Whiners that Fail

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• • Nathan Pledger 10 minutes later:

    • • Good point, Bob.

      • I had this discussion today when my employer asked me why I would want to buy my own books after telling him it was a “personal policy”.

      • I am in charge of my own development, I blame no-one else for problems in it and part of that is buying books. And besides, if I leave, I’m in no way obliged to leave them behind.

      • (@programx)

• • Mark Nijhof 15 minutes later:

    • • Hehe this reminds me of some of the alternate title of your last podcast with Scott: http://www.hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=168

      • But yes it is impressive how little people will do to learn. If I look at how many college’s are coming to our Free + Free Pizza NNUG presentations than that is just said. I mean you get free pizza and learn something.

      • Same applies to reading blogs (which are also free) I keep sending around interesting articles and I am pretty sure only 5% of the people actually reads them. They don’t have to read them all, but most are actually on the topics that they are working in. Said again.

      • There are always people that expect to improve by doing nothing, but the sheer amount of those people in our business is freighting.

      • Keep up the good articles and all that, I use them to learn new stuff. Thanks!

• • Fogus 20 minutes later:

    • • And as expected, pasting the titles of these papers into a Google search box yields a free PDF version as the #1 or #2 hit EVERY TIME.

      • It’s not tough.

      • -m

• • Declan Whelan 22 minutes later:

    • • Right on Bob!

      • I don’t understand why people feel so victimized and don’t take responsibility. Unfortunately, small things like links to free papers morphs into a larger victimization pathology that ends up failing projects and companies.

      • Thanks for the straight talk!

• • BCoelho2000 23 minutes later:

    • • I am a strong believer in the power of knowledge sharing. Think about it: we have been sharing knowledge from the beginning of times.

      • The power of sharing knowledge has enabled us to evolve beyond our own boundaries and beyond our own individualities.

      • However, no matter the quality of your content there will always be someone that finds your content boring…

      • Even if Jesus Christ wrote a blog… there will always be someone that would say: “Man you only write about God! Write about something cool!”

      • :)

• • Joshua Kerievsky 34 minutes later:

    • • Spending money to learn is a great way to make more money because you become so much more valuable and expert in your craft. I never hesitate to buy great literature. And that has always served me well.

• • Denny Abraham 40 minutes later:

    • • @Joshua The real tragedy is that all those papers ARE free. People just weren’t willing to spend the 10 seconds on google scholar.

• • Stephen Bailey about 1 hour later:

    • • It is amazing how people can take the time to moan about not been given the link because that is not saving “the masses” time… but by some act of blatant stupidity it does not occur to them to post the link themselves in the comment.

      • If they truly cared about the masses would they do anything else ?

• • John Goodsen about 1 hour later:

    • • Hey Bob,

      • Rock on! Great rebuttal. I think Sarah Palin wants to know what’s the difference between you on a blog like this and a pitbull with a keyboard and reading glasses?

      • Seriously, maybe we can we learn from Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism – Producers create / Looters take. The world of software development is littered with looters like the trolls that responded to Michael’s blog. Michael is a producer not a looter. Probably about everyone that read’s your blog is a producer, not a looter also.

      • Can anyone say “Who is John Galt?”

• • Matt about 1 hour later:

    • • Was it a little disappointing I couldn’t pull these papers up right away, sure… Do I still have the list saved, to track down every last paper, and read twice, absolutely. Incredibly valuable information.

• • Kalle about 2 hours later:

    • • I can only agree with the other posts, and just wanted to give them whiners a link http://tinyurl.com/d9brp7

      • Keep fighting for good craftmanship, and hopefully more people will join.

• • James about 2 hours later:

    • • While I agree that people should be responsible for their own development should their employers fail to help out, I also believe that too many employers fail to invest in their employees.

      • If you look at the best practices amongst the leaders in a variety of fields, you will find that the most successful companies have programs to invest in their employees and see significant returns when they do so.

• • Chad Myers about 3 hours later:

    • • They’ll happily pay thousands/semester to go get a Univ. degree that’s mostly worthless in our industry, but $20 for a PDF OH NOES!!!

      • They’ll probably find a bit torrent of them anyhow—the same people who expect the software they write to earn money and pay their own salaries…

• • Sam about 3 hours later:

    • • You know, I’m absolutely not a right-wing fundamentalist. However, I find the responses to Michael’s blog utterly insulting even to this centrist’s sensibilities.

