I've seen this article before. A lot of people that are active on the internet like to assume that everyone is using the latest tech and can just use whatever tech they like. This is rarely the case. I've spent the majority of my career tending to old code bases.

There is a lot of legacy code that is still working fine. There is a lot of old C# code bases that are working exactly as intended in now unsupported .NET versions.

One of the constant annoyances of some of the newer tech stacks is that developers constantly break the API meaning that when you upgrade the framework version you have to fix code and probably tests as well. It is absolutely infuriating when an API is changed when the old API was working perfectly well.

I keep up with modern tech. I regularly learn new languages and frameworks. I lead agile dev teams. I work as a consultant modernizing devops and moving to cloud deployments. I write real software for real businesses doing real things.

I don't blog. I don't go to conferences. I don't go to hackathons. I don't have any meaningful presence on GitHub. Hacker News is about the only place I have even the slightest footprint, and most of what I talk about here has nothing to do with my career as a software engineer.

So what? The implication in this article is that if you're not out there trying to be visible, you must be some crusty old COBOL developer locked in the basement.

In my experience, the people who are the loudest are rarely the people who are doing the most. If you spend all your time trying to prove to strangers that you're hip to the latest trends, just how much time are you spending doing anything of actual value? Not everyone who has a big public presence is actually doing anything. Most of the discussions online and presentations at conferences are nothing new. Most of it is self-promotion. When I see people get all excited about tech, it's usually because it's new to them, not because it's a new idea.

The big mess seems to be in the CSS/Javascript space, where fad frameworks come and go rapidly. There's more change than improvement. Visually, most web pages haven't changed much, and web development has become much harder.

But we can now scroll forever. Slowly and jerkily.

On the language front, we really should have had a replacement for C/C++ by now. We don't. D never got traction. Go is mostly for web back ends, where it has really solid libraries heavily used within Google. Rust looked promising but was taken over by the "functional" crowd and is doomed to Haskell obscurity. C++ itself is now trying to fake ownership tracking at run time, with mediocre results. The abstractions always leak because too many old things need C pointers. Java was supposed to replace C/C++ but became tangled in its own libraries and ended up replacing COBOL.

There's been some progress. There's now grudging agreement that the way to go is type declarations with some type inference. Having to type everything is too much of a pain. Not typing anything makes for unreadable programs. Function definitions really do need type info. So C++ added "auto" and Python added "advisory typing", moving both towards the center. Which is about where Go started.

> we need to find a balance between those of us online yelling and tweeting and pushing towards the Next Big Thing and those that are unseen and patient and focused on the business problem at hand.

What makes him think we don't have a balance already? Most devs are the quiet ones who just do their job and then go home. Aside from participation on HN, I consider myself to be be one of those quiet ones. I work on business problems with whatever tools are appropriate, which includes both modern stacks and legacy codebases.

I'm not sure what other balance he is seeking.

I feel like the article misses out on two crucial truths:

1. Most of the new tools are pure nightmare to maintain. RoR has breaking API changes often enough that you need multiple people to maintain a large codebase, whereas in PHP you'd only need one person because things don't magically break that often. And MongoDB is so convoluted and complicated that almost nobody can deploy it correctly. And then there's "new" container techniques, which are basically just an admission that you have no f*ing clue on how to make your new tool set secure. In most cases, the loud new technology is just over-funded hipster stuff, but not ready for the real world yet.

2. Posting things online (e.g. Source Code) will not only attract the attention of peers. You might also get flooded with rather demanding emails by technically incompetent people who complain that your free source code release didn't solve their problem.

Also, I wonder if the author is aware of IRCs ongoing popularity for private development discussion rooms. It seems many people thought Slack was new, but some of us programmers have been hanging out like that since 95.

I wonder if Scott Hanselman ever had to maintain large system while having limited resources to do so. Churn is bad for most, apart from companies who must sell new things to keep on going, like software companies. Moving fast and breaking things is great when you don't have to consider churn cost. Calling the anti-churn crowd "dark matter developers" seems at least a bit derogatory.

That's a nice way to describe something, but it doesn't have to be a problem. Some devs around me (partially me too) just doesn't want to tweet or write blogs about tech, yet we could work in bleeding edge tech or writing cobol at the same time.

Some people maybe don't need help, guidance, or something like that, maybe just maybe we like the things as they are now.

Maybe we'll start doing all of social stuff some day.

It's just okay.

The fact that you go mostly "unseen" online seems completely orthogonal to whether you love programming and keep up with the latest technologies, etc. I would consider myself "dark matter" in the respect that no one knows who I am and I'm not constantly blogging or tweeting about stuff. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in, passionate about and highly competent in technology. I find it kind of insulting actually that someone would assume that just because I'm not loud about it means anything else about how much I care about it or how good at it I am. I'm not totally surprised by this though; for most people, if you're not jumping up and down telling them about how awesome you are they have no way of knowing. I see this a lot in my current job; all the developers know which of their colleagues are kick-ass at their jobs, but you have to sell yourself and your accomplishments to everyone else.

