I'd consider myself to be one of these developers. I don't blog, I don't Tweet, and my public GH contributions are sparse at best. I'm a fairly senior engineer in a large company. What bothers me about this post is the idea that I must be lagging behind on using the newest technologies just because I don't Tweet about it?
Conferences, in my experience, are mostly a waste of time. I can usually watch the keynotes online after the fact if I care to. I'm not interested in joining discussion groups and posting; like the vast majority of people, I'm content to lurk, but I'm not blind!
So yeah, I'd be very comfortable challenging a light-visible developer on pushing/using new technology and generally being aware of the landscape. I just don't care to talk about it constantly.
While I’m not in this group since I have a hard time detaching from work, I think Anthony Bourdain summed this up well.
“I'll generally take a standup mercenary who takes pride in his professionalism over an artist any day. When I hear 'artist', I think of someone who doesn't think it necessary to show up at work on time. More often than not their efforts, convinced as they are of their own genius, are geared more to giving themselves a hard-on than satisfying the great majority of dinner customers. Personally, I'd prefer to eat food that tastes good and is an honest reflection of its ingredients, than a 3-foot-tall caprice constructed from lemon grass, lawn trimmings, coconuts and red curry.”
Great quote. It applies to pretty much any profession that isn't pure art. Knowing how it works in medical and research fields, it would be a great analogy for that too.
good luck developing new dishes without artists. Maybe you don't want a "a 3-foot-tall caprice constructed from lemon grass, lawn trimmings, coconuts and red curry" but A) that sounds fucking delicious to me and B) in the same way that fashion houses present ideas that are then digested and disseminated into consumer clothing lines, culinary artists also provide an essential service in pushing the art of food forward.
that's such an unnecessarily disparaging remark that I kind of don't even know how to take it (or him) seriously.
I think you focused too much on that part. The overall point (artists are self absorbed and unprofessional) is really hard to argue against to anyone who has spent any time out in the world
And you don't even need to go that far. Bourdain is talking in the context of running a successful restaurant -- serving quality food to customers that they want, on time. The artist can be everything GP said they were and still be inferior to the mercenary in that context.
I think the fact you’re commenting here at all, sharing your thoughts and choosing to make yourself heard, sort of excludes you from the silent dark matter group, no? It’s no shining badge of merit, but I do think that being on HN at all, choosing to spend our time learning and conversing about our career field, is a fairly strong group-signal in and of itself.
I’ve worked at tiny startups all the way to big tech and immediately had a few people come to mind when I read the description. A lot of them were really into sports or the arts or had a busy family, often this meant that outside of the function of our very specific role, they never really had much to say about tech or programming. That’s a really good thing though! I think it’s a drag spending all day with people whose interests are too similar to mine, it gets really stale. I’d much rather hear about how Dan’s hockey team’s doing than yet another debate about LLMs :)
> I think the fact you’re commenting here at all, sharing your thoughts and choosing to make yourself heard, sort of excludes you from the silent dark matter group, no?
Come now, if your definition is so strict then nobody is in that group. Its a very far cry from youtubers/guest speakers etc.
There are degrees of everything but I'm sure there is a non-trivial subset of developers/engineers who don't blog/write, post on social media professionally, attend conferences. Maybe a lot of them are just 99% dark because they posted on HN a few times. But you might be surprised at how many people are nearly invisible on the web--and certainly professionally.
An underappreciated aspect of all this: how many people are under NDA?
There's no upside to me talking about my current work and I might accidentally breach NDA, so I don't. I feel I can give detail-stripped war stories from previous jobs, though.
(Working on WinCE was very much being a "dark matter" developer, because there's almost no user community at all. And a good example of the NDA problem: you get some of the source to Windows CE, which you can't really discuss in public because it's copyright Microsoft)
Or they have security clearances etc. I'm sure I know quite a few people who go "Hmm. My employer doesn't even really want us posting on social media so on the one hand maybe I can earn a few Internet points. On the other hand, I could get fired. Tough call. (Not.)"
I worked for 3 years at Ab Initio, a software company with an ETL product which is - honestly - phenomenally good and worlds above anything else in the space, open source or not. (It was designed and is still mostly developed by graybeard former Symbolics and Thinking Machines Corp. hackers.)
And I never blogged or spoke a word about it, because it's absolutely forbidden both by rule and by company culture.
Given they make money hand over fist... I think they're doing just fine with their current strategy. I obviously can't give details, but they basically print money.
