[sigotirandolas]

For as much as the author may get roasted for stating the obvious, I've often seen this "measure everything" mindset, coming from those you'd think should know better than that.

I've even seen this stupidity in myself sometimes. In a way it's funny how you can get so lost on the numbers that you forget about the thing.

[mosselman]

Measuring and feeling are not mutually exclusive.

This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.

I wouldn’t normally even comment something like this about someone’s article, but I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me and I am worried that if we don’t point it out, we will lose our ability to spot nonsense like this and side step our critical thinking.

The “trick” is contrasting or relating something completely irrelevant to some sort of nonsensical or obvious “thought piece”.

I am sure this is some sort of named fallacy and someone else can explain it a lot more eloquently, but this is my attempt.

[mitchellh]

(Author of the linked blog post).

Look at my other posts and you'll see I'm not like an "influencer content" person. I purposely made this piece shallow to encourage more people to read it and discuss the core idea, rather than get distracted by specific examples or points.

I've blogged long enough on a personal level, done corporate PR long enough at a professional level, to know that the more words there are, the more people get bogged down in the details.

I plan to follow up this post with specific callouts and associating it directly with my work (both positively and negatively). But, for example, if I used Terraform as an example of something in this (hypothetically), people would focus in on arguing the merits of "feeling" Terraform. That's not the point.

The point is to think about what we're shipping.

[elktown]

I couldn't help but laugh when reading this, knowing that 80% of this thread would be picking apart any specific example if you provided one - completely missing any kind of "reading between the lines" message.

[mosselman]

Thanks for your response.

My point isn't that you can't write whatever you want because of course you can.

The audience of my comment is the consumer of any online content to be careful about projecting too much into it.

[jbmsf]

We have a recent hire who comes from a background where a) the user base was much larger and b) metrics were the best way to understand outcomes.

Our company is smaller and earlier than that. I enjoy the focus on metrics, it's a good push for us, but sometimes you just have to do the obviously good thing for users without trying to build a metrics framework around it.

[mosselman]

I totally agree, I wasn't trying to push the merits of metrics. I meant that feeling and metrics are not mutually exclusive and that is what the author was trying to claim.

[sigotirandolas]

> Measuring and feeling are not mutually exclusive.

They are not mutually exclusive, but they compete to a degree. If someone's time is mostly spent on what can be measured, they can't spend time on "common sense" or investigative work that is less easily tracked. At the end of they day, trying to measure everything makes as much sense as trying to document every line of code. (Most of this, naturally, also applies the other way around).

> This is just the frame that the author is trying to prop up in order to sell us their shallow, meaningless piece.

> I see this pattern a lot in “influencer” content that people sometimes share with me

I think a lot of the shallowness is from blogs or HN being a public, persistent, broadcast written media. In a face to face conversation, you can generally follow up and share more specifics and nuance without fear of getting a bad reputation.

If anything I think the bias is the other way around, on the Internet whatever you write can get cherry-picked and framed to make you appear terrible, in person it's much easier to get a fair sample.

[luxuryballs]

And here I was expecting a roast about how “A feeling.” is not a complete sentence.