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I'm tired of the fact that ordinary sellers impersonate developers and dishonor the industry. They make the world worse



When Dud released a video about the valley, I was very upset. I didnā€™t know what he was talking about, but I immediately drew my brain: successful successes speak of overcoming, the spirit of entrepreneurship, millions of bucks raised, and how much their shitty application affects the world.

Then I thought - I need to look, condemn and bang the article. About the fact that Dud is an asshole, but in the present development everything is different. Two months have passed already, but I still could not force myself to look at it.

My news feeds were inundated with discussions, admiration and criticism of the release. Every time I read something about it, I experienced an incomprehensible almost physical pain. Well, the country's chief journalist spoke about my industry, but he didnā€™t tell how I wanted. You can live with it. Yes, with all my overflowing and disheartened techology, I'm still a little envious little guy. I also want to sit in a coffee shop in Palo Alto and watch me receive a check for five million dollars. But look, I grew up in Russia and have long learned to ignore my pathological envy. I havenā€™t been hurt from her for a long time.

I certainly didnā€™t bomb out of envy - and for a long time I did not know why.


I recently launched a podcast with my friend and we needed an interesting guest. We were afraid to write to famous people, and just called our friends. But then my friend remembered that he had somehow interviewed Andrei Breslav - the creator of Kotlin - and there were contacts. We called Andrey and had a good conversation with him . It was hard for me - I was nervous and embarrassed because I was in awe of him. In front of me was a man who came up with the language of programming. And not some academic jap, but a thing that is used and respected in the industry. A language that I personally thought was simply gorgeous. My co-host was not in awe. He is a journalist, and for him the creator of YaPa is not a quantity at all.

When the recording ended, we said goodbye, I went to smoke - my hands trembled so that a cigarette fell out of them. And then I realized. That's why the stupid issue of the valley hurt me so much. Dud made an issue about Russian people from the industry, as if showing - here he is, the top of Russian IT. And I just spoke with the creator of the world programming language, who lives in St. Petersburg.

Any user application that you have created is a contribution to the world. And the programming language that you wrote is a billion of such contributions to the world. If you wrote a conditional Kotlin, even if you damn worked as the weakest member of the team that made it - you stayed for centuries. A huge number of things have already been built, and will still be built on it. The contribution is so gigantic that it simply cannot be appreciated - it is priceless.

I am a big dreamer, but even in my head always dreaming about everything in the world, there is no greater dream from the professional than building my own PL, which will be used by many people. Being one of the creators of a programming language is the pinnacle of a software engineerā€™s career, and the best dream a programmer can have.

You understand, when you are just starting to write your first console chess, in between ora to the compiler, that your code does not work, you dream of becoming an important and cool programmer. And for me then, important and cool programmers were Bjorn Straustrup and Dennis Ritchie. To a lesser extent, Linus Torvalds, Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak. All these are the people who created the industry. Pure techies. Iā€™m not saying that they didnā€™t want and didnā€™t raise those millions of dollars (old Bill raised $ 100 billion), but I personally didnā€™t buy that from them. They invented the development as it is now.

I also dreamed of inventing. He spent seven years in the industry, and began to understand that it would not work. But he continued to kick his average brains, because it's a good dream. Yes, I'm stupid, but strange, but too lazy to really study and work well. But I like the idea of ā€‹ā€‹putting my life in unsuccessful attempts to bring something to this world. Because at least I can find things that are definitely not promising - so that the smarter guys do not spend time on them.

I bombed because I realized - my dream means nothing more. Now that people dream of getting into IT, they dream of becoming businessmen, not inventors and scientists.

Now you donā€™t need to dream of opening a cool working system, you just have to dream of asking yourself a relocate and convincing a fat bag from the valley to invest in some garbage about which you managed to tell him first. Because in development, Phil, this is whatā€™s going on. And morons like you do some garbage. There is no need to talk about them; there is nothing to dream of being like them. You are idiots, and smart guys have been raising millions in the best place on earth for a long time.

This is very painful. I recalled how I once helped a friend interview the guys who raised a bunch of dough in the valley and started figuring their product. The conversation just killed me. They explained to me with a blue eye - here we came up with an idea, it won the competition, and we were paid a trip to the states. There, we realized that the idea would not go in - and everyone around was talking about other things - we threw out our idea and came up with a new one that fit more into trends. Zachody over night, and we were given grandmother. Their developer, who proudly called himself CTO, did not even really understand programming, said that he was not particularly interested in writing code, and that no one was really conducting technical conversations in the valley - everything was just about management and presentation.

People say with inspiration how they dream to change the world. And after five minutes - that they absolutely do not care what to develop. In my understanding, a person who wants to change the world sees a terrible problem, lights up with its solution, finds an idea and tries to realize it no matter what. Breslav also has a startup - and he is just like that. Breslav will not throw his idea into the landfill if the investor calls it useless bullshit.

These same guys are ready for a second to give up everything that they believe in if investors doubt them. That is, they donā€™t even hide - yes, they really donā€™t give a poker what to do. And the world is also poher. If only someone invested in it. Since then, time has passed, and their startup burst. There and the road.


But it bombs me that the image of these nonsense parasites on people like Breslav. If the ordinary viewer Dude, who is written with delight after a film about the valley, listens to the technical monologue of Breslav, his brains will boil. He will think, "Nichrome himself these IT people are smart." And then he will see the next businessman from the valley, who calls himself a developer, and decides - "well, that means this same intellectual."

Nichrome. Breslav, Straustrup and Ritchie have been gnawing at the most complex sciences for years to build the foundation for the future of technology. Businessmen are very, very different. And I have nothing against entrepreneurship, itā€™s also difficult. But it infuriates me when ordinary sellers impersonate scientists in order to look cooler in the eyes of people.

All this is not only painful, but also destructive. Well, if the empty-handed people come into the industry, they slander someoneā€™s money and fly into the pipe. It is scary when really talented and cleverest people abandon the development of technology for the sake of stupid undertakings in a colorful wrapper. There are still a bunch of smart engineers who decided not to make their own language, compiler, virtual machine, operating system or database - and instead they poured brains into a product that simply amuses people, killing their time, and after a year will cease to be fashionable.

It is scary that people who are just dreaming of getting into the industry will not see the difference between a cool engineer and empty-handed people - after all, both do the same thing. They will see enough, spit on complex textbooks and go to learn to make presentations - and then there will not be even cool engineers who are offended. But it seems to me too early to stop the development of complex systems and rush to collect bright appendices from ready-made layouts.

I know that the world needs everything - both entertainment and complex systems. But I am protesting the bias in the wrong direction. This complexity should be mainstream, and entertainment should be a complement. The dream of becoming an inventor and scientist should remain flagship. She should get all the attention. And the dream of becoming a businessman is a minor error for those who did not succeed.

But you can believe me, from this moment on, everyone, absolutely his mother, every person who suddenly decided to become a programmer - will dream of becoming one of these valley idiots. Many of them will succeed (gods, any monkey can do it), and they will come to hire you - so that you make applications for them that are fart-tapu instead of moving technological progress.


Watch my podcast - issue with Breslav here

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