Many of those corps also have restrictions on speaking/posting publicly as well, and something like setting up a blog or Youtube channel would need legal approval. Some even ban public posting on social media and forums. These restrictions are not just on confidential content as well, but on literally anything you post publicly (as it may affect how others view the company). Due to IP agreements anything you post is also considered corporate IP anyways and thus even commenting on social media is forbidden.
Therefore if you see say a Github user who hides behind their screen name, or a HN commenter who purposesly keeps their job details vague, that could be someone who doesn't want to be dark matter - but the company policies force them to hide that way.
Even the idea that new tech is somehow worth our time and attention because it is new is extremely presumptuous. It disrespects my time by trading it for the cheap fashion and marketing of industry.
The problem with your model is that it relies on there being “proven” technologies to begin with, but who is going to prove them if not those very groups you deride? You’re proving the necessity of the early adopters and hype suckers if anything.
Couldn't one make the point that those early adopters in orgs that can afford to take on the risks pave the way for everyone else? And eventually, once some technologies survive and others die off for a variety of reasons, people with deadlines to meet (more limited amount of time and resources to invest in getting something working) can just build off of the success of others?
>The problem with your model is that it relies on there being “proven” technologies to begin with
This takes overthinking to a new level. Of course there are proven technologies - used with success for decades, known for their stability, etc. I'm pretty sure one can find arguments against any of them. But we do have a general (not unanimous) consensus, even if it hasn't been cast into stone. For example that Python is tried and mature for data science, or that C++ has proven itself in games, and Java in enterprise and application server programming, and so on.
>but who is going to prove them if not those very groups you deride
Actual domain experience from millions of developers, and observation of decade(s) of use, stability, and known upsides/downsides?
Nobody waited for hipster programmers to declare mature technologies. Their "job" is to hype new stuff. If it evolves into something mature, they go to the next shiny thing.
The dividing line between hipster programmers and “engineers” is nonexistent. They are just other programmers. Those millions of developers didn’t hop on the bandwagon just because Java was sitting there, it required a lot of forward-thinking, high-skill people to get off the ground. And they were hipsters at the time.
>Those millions of developers didn’t hop on the bandwagon just because Java was sitting there, it required a lot of forward-thinking, high-skill people to get off the ground. And they were hipsters at the time.
Nah, I was there "at the time", and this is bad example. Java got traction because of marketing to corporate departments, not because of "forward-thinking, high-skill people" driving it. It was literally the first language that came with a full blown, tens-of-millions, commercial hype campaign.
In any case, the early adopters were neither "hipsters" nor more mature "engineer" types. It was the duped-by-hipsters types, but at that time enticed by marketing.
The kind of hipsters described above and in abundance 2023 (or even 2010) sense hardly existed back then (Java caught on during 1997-2000), and even when, very rarely, they did, they didn't have the means and captive audience to make their hype be adopted (people hyped things like Ada, Smalltalk, Lisp, Eiffel, and other lost causes). Back then it was mostly marketing driven hype, sold to corporate decision makers.
Modern hipster devs came about with blogs, social media, the proliferation of conferences, the rise of startups as we know them today when they recovered after the dot-com boom,
and companies like Google and Facebook fighting it out for developer influence.
You wrote about me deriding bald people in this thread (telling me it's bad "to deride people who have no hair"). My response above was about that: that I did no such thing. I mentioned bald people vs people with hair as an example of a sorites ("no clear boundaries") problem. Not to cluster them with hype-promoting developers (that doesn't even make sense).
As for the others types that you mention, sure: the very purpose of the original comment was to deride people promoting hype.
It's impressive the lengths you'll go to avoid seeing the point. My message is, don't write off people just because they appear to be hipsters. Similar to people lacking hair, who are oftentimes the SAME persons as those people having hair, the developers participating in new technologies are often the same as the ones writing in mature codebases.
The "hair' argument becaome so convoluted I don't even know where to address, so let's address your main concern.
Are we allowed to write off people's activity for any reason? Dislike certain trends people follow? Criticize some tendencies or bad habbits? If so, I chose to criticize hype-merchants and write them off (regarding that aspect of their life, I'm sure they could still be wonderful parents, or golf players, or whatever otherwise).
That is what happens when you bring up unrelated topics like hair in a discussion about developers.
The question is, write them off as what? Because as we already established, it requires developers in order to make a technology “mature.” So how does it make sense to write those developers off, when they are necessary to the creation of the thing you want?
I don't find that the process of making a technology mature is the same as it's mass adoption as the hyped new thing.
If anything, the latter leads to the opposite: tons of immature technologies, hyped to high heaven, used by tons of developers who don't know any better, and then discarded as a new shiny thing comes along. Discarded both by users, and their limited-attention-span creators.
