This is a weekly roundup of awesome DEV comments that you may have missed. You are welcome and encouraged to boost posts and comments yourself using the #bestofdev tag.
@davidk01 hopped into the What’s a concept you understand now, but took you forever to grasp? thread with this pearl of wisdom:
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@bosepchuk talked about effective leadership and team camaraderie in a thread titled Why is the software industry so competitive?:
I agree and it's not healthy. While no one factor is solely responsible, I'd say ineffective leadership is a big problem in our industry.
Say what you want about jocks, but they know how to work on a team and their teams are lead by people who know how to lead.
Have you ever seen a new programming lead or senior dev receive leadership training? Training in team dynamics? Psychology? Managing people? Effective communication? Coaching?
Another example: the military is all over this stuff because they know the importance of working as a unit. Maybe our profession will catch on one day.
For a first team in this "Top 5" series, we're featuring back-to-back comments from the same thread. The whole conversation is worth a read, but you may want to start with this top exchange. First, @davidszabo97 answers the prompt of Are we Developers helping Google to build an unstoppable monopoly?:
Does Google make your life easy?
- You can have a full analytics of your website in 1 minute (Google Analytics).
- You can deliver fonts to your website visitors via a free CDN, oh and it also optimizes it for the visitor via User-Agent. (Google Font)
- You can show off the location of your business in 3 clicks (Google Maps)
- You can have a full server running in 1 minute (Google Cloud) (paid)
- You can store unlimited photos (Google Photos)
- You can store 10GB data (Google Drive) etc...
Oh and all of these are in sync between my phone and desktop. And I can sync easily via Google Chrome.
We can't shutdown Google and Facebook. They definitely make our life easier. And yes, they collect a lot of information about us. Thanks to GDPR we can have control over this now, but here is the question:
Would you pay for all of these different services if they would offer full privacy and zero data collection?
I bet you wouldn't because you love free services.
Do you know how much all of these would cost for you? (And don't say there is Dropbox and other free alternatives, because they also collect every freakin bit about you)
@sarthology offers a thoughtful reply:
Question is not about whether they are making our life easy or not.
It's more about, should we let them establish a monopoly or not. Remember how Google first gave maps API for free just to kill competition and now when they own most of the market, It's not Completely FREE anymore. Many small companies are complaining.
We developers have the knowledge to create alternative products and creative ways to reduce the cost too.
We finish up this week in the Guide to Hiring Developers. @rrampage challenges some of the original post's main points in a thoughtful and constructive manner:
Hi Peter,
Some of the negative indicators are debatable. For example:
Started programming at university
For many students in my country (India), there is no access to computers in schools. University is the first exposure to computers. Penalizing people for this seems counter-productive at best.
All programming experience is on the CV
This ignores people who work in industries with strong NDAs e.g aerospace, defence. For such candidates, the only way to show expertise is to mention on CV
Happy to work with whatever technology you’ve picked, “all technologies are good”
At the end of the day, a professional developer solves business problems. Tools and technologies are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. Getting fixated on particular tools may put you off track from solving the problems. It is true that some tools are better for particular situations but in many places you do not have the freedom to decide that.
Programming is only a day job
This assumes that programmers have no life outside of programming. A person can have other hobbies than coding.
See you next week for more great comments ✌
Top comments (2)
Congrats @davidk01 , @bosepchuk , @davidszabo97 , @sarthology , and @rrampage for making the list this week!
Very glad that last comment was included on there. They're especially common mistakes for hiring and can push out too much potential talent.