TL;DR, I know this is an old article, but it seems there's still some perception that us dark matter folks are all just passionless drones in it for the paycheck, and while there's surely some percentage of us for which that's true, I think it's completely wrong-headed to assume that's how we all are.

Back in the usenet days it was said that 99% of users were readers and 1% were writers. The same is true for the web.

That is, I think "dark matter" developers read blogs but they just don't write them.

As for conferences, these are widely seen as a scam. I remember sitting through a presentation at the end of a conference by the platinum sponsor where I sat next to some tired defense contractors from the East Coast and then drinking in the hotel bar later with the director of marketing for the sponsor who thought that he hadn't gotten what he paid for.

Scott talks about how devs don't do anything to be seen yet if you look at his twitter stream it's mostly just him tweeting his own posts and retweeting other "famous" developers. He, and the majority or other very visible people in the community, gatekeep the blogosphere by failing to help anyone else break in (not necessarily consciously of course; they may just never see the less famous devs posts).

Scott could be a much bigger part of the solution than he chooses to be.

I keep a client that has not much to do with my current line of work, just to keep in touch with these guys and this environment. I feel it is important to solve real problem and real user's problems from time to time, I learn a lot from them. On top of that, I am a client of them and we live in the same city, so there is mutual interest things go smooth.

And yes, they learn a lot from me. Sprinkling some new tools like git and Docker, encouraging people migrating their systems off PHP4, etc. can't hurt.

> The Dark Matter Developer will never read this blog post because they are getting work done using tech from ten years ago and that's totally OK

I thought I was a “Dark Matter Dev” until this. But then it’s weekend so maybe I still am.

All great and admirable till you wakeup one day and find out no one read your cv because you have zero online presence.

"Dark Matter Developer", what label is that for a developer doing his thing without going to conferences, doing blogs, etc..? This should not be on HN imao.

Just don't actually go and look, if you're not prepared for the fantasy to be broken that such persons are super productive and doing quality work.

There's enough dysfunction to go around that all types of programmer can be uniquely afflicted, and usually are.

Sure. I've met a lot of well-known authors at conferences and meetups. I've met people who work for big companies with R&D arms who are putting out content and products on the "bleeding edge" of technology (ala ThoughtWorks, IBM subsidiaries etc).

Most of these people love technology. They love learning about technology. They'd be perfectly happy working in technology, but because monetary success ends at being specialist consultant in a super lucrative field.. They stop.

Now they work in strategy and marketing around technology. Why? Because it's more lucrative. The job is more fun. They get to meet really, really smart people without having to work 60 hour weeks for $250K a year. (Which is great, of course, but these people have the soft-skills to add a multiplier to that amount.)

I'd be happy working 9-5 as a CRUD software developer with a great team in an OK company.

I'd be happy working in a very specialist field, earning $250K with an amazing team, in an amazing (funded) company (for a few years before shareholders start making demands).

I'm more happy working random hours around the world, meeting and talking with the smartest people in technology at a range of companies. I get to learn about what they've achieved, how they've achieved it.. Without having to burn the candle at both ends.. And I get to just play with whatever tech I feel like playing with.

They're different careers. A lot of people dabbling, or dipping their toes with blogging etc. are just doing it for a better portfolio when they company hop.

> If you spend all your time trying to prove to strangers that you're hip to the latest trends, just how much time are you spending doing anything of actual value?

This is something I've wondered about a lot of social media users to be honest. I mean, if you're seeming spending all day on Twitter or what not, how are you finding the time to actually do any work? Do any of these super outgoing social media addicted conference every week developers actually have a full time job? Or is their entire career about promoting themselves?

>Rust looked promising but was taken over by the "functional" crowd and is doomed to Haskell obscurity.

I think that's unfair and inaccurate. Rust is going to remain niche because most developers are happy with garbage collected languages and have no need to switch to Rust. Rust will eat a bit into C++'s domain, but I don't think it'll ever take over the world. GC is good enough, works great now and worked great 20 years ago.

> Visually, most web pages haven't changed much, and web development has become much harder.

Both true, yet engineers keep switching to newer frameworks and libraries anyway, rather than sticking with what they have and just building stuff.

The question then becomes, assuming they are rational, why?

I'll propose at least one major reason: efficiency. What's improving isn't what is possible to build with these technologies, but how effectively those things can be built, to a reasonable degree of reliability, in the same amount of time, even accounting for the greater difficulty in learning and using the technologies.

That's where progress is being made here. Not in the what but in the how easily, how quickly, how well. You could do anything you can do in React (say) with vanilla JS, imperatively updating the DOM with cumbersome APIs etc. The question is how much longer would it take / what more could you have built in that time using React.

Rails has a very predictable cadence (once a year) and a published support policy.

https://guides.rubyonrails.org/maintenance_policy.html

> RoR has breaking API changes often enough ... magically break that often

According to the support policy, nothing magic about those breaking changes: "Breaking changes are paired with deprecation notices in the previous minor or major release."