> "Newest technologies" are for early adopters and hype suckers. Engineers use proven technologies, not just "newer" for the sake of it.
This is in total opposition to the way I was taught engineering.
New technologies get used in products and projects all the time. There's a discipline called risk analysis where the pros, cons and risks of technological choices are weighted-in to take a decision on whether or not to incorporate them.
The more a given tech is used, the better it's understood, making it less risky to incorporate into larger products.
Engineers also fall victim to hype from time to time, because engineers are human.
It's part of an engineering mindset to trust proven technology, but it's also part of an engineering mindset to make sure you're staying up-to-date with critical changes in your field. Ignoring either for long enough will make you a worse engineer.
>Engineers also fall victim to hype from time to time, because engineers are human.
Sure, just like everybody has shat themselves one time or another, at the very least as a toddler, but perhaps also when they had to make a long run to a remote bathroom after Taco Bell. But there are really people suffering from severe diarrhoea too, and those are two distinct groups.
It's not that engineers are immune to hype. It's that the others are hype-magnets and hype-spreaders.
Doesn't this imply that "hype-magnets" and "hype-spreaders" ("the others") aren't engineers, or couldn't be?
Engineers aren't some special class of human with special brains or pseudo-Vulcan logic that makes it impossible for us to be just as hype-spreading as anyone else.
I think being up to date on new technology puts you clearly not in the “dark matter” camp he’s talking about. There is a lot of development happening in ASP.net, C, Cobol and platforms that have been stable for decades.
[had an extended comment here before but got downvoted by what I can only imagine are people offended by the word “lagging”. Reminder that downvotes on HN are for comments breaking etiquette, not to show disagreement]
> Conferences, in my experience, are mostly a waste of time. I can usually watch the keynotes online after the fact if I care to. I'm not interested in joining discussion groups and posting; like the vast majority of people, I'm content to lurk, but I'm not blind!
And hallway track if you're into that sort of thing (which I am). I do think that, especially with the increase in video we've seen over the past few years, if you're going to conferences to sit in keynotes and breakouts and then head back to your room, they're probably a waste of time and money for you.
I applied to some jobs and they didn't see anything and I got shot every time.
So right now, I publish a lot more, I do this for myself, so not everybody can see me.
My hypothesis, people change the rules a lot and when things start to fall apart the rules. So right now, when I see nothing, there's a big chance that I don't going to this person serious.
Scott should indeed rewrite that article one day (HN: shanselman ... do you read ;)). You are right with this statement. These are two different things which often correlate but not necessarily.
> My coworker Damian Edwards and I hypothesize that there is another kind of developer than the ones we meet all the time. We call them Dark Matter Developers. They don't read a lot of blogs, they never write blogs, they don't go to user groups, they don't tweet or facebook, and you don't often see them at large conferences. Where are these dark matter developers online?
"another kind of developer than the ones we meet all the time" sounds incredibly condescending and wrong at the same time. We all meet them literally all the time. They are our co-workers. Never did I work in a team where the majority of my peers were avid conference speakers and bloggers, quite the opposite. It's just called normal human beings with hobbies other than only computers. They are not dark matter, because we can see them all the time. They are the norm, not an abnormality. This whole blog post has a tone to it which doesn't sit well with me.
> The Dark Matter Developer will never read this blog post because they are getting work done using tech from ten years ago and that's totally OK
That's incredibly judgemental. These are normal human beings who are not some mindless dumb people who don't do anything except work go home and sleep. They read posts like this and they don't necessarily use 10 year old tech as Hanselman suggests in his condensending ways. They are just not such a narcissists who need to sign up on every social media platform and constantly tweet about a shitty podcast and making shitty tiktoks to get a feeling of worth in their life. That is perhaps the only difference.
Perhaps the reason you see these developers is because you're not in the bubble that Scott Hanselman and most of HN is inserted in. I don't really think this is exactly wrong given the context and audience.
-
"They are just not such a narcissists who need to sign up on every social media platform and constantly tweet about a shitty podcast and making shitty tiktoks to get a feeling of worth in their life."
FYI, this is waaaaay more judgemental than what you quoted...
Indeed. Scott is a evangelist which promotes .NET. His circle are surely more in the blogger-sphere, conference speakers, presentation cycle etc. I am pretty sure that he has some deep connections (e.g. to the .NET team itself) but most likely not as a co-worker.
It seems like a sign of poor judgment to 1) assume you're not in a bubble and 2) to confidently and extensively opine about truths about the world that you can't observe.
