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Developers are way too sensitive. | Theo - t3․gg | YouTubeToText
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Summary
Core Theme
The core theme is that software engineers have become overly "fragile" due to a combination of human nature, the inherent complexity of the field, and a tendency towards tribalism, leading many to resist change and progress rather than embrace learning and growth.
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Why is everyone so fragile? You're mad
that someone made a game with AI. You're
mad that someone updated a JS library.
You're mad that someone made Doom with
TypeScript. I'm mad that everyone's mad
about these things. I have a lot of
feelings on this one. The thing I've
seen a lot of, too. Feels like
engineering is in this unique place
where there is more progress than ever,
but there's also more frustration about
that progress. And it's unbelievable to
me the sheer levels of I don't even know
what to call it. Just disdain I've been
seeing from developers who don't like
where things are going. Used to be
something I would spend a lot of time
thinking about and finding ways to
solve. Like how can we convince these
developers that these things are good
and that their frustrations are
misplaced. Over time, my perspective has
shifted and I am much more aligned with
what Trash is saying here. I think
engineers as a whole have gotten quite
fragile and I want to talk about what
this means, but since I'm about to talk
a lot of [ __ ] on engineers, there's a
good chance none of them will ever hire
me again. So, uh, let's pay some bills
really quick and then we'll get back to
it. Today's sponsor is a little bit
different. I want to tell you a story
about a mistake I made. I love building
modular things in my serverless scalable
ways. As such, there's a lot of products
that I just don't think are for me. When
things get too combined and they provide
too many different features, I tend to
assume it's not going to do what I need
it to well and move on from it. One of
those businesses is today's sponsor,
Convex. And the reason I'm opening like
this is I want to make sure you guys
don't make the same mistake that I made.
I assumed when I read the code and I saw
what you could do with Convex that it
was built for people who are starting
from scratch on a brand new application
that they're working on as a side
project. And I was so wrong that I I
feel bad about it. The amount of time
and energy and honestly probably
customers that I have lost because I was
hesitant to try Convex 2 to 3 years ago
horrifies me. The fact that I took
Tanner Lindsay and WebDev Cody and a
sponsor deal for me to even give them a
real shot is pathetic. I screwed up. I
was wrong. And I am so happy that I've
made the move to Convex because it's
made our lives significantly easier for
T3 Chat. Sure, we had an outage, but
most of that was my fault in the tiny
tiny bit of it that was theirs. They
documented the hell out of and did a
great public postmortem. This is a
company that passes Sam Lambert from
Planet Scales sniff test for knowing
databases. Well, they really get it.
They're not just some fun thing for side
projects. They're a very, very
legitimate platform for building quality
applications using TypeScript. If you
want to see how simple it is to use, go
look at the code for the T3 Cloneathon.
I used it heavily there and it made it
so I could vibe code the whole thing out
in like an hour. It's really impressive.
But just take my word for it. If you've
seen Convex and assumed it wasn't for
you because you're building legit,
powerful, big user software, you're
making the same mistake that I made for
multiple years, and I immensely regret.
Convex is sponsoring this video, but
they've told me nothing about what to
say. So, I want to take the opportunity
to be honest with you guys because I
don't want more people making the
mistake I made. You haven't given them a
shot yet, you really should. Check them
out today at soy.link/convex.
Why are engineers so fragile? This will
be a fun one. There's a lot of layers to
this one. Oh [ __ ] Trash is here. Thanks
for stopping by, man. Thanks for
inspiring this. This has been on my list
to do for a while. It was a very good
tweet and I have a lot of feelings. So,
we need to start talking about normal
curves. If somehow you're watching this,
you're not familiar with normal curves.
It's a pretty useful concept for how
capabilities of things are distributed.
There is the median, which is the thing
right in the middle, the average, so to
speak. I know median and average are
different. You get what I'm saying? And
then as you go further and further from
the norm, those distant points become
more rare and unique. Someone who is way
worse than average is similarly rare to
someone who's way better than average.
We've all seen the normal curve meme,
but we need to talk about what this
means for developers. A fun mental
exercise that I learned to do when I was
very young that has haunted me since.
You guys have probably done this one
with me before. Imagine a perfectly
downthe-middle quality engineer. Someone
who is as average and median middle of
the road as possible. Person who, you
know, isn't going to go excitedly learn
a new technology, but you also know will
write an if statement correctly without
having to Google search for it. They
might have to Google search for some
other syntax, but the the core
fundamentals they probably know well
enough. You're bog standard average
engineer. Just picture this perfectly
middle person. Half of engineers are
worse at coding than that person. Not
exactly 50%, but it's 49.99999.
You get the idea. Very close to the
majority of engineers are below average
cuz that's how averages work.
Thankfully, this also means half are
better, but they're not a lot better.