      • Bob, I can’t help but chip in my two cents here: RIGHT **‘in ON!

      • People need to start thinking more like owners. Yes, they’re hired as employees, but realistically speaking, they’re offering a service in exchange for revenue. As soon as people connect that concept with how a business operates (offering a service or product in exchange for revenue), one quickly realizes that a whole company’s worth of employees can be replaced by an equal number of sole proprietorships which cooperate with each other on contractual or gentlemen’s agreement basis.

      • In my experience, the only distinction between an employee and an owner is that the former thinks of himself as a victim when he doesn’t get what he wants, while the latter finds an alternative route to get what he wants.

      • To this end, therefore, any corporate owner will obviously take whatever steps are necessary to ensure the competitiveness of the company. This includes purchasing materials, and if unaffordable, proactively seeking alternatives, which can give a competitive edge. Combine that realization with the realization that you are your own company’s owner, and suddenly, the onus to read papers (surprise!) falls on you.

      • Also, who gives a rat’s * about the $10 it takes to pay for a single ACM article? Consider the benefit said article can bring down the road. If you can find it for less, be our guest, but $10 isn’t asking too much for high quality research. Most “victims” blow $10 easily on cigarettes, at the movies, or at the gas pump. In all three of the latter cases, once you’ve exhausted your new possession, it’s gone forever. With the ACM paper, you have a print-out and/or the downloaded PDF, allowing you to do whatever you want with it, for as long as the binary image remains intact.

      • Want to recoup your costs? Print it out 10 times, and charge $2/copy. You’ve made $10 profit that way, and hardly anyone would notice.

• • Sam about 3 hours later:

    • • You know, I’m absolutely not a right-wing fundamentalist. However, I find the responses to Michael’s blog utterly insulting even to this centrist’s sensibilities.

      • Bob, I can’t help but chip in my two cents here: RIGHT —‘in ON!

      • People need to start thinking more like owners. Yes, they’re hired as employees, but realistically speaking, they’re offering a service in exchange for revenue. As soon as people connect that concept with how a business operates (offering a service or product in exchange for revenue), one quickly realizes that a whole company’s worth of employees can be replaced by an equal number of sole proprietorships which cooperate with each other on contractual or gentlemen’s agreement basis.

      • In my experience, the only distinction between an employee and an owner is that the former thinks of himself as a victim when he doesn’t get what he wants, while the latter finds an alternative route to get what he wants.

      • To this end, therefore, any corporate owner will obviously take whatever steps are necessary to ensure the competitiveness of the company. This includes purchasing materials, and if unaffordable, proactively seeking alternatives, which can give a competitive edge. Combine that realization with the realization that you are your own company’s owner, and suddenly, the onus to read papers (surprise!) falls on you.

      • Also, who gives a rat’s @$$ about the $10 it takes to pay for a single ACM article? Consider the benefit said article can bring down the road. If you can find it for less, be our guest, but $10 isn’t asking too much for high quality research. Most “victims” blow $10 easily on cigarettes, at the movies, or at the gas pump. In all three of the latter cases, once you’ve exhausted your new possession, it’s gone forever. With the ACM paper, you have a print-out and/or the downloaded PDF, allowing you to do whatever you want with it, for as long as the binary image remains intact.

      • Want to recoup your costs? Print it out 10 times, and charge $2/copy. You’ve made $10 profit that way, and hardly anyone would notice.

• • Tina Orooji about 3 hours later:

    • • I think part of the disconnect is that in this day and age with bloggers, podcasts, etc. information is constantly at our fingertips. We assume all of this information is quality, but that’s not necessarily the case. Whiners are missing that articles published in academic journals are peer reviewed and have a much higher chance of actually containing substantial information.

• • Tina about 3 hours later:

    • • I think part of the disconnect is that in this day and age with bloggers, podcasts, etc. information is constantly at our fingertips. We assume all of this information is quality, but that’s not necessarily the case. Whiners are missing that articles published in academic journals are peer reviewed and have a much higher chance of actually containing substantial information.

• • Robert 'Groby' Blum about 4 hours later:

    • • Looking at the average quality of people I had the “privilege” to interview in my career, I guess we should be thankful those guys even bothered to read Michaels list….

      • But in all seriousness: I cannot understand how you can call yourself a professional in our field and not have either a subscription to ACM (alternatively, IEEE).