You have a dislike of the author, and it shows, which is sad (and against the spirit of why we are here on HN). I did not pick up any such tone from the post, nor any sense of condescension. That might be you projecting.
They've chosen a way to express, what to _us_ on social media platforms, are the people whose voices are not heard. If you have chosen to take that in bad faith, please take a step back.
I've explained why I think those are bad takes. Perhaps you are projecting on me something because you don't like my opinion. Also asking me to take a step back because you don't like my opinion is really against the spirit of why we are here on HN. People are allowed to express their views in comments as long as it's respectful. I think I articulated my points in strong but fair way and didn't say anything in particular about the author which makes it personal. However, you've made it now personal by accusing me of something unfounded without any proof. Perhaps you should take a step back and reflect on your own conduct.
I'm a fan of Hanselman but I think I get the gist of what you're saying. The post has an air of 'let's not forget about these strange specimens' when, like you, I'm under the opinion that the type of person he describes in the post are the norm.
Scott is a fantastic teacher, I've learned a lot from listening to him and his podcasts. But at the same time, being in his position requires one to stay on the bleeding edge in some cases, to be able to teach newcomers emerging technologies and explain new features in Microsoft tech like ASP and C#.
When you're surrounded by tech bloggers, social media and the like all day, I expect it to shape your view of what the wider development community actually looks like - even if you're in it. As you say, I feel the vast majority of us just go to work, go home then carry on with our lives. Perhaps pop our head over the fence one in a while if something truly earthshattering is happening.
You’re accusing the comment author of something they didn’t commit. How perceiving condescension in a given paragraph of text is having “a dislike of the author” and “projecting”? If you didn’t detect something that somebody else felt, how does that invalidate somebody else’s opinions or feelings?
I like Hanselman but also think he's off base here. Some of that 99% are probably as he describes, but plenty are working on cool stuff with the latest tech, but just aren't into social media or conferences.
This misunderstanding explains the animosity in the comments.
Somehow using older tech is being conflated with being a lesser developer, and not being “cool”, when that’s kind of the opposite of the point of the post.
It's bizarre to suggest not going to conferences or keeping a blog means you're stuck on VB6 (released in 1998, 14 years before the post was written). It doesn't not mean that, either. The two things are unrelated to each other.
Scott Hanselman is projecting the world view conference-goers and blog-posters onto everyone else. He is obsessed with modernity, so everyone else must be using stable technology; he worries that his bleeding-edge tools are problems in need of a solution, so everyone else must be producing. In reality, any given 99% of developers is going to be using a diverse and varied mess of different technologies of varying maturity levels.
I don't think it's animosity at being called a lesser developer, but rather a baffled sense of insult at the claim that 99% of any group can be homogenous enough to teach lessons. Imagine a car enthusiast who drives a Porsche 911 writing the same article about the "dark 99%" who drive proven vehicles like a Toyota Camry (sensible passenger car) or a Mack Titan (gigantic truck used for pulling 200 tonne road trains) and are out there transporting. It's just a really weird claim to make given that the differences between his 1% and absolutely everyone else are dwarfed by the massive internal differences within that 99%.
The car enthusiast (or amateur race driver) is actually a pretty good analogy. Most people out there, including the Toyota and the mining truck driver, are likely not into the details of car construction, engines, and may not be up-to-date with the latest fuel injection tech that can give a 12% performance boost at high RPMs. And that’s totally ok and expected - they are using the vehicle as a tool to get jobs done. They might know enough to recognize a problem and know what model they want, but not get lost in details.
The people who go to car meetups and follow all the engineering and racing teams will be much closer to modern tech. Because it requires them to know about the latest developments in order to stay in the conversation.
What I disagree with is the % - it’s more like 90/10 instead, and most commenters here are probably in the 10% just for being on HN.
Probably some rationalization going on there: "those 5:01 devs might be productive, but, we who burn the midnight oil blogging about exciting new web frameworks are the REAL devs."
"Guys, did you know there are developers who are just developers and don't jump on the self-promotion-and-conference-speaker-train out of actually-writing-codeville at the first opportunity?! Shockingly, such people exist! They might—and you'll want to sit down for this—even not be bad at their jobs!"
I read the post initially as mocking the self-importance of the "1%". Also a bit judgemental, TBH, but in a friendly way. Who cares about what Scott Hanselman thinks, right? But the later parts indeed trend towards patronizing.