There are very few engineers that are
significantly better than that average
engineer. And there's a lot of engineers
who are meaningfully worse. The myth of
the 1x engineer, if you will. In the
middle here, we can imagine the 1x
engineer right in the middle. You go
down, you get to the 10x. And as you go
the other way, you get to the 0.1x. This
is the nature of engineering, but it's
also the nature of something else that's
important. If we go to my YouTube
analytics, which give me one sec to make
sure I don't leak things I don't want
to. Oh, yeah. My favorite bug here. I
mentioned this before. See how it says
stream finished when the stream's not
finished? That's cuz it cached the wrong
state and then it catches up and figures
out what it's supposed to actually be
showing. Let's look at some recent
videos. This one, my thoughts on vibe coding,
coding,
nearly 50,000 views. It's over that, but
this number's delayed. 284 comments.
That's roughly my usual ratio of
comments to views. If we do that ratio
out quick, 284 / 49,000,
that's 6% roughly. So, we do the math
for Theo's comment section,
around 0.6 6%
of viewers leave comments. It's actually
quite a bit worse than this cuz any one
person will often leave multiple
comments. And I would estimate that
greater than 90% of YouTube comments are
left by less than 0.1%
of viewers. This is from like very
rudimentary numbers I've run on my side.
The vast majority of YouTube comments
are left by a very, very small
percentage of people. The ratio here is
insane. And this was a hard thing for me
to digest as a YouTuber because I would
talk to people about my videos and
they'd be like, "Yeah, that was a really
good one. I learned a lot from it." But
then I would look at the comment section
and it was a mix of porn bots and people
flaming me for daring to say anything
about their beloved tool. What I've
since learned is that the people leaving
comments are not normal. 0.6%
of any group of people is not the normal
group. The 0.6% of people leaving
comments on my videos are not my average
viewer. They think they are here.
Those people without question imagine
themselves as being in this upper
echelon. But the more I've talked to the
average commenter, and no offense to
anyone who's left a comment on this
video already, actually, if you've left
one before you got to the end of it, you
are probably the person I'm talking
about. But if you've left a comment
that's kind asking thoughtful questions,
whatever, this isn't about you. This is
about the majority of the comments that
I get, which come from a minority of the
people. They are here and that is a hard
thing for them to accept. It is
unnatural to enjoy feeling stupid. So if
you encounter something that makes you
feel stupid, your instinct is to fight
it. Your instinct is to pretend that
you're here because the alternative is
that you're here and that makes you feel
bad. It's our job as engineers to feel
stupid a lot. And it's unnatural for
humans to feel stupid a lot. These two
facts are what make engineers so
insecure. I am very fortunate that I
learned how to code after I learned how
to skateboard because you don't get good
at skateboarding by sitting in class
reading about the history of the
skateboard. Y'all might know Giggly.
She's a Harvard grad CS student that now
has a job in software development.
Pretty good at what she does. There's a
lot of men on Twitter who are really mad
at her existence as a cute girl who went
to Harvard, got a degree, and makes
money doing code. a Harvard educated
software engineer, eh, without using a
search engine who's considered to be the
father of modern information theory.
This is somebody who's on one side of
the curve and thinks they're on the
other. He doesn't want to feel stupid.
And since that person looks down on
women, a woman being a successful
engineer, a woman being more successful
than him makes him feel stupid. So
instead, he says something even
stupider. I People are saying that's
bait. I legitimately don't think it is
having read through this person's other
posts and
bait used to be believable, but this
isn't funny enough to be bait. This is
just somebody being incredibly stupid.
And I've seen so many things like that
in my comment section. You guys have no
idea. And there are so much of that. If
you just read through someone like
Giggaly's replies, it's hilarious. It's
so common that engineers are sensitive
to feeling stupid and find random things
to prove that they're actually the legit
engineer. And again, to compare to
skateboarding where I came from, if
someone finds a way to do a really
insane trick, the response isn't, "Well,
you don't know enough about the history
of skateboarding to do that." People
would do that here and there if you like
did a trick that already been done. But
the response when people would talk [ __ ]
was like, "Why the [ __ ] are you doing
that? This person just did an incredible
thing. this 18-year-old just did an
unbelievable trick. Why are you mad
about it? What the [ __ ] is wrong with
you? Because you didn't get good at
skateboarding by obsessing over every
detail of the history. If you do that,
it's fun and exciting. And the people
who are the encyclopedias of
skateboarding are held in a different
way in the skateboarding world. Somebody
like Jake Phelps, who used to run
Thrasher, knows every detail of the
history of skateboarding, who did what
trick in what place and when they did
it, and who they were inspired by to do
it. He was not a good skateboarder. He
just loved skateboarding and the
entirety of the world of skateboarding
and became the person sharing that
knowledge with so many. But that was
different and he didn't view himself as
a skater in the traditional sense. He
did care deeply and was a skateboarder.
