The "reddit effect”

  • Article

Yesterday I posted on Developer vs “the others”.I started to notice lots of comments coming in and then a serious number of page views - probably 10 times my norm.

The reason was it ended up on reddit. This was all rather fascinating for me – I have never been on reddit before…

It is not my usual type of post. It is a post I have been meaning to do for a while and realised it would be something quite different for this 4 year old blog. It was an exercise to see what would happen next if I did it.

What did I learn? The impact of reddit (or any of those similar sites) is you suddenly get a lot of folks turn up on your blog who will literally read just that one post (I tend to read other stuff by the author – but maybe that is just me). They then can draw a huge number of conclusions about you as an individual from that one post. Impressive. Some can do this just by reading other peoples comments about you – without even reading your post. Very impressive.

I am therefore (in no particular order") – a “useless developer”, “have a heck of chip on my shoulder”, “loser, self centered donothing”, “suck”, “smug and arrogant” :-) (Ho hum – it is my review next week)

I learnt a lot about how a post like this would be perceived. Very useful.

Finally a few comments:

  • The post is absolutely developer biased. Totally, utterly. That was the intention. I was firmly looking at how it appears from the eye of a developer.
  • I wanted to draw attention to some of the problems I see developers have to face day in day out.
  • I absolutely was not talking about the relationship with end users. This was about the internal relationship within software companies.
  • I do not think developers are always right, can work in isolation or that “the others” serve no purpose. I have been one of “the others” in the past.
  • It is not a dig at Microsoft. Sure I see some of the stuff I talked about in parts of Microsoft (and completely absent in other areas) but it is driven by my work with many software companies over the last 12 years.
  • With hindsight I should have given more context to the type of companies I was thinking of – namely Independent Software Vendors where the company is about producing software for external organisations to use. Some of the comments back were assuming I was talking more broadly.