[colund]

I can only speak for myself, but I am tired of these "soft" software development books and the various "movements". They seem to be attempts to transform our technical field from solving real world problems via math and deep understanding into something like politics or religion.

I think recent success of these soft topics may be based on people's feeling of self improvement and enlightenment. I can understand that it creates a nice feeling, but prefer to be enlightened by actually learning to solve real things in a more elegant, efficient way than before and I prefer to learn the rest via actual work experience.

Real self-help would mean to become independent from advice from the outside and looking into yourself and finding out how you can do something better by actually doing it...

[crux]

Values like efficiency and elegance are mediated and determined by the community and the subjective individual. They're neither unambiguous nor universally agreed upon. Even on the very simple, immediate level - is elegance more like readability or concision? Is efficiency a matter of performance or maintainability? Now expand your view to encompass all the problems and questions that come up in the course of your job—the majority of them, as noted above, having more to do with other people than writing better code.

Being better at your job isn't simply a matter of advancing along the numberline of skill and smarts. And unfortunately, many of those who think it clearly is, or can be, are assholes who are lousy at working with others.

[jasonwocky]

> They seem to be attempts to transform our technical field from solving real world problems via math and deep understanding into something like politics

The problem with that perspective, as I see it, is that all cooperative human endeavors are inherently political. You can't "technology" your way out of those dynamics, and you can't simplify your worldview to ignore them because they frequently-enough have real impacts on the work.

So what I see a lot of these movements doing is recognizing and reacting to those dynamics, rather than trying to build solutions based on a model of the world without them.