He'd skate every day to and from work
and around the city. But his knowledge
of skateboarding didn't make him a
skateboarder. His love of skateboarding
made him a skateboarder. The knowledge
was just the thing he chose to focus on.
The best skateboarders aren't the ones
who know everything about skateboarding.
It's actually kind of funny how often
the best skateboarders don't know [ __ ]
about skateboarding. They don't watch
videos. They don't know anything about
it. They just go and do it and then go
home to their wife and kids. Because you
don't get good at skateboarding by
learning all the details. You get good
at skateboarding by doing it. And
whether or not we want to admit this as
engineers, it is the exact same thing.
If the fundamentals are important to you
in your work, you will discover that and
learn them. And if the history of
information theory is important to your
job, I would question if your job is
actually software engineering in the
first place. But the biggest thing that
skateboarding taught me was to love
failure. I learned how to do tricks in
skateboarding by screwing them up over
and over again. By hitting the ground,
getting it wrong, getting hurt, and then
trying again, again, and again, and
again, until I somehow managed to ride
away. And that feeling of riding away
was so magical that I would push through
those hard things to get there. And
slowly, I learned to not hate the bales
and hate the failed attempts. I learned
to love them because those failed
attempts to land a trick, each one got
me slightly closer actually riding away.
So by the time I moved to software dev
and my apps weren't compiling didn't
feel that bad cuz at the very least I'm
not risking breaking my arm every time
my app fails to build. So I learned to
love that feeling of doing it wrong, of
being stupid. I learned to love the
failures because they meant I was
getting closer to success. That is an
awesome thing. And I love somebody
that's brought this up. Been rock
climbing for almost a year now. 99% is a
failure or oh sorry 99% of rock climbing
is failure. Yeah, succeeding every time
means you're not not growing. I was
going to make a joke doesn't fit anymore
of like devs getting into hobbies where
if you aren't 100% capable you're bad is
funny to me and I kind of think of rock
climbing that way. Thankfully in like
rock climbing gyms you can fall and get
back up. It's fine. Rock climbing an
actual giant rock one failure means you
die. And if that's how you work, if
that's the thing you do for fun, and you
bring that mental model back to software
dev, you're never going to do better.
You're not going to improve. It's so
important to work in ways where you can
fail and learn and grow. And learning to
love the failures is essential. To be
really good, you need to fail 10,000
times. Yes, humans evolve to avoid
things that make them feel bad and dumb.
Very good thing. Humans steering away
from the things that make them feel bad
and dumb generally keeps them safer. If
you get in the back of a plane and you
look around and see all the controls and
say, "I don't think I'm smart enough to
do this." You might save some lives by
not doing it. If you look at a wound on
your leg after making a dumb mistake and
say, "Hey, I probably shouldn't run into
metal things anymore." You'll be safer.
If you put your hand on a fire and
realize it hurts and you get burned,
you'll probably do that less. We are
engineered to steer away from things
that hurt us and make us feel dumb. But
engineering is encouraging us to do
things that make us feel dumb. Because
of this, engineers are in a weird space
where we feel dumb more often than the
average person. The average person
probably feels stupid maybe a few times
a day. Not a lot, but some number of
them. A great engineer feels dumb a lot
of times a day because they're working
in things they're not familiar with.
They might have changed their mental
model for it where they don't feel dumb.
It now feels unfamiliar and that's how
they categorize it in their brain and
how they process it. But you should at
the very least feel unfamiliar regularly
as an engineer or you're not growing and
you're probably not doing your job very
well. The complexity of the stuff that
we do necessitates a level of
unfamiliarity due to the wide range of
things that exist in our field and that
range is growing constantly. As such, we
find interesting ways to cope. If this
is the world of engineering, this
circle, as we all know, data sets are
always circles. World of engineering,
there's a lot of different types. I I'll
specify software engineering. I know you
are mad that software engineer is in a
real term or whatever. They can screw
off. This circles the world of software
engineering. There are lots of different
sections in here. You can pretend that
it's cut in a linear way. It's not.
Let's say we have gamedev, webdev,
infra, and operating systems. Not meant
to be a comprehensive list. Certainly
not meant to properly represent the
ratios because it would probably look
like this nowadays. Like at best, if we
were to pretend it's only these four
things, maybe something like that. You
get the point, though. The problem is if
you live in one of these worlds, like
within webdev, we have like the React
bubble. We have jQuery people that are
still insisting that jQuery is the only
way to do things even though the creator
of jQuery doesn't do that.
We have all the other tools and
technologies and things in this one
bubble. If you are a really good React dev,
dev,
I would say best case you like maybe
understand twothirds of React and the
things that it's used for. like best
case, like the best reactives in the
world, like the ones who work at Meta.
