> The code blog author writing useful advice is great. That same blog author submitting all his posts to Hacker News contributes nothing more to his greatness.
Submitting his blog to HN is part of communicating - and - spreading his advice to an even wider audience. And it's these sort of people who develop a following, influence and success.
You seem to be under some misguided belief that technical excellence is mutually exclusive to communication skills. On the contrary, what the other posters have been saying to your post is that you need both to be truly successful - they are both important and both need development.
A marketer who has nothing worthwhile to market is no better than a technical person who can't communicate his achievements.
Code only speaks for itself to other coders. If all you seek is to mix with other programmers or work on a small self-contained project that is purely code based, then that is fine (I say this in a non-derogatory manner).
But most things in life are not self-contained - you have to mix and interact with people who are not subject matter experts - and with no communication skills, or a belief that 'people should recognise good code when they see it', you'll never go as far as you could if you had accepted that self-promotion is a necessary part of interacting with others.
To a degree yes it does. But an inability to self-promote will, in most cases, limit your influence/reach. Good example is Chrome/Safari/Firefox/IE - they all do roughly the same things, for most people, there is little difference between them.
Google realises the need to self-promote ... they just released their 'Dear Sophie' ad pitched at a wider audience than just the tech community.
> the software actualized by code DOES speak for itself to anyone capable of using it.
And this is the point that one of the parent posters made - this attitude of 'people should be able to tell how brilliant my code/software is' is really arrogant (the parent posters words, not mine). Your customers/users will almost never be more knowledgable about your software than you are - so by not self-promoting, you will actually be losing customers/influence/users because they will pass on your products if they don't understand the benefit to them. This applies to the most brilliant of customers to the dumbest.
any yet the self-promotion of browsers has NOTHING to do with their quality!
ms did a great job of self promoting ie and it's a piece of shit.
firefox gained a huge market share because the actual experience of the code is brilliant, not because of any self promotion.
all self promotion does is add a layer of noise over figuring out what to use. that is the ONLY reason google advertises chrome - because all the marketing scum out there has made it necessary.
So now we've reached the conclusion that marketing in of itself is bullshit? The evolution of marketing has lead us to cause the so called "scum" to exist because of how traditionally effective marketing has been. Now that it's so widespread its becoming increasingly ineffective. Thus, enters the scum, or in other words more creative ways to interrupt your attention.
The techie (or Silicon Valley) view of the economic world, while fruitful, is a very meritocratic. We only believe that cream of the crop always rises to the top. Unfortunately this is not how the world works and the OP's suggestion about self-promotion is evidence of such (read - Jobs v Wozniak). We read stories from Steve Blank and PG about "just make a good product and the rest will follow". While good advice, I can count on my hand the number of products that "suck" that are way more successful than the ones that don't suck. It's the reason SAP, MS, and Oracle still exist.
Why are techies like this? I believe its because we are extremely analytical pattern hunters - we hate replication and deficiencies. Marketing to us represents an inefficiency in the system because it doesn't represent 1 or 0.
> Why are techies like this? I believe its because we are extremely analytical pattern hunters - we hate replication and deficiencies. Marketing to us represents an inefficiency in the system because it doesn't represent 1 or 0
Actually it's not just that. True, techies recognize that marketing represents an inefficiency in the system, but, lacking social skills, techies are naive enough to think that they can improve the system. They can't, and they don't understand why (but look ma, I made a goooood product, why won't anyone buy it?). They assume that everyone has plenty of time on their hands to read the latest reviews on the product they buy, to compare specifications, and then to trial-test the product themselves, all the while being careful so as "not to fall into a marketing scam." No, most people are not like that. Most people make snap judgements in a split-second about whether or not to buy a product and if they feel like they spend too much time deciding then they simply move on. Techies specifically choose to ignore things like public image and social status (actually they replace the status ladder by their own one), and consequently suffer from it.
A non-technical user of this hypothetical iOS app won’t be able to tell if the author had to do some clever algorithmic hacks to get an acceptable level of performance, or if s/he spent a whole day figuring out how to work around an undocumented bug in some versions of iOS, or if the whole program is really a mountain of kludges that will cause endless pain to the next coder who tries to add a feature to it.
Submitting his blog to HN is part of communicating - and - spreading his advice to an even wider audience. And it's these sort of people who develop a following, influence and success.
You seem to be under some misguided belief that technical excellence is mutually exclusive to communication skills. On the contrary, what the other posters have been saying to your post is that you need both to be truly successful - they are both important and both need development.
A marketer who has nothing worthwhile to market is no better than a technical person who can't communicate his achievements.