[nordsieck]

1. Don't ever use the phrase "as a community" unless you carefully define it first.

2. What, specifically, about a flea market is bad. If the complaint is about quality, I'll refer you to Sturgeon's law.

3. You're going to need to explain the competitive vs cooperative comment, right now I have no idea what you are saying.

4. Your comment about "blogging, teaching and tweeting" is true, but I think it is clearly an improvement compared to the previous system. Portfolio based systems are almost always better than credential based systems.

5. I'm not sure who's making money selling pick axes to starry-eyed bumpkins, but all of the development tooling I use is free. Almost all of the online tools I use are prices such that individual use is free and corporate use costs money. Not sure what you're talking about here.

In summary: It seems like your basic thesis is that the world isn't equal because some people are better at communication and self promotion than others. I'm not really sure why you think the world could be another way.

[sheepmullet]

"4. Your comment about "blogging, teaching and tweeting" is true, but I think it is clearly an improvement compared to the previous system. Portfolio based systems are almost always better than credential based systems."

Are they really though? On what basis?

99% of my best work can't form part of my portfolio. I spend 2 hours of my own time on L&D each week day. Maybe 30 minutes of it is on projects I could present. In a year that's ~120 hours max. I'm not going to be doing anything really impressive from a portfolio POV with less than a month of full time work put into it.

Even worse is the trend I'm seeing where people drop the Learning from L&D altogether so they can invest more time into presentable projects. It is stunting their growth as developers... even as it improves their hireablility.

[nordsieck]

To be clear, the previous systems is getting a BS in computer science from some university, or a bunch of certs from companies like Microsoft.

There are certainly problems with the portfolio model, but I've never heard anyone seriously argue that it's worse than credentials.

[sheepmullet]

Credentials vs portfolios isn't an either or argument. And "worse" is a loaded term.

If you have the credential of an undergrad degree at MIT with a good GPA, combined with a credential of working for Google for 5 years, there is a very high likelihood you are a good engineer.

On the other hand if you have made serious contributions to the Linux kernel, there is a very high likelihood you are a good engineer.

But most developers don't go to MIT and work at Google. And they also don't make serious contributions to large open source projects. For most developers credentials and portfolios are not effective methods of hiring.

[exelius]

I agree with you. In the real world, communication skills are important. Far more issues are caused by poor developer communication than by poor coding skills. Blogging, teaching and tweeting help you build those skills. Coding is only one part of development, and it's by far the easiest part to master.

[sheepmullet]

"Blogging, teaching and tweeting help you build those skills"

Yes, at about 5% of the speed you could learn by actually working on your communication skills with your colleagues on a day to day basis.

[exelius]

There are different types of communication. You certainly can learn interpersonal skills that way, but blogging is a great mental exercise on getting your thoughts on paper. The only way to become a better writer is to write, and blogging is just that. Tweeting is actually another great writing tool; it teaches you to communicate while being brief. And teaching is always good -- it helps you learn the subject better and exposes you to different perspectives.

Basically, if you want to ever be more than a code monkey, you need to speak up both in person and online.

[sheepmullet]

"but blogging is a great mental exercise on getting your thoughts on paper. The only way to become a better writer is to write, and blogging is just that."

So is writing an email. In a typical day I probably send 5 important emails. Writing opportunities abound!

Not to even start on writing designs, memos, technical briefs, position papers, meeting notes, technical docs, user documentation, etc, etc.

The opportunities to practice your writing skills at work are limitless. I'm not opposed to blogging in any way; let's just not pretend blogging (or tweeting) is in anyway important or necessary for building communication skills.

[sandal]

Thanks for the feedback!

> 1. Community is absolutely a weasel word when you're using it to lump together people from many different backgrounds and speak on behalf of them, or to act as if your particular sense of identity is representative of a whole group.

Help me find a better word for what I'm trying to say here: When I say "as a community" I mean, "as people who ought to be concerned about the social impact of our decisions as much as the economics and personal motivations"

> 2. Nothing is bad about a flea market. I just would like to be able to also have public non-commercial spaces for learning, and have them be well funded and supported too. I meant it literally when I say the current model works too well economically, and so there is less incentive to make long-term investments in educational resources that are explicitly for the common good.

> 3. It comes down to economics and social capital. Those who have gained notoriety through luck, connections, or money, tend to have their signal amplified indefinitely.

Yes, if someone really starts being malicious in what they do they will eventually lose their reputation, but it's a slow process and so those who get into that position tend to stay there. This is the nature of a competitive environment, whereas a cooperative environment intentionally makes adjustments to mitigate that effect. It's a little hard to explain because we have so many examples of the former and so few of the latter.

> 4. We agree, and I said that a few times in the article. It wasn't just for rhetorical purposes. I'm saying, if the current model is an improvement and evolution of a worse model that existed in the past, maybe we can still think about a new paradigm shift that is much better than what we have now.

But honestly, I'd be perfectly satisfied with comfortable co-existence between the commercialized education model. Even if 80% of our work was indirectly or directly tied to commercial promotion, it'd be nice if 20% of our resources could exist in the commons.

> 5. Not referring to developer tools here, I'm talking about developer education. There are plenty of "learn to code" things that are not effective, but because they're marketed well, they make plenty of money. In addition of these, there are plenty of "how to make money as a coder" things, etc.

There are also plenty of examples of open source tools that are poorly documented or designed, yet due to their popularity or entrenchment, spawn a business of consultants and educators to teach people commercially to use these things, without contributing the materials back to the commons under free documentation licenses. This is valuable work and shows that our marketplace is semi-efficient, but it's not socially optimal. The socially optimal result is for the information to be released as free documentation.

> In summary:

I guess my thesis missed you, because that's not what I meant to say at all. What I said is, "the world is unequal, and so it will tend to favor a tiny minority of privileged folks unless we actively seek to balance things".

For my own part, I've spent the last five years creating what may be the largest collection of open source learning materials for Ruby programmers in the world (find it at practicingruby.com). If you google "infrastructure automation", one of our articles is the top hit. If you google "actor model", one of our articles is on the front page. Neither of these articles were written by people with sizable followings or influence on the internet.

I paid these folks for their work, helped them shape and edit their content, and gave them access to a much larger audience than what they would have reached on their own. My own name does not appear on their work, nor does anything promoting some third party product or service.

People do pay for Practicing Ruby. Not commercial sponsors, but readers and community supporters. It'd be nice to see a few dozen similar publications on various topics, and for the model and motivation to be well understood and supported.

The problem I have is that this kind of thinking about publishing is something people never even give a passing thought... so as someone trying to do something different, I am constantly fighting an uphill battle.

I don't want to overstate my own role in making a difference here... I view my own project as a baby step, one of many necessary to make the kind of changes I'd like to see in the world. But at least I'm trying to stand up for my principles by putting the ideas into practice.

[Kalium]

> Help me find a better word for what I'm trying to say here: When I say "as a community" I mean, "as people who ought to be concerned about the social impact of our decisions as much as the economics and personal motivations"

"Profession" is the word you want here, I think.

[sandal]

Maybe! Although (for better or for worse), it's a word you rarely hear in the software industry.