Maybe they can fill out like this side
of this one bubble here. And then you
ask them about how suspense works within
React 3 fibers parallel loading and they
look at you like you're an alien
speaking a different language. Or what
happens sometimes that's even more fun
is React's place in this bubble moved.
They actually moved down so that it
overlaps with infra a bit with server
components. All of a sudden, knowing all
of React means you need to know a little
bit about infra 2 and it didn't move
there, it grew there. So if your
understanding of the world is this box,
like this is where you currently live
and reside and you fought really hard to
know everything in this box and you're
really proud, you're a great engineer,
you start doing stupid things like
saying, "Well, game devs don't know what
they're talking about. They're not real
devs. Operating systems are silly. Just
use Mac OS. Backend is stupid. Why are
people still building servers when they
can just use Verscell? And at the same
time, we have people in the infra world
who are expected more and more to build
good applications and systems that work
well with applications saying, "Well, I
wouldn't have to do that if we just said
HTML." React joke. GameDev Schmev, they
think things are so hard, just put it in
a sync engine and be done with it.
Operating systems, I already have Linux.
What do you need to change? Stop
changing Linux. You're just making my
life harder. All of these boxes exist
because we live in them. It's the work
that we do and the way that we think
about things. Somebody brought up the
example of asking Dan Aro about CSS.
Very, very amusing. A fun convo I had
with Dan way back when server components
were happening was about cold starts on
Lambda. I had to explain how Lambda
worked to Dan Abramov as he was
architecting server components because
the idea of cold starts wasn't a thing
that made sense to him yet. I had to
explain all of these things. And that's
not because Dan's a bad engineer. It's
because he lives in a different box. And
that's fine because he's excited to
realize the box has many directions he's
not going in yet and he can learn about
all of them. But if you live in this box
and you're very happy with it and then
the box gets bigger that way, suddenly
you went from knowing 50% of React and
feeling like you knew 80% of React to
knowing like 30%. And that feeling
sucks, especially if it goes over a line
that you're not comfortable with because
you're fighting to be confident in the
thing you already do. You put a lot of
work in to build this little box around
the part of React that you work in every
day. You've also put a lot of time into
looking down on the people who aren't
doing the thing you're doing, saying
that they are lesser in some way,
assuming you're insecure enough. We've
all built our mental boxes around what
we do every day. And as a result, we
inherently see what we do as more
complex and what other people do as less
complex. If you're not familiar with the
Dunning Krueger, as you get into a
thing, you start to think you fully
understand it and can do it and be
successful with it. And then as you
learn how complicated the thing actually
is, you immediately have your confidence
plummet and then slowly build it back up
as you learn more and more about the
thing. If you know how to engineer
within one of the boxes or one of the
parts of this world, you don't have to
go very far into the others to feel like
you know what you're doing. And if you
stop there, you'll just look down on
those things. So, if you're building
some infrastructure for some weird
project and you put together an HTML
like page for it and then you add like
one interaction with a web component,
you'll be like, "Wow, this is so easy.
Everybody thinks React is necessary.
They must suck." And then you look down
on them. And then when you see
innovation happening in that space, you
look down on it because you currently
reside here in your knowledge of the
thing. And the people who are smarter
than you about it are going to be less
confident than you about it because they
know more. And the more you know, the
less confident you are. There are
questions people could ask me about
React 3 years ago that I would very
confidently answer and might even be
correct about. And now I would say, hm,
I'm going to go check the source code
quick because as much as I think I know,
I'm more aware of what I don't. And I'm
very aware that my confidence can be
misplaced in something as complex as the
React ecosystem. All of this combines to
people feeling weird. If you spent years
building this little knowledge box and
you managed to get a job in it and be
the React expert at your company because
you know a little over half of React and
now React is suddenly moving in a
different direction, not leaving the
space you're in, but expanding into
others, that's going to feel personal.
And I've seen devs that I used to look
up to being very hostile towards the
React team and community for daring to
venture into spaces they don't want to
be in. One of the cool things React did
was enable front-end leaning devs,
people who wanted to focus on the
browser, CSS, styles, JS, animations,
integrations, accessibility, and all of
that. They wanted to be a senior
developer on the web. And the cool thing
React did was by enabling new levels of
complexity in our web applications, they
also enabled a need for engineers who
could wrangle that complexity and build
these gigantic web apps with hundreds,
if not thousands of devs contributing.