I'm put off by the entire classification system. I suppose I'm someone who rarely fits into classification systems anyway, but I don't think I'm so atypical here by:
- occasionally reading a link from HN
- regularly reading discussions on HN
- occasionally reading other tech blogs
- never going to conferences
- never blogging about programming
- almost never coding in my free time (but doing other hobbies instead)
Am I in the 1% of visible programmers? I absolutely do not think so, largely because I don't blog or talk about tech. But I'm also not in some kind of weird sheltered place where I have no idea what's going on.
My guess would be that's pretty typical of an enterprise programmer, especially if you replace "never" with once in a blue moon and perhaps exclude people who are active in open source development.
> The Dark Matter Developer will never read this blog post because they are getting work done
If we cut things off there it becomes a statement I find much more palatable.
Not everybody has the luxury of spending time thinking and talking about code - most of us spend that time writing code. Not that no one ever benefits from thinking and talking - quite the opposite - but the reality is, most employers don't want to pay most of their employees to perform that work. They'd prefer it be limited to a senior developer or manager role.
"They don't read a lot of blogs, they never write blogs, they don't go to user groups, they don't tweet or facebook..."
How do you know if you've never met them or talked to them?
"There's this group of people I've never met or talked to, and here are my assumptions about them." is a horrible thing to write. Baseless assumptions because you're some sort of 'thought leader' in web doesn't lend itself to saying backend dev, embedded devs, game devs, enterprise devs, etc are putting things out there.
This article can be distilled down to "I live in a bubble and can't be bothered to look very far outside of it. Why aren't those devs coming to me?"
My take on this is that we all live in our "bubbles". You, me and the next person reading this. What I believe Scott is saying, that there are a lot of people not reading this. However,they do get stuff done just fine.
Advice I see here is: If you are a creator, take into the account how your decisions will affect ALL users of your product.
>How do you know if you've never met them or talked to them?
By definition. If they tweeted or used facebook they would make their presence known and would no longer be a dark matter developer. Same with leaving comments on a blog, writing blog posts, or attending meet ups with other programmers.
I've been active on Twitter for almost 15 years, I have a couple of thousand 'followers', and I've seen posts from maybe 500,000 people at most. That's out of 450,000,000 active users at Twitter's peak. The notion that you'll have seen all, or even a significant amount, of the active devs is just daft. Same for blogs, Facebook etc. Unless Scott is open about how often he seeks out and reads blogs by people outside of his immediate bubble I think it's fair to assume this is just him failing to listen rather than millions of devs failing to speak.
Also, isn't this kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy? Once Scott sees a dev on Twitter or at a conference he must mentally move them from "dark matter" state to "not dark matter" state. By definition that means it's impossible to ever meet a dark matter dev, so they'll always be unknown to him.
This is exactly why hiring on github repos is such a bad take.
Most of these developers, do their job, learn new stacks when the need arises to do so, their work is proprietary, and have hobbies completly unrelated to programming.
> and have hobbies completly unrelated to programming.
This is critical to the discussion. In every industry you see people that live and breathe by their jobs, and why not. But especially in IT, there's this weird syndrome of "the revenge of the nerd" where many teenagers were nerdy and UNcool and now they're in tech and they can have big positions in big name companies and whatnot and it seems that working in Tech is the new metric for professional achievement.
And it's so easy to see the narrative as "only monomaniac nerds make it" because that's what we're told and what we hear. But the truth is, many more people are invisible because their work in tech is just a function/job/utility rather than a revenge over their own teenage years and/or a complete dedication.
I personally grew from the former category to the latter and I'm so much better in my life. YMMV as always.
I agree with this take somewhat. I used to work with a guy who would talk about his great Sunday afternoon spent coding, or take a week off to write a book about being a more efficient developer. A fine enough co-worker and very dedicated to his job, but when he burnt out he burnt out hard.
Lots of developers have various degrees of that "revenge of the nerds" syndrome, but many (including myself) get over it somewhat as you get through a few waves of cool new tech fads, crunch times, and boring projects that have to get done and it just becomes a job to do.
Or Github (nothing against it) can just be a form of nerd social media, where most people opt out of putting everything in public view for various reasons.
For example, I've been participating and trading in prediction markets as a form of income during the pandemic. It was originally just a hobby but I was between jobs when the pandemic hit. I imagine many employers would be turned off by this (and still have no idea how to present this as I'd like to get back into tech). If only due to a lack of understanding as it is still a very small niche.
And most code and projects I produce aren't really worth the extra effort to present publicly and would only serve as a noisy hiring signal. Would anyone really think it's impressive to see dozens of hastily written disposable web scrapers for very specific details from niche data/news sources? Or some code to browse a dataset in Pandas? Probably not.
