Many of us feel this way about his essays. He bloviates often as if on a pedestal without realizing how transparently arrogant he sounds. Many of his ideas inherently contradict his other ideas, or are simply vague and shallow. But he’s rich, so of course he must be an astute philosopher.
Thank you for your note, and for all you do to help moderate HN. Moderators like you help keep the site honest.
I have reviewed the link you provided. I agree with the guidelines noted therein. I asked some of my peers to give an objective read of my comment and they found it an accurate reflection of how they too responded to the posted essay. I cannot identify anything about it that was contrary to what is observed by many members of this community.
I do apologize to you though if you read it differently.
I can't help but feel this essay is literally 100x longer than it needs to be for the point it's trying to make. This sort of long-winded, redundant writing seems to have gone out of style a long time ago.
Yesterday I poured over two companies documentation. About 200 pages of their API docs only to find:
Dozen of typos. Errors in versions. Conflicts in examples. Broken examples.
I barely invest in this much reading but this time I did because I was trying to deliver and sure enough I'm able to benefit our entire product because of this effort.
By the way, and only because your comment suggests you care about detail and will find this valuable: it’s “pored over” unless there was a liquid you were dumping on them.
It’s hard to not be lazy in today’s corporate environments. You simply don’t get much for putting in the extra effort.
Hard work needs incentives. Companies want you to light that fire yourself so they don’t have to pay extra. It’s why I’m not curious about anything work-related (plus it’s hard to be interested in CRUD apps after a decade). Even if I was, I’d give the benefits to myself and not my company.
Perhaps I am a bit too cynical here, but I think that it is harder to criticize a long-winded article than a short bold statement -- thereby making it slightly more comfortable to publish. For a critical reader, it takes a lot of effort to read the entire article, then check that its flaws are not nullified by some additional arguments, etc.
> "Believe it or not, I tried to make this essay as short as I could. But its length at least means it acts as a filter. If you made it this far, you must be interested in doing great work. And if so you're already further along than you might realize, because the set of people willing to want to is small."
I scrolled up and down quickly through the essay, and the above was the very first thing I randomly read.
