"I know you hired me to murder the competing gang, but I thought designing a new multi-paradigm type-safe VM-driven LISP-like automatically verifyable programming language would be much better use of the money".
I've got a make a living somehow, and keeping programmers out of the murder industry seems like the least I can do. If you let one in pretty soon the whole thing becomes automated and you'll just have AI-powered steamrollers turning the whole thing into an impersonal, generic experience.
I mentioned OSS in a different comment, but it's not the only thing I've noticed this with. Politics at any level in the US (local, state, or national) falls into the same situation regardless of party.
Activism takes time and resources to be successful and get your name out, and the moral status attached to it creates a similar set of incentives such that you end up with the same pattern of lifers who are perpetually broke, independently wealthy folks who can be heavily involved and live decently at the same time, and folks with a dayjob who are involved but never really wield much influence on any level.
It's an interesting problem and I'd argue it serves as evidence that this happens to anything with attached status. Journalism I've heard has the issue as well.
FWIW the open source scene (at least in the US) can often have very similar dynamics. I believe it was Ashley Williams who put it best by saying that in the Rust community (where I am), one's influence is determined by one's free time. I've noticed over time that in certain areas it can very much be those with the least experience on a subject (but the most free time) who wield the most influence.
> I've noticed over time that in certain areas it can very much be those with the least experience on a subject (but the most free time) who wield the most influence.
Unfortunately, I have found similar. A prime example I feel is Reddit mods, who all do it for free and spend countless hours moderating a community. In fact powermods, the most influential ones, were moderating a decent handful of communities. There wasn’t necessarily any reason for them to be in power specifically other than they had the time and desire for that power. No real need to interact with the community or even know what they were saying, as long as you could remove enough low quality content to retain your position.
I find that phenomenon in many self-organizing communities. it is often true that those with the most free time do get to research the problems and solutions more and have good answers, but even if they do, they dominate the conversation in an inherently unsustainable way. they either drive out newcomers or burn themselves out - sometimes both!
I think that is what HN is getting out of this article.
Lots of us have side biz, or are working on something important to us, and we often think our product is better than the leaders of the industry. Heck, from a data/math point of view, mine is the best, without a question. I just don't have the charisma or connections to make it the number 1.
I know my output(science) is going to last beyond my lifetime, even if I'm not nationally popular. I have academics and international leaders reading my work. Good enough for me.
You say it like it's a bad thing. I guess it's a bias to be aware of so the community can try to compensate, but there's really no other way. Power goes to those who are contributing. If I'm building an open-source compiler I'd love to give power to the world renowned experts on compilers, but unfortunately they are not participating.
If you're building something that has a big community and sees a lot of use, you've got a lot of different stakeholders with different needs. The folks contributing to the compiler, language, standard library, or build system directly are not your only stakeholders, nor are they your only contributors.
Successful languages don't become successful without a rich ecosystem behind them. The people responsible for those projects are probably more important to your continued success than anyone contributing to the language itself.
What processes you have makes a huge difference in terms of who you give power to. If you have formal processes that ensure that folks have time to weigh in on things, and you make it easy to follow what's going on (signal-to-noise ratio is important here!), you can get much more relevant feedback from a much larger and more important group of stakeholders than if you handle things in a noisy, fast-moving zulip.
Google it. It's a racket. Teacher's unions have negotiated automatic pay raises for certain educational attainments. Those attainments are certified by the Ed Schools. It's basically the certification program scam.
I've also noticed that attitudes towards the homeless are completely different between those who walk and those who drive. I'm personally willing to pay whatever it takes in extra taxes to get them shelter and deal with the current crisis in my city, but I've noticed that people who drive are often far less willing to support action here.
I think I understand a lot more about UCEPROTECT now that I've read the message you linked. This is pretty extraordinarily sexist and unprofessional, and you can really get a sense of how much the author despises anyone who criticizes him.