That meant we had senior to principal
level devs doing nothing but managing
Webpack configs and package JSONs and re
viewing code from other teams and making
sure this giant pile of React doesn't
crumble. And they did all of that
without touching a goddamn server. React
was key in enabling developers at
enterprise companies building
applications for users to have full
career paths and trajectories without
leaving one side, without leaving
webdev. And that was pretty cool. Not
because everything's way more complex
than it needs to be, but because massive
complexity was now possible just within
webdev itself, allowing for bigger,
better apps, bigger teams to work on
those apps, and more knowledge to be
necessary, but also existing within that
space. But if your excitement came from
the fact that you could now be a
principal level engineer working in JS
and CSS on the web primarily watching
React push you towards the server feels
like you're being betrayed. That promise
of now you can have a full fulfilling
career in webdev really should use the
infra 2. That extra whisper at the end
hurts them and makes them feel insecure
because React gave them a security that
they could be a principal level engineer
and they can make 500k a year and
deserve it just writing JavaScript in
the browser all day. That being
challenged makes them go back to the
insecurity they felt when they first
were learning webdev. It makes them feel
dumb again. And these people might not
have felt dumb for a while because
they're the best React engineer at their
company. When anyone has any problem
with React, they're the person they go
to to ask. And since they are not the
0.6% of people who leave comments,
they're not in the Twitter world or in
my comment section or in here enough to
have great engineers pushing back on
them to make them feel dumber. I'm
incredibly fortunate that my time at
Twitch was almost always surrounded by
awesome engineers pushing me to be
better and also trying to learn from me
as I would go down these deep rabbit
holes. And after I left Twitch, I got
pulled into the open source community.
And I had so many incredible developers
from there take me in and give me more
to aspire to and people to learn from.
People like Jensen who helped build
Radics, people like Tanner Lindley who
built the whole Tanstack in React Query,
people like Ryan Carneato who built
Solid or Fred Shaw who built Astro.
These people were so excited to go deep
on the details with me and they were way
smarter than me. So, I knew that I
wasn't the best in the world at this
stuff, but I loved it so much that I
could hold the conversation with them
and keep learning through them. I don't
know where I would be if I didn't get to
feel stupid every step along the way if
I didn't have that opportunity to keep
humbling myself and learning more and
more about things like this. It's why I
love software. I feel like I can run in
any given direction and find more to
learn the further I go. And that's
awesome. I'm looking for growth, not comfort.
comfort.
Most people don't though. Growth versus
comfort is probably the biggest issue
that we have here. Most people hit a
point in their life where they don't
want to keep improving and growing. They
are happy with where they're at and they
are wanting things to slow down. Maybe
they have a family and kids. Maybe they
are saving up for their retirement fund
so they can go have a farm or do some
other job. They might have spent their
whole career up until that point
learning new things, trying new tools,
pushing new solutions, challenging
themselves to improve and be better. But
most people don't do that. And even the
ones who do, for the most part,
eventually stop. They slow down. There
are very few people who consistently
throughout the entirety of their lives
are challenging themselves to do new
things, pushing themselves to do things
they're unfamiliar with, and improve
every day. And that makes me sad because
I at the very least I hope that I'll be
continuing to improve for as long as I'm
on this goddamn earth. I want to
challenge myself and learn new things
and try new stuff. That's why this
YouTube channel exists. Not because I
failed to get a job in engineering.
Quite the opposite. I had too many
opportunities in engineering, but all of
them were surrounded by people who I
didn't really think I could learn from.
And I was tired of being the only person
who cared about technologies and new
solutions and new frameworks and stuff.
So, I made this channel to just get it
out of my system and talk about these
things because I really wanted to. And
then it blew up almost immediately
because a lot of y'all want the same
thing. My average viewer is not somebody
who is in one of these boxes that's
really insecure about the box getting
bigger or feels really bad when someone
tells about something that is in a
different place. If someone joins your
team and their knowledge is here and
your knowledge is here, the instinct for
many people is to talk [ __ ] on this and
say, "Well, that's not a real thing.
That's Flutter or that's Vue. No one
actually ships that. But the reality is
that most of the time these are just
different experiences in different lived
realities except for Flutter. I've never
seen a good Flutter app. But other than
that, this is a difference in our
experience. And when I look at this and
I see somebody who has this knowledge,
it excites me. But there's another
painful reality with this. If you look
too excited about the things you don't
know, there are a lot of engineers who
will just assume that you are dumb. I
had this really bad. Another one of the
reasons this channel exists, this is a
story I've like hinted at a few times
and I've never found a better place to
put it than here. The reason that Linear
is responsible for this channel is
because they rejected me as one of their
first hires when I interviewed there.
