[area51org]

I don't know that the problem is short attention span. Poor communication has always been with us. I am sure Luu has compelling insights—what I was able to get through seemed interesting—but he is a poor communicator. It's not just that he presents a wall of text; his wording and his approach to communication tell me that he thinks if he just gets his thoughts recorded, that's enough. It is not enough.

[9question1]

It might not be enough for you, but maybe you're not the target audience. His blog is quite popular so clearly it's enough for a lot of folks.

What is "good" communication depends on the social context of the communication, the audience, etc. A novel probably shouldn't be written in the same style as a project status update document. IMO one of the downsides of people in our modern education system being drilled on the "one true way" of communicating for a small handful of contexts (position paper essays, tactical business memos) is that they begin to think that is the only way to communicate ever in any context to any audience and forget that different people have different tastes and in a lot of contexts catering to your audience's taste is what matters.

[tolciho]

At least we're not being read to from a book called Ulysses?

[askafriend]

True but if this is just the extent of he can do, maybe it's better that he did it than if he didn't bother to put his thoughts on paper at all.

I'm sure you'd say it's a distinction without a difference but clearly it resonates with someone and those people are able to summarize his ideas or reframe them for a broader audience.

[jpm_sd]

Yeah it reads as completely unedited. Needs another pass.

[klausa]

I'm really curious what makes you say feel that way, if you can put it into words?

I think his style is quite particular (I think I would compare it to patio11 a little bit?), and I understand it not being everyone's cup of tea; but one thing I don't think I would ever say it feels unedited.

To me, it feels _very_ edited — yes, there are occasional sentences with five sub-clauses in them, but they all feel very _deliberate_, and serve a particular stylistic goal.

[Suppafly]

>I think his style is quite particular (I think I would compare it to patio11 a little bit?)

I find them quite different, patio11 is good about introducing a topic and easing you into, even if it's something you might not be initially interested in. Luu's writing isn't inviting at all. I'm sure it appeals to folks already familiar with his work, but there is nothing to draw in a new or not particularly interested reader.

[duckmysick]

I struggle to find a stylistic goal here:

> Yossi's post about how an unusually unreasonable person can have outsized impact in a dimension they value at their firm also applies to impact outside of a firm. Kyle Kingsbury, mentioned above, is an example of this. At the rates that I've heard Jepsen is charging now, Kyle can bring in what a senior developer at BigCo does (actually senior, not someone with the title "senior"), but that was after years of working long hours at below market rates on an uncertain endeavour, refuting FUD from his critics (if you read the replies to the linked posts or, worse yet, the actual tickets where he's involved in discussions with developers, the replies to Kyle were a constant stream of nonsense for many years, including people working for vendors feeling like he has it out for them in particular, casting aspersions on his character, and generally trashing him). I have a deep respect for people who are willing to push on issues like this despite the system being aligned against them but, my respect notwithstanding, basically no one is going to do that. A system that requires someone like Kyle to take a stand before successful firms will put effort into correctness instead of correctness marketing is going to produce a lot of products that are good at marketing correctness without really having decent correctness properties (such as the data sync product mentioned in this post, whose website repeatedly mentions how reliable and safe the syncing product is despite having a design that is fundamentally broken).

I'm sorry, this is too much for me. I don't understand what this paragraph is about. Too many abstract nouns; "correctness" lost its meaning for me. If this is a parody or a joke, then it flew way over my head. Was it supposed to recreate "a constant stream of nonsense"? If so, it missed the mark.

It's like Infinite Jest set in Silicon Valley.

[lawn]

For me two things jump out:

Giant paragraphs (hard for the eyes to keep focus).

Sparse amount of headers (contributes to the flow and easier to scan, to see if it's something I'm interested in).