> You might also get flooded with rather demanding emails by technically incompetent people who complain that your free source code release didn't solve their problem.

Once I learned to listen to incompetent users, I started to create usable software.

My gut reaction is still, "RTFM you're doing it wrong." But now I follow that up by figuring out how to make the software work like the user thought it should or I change it so they never get in the frustrating situation in the first place.

What I finally realized was that if one person got frustrated enough with my software that they took the trouble to post an incoherent and technically incorrect rant on Github then it's likely that 100s more users had similar problems and said nothing.

Now I receive effusive emails about my Open-Source almost weekly.

> You might also get flooded with rather demanding emails by technically incompetent people who complain that your free source code release didn't solve their problem.

This. Happens so frequently, that making things OSS now carries an additional burden. I personally find it very painful to e.g. ignore the PR or issue opened by some hapless person in a bad situation trying to figure out the most dumbest thing. It makes the alternative (never OSS'ing anything) sound better, if only for my own peace of mind.

Is PHP still a thing?

I've worked on a team before where we every dev said "we need to upgrade X, we're Y versions behind" and management always responded with "no budget, this is not a priority". This continued until our hand was forced by a company wide initiative to modernize some aspects of our architecture and all of a sudden our team was frowned upon for being so far behind. Then we had to spend many months on an "upgrade project". I'm sure this same story has played out many times over in many other companies. In my own experience, often lack of tech currency/accumulation of tech debt is a management/organization problem. They won't get rewarded for upgrading things until their boss makes it a priority and there is some highly visible "upgrade project", so why bother doing so now.

I know Scott meant nothing derogatory by it. "Dark matter developers" refers to the developers you don't see. If someone is offended by that, I think it's a sign that they desperately wish they could be at the leading edge, but aren't allowed to. There's a ton of developers in the industry who have a different set of values than that.

This is a really good point too, especially when considered the whole 99% rule or what not. Tech community sites like Hacker News, and web dev sites like Smashing Magazine or CSS Tricks or what not have a large audience of lurkers that keep up to date with everything mentioned there yet don't spend their time posting about it on social media. Hell, I'd say I'm in the same boat there too. Read a lot of these kinds of sites and blog articles, but generally don't talk about 'em online much.

Of course that's not to say being in it for the paycheck is necessarily a bad thing. Not everyone needs to be 'passionate' about their job to do well in it, and if say, my doctor or surgeon is good at what they do, I don't really care if they spend all their free time talking medical issues on social media or posting on Hospital News or what not.

I think that by virtue of being here to comment at all, you are not one of these dark matter devs.

The group of people he is describing I think largely don't bother to come to communities like this. They do their job, go home and only know about developments in tech if it is relevant to their job and most likely because it comes through in-house channels.

I know a lot of people like this. Many of them aren't even aware that automated testing is a thing. They hardly know anything about any programming languages or technologies except for those they work with.

I feel obliged to jump in and defend Scott here - I just don't think what you are saying is a fair summary of his behaviour.

For sure, I see him doing what you say, but I also see him regularly retweeting and responding to comments and questions from accounts with few followers, and particularly so from people from minorities within the developer community.

There are plenty of examples of people I can think of who behave in exactly the way you suggest, mainly spinning the flywheel of boosting the online presence of already famous people and not engaging much with outsiders, but Scott not only isn't one of them but perhaps one of the best examples I can think of of actively doing the opposite of that.

It seems like you're missing the point here. The "dark matter" developers aren't being prevented from being internet famous by some mean old clique of tech bloggers that won't let anyone else in. They are the ones who don't care at all about being internet famous, don't write blogs or tweets at all, and don't know or care what other people are blogging and tweeting. They just write code that solves business problems and then go home and do non-tech stuff.

This is not a problem that needs to be solved, it's just something to be aware of.

Yeah, there's definitely an element of unintentional gatekeeping in many communities/fields, especially given how many 'popular' or 'famous' creators only seem to mention other popular or famous creators. Often made worse by their tendency to not look for the original source of an article or news post, and to end up retweeting or sharing the aggregated version from some popular site or creator.

For dark matter developers, there is no "gatekeeper" since there's no gate they want to cross: those developers aren't posting, and they don't value the visibility that it sounds like you do.

You should listen to Scott's podcast: he has a wide array of guests, in many diverse topics (even topics that could be seen at odds with his employer, Microsoft). Most of them are people I've never heard of. If there are gatekeepers, Scott isn't one of them.

>He, and the majority or other very visible people in the community, gatekeep the blogosphere by failing to help anyone else break in

It's not his job/role to give people breaks. He's not a Hollywood impresario, he's a blogger. If people are good, they will be discovered.

I don't think the point of his article is that this is a "problem" to be solved. And personally, I don't think these people owe you anything. Twitter etc. are all open platforms, there's nothing preventing your stuff from being seen by others.