[jonmc12]

I dunno.. your article only has 2 links - 1) 'Websites that suck', 2) your own article about how 'incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their abilities'.

The last 6 paragraphs are fairly obvious points where you do not go into detail or give examples. How is the reader supposed to know what you mean in a way that is useful? Some links to examples or how to implement would be useful advice.

Also, I'm curious, why the snarkiness? Do you consider being critical of others to be part of your online persona? Is it for entertainment value? Is it an effort to improve something? I don't mean to pick on you - I'm actually curious.

[TheThinker]

I was honestly not trying to be snarky. Can you point out where I was? Seriously, I'm not trying to get defensive here - it would help me if you could point it out.

[jonmc12]

Perhaps snarky was not the right word - the article contains little/no sarcasm. I think myself and others are reacting to the general feeling of a largely negative criticism without any focus on good design done by engineers (or anyone).

Words like 'mad skillz' imply condescension towards some hypothetical group of developers. Words like 'self-serving', 'lack of', 'incompetence', etc are just negative - again targeting a straw-man group of developers.

Within your article there seems to be a paradigm of a) stuff that 'sucks', and b) the 'right' way (your way).

So, it leaves me thinking that you are targeting a negative generalization towards a group of developers. Effectively, you created an ad hominem argument against a straw-man. This comes off as negative, but more so it tells me as a reader that you spent energy evaluating the scenario from the standpoint of 'this is wrong', without fully understanding the point of view of your straw-man or pointing to examples of good design.

Instead of conveying 'these guys over here suck, they should do it my way' you could have conveyed 'these guys over here can suck, but when I have observed them doing x, y, z they definitely suck less' - same message without the ad hominem. Or, even better 'these guys over here are good at design vs average engineers because they do x, y, z' - same message with an emphasis on positive examples, not negative examples. That would convey that you have taken the energy to evaluate both the negative and the positive about the straw-man developer group you appear to be attacking.

As a general aside, I have been trying to understand why many smart / skilled people bias towards viewing others in a negative light - ie, does it have a benefit? I am generally interested to understand where this negatively comes from when skilled people evaluate their peers.

[TheThinker]

Thanks for the feedback. Negative criticism, I was certainly engaging in. I'm not sure that I'm attacking a "straw-man group of developers," though -- I certainly never meant to convey, for example, that all developers are bad at user interface design -- but I did say "most" so perhaps I was painting with too broad a brush. And agreed that I could have provided concrete examples -- perhaps a future post.