> Maybe using ASP.NET 1.1 at a local municipality or small office
> But, as my friend Brad Wilson points out, those dark matter 99% have a lot to teach us about GETTING STUFF DONE. They use mature products that are well-known, well-tested and well-understood.
No, not really, we know how awful all those municipality/small office tech is, partially because yes, those mythical "well-known/tested" tools are pretty bad (also, it's ironic to call C/C++ with their share of footguns well-understood). The main learning from that experience is the opposite - all that poorly designed tech should not stagnate even if the road ahead is full of other poorly designed bumps because otherwise you'll never get to anything good
I am on the way back to be a dark matter developer.
The last 3 - 4 years i use the shiny new tech things and i feel like i fall from one black whole to the next. Most of the time i fix things of shiny new things. These new things fixing problems, that was solved 20 years ago from dark matter developers. But hey, we have cool bloggers and facebookers, they told us, that these things are cool and a really joy to work with. Haha, they don't now anything.
You know things like hydration, "islands", SSR, yes right, things that we use 20 years ago. And now we are back here again, but wasted huge amount of time, reinventing 20 times the wheel.
Dark matter developers, you have done everything right!
I guess I am dark matter dev. I comment on HN but nowhere else really.
I enjoy programming and have solo build systems that run businesses. However, there is so much stuff that interests me outside of programming that I don't care to commit time for projects that may never bring any value to my life.
I'm also sick of the internet machine and all the hype about some tech. I got burned by picking up something new after hearing about it on social media. Many times the YouTube tutorials are so basic that as soon as you start implementing that tech you discover bugs, lack of docs.
All new tech sucks when you are trying to "get stuff done". I had discovered bugs in books and was literally stuck for days trying to figure out how to resolve them and SO would return no solutions.
> Dark matter developers, you have done everything right!
The article is from 2012. I wonder if the author's opinion has changed much since then? It does seem that we don't pay enough attention to making things that we can keep running and improving for decades. These days I really favor mature tech. Things that have stood the test of time.
I have a lot of respect for things like Java and Ruby on Rails and even Windows COM.
No he did not. He used the terminology into at least 2020. Scott Hanselman is a very prominent figure in the .NET ecosystem and speaks in tons of places.
And .NET has a core problem in exactly that space: They have a huge (profitable) market of black matter developers who like X (e.g. a visual designer) and a open source community which asks for Y (e.g. WebAssembly support). So .NET is always ripped apart between the Enterprise centric analysis (MS has agreements with big companies to analyze their code usage) and the analysis from the GitHub issue trackers.
I feel like the author has somehow conflated two different concepts. Developers who are not hyper vocal and developers who don't use the latest technology. Those are not all the same people.
There are plenty of people who most work with older tech, and they are quite often not the especially vocal ones, writing blogs, debating approaches on twitter, discussing on this site (which obviously skews a bit to people working in startups), etc.
People in startup, or software development social media bubbles tend to get a very distorted view of things. Like that everyone is using react, or that everybody is doing SPAs, unless they riding very front latest trends where things are headed a little more back to server side (e.g. server components etc).
But both of those are nowhere near everyone. The whole point of this article is a reminder that what everybody is talking about on sites like this is far from a complete reflection of the space. Most bloggers like to talk about the latest tech, and most startups often use either the latest or near latest, but it is important to remember that the resulting perceptions are skewed relative to the sheer number of developers out there.
I don't blog anymore because after some months of doing it casually every so often I realized that no one except my brother ever read it and no one was going to start unless I devoted a huge amount of energy to promoting it.
Does that mean I didn't have anything interesting to say? No. I think I had a lot of interesting things to say. It just means I'm not popular.
Likewise I don't bother posting on Hacker News or Reddit anymore because all of my posts have been mainly ignored.
Does this mean I don't know anything about new technology? How could I possibly not be aware? I read HN every single day. The last few contracts/startups I have done were with the trendiest stuff like GPT and Stable Diffusion.
You popular people don't know about me because I'm not popular. But don't confuse that with being out of touch or uninteresting. Popularity and merit aren't the same thing. Go listen to the Billboard Top 10 songs right now and tell me if you really think those are the best 10 songs in the world currently.
I’m not particularly comfortable, using terms like “dark matter” to describe folks. Many of these people probably far outshine me, in passion, skill, talent, experience, and expertise. A lot of them are likely not visible, simply because it isn’t a priority for them.
It takes effort to keep a high profile, and many folks find they have other things to which they may wish to apply that effort.
