor primary goal as many factors governing success lie outsides the code one writes or the product one is building.<p>I always feel happiest when I fix the problems I want to solve elegantly and those solutions are widely adopted by the people primarily suffering from those problems. Whatever people think outside that scope doesn't really affect that satisfaction.

HN navel gazing aside -- I think this is really good advice. Rather than trying to impress your coworkers -- try to impress your users.<p>I think the challenge in many companies is getting enough access to your users that you can tell if they are impressed or not.<p>I'm going to try to think this way more.

No... Developers are really easy to impress. Show them something that will save them time and effort to make something and they will flock around it. You give them a tool that "automagically" does something tedious they used to do and makes it easy and they will be there in a heartbeat with their wallets open.<p>The python in javascript on the client side is a neat hack, but it's not solving any known problem for the mass of developers here. If this showed examples of performance and gained improvement over alternatives and it would sell better here. Right now though, it pushes the idea that javascript isn't good enough and we should be using something else in the browser (see DART, CoffeeScript, etc and related flame wars).

I always try to make a point of showing appreciation when someone programmed something cool.

Developers and engineers in general develop an ego with time. They take pride in their work and are very protective of it. They also relish the petty mistakes that others make and scoff at them - 'pfft I could have used X instead of Y to do Z. Who uses Y anymore !?'.<p>For example, you can find this behavior when someone posts something about problem X and there is a minor grammatical mistake or an opinion that is expressed in the post that is unconventional. The comments section will zero in on that and miss the big picture.

I wonder if this applies to other professions?<p>E.g. what does a master chef think about the dish by another master cook?<p>Does an architect respect the buildings of another?<p>What about painters, musicians or writers?

Part of getting criticized is deciding whether you accept them or not. If you try to fight a criticizing troll, you probably won't win. It's easy to get drowned by criticism, so choose your battles wisely, just like Elon Musk, he quit a political action committee because he sees that the group was too cynical. And as experience teach us that too much cynicism tends to hoards negativity.

I also read that story yesterday, and I thought, "this is pretty cool, I wonder how it works. It probably compiles to JS" and clicked through and looked at the site for a bit.<p>At the end, I thought it was a really awesome idea, but didn't comment -- I guess I should have, and this blog post makes me feel kind of guilty.<p>I've learned my lesson -- If you like something here, or even think it's remotely interesting, say so.

I'm impressed by stuff all the time. I think there's just a fatigue about creating an emulator for or an implementation of X in javascript.

I would argue that developers can be impressed. However the ones that aren't are normally quite vocal. Commentary on the internet is normally toward the extreme end of opinion and should be regarded as such. It is difficult to adjust to this though as it is in direct contrast to real life where people make deliberate efforts to moderate what they say.

I am a developer and I have been impressed by other developers many times.<p>That being said, I don't care much for "show off" posts like "Look everyone, I made a functional web server in Brainfuck!". If you're <i>trying</i> to impress other developers, it is certain that you won't. It is not a worthy goal in itself.

My favorite quote from Steve Jobs:<p>"Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?"

Hemingway explains the phenomenon succinctly. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&#38;v=kw9spMYA-XU#t=40s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&#38;v...</a><p>And remember - don't be self-effacing.

I remember a comment from PG about this matter. He too was not impressed with all the negativity lurking HN.<p>It's not about admitting genius. It's about recognizing effort and proactivity.<p>It's about stimulating good behavior. It's not about who's more badass.

This post reminds me a bit of the momentum-sapping negativity Dave Winer describes in his old post on <i>Stop Energy</i>.<p>See: <a href="http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy" rel="nofollow">http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy</a>

Just tried accessing this via the HN link but it was dead. It seems this is the new location of the post:<p><a href="http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/" rel="nofollow">http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/</a>

Developer != Developer.<p>Many Developer think that they are the best developer in the world and this kind of people dont honor others work.<p>Since i use github, i see that not everybody think like you do (in the past i agree with your statement).

I'm just wondering, if one day someone submit a post on HN "Bob Smith just have implemented AI-Hard in JavaScript as his weekend project, watch the demo", what would be the first comment :)

"page not found"<p>someone have a mirror please ?

Are the examples given by the author really that worthy of respect? If you write yet another unnecessary Foo to Javascript translator, or over-complicate your code to show off how well you know the dark corners of your chosen language (both examples given by Chris), should people really be impressed? And if people aren't, should they put on a fake smile and pretend to be?