Ask HN: Is HN an echo chamber?

16 points

11 years ago

From my observation, the software community seems to be largely segmented into two main subcultures or school of thoughts (while there are many other shades in between or at their intersection): the hacker one and the non hacker one (I will use "enterprise" for lack of a better word).

The hacker subculture has a more craftsmanship oriented approach to software development while the enterprise subculture has a more engineering oriented approach.

Some technologies that tend to be more commonly associated with the hacker subculture would be Linux, Python/Ruby/Go, REST, etc. And with the enterprise: Java/C#, Windows, Oracle, SOAP, UML, etc. (I might be a bit off here)

Obviously, Hacker News is largely dominated by the hacker subculture and since it is my primary source of information, I am sometimes wondering if I am missing out on some valuable knowledge from the other side of the industry (e.g. I stumbled upon infoq.com recently and realised I didn't understand half of the jargon - IT governance, AOP, DDD, APM, etc.).

Do you think my assessment is somewhat accurate? If so, any actionable advice on how to get more exposure to the non-hacker side of the industry?

9 comments