I probably fit the description of a dark matter developer. I don't have any public github repos and don't feel comfortable blogging. I do read a lot of blogs to keep me up to date with the current trends and try to get some in depth knowledge. A lot of the new trends are basically old stuff with a catchy name, so my primary focus is finding out what makes it different or better.
It's fun to test new technologies, but I can't in good conscience recommend them to companies that don't have the resources to actually be at the bleeding edge. Too many people look at the shiny new tech and don't consider the cost of using it.
My primary motivation is creating a good product. I get things done by managing a healthy mix of known technology with a sprinkle of new things so that the magpie developers can see something shiny. In my experience the new shiny things should be kept to a minimum until you either grow so big that your lost opportunities are insignificant, or you have several teams able to cover the bets in case s*t hits the fan.
Unless your startup is mostly technology (like a new database), you are probably better off using "boring" technology and focus on making your product stand out. Try to find a few dark matter developers who knows how to balance.
I regularly point out that Windows Server is still about half of the general server market and shouldn’t be simply disregarded as if it didn’t exist. Invariably, there is some SV ex-FAANG employee here who is simply incredulous at this fact. Just can’t believe it, because in his corner of the world only Linux is used.
Similarly Azure is just a myth and does not exist.
> I regularly point out that Windows Server is still about half of the general server market and shouldn’t be simply disregarded as if it didn’t exist. Invariably, there i
It's hard to get reliable numbers, but there are few third-party stats that say between 40-50% globally, but in some countries likely over 70%.
In Australia, I work as a consultant across many orgs, both large and small, and the percentage of Windows Servers is definitely over 75% here, but apparently we're an outlier. For example, Australia East is a top-tier Azure region because there are so many Microsoft-centric large enterprise orgs around here.
It also matters what you consider a "server" and whether you count "unique configs" or raw numbers. For example, a University might have 2K-3K distinct Windows Server VMs and a 5K node Linux HPC environment running an identical build as a single cluster. So do they have more Windows or Linux servers? Technically, more Linux, by the numbers. But their admins will spend 99% of their time dealing with the large number of distinct Windows VMs, and treat the Linux cluster as just 1% of their fleet.
In this manner, the FAANGs definitely skew numbers. They may have hundreds of millions of largely identical Linux servers, but they're treated as a few huge clusters.
And of course, startups created by ex-FAANG employees will generally be Linux-centric and all hires will be similar Silicon Valley types, reinforcing the notion that "only Linux is used for servers". Yes... in one tiny part of the world. I bet BSD is also more common... near Berkley.
Ha, I've found this attitude from a bunch of people in other parts of our extended company.
Cloud means 'AWS', apparently.
Servers only run Linux, supposedly.
btw, Windows Clusters can do a good job, albeit an expensive way to resilience, but not something understood from many of the Linux-only crowd.
We need more openness and less closed views, for sure.
>My coworker Damian Edwards and I hypothesize that there is another kind of developer than the ones we meet all the time
Yes. Real-world developers, as opposed to serial new-tech-hype suckers, software convention panelists/social media influencer developers, and cushy FAANG employees.
I would write and share more, but the HN tribunal is just too bitter and merciless to expose your weak and vulnerable self to – as the comments on this post perfectly illustrate.
If you want to share, try different forums, subreddits, etc. Some are very friendly and supportive. Show HN is supposed to be supportive too (by the rules) but some people are not, just the way it is anywhere online.
And the loud developers like to invent new terms like “dark matter developers “ even though they can still communicate clearly without inventing new terms for every blog they write to pretend to be original
I work in a peculiarly dark matter technology. Windows File System Encryption drivers. The only book available on this subject (Windows File System Drivers) is Rajeev Nagar’s “Windows NT File System Internals” which was written in 1997 and is still relevant.
Thanks for posting this. I like to reference it especially on HN and Reddit; we live in online echobubbles and need reminders that our views, circumstances, and passions don't represent those of the majority.
Don't mistake their silence for lack of an opinion though! I work with them and do my best to encompass their views and requirements where I can.
> and need reminders that our views, circumstances, and passions don't represent those of the majority
There is an army of self-appointed activists/moralists spamming every thread in every forum with such "reminders". I sure wish there were fewer of them, and that forums like this one had rules against repeating that trite remark 200 times per day.
This blog is in the "Musings" section, and was written in 2012. So the landscape is different and the thoughts are probably not fully laid out, and I don't have any context on the author at the time.
But to me, in 2023, this post is such an odd take.