Why did Linear reject me from working
there? When I was going to interview at
Linear, I was really excited. I went and
watched some talks from the developers
at Linear and one of those talks was all
about really performant state management
in sync in React back in 2019. I thought
that was so cool. And after working at
two startups and doing some consulting
where I was the smart engineer, I really
wanted someone I could learn from. And I
was so excited to potentially go to
linear so I could learn from these
people who were smarter than me, who had
more experience than me, and get the
opportunity to be in a room full of
talented people again, pushing to better
themselves and better the things that
they're working on because I wanted it
so badly. I just missed being surrounded
with smart people that would push each
other to improve. The rejection I got
from Linear changed how I think about
engineering entirely. Here's the actual
email I got. Wanted to circle back from
your call with Jory. I wasn't sure if he
has communicated feedback to you yet,
but unfortunately they made the tough
decision to not move forward. Jory loved
your passion and your gaining experience
with the right technologies, but overall
felt that they need a bit more
experience at this time. The problem was
that I expressed my excitement to learn
from him. I am 100% certain if I had
just flexed what I could do instead of
expressing my excitement to learn from
him, I would have gotten that job. This
was about 4 months before I started my
YouTube channel and two months before I
started my company. It's rare I say a
company fumbled me. There are plenty of
times plenty of times where I got a
rejection that made sense. Like I got
rejected from Retool and no one made
sense. I was not the right fit for them.
Linear [ __ ] up hard with this mistake.
They've now hired like 20 people to do
the job I and one other person could
have done for them. And I followed up
after too, saying, "Hey, I feel like
there might be a misunderstanding here.
I'm not trying to like gloat, but I know
what the [ __ ] I'm doing. I think this
rejection happened because I expressed
my excitement about learning from this
team." That wasn't because I have to
learn cuz I'm underqualified. That's I'm
excited to have a team of people who
know what the [ __ ] they're doing so that
I can continue to grow. And I originally
was distraught by this because I was
very excited about linear at the time.
But after thinking through it a little
bit and talking with a couple other
people, hell, it was I think 2 weeks
after this, not even that Tanner
Lindsley, the creator of React Query,
asked me to go investigate TRPC for him,
which kickstarted the T3 stack in his
entire YouTube channel. So it was
entirely a fumble on their part. I I
amused at the level of fumble that
happened there. But the fact that the
industry had rejected my excitement and
energy and my desire to grow meant I had
to find somewhere else for it. If I
couldn't get a job where my excitement
to learn was going to keep me moving
forward, then I needed to find a place
where I could do it instead. And that's
why I say this. I needed a place to have
these conversations, to talk about these
things I was excited about. And I could
say almost certainly if Jory didn't [ __ ]
up his interview with me, that my
channel might not exist. And the
engineers he hires today might not be as
good because they're all watching my
goddamn YouTube channel. I would
guarantee the 20 people he hired instead
of me all watch my channel to keep up.
And a decent number of them are probably
watching this, too. Hi. Your boss sucks
at hiring. I hope that doesn't affect
you in your career. Yeah. The thing that
took me much longer to realize is that
part of why I didn't get this
opportunity was insecurity. The
realization that a spunky excited kid
could keep up with them was not
something they wanted to process yet. So
instead of processing it, they rejected
me cuz that was easier. It was way
easier. And I get it. Accepting that
some 20some year old kid that just left
Twitch knows what they're doing really
well is hard. And if you can flip it in
your head, like your brain will always
take the easiest path by default. And
since your brain doesn't want to feel
dumb, if it's ever handed a path that
gives you an easy out, you will
naturally take it. On YouTube, I see
this a lot with people trying to find
success and get views. And they will
constantly blame the algorithm or the
way things are being recommended or a
change to the app is the reason they're
not finding success. If a developer is
struggling to get hired, they'll blame
the state of the hiring world. They'll
blame the technical interview process.
They'll blame the frameworks for
changing all the time and not
recognizing the value in their toolkit
from 10 years ago instead of improving.
People like to find ways to excuse their
lack of success, and it's much easier to
do that than to push through it. And I
know a lot of YouTubers feel strongly
about this because I accidentally
outgrew most of them in a month. It is
what it is and I get why people feel
that way because it doesn't feel good to
see someone finding success with
something you struggled with. So instead
of recognizing your opportunity to grow,
it is our nature. It is the way our
brains work to do the opposite to find
an easy out, an excuse. And brains love
excuses. I almost just wrapped this up
without talking about artificial intelligence.
intelligence.
And I honestly think I can make most of
the points I need to without talking
about AI. But AI represents a very
painful moment for a lot of these
insecure devs because if you're one of
those devs that's in like the lower
quadrants here, you're one of the devs
that isn't doing particularly well and
is on the like lower end, AI programming
is probably around here in terms of the
quality. like it can put out better code
than at least 20% of engineers I would
guess depends on the task and a lot of
other things but it's not quite like an
average experienced engineer but it's
far along enough that the people in this
space be it the ones who are just
learning how to code or the ones who
have refused to learn anything new for
10 years these people feel awful right
now because the writing's on the wall
for them the wall being the skill level
for the AI being on the other side of
the AI skill wall is very painful and it
makes you feel like you've just wasted a
ton ton of time and energy and effort
and everything that you've spent your
life on that a lot of us were promised
very early just learn to code Google is
the best place in the world work
everyone just Google searches everything
all the time great engineers barely even
know what they're doing you guys might
remember this take these happened all
the time this is prime's favorite thing
to [ __ ] on that the the people saying
the whole just Google everything, no one
knows what they're doing stuff are bad.