      • Pretty much any search for papers stumbles upon that portal – after a while one would expect people to get the hint that it’s an important resource…

• • DanF about 9 hours later:

    • • Preach it Bob.

      • And I’m with Mr. Blum on the ACM membership. I’ve joined several professional organizations and let my membership lapse because all I ever got were election results in my inbox, but I’m in ACM for good. They offer tons of value (CACM and O’reilly Safari spring to mind) for a very reasonable fee.

• • Anne Epstein about 12 hours later:

    • • I started to write a response to this, then decided it deserved its own blog post. here it is:

      • http://devlicio.us/blogs/anne_epstein/archive/2009/02/27/thoughts-on-quot-whiners-that-fail-quot.aspx

• • Sebastian Kübeck about 14 hours later:

    • • ...Spirits that I’ve cited My commands ignore. (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

      • Bob, you invited the trolls with your open letter to Joel Splosky. If you want to get rid of them, you’d better stop feeding them. They’ll leave once they loose attention for it’s attention, not a rational discussion they are looking for.

• • Andrew Rea about 16 hours later:

    • • Fantastic Article. I totally agree ofcourse. Just have to say that this part:

      • “They’d better not expect ME to do a google search for an article! They’d better come right over here to my cubicle between 9am and 10am and read the article to me while stroking my hair!”

      • Had me laughing my head off. :-)

      • Thanks again for the quality posting!!

• • bulldozer about 18 hours later:

    • • Great post, way to put “those lazy people” in their place, yada.yada.yada.

      • Could your post be interpreted as “whining about whiners”? Is the pot calling the kettle black here?

• • Hamlet D'Arcy about 18 hours later:

    • • What amazes me is that no one took the time to find 10 free links and post them as a comment to Michael’s post. When slashdot links to a pay site, the first post is always a link to a free copy. Perhaps, as blogs get popular, we need a karma system so that people are motivated to do something like that.

      • I totally agree with your article, btw.

• • Michael Feathers about 19 hours later:

    • • Well, it’s a funny thing about this. When I typed up the list in a tumblr blog, I thought “Gee, people will want links.” But, then I thought “Nah, it’s easy enough to google them” so I wrote up the list and pointed to it from Twitter.

      • I received many replies of thanks from my tweeps. And I thought “well, it would be nice to make a blog about this” so I sat down and started googling links.

      • Now, here’s were it gets interesting: some papers were easy to find in relatively public places; others were up on course websites and I thought “Well, it wouldn’t be right to have all of these people hit their servers without asking, and the links will probably be taken down anyway” so I linked to citeseer and ACM and, of course, got a lot of grief about the latter.

      • Personally, I think the ACM Digital Library is an incredible resource. All of these papers, however, are available for free. I wouldn’t buy them from ACM, but I am an ACM member, and I’m glad to give them money in other ways. They’ve done some wonderful things over the years.

      • The money thing reminds me of something else..

      • The other day, I tweeted about a great book which few people know about: ‘Patterns of Software’ by Richard Gabriel. And, again, I thought about providing a link (despite the fact that Google exists, you know) and I came across something interesting. I found that the book wasn’t out of print (although if you looked at resellers you might have thought that, some of them had the book jacked up to $70); it’s on lulu.com with a print price of about $9 and free version for download.

      • You know what? I hesitated. The book means a lot to me and I thought “you know, I hope people buy the print copy. Richard deserves more for this. I hope people just pay out of appreciation.” If I ever lost my copy, I would.

• • John about 20 hours later:

    • • This suggests a good interview question: have you spent a dollar of your own money on professional development this year?

• • hakoon about 24 hours later:

    • • reminds me of this clip of comedian Louis CK and Conan O’Brien:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoGYx35ypus

• • Jiang LIU 1 day later:

    • • Bob, I have translated the main points into Chinese:http://blog.csdn.net/turingbook/archive/2009/03/01/3946421.aspx

• • Robert 'Groby' Blum 1 day later:

    • • @Mark Way to miss the point… It’s not a “leftist political context”. It’s an entitlement complex, plain and simple.

      • As to the question if that information should be available freely, that’s a different discussion. I’m not sure if that’s either leftist or “RMS”, though. It’s a matter of discussing how our tax money can be spent on the one hand (and Ithink that any conservative should be interested in that too), and how to reward curators on the other hand.