People not interested in being noisy on the Internet (or the walled gardens that today constitute the "public", attention-based Internet) in no way relates to _any_ of the numerous assertions he goes on to make about those hypothetical 99% of people.
Literally every take and even implied take (e.g. the silent 99% don't use technologies that iterate at high speed), seemed like a totally off-base generalisation in my experience.
As a counter point and friendly reminder, you don't have to feel pigeonholed by any or all of the assertions in this post just because you don't want to be noisy on the internet.
It's a pleasure to work with dark matter developers. I have worked with quite a few. They are not even on LinkedIn. They are quite productive, focused & get work done in 6-7 hours. They go home & enjoy time with their kids. On weekends they play poker with friends who are also dark matter professionals.
> They don't read a lot of blogs, they never write blogs, they don't go to user groups, they don't tweet or facebook...
So, the article alludes to a spectrum of engagement, but uses a binary distinction (dark or not) as its driving metaphor which has created some cross-talk in the comments here.
This is a bit unfortunate because other metaphorical humor in the "grey developer" spectrum lies in wait. (Not just grey beards, grey matter brain stuff, etc.). Two of the comments to his blog (spelling "grey" both ways, lol) mention this.
Of course, even referring to it as a one-dimensional "spectrum" obscures the complexity that it is surely multi-dimensional, and indeed my quoted comment begins to enumerate independent axes.
> They don't read a lot of blogs, they never write blogs, they don't go to user groups, they don't tweet or facebook, and you don't often see them at large conferences.
One of those things is not like others. I read a lot of tech blogs/articles etc. I just feel a bit of imposter syndrome when it comes to writing/blogging. Not a lot of user groups or conferences (e.g. for Linux which I enjoy a lot) at my current location. For tweeting/facebook, I deleted my facebook account long ago and I never got the point behind twitter for tech content except for things like breaking news/product launches etc.
I would venture to guess that decent number of those also work on modern technologies. Or whatever the more active people in team happen to successfully push through. Or did in past.
That would be me. I never read blogs. I never write blogs. I never go to meetups. I don't contribute to anything on GitHub. I occasionally watch a video or two on YouTube, that's about it.
You see, I'm a Corporate C# programmer from the EU. All I ever need exists on microsoft.com and stackoverflow.com, and when my 9-5 is up, I go home and I don't think about work for the rest of the day. Average age of my team is probably around 40.
I recommend to deep dive into various technologies/communities from time to time. There is a plenty of separate, but vibrant tech spheres. They are "dark matter" to each other.
If dark matter means writing PHP+HTML+JS+SQL in large files and calling that getting things done, I rather not learn about dark matter.
I think we've learned that there's a lot more to developing software than "make XYZ work": can we onboard new devs without driving them mad (readable, logically structured, documented)? is it testable? do we have up to date dependencies?
Who said they write bad code???
All those dark matter dev are working on most mission critical softwares and not just writing JS.
Most of them see past hype for sure.
Indeed. As an example, modern era devs don't realize how much of the global financial system is underpinned by decades old Cobol code. Personally I'd rather be working on a system that's massively important with less flashy tech, than building more inconsequential apps with the latest frameworks.
> Personally I'd rather be working on a system that's massively important with less flashy tech, than building more inconsequential apps with the latest frameworks.
I am the same type of person. Solving a problem and creating a great product can be very rewarding and is my primary motivation.
There have been times in my career where I have been thinking more about how I could sneak in a new technology in a project. In those cases it was a sign that the things I worked on were not motivating enough, or a bad work environment. I'm more aware of how these things affect me now that I have the benefit of hindsight.
> If dark matter means writing PHP+HTML+JS+SQL in large files and calling that getting things done, I rather not learn about dark matter.
Dark matter code can be clean or spaghetti. New shiny code can be clean or spaghetti. Implying that there is a causal relation between dark matter and spaghetti is disingenuous I would say.
Of course, code written for the new shiny framework from two weeks ago is at most two weeks old and thus hasn't had time to accumulate cruft. But that doesn't say anything about the quality of the developers.
I would say if code is really old and still receives new features, the developers must have been doing something right! Take (GNU) Emacs as an example, it's from 1985 or so I think, and now speaks LSP.
Conferences, in my experience, are mostly a waste of time. I can usually watch the keynotes online after the fact if I care to. I'm not interested in joining discussion groups and posting; like the vast majority of people, I'm content to lurk, but I'm not blind!
So yeah, I'd be very comfortable challenging a light-visible developer on pushing/using new technology and generally being aware of the landscape. I just don't care to talk about it constantly.