There's two sides to this one. On one
hand, if you're Google searching
everything every day and you're doing
the same Google searches regularly,
you're not actually growing and you're
not actually a good engineer and you are
going to be replaced with AI. On the
other hand, if you're constantly dipping
your feet in different things, you're
constantly challenging yourself in ways
where you're playing with things you've
never heard of before, you're solving a
problem in a way that's complex enough
that you're trying a new technology that
requires you to learn all these other
different new things, then you are
Google searching a lot. There's a good
IQ meme of this one for sure, the bell
curve meme, where on the left side it's
just Google search everything because
they don't know what they're doing. On
the right side, it's just Google search
everything because they're doing such
hard stuff and trying new things all the
time. And then in the middle, it's like,
wait, no. If you're Google searching,
you don't know what you're doing. The
Midwit meme is very real here of the
people in the middle insisting that if
you Google search, you're bad. The
people on the right saying, "No, I'm
doing different things every day. I'm
experimenting with different
technologies and solutions and
challenging myself consistently. I have
to keep learning. I need to keep
Googling." And then people who don't
know what the [ __ ] they're doing at all
see that and are like, "Oh, well, if a
great engineer is googling all the time,
then it's okay that I am, too." And just
never developed the skill. And that
sucks. That's just not good. And a lot
of people were sold this promise. A lot
of people were told, "If you go to this
programming boot camp for 3 months,
you'll make $100,000 a year." And that
was encouraged because Google was tired
of paying people $200,000 a year. So
they went to him with all of this
marketing, all of this money spent on
different education programs, Google
Summer of Code, all these things, all of
the dev tools, they've open sourced and
everything too. Google's goal has always
been to lower the cost of the average
engineer. And AI is helping them
accelerate that. And the victim of that
is the below average engineer. And they
for the first time arguably have right
to be scared because the job of the
mediocre engineer is dying very quickly.
The engineers that refuse to learn React
could get by maintaining legacy systems
for the last decade. But those same
engineers are going to have their system
replaced with some AI generated
vibecoded slop and they're going to be
so insecure about it that it becomes the
rest of the world's problem. AI is just
going to make this all happen faster. It
was happening, but yeah, now it's just
going to go crazy. Like it's I feel bad
for the devs that are below average that
are starting that are trying to learn
and improve because they're going to get
grouped in with these people that have
not learned or improved in 10 years
because they're both on the same side of
the line. It's easier than ever to learn
and grow and technologies are changing
fast enough that you have so much
opportunity if you're willing to put the
work in and take it and you're willing
to feel dumb and get excited about the
things you can learn. But if you haven't
learned anything in 10 years, the only
reason you got by was you were
maintaining a code base nobody wanted to
touch for 10 years. AI doesn't mind
touching an ancient codebase and it
certainly doesn't mind replacing it
either. There this does hurt junior
engineers and I have a whole video about
the plate of the junior engineer coming
soon. It's probably out before this one
even is knowing what the schedule looks
like. But yeah, the insecurity around AI
was absurd duorous [ __ ] until it
wasn't. Now the the fact that code is
more disposable means that people who
write disposable code are going to have
more of it thrown away. The reality of
the last decade has been that code is so
expensive that if you had a bunch of
code written by somebody in like this
range. Previously, you would pay someone
talented to come in and maintain this
code. If somebody came in that was a way
better dev and you handed them this pile
of code written by [ __ ] devs, if they
said, "That's not tenable. I'm going to
rewrite this." They would be laughed at
or fired. Now, by the time they've said
it, they also have an AI generated
starting point that's at least as good
as the [ __ ] show that they were hired to
maintain. The giant piles of garbage
code written by garbage engineers that
are being maintained indefinitely
because replacing it's too expensive and
hard to risk. That's over now. That era
is done. Code is more disposable than
it's ever been. So, if the code you
wrote deserves to be thrown away, you're
no longer getting a free pass. The true
inclusivity in software engineering was
never about DEI. It was about including
bad engineers and letting their code
ship to production because there were so
few engineers we needed whatever code we
can get and that's over. That era is
done. To go back to the core point, why
are engineers fragile? I think there's a
few key pieces that led to us being the
way we are. One, jobs require us to feel
dumb. Two, it's human nature to fight
back when you feel dumb. Three, the
breadth of the dev world is insane.
