Complaining about spammers is kind of a futile endeavor, and in this case, it even seems that there are people behind it which kinda makes me feel bad to complain about it, but I keep seeing this spam-type substance on my sacred forums.
Many of these posts come from a blog called devinterrupted. They post things related to "engineering management" type topics. And, they often "hit a chord" and get highly upvoted and replied to. It's often the type of thing everyone can add their two cents on, or offload some steam. One person called it engagement spam and that seems about right.
This wouldn't all be so bad, but it is sometimes posted with formulaic titles, created by sock puppet accounts and promoting a specific company (linearB). I gathered as many posts from them as I can, helpfully grouped into clickbait-y categories.
Update 2023-01-06: a Reddit user reached out to me who is quite knowledgeable about astroturfing campaigns and confirmed my suspicions here that it's all sock puppet accounts
“There should never be coding exercises in technical interviews. It favors people who have time to do them. Disfavors people with FT jobs and families. Plus, your job won’t have people over your shoulder watching you code.” My favorite hot take from a panel on 'Treating Devs Like Human Beings.' https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/zkj6pb/there_should_never_be_coding_exercises_in/ (14k comments, 8.7k, Dec 12 2022, one of the most upvoted articles of the year on reddit /r/programming)
“We all use products that are amazing when the company is like 5 devs, just building what makes sense. They grow & through failures of leadership, they end up with bloated product teams that don't understand the work of developers." Former GitHub VP pulling no punches in recent pod on state of tech (413 comments, 3.2k, Dec 20, 2022) https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/zr9tsr/we_all_use_products_that_are_amazing_when_the/
TIL That developers in larger companies spend 2.5 more hours a week/10 more hours a month in meetings than devs in smaller orgs. It's been dubbed the "coordination tax." (https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/zg6ec9/til_that_developers_in_larger_companies_spend_25/, 517 comments, 4.5k, Dec 8, 2022)
TIL 9 out of 10 devs said they would give up 24% of their lifetime earnings if they got more meaning in their jobs. Also, 84% say they're disengaged at work and don't trust their company leaders. https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/u9ogin/til_9_out_of_10_devs_said_they_would_give_up_24/
TIL about the "Intent-Perception Gap" in programming. Best exemplified when a CTO or manager casually suggests something to their developers they take it as a new work commandment or direction for their team. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/u7dv5m/til_about_the_intentperception_gap_in_programming/
TIL after auditing 2,000 dev teams, data scientists found that programmers are waiting on average 4+ days for their review requests to be picked up by other ... (partial result from google, post super deleted https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/xh649i/deleted_by_user/)
"Dev burnout drastically decreases when you actually ship things regularly. Burnout is caused by crap like toil, rework and spending too much mental energy on bottlenecks." Cool conversation with the head engineer of Slack on how burnout is caused by all the things that keep devs from coding. (https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/vold1e/dev_burnout_drastically_decreases_when_you/ also https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/zwjxsf/dev_burnout_drastically_decreases_when_your_team/)
"Dev managers' most overlooked responsibility is to treat dev bandwidth as a valuable, limited resource. It's the highest leverage for every software-driven company and needs to be calculated as such." Cool convo with Stripe's top engineer on how the dev org connects to the rest of the company https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/wwsrw5/dev_managers_most_overlooked_responsibility_is_to/
"Developers do nothing good after 45 hours of work." Fun conversation with head developer of Netflix on the dumbest things engineering orgs do to kill productivity - they really take a crap on retros. (Post deleted https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/umhf4v/developers_do_nothing_good_after_45_hours_of_work/)
“The longer a developer assumes a code review will take, the longer they will take to respond to it.” Interesting case for adding estimated review times to pull requests (Post deleted after being called a sock puppet account https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/z2bo70/comment/ixgfn2x/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 )
Study: Developers spend over 2 days a week just waiting for other developers to review their code (Post deleted) https://www.reddit.com/r/java/comments/t5f6i7/study_developers_spend_over_2_days_a_week_just/
"The modern pull-request process has caused inefficiencies, particularly review delays, as it isn't automated, so speed depends on the availability of the right code reviewer." Interesting blog arguing for filtering pull requests based on risk in order to promote "continuous merge." (Post deleted, called out as a spammer account https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/zdbtfr/the_modern_pullrequest_process_has_caused/)
"Too many companies treat dev burnout like a 24-hour flu where they can just send a person home or tell them to take the day off." A trained therapist-turned-engineer reveals how she diagnoses healthy dev teams from ones doomed to fail. https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/wonkt6/too_many_companies_treat_dev_burnout_like_a/
There was another highly upvoted post about "cycle time" posted to /r/programming probably that I cannot find now
The devinterrupted blog/podcast appears to be related to the linearB company, who advocate a notion of "cycle time" (https://linearb.io/blog/cycle-time/) as a developer metric engineering managers should look at. They interview some interesting people but someone referred to it as "engagement spam". They promote the "gitStream" product on all the posts on devinterrupted. https://linearb.io/dev/gitstream/
Update 2023: I would bet the "contextkeeper" blog is related because some sockpuppet accounts are posting from both blogs
I'd recommend linearB stop posting these things, or pretending that they are not behind these posts.