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Title

The "Hustle" culture in Software Development

Description

Have you noticed that there is more and more content available to help you learn how to program? For every topic under the sun, there seems to be a blog article or video of superficially reasonable quality. For every question on StackOverflow, there's an effusive answer with examples. This is all pretty great, honestly. However, with the increase in content. there is also the need to be able to wade through it. How old is that StackOverflow answer? How appropriate is the answer to your particular question? Are there other solutions? Maybe easier ones? Maybe more modern ones? Has this solution to this particular problem been addressed in more recent versions? This isn't new, of course. You should have been asking yourself questions like this for quite a while with these so-called expert-community sites. However, now, we're also inundated with content from people hustling to make a living as professional, freelance, advice-givers online. This is not a bad thing, necessarily. It's great that the unsung masters that formerly only provided value inside of a single company are bringing their didactic abilities to the world. That's not all that they're doing, though. Those who are on a subscriber model <i>have</i> to publish content in order to keep their subscribers. They don't even necessarily have to produce anything of lasting value---they just have to produce <i>something</i>. They just have to retain and/or grow their subscriber base. This leads to nice-looking, but ultimately useless "fluff" content that rehashes an old concept with a few flashy graphics or an accompanying video. And the videos! Many of them take 15 minutes to explain a concept that you could describe adequately in a paragraph and a code example. The Microsoft MVP bloggers are very conspicuous these days: there are many who are publishing an article or two per week "explaining" a C# 10 feature that has already been explained to death in dozens of other high-profile articles---to say nothing of the article <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/welcome-to-csharp-10/" source="Microsoft Dev Blogs" author="Kathleen Dollard">Welcome to C# 10</a>, which comes straight from the horse's mouth, is wonderfully written, and, honestly, says all there needs to be said about these features. But, if you search for "C# 10", there is a flood of repetitive and, sometimes, outdated, information on C# 10. And these authors are all still churning out the articles. They're doing it for the clicks, for the ad-views, for the subscribers. It's a living. I get it. But, overall, it contributes to a very muddled picture that makes it difficult for people looking for advice and assistance.