      • But keep simplifying the issue to talking points…

• • Dissenting voice 1 day later:

    • • I think it’s unfair to characterise this as purely an “entitlement complex”. Much of the cited research was publicly funded, as indeed are many of the other papers that go out via organisations like the ACM, and in such cases, there is a legitimate expectation that the results should be made freely available to the public. This is a very different position to expecting everything to be made public, regardless of who put all the effort into creating it and where their support came from.

      • In any case, it’s all very well saying $20 for a PDF is nothing if you’re an internationally known consultant or senior software engineer with plenty of money, but if you’re going to post under a provocative title as Michael did, you’d better consider the less well-off programmers among your readership as well.

• • Fred Morrison 1 day later:

    • • Rush has a great term that I will borrow and use to coin a more industry-specific phrase to describe the people you are talking about: “the new programmer castrati”.

• • The OberGruppenFuhrer 1 day later:

    • • Thinking like a psychologist, I think the losing came first, then the whining. These people need (professional) help with their self-esteem issues.

      • There might also be a cross-cultural aspect to it. In some parts of the world intellectual arrogance can be used as a proxy for knowing what you are talking about…

      • It’s true though, our industry seems over-represented with young opinionated losers…

• • Buck 1 day later:

    • • First, why are comments appearing twice. Really, once is enough.

      • Second, my company does have me trained on products they decide to use. It would be silly to mandate the use of certain software tools and then force you to pay your own way for training. If you are hired as a Java programmer, and later the company decides to use .NET, do you really expect your programming staff to go to .NET training on their own dime? I would in no way work for such a company.

      • Of course I’m talking about decisions made after you are hired as an employee. You don’t hire a new programming staff for each new project, do you?

• • DAR 2 days later:

    • • Just my $0.02, but I think your rant is a bit misguided, Bob. Yes, the guy was clearly a pissy little whiner, but nevertheless there’s a decent-sized nugget of truth in what he’s saying:

      • I read a TON of tech stuff online every single day, including whatever stories look interesting on Reddit, Hacker News, and Techmeme, numerous papers coming out of academic comp. sci. depts. (and Google Engineering), as well as well over 100 tech blogs (including this one). And I also spend hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars on tech books every year on technologies I need take a deeper dive into. (So this isn’t about money.)

      • But honestly, when someone sends me a link to a paper at the ACM site I pretty much just ignore it these days. Yes, I’m sure there’s some very interesting papers there, but there’s also a TON of other interesting tech reading available elsewhere, about 99% of which is available for free. So honestly it’s just not worth it for me to pony up cash for every site that stupidly and arrogantly thinks that their content is better than everyone else’s.

      • Frankly, by putting up a pay wall at their site, all the ACM is really accomplishing is guaranteeing their irrelevance to the next generation of engineers, who will eagerly use Reddit, Digg, HackerNews, SlashDot to adequately fill the void.

      • Not smart, ACM. Not smart at all.

• • DAR 2 days later:

    • • Just my $0.02, but I think your rant is a bit misguided, Bob. Yes, the guy was clearly a pissy little whiner, but nevertheless there’s a decent-sized nugget of truth in what he’s saying:

      • I read a TON of tech stuff online every single day, including whatever stories look interesting on Reddit, Hacker News, and Techmeme, numerous papers coming out of academic comp. sci. depts. (and Google Engineering), as well as well over 100 tech blogs (including this one). And I also spend hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars on tech books every year on technologies I need take a deeper dive into. (So this isn’t about money.)

      • But honestly, when someone sends me a link to a paper at the ACM site I pretty much just ignore it these days. Yes, I’m sure there’s some very interesting papers there, but there’s also a TON of other interesting tech reading available elsewhere, about 99% of which is available for free. So honestly it’s just not worth it for me to pony up cash for every site that stupidly and arrogantly thinks that their content is better than everyone else’s.

      • Frankly, by putting up a pay wall at their site, all the ACM is really accomplishing is guaranteeing their irrelevance to the next generation of engineers, who will eagerly use Reddit, Digg, HackerNews, SlashDot to adequately fill the void.

      • Not smart, ACM. Not smart at all.