There's always more to learn and it's
always changing and we are always
pursuing better ways to do things in
dev. Doesn't mean you have to keep up,
but it means someone is. And if you're
not, you're not as far along as they
are, which makes you feel bad. And then
there is the tribal nature of it all.
Since we have our tribes, we have our
little bubbles within our little
sections, it's very easy for us to look
down on the people outside of our
section on here. And this happens in
almost every industry. The FBI looks
down on the police and the police look
down on FBI. Street chefs get frustrated
with Michelin star chefs and Michelin
star chefs think the street chefs have
no idea what they're doing. When you
live in different bubbles within as
industry, it's easy to not understand
the thing on the other side and to start
looking down on it as a result. I even
experienced that as a YouTuber. I
noticed the moment where my audience
stopped seeing me as the open- source
developer who happens to have a YouTube
channel and instead saw me as the
YouTuber who pretends he knows how to
write code. I watched that shift happen
and it happened right around 100,000
subscribers for me. Humans are tribal by
nature and if being tribal allows them
to deal with these other parts more
easily, they will. And as a result of
that, there's a lot of people who talk a
lot of [ __ ] about things that they don't
really know anything about. But there's
one really important piece to remember
about all of this thing. I started with
the rude comments that inspired all of
this. The people being stupid on Twitter
about AI game generation, the people who
are leaving rude comments on this very
video right now, they are not average.
They are certainly not above average.
The vast majority of those people are a
tiny little blip right here. And this
tiny little blip is very, very loud,
very, very annoying. But this blip is
responsible for the majority of the
negativity on the internet. They It's
the classic loud minority thing as
chat's already pointing out, but it goes
further because the majority of people
aren't saying anything at all. It's not
just the loudness and the reach of the
message, it's the messages in the first
place. The average animate profile
picture [ __ ] poster on Twitter posts a
hundred times more than actual
developers do. The sheer volume of
things coming from these insecure people
is massive because what they're doing
instead of learning or shipping or
improving the things that they do. The
people who make this much noise and
complain this often aren't shipping
[ __ ] They don't do anything. They just
complain all day and they do not
represent engineering. It's annoying to
think that the negativity towards React
isn't a big deal because you see it
everywhere, but the people who are
shilling it are a very very very small
portion of the users of React. The
average React developer doesn't even
have a Twitter account, much less if
they do, they're probably not talking
about React on it very much. I didn't
think this YouTube channel would have
any viewers at all cuz I didn't think
many people wanted to watch videos about
software dev. And I was wrong. There's
way more than I expected, but it's still
like way less than a tenth of engineers.
Probably closer to a 50th. Those
engineers will be better than average
and help push their teams to be better,
too. They might send one of my videos to
a teammate, but the people who enjoy
consuming this content are not average.
And the people who like [ __ ] on this
content are even less than average.
They're very, very small portion of the
group. And when you're seeing all this
negativity on the internet, I encourage
that you take some time to talk to
people in the real world. Find a
developer who isn't online but talks
about these things at work and does it
for a living. See how they feel first
before being so confident that everyone
hates React and everyone's moving away
because when you talk to real
developers, you'll realize things are
not what you might think they are in
your little bubble. I even run into this
here because I'm an SF. So we are a
bubble of people who care a hell of a
lot more than average. And if I'm not
careful and I don't talk to developers
outside of this bubble whenever I have
the opportunity, then I will lose touch.
I'm just obsessive and nerdy about these
things. I would be looking into the
newest framework releases with or
without my YouTube channel. I just lucky
to have found a way to healthfully
engage, continue to push myself to learn
and grow and try new things, but also
profit from it, run a team on it, and
benefit from doing this instead of it
being a useless side quest I go on. The
people on the other side are trying to
justify not doing it, trying to justify
refusing to improve, trying to feel
better about the fact that they haven't
learned anything in 10 plus years. It's
a hell of a lot easier to talk [ __ ] on
React than it is to learn it. And humans
will always take the path of least
resistance without a little bit of
motivation to go the other way. So the
next time you see an engineer saying
something fragile and stupid, just think
to yourself, is the alternative easier
or harder? Is them understanding the
thing an easier path for them or is it a
harder path for them? And if the answer
is it's an easier path, that's probably
why they're doing it. Not because the
thing they're talking about is actually
bad. simply because it's easier to talk
[ __ ] than it is to learn the thing. And
then go apply this to my take on Flutter
and you'll understand the depth of my
hatred for it. Think I've made my
points. Engineers are fragile. There's
reasons why. And the ones that are the
most fragile are the ones that make the
most noise. Should start ignoring them.
People who build actual things are who
we should learn from. And we should take
the time to learn from the engineers who
aren't posting all the time, but are
actually shipping things every day. Let
me know what you guys think about this
one. And have fun in this comment
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