• • DAR 2 days later:

    • • Just my $0.02, but I think your rant is a bit misguided, Bob. Yes, the guy was clearly a pissy little whiner, but nevertheless there’s a decent-sized nugget of truth in what he’s saying:

      • I read a TON of tech stuff online every single day, including whatever stories look interesting on Reddit, Hacker News, and Techmeme, numerous papers coming out of academic comp. sci. depts. (and Google Engineering), as well as well over 100 tech blogs (including this one). And I also spend hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars on tech books every year on technologies I need take a deeper dive into. (So this isn’t about money.)

      • But honestly, when someone sends me a link to a paper at the ACM site I pretty much just ignore it these days. Yes, I’m sure there’s some very interesting papers there, but there’s also a TON of other interesting tech reading available elsewhere, about 99% of which is available for free. So honestly it’s just not worth it for me to pony up cash for every site that stupidly and arrogantly thinks that their content is better than everyone else’s.

      • Frankly, by putting up a pay wall at their site, all the ACM is really accomplishing is guaranteeing their irrelevance to the next generation of engineers, who will eagerly use Reddit, Digg, HackerNews, SlashDot to adequately fill the void.

      • Not smart, ACM. Not smart at all.

• • JR Thomas 3 days later:

    • • If I felt reading particulair papers was imperative you would have a point.

      • ACM is a dinosaur. (statement of fact) 100 bucks a year to read content, really? Have they not been paying attention to the land slide of quality content available on the web for free? I think Acaedamia in a move to stay relevant should find a means to publish their papers on line for free. Specially ones as important as these.

      • I am pretty sure my career is safe not paying to read the ones on ACM.

  • Robert 'Groby' Blum 3 days later:

    • • All the papers that “should” be freely available usually are. All you need to do is google it. Obviously, that’s too hard for some people, so they whine here, too. That’s kind of the point Bob was making ;)

      • As for ACM being a dinosaur – they are fulfilling an excellent role as curator of knowledge. If I need to know about technology, Digg, Hackernews & Slashdot are mostly a bottomless pit of ignorance. Granted, they’ll keep you up on news – but as a knowledge repository, they are severely lacking….

      • I prefer to just search in ACMs portal, and get actual relevant results. And I gladly pay $100 a year to get only relevant search results.

      • If you must do it for free, Google Scholar is a close second. Citeseer is number three.

• • Dagfinn Reiersøl 3 days later:

    • • I woke up thinking about this discussion this morning. And I realized I had to disagree. Not about the value of those papers, not about the idea that you should be responsible for your career, but about the implication that employers in general will reward you for seeking that kind of knowledge.

      • Yes, I appreciated the blog post about the papers. I believe deep insight is worthwhile and important for programmers. It makes programming much more interesting and satisfying. And those blog comments about not linking to anything that costs money are just ridiculous.

      • But, is reading those papers really going to help your career, or is it, to put it bluntly, mostly pearls before swine?

      • Uncle Bob, do you seriously believe that most of those who hire and manage programmers care who’s read those papers or even the books about principles, patterns and and all that? That they know the difference between superficial and deep knowledge, between real skill and lip service? Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but I don’t. I’m not sure reading excellent papers and books related to software craftsmanship would reach a realistic top 50 list of learnings that would boost a programmer’s career. At least not without a good marketing strategy to go with it.

• • Washu 3 days later:

    • • I read this and couldn’t agree more. Having hung out on gamedev.net/#gamedev, you see this kind of behavior a lot. People will come in, demand answers, and not even bother to say thanks when you do help them. It’s rather sad too, since these same people are going to end up being our successors, and they’re going to suck horribly at it.

• • Blake 9 months later:

    • • Information wants to be free!

      • Sadly, food and heat do not.

      • If you want to charge for your work, them’s the rules, and nothing wrong with that. I buy my own hardware and software, in addition to books, and treat anything my employer decides to provide as a pleasant surprise, taken with a gracious ‘thank you.’

  • cheap vps about 1 year later:

    • • But yes it is impressive how little people will do to learn. If I look at how many college’s are coming to our Free + Free Pizza NNUG presentations than that is just said. I mean you get free pizza and learn something.

      • Same applies to reading blogs (which are also free) I keep sending around interesting articles and I am pretty sure only 5% of the people actually reads them. They don’t have to read them all, but most are actually on the topics that they are working in. Said again.

      • There are always people that expect to improve by doing nothing, but the sheer amount of those people in our business is freighting. cheap VPS Keep up the good articles and all that, I use them to learn new stuff. Thanks!