Tech Influencers
Some are great, and some aren’t
I wrote quite a bit of text about dealing with plagiarism, as well as a time a tech influencer ripped off a blog post of mine. To save you time if you are just here to learn about good tech influencers, I will provide some links to resources.
There was a strange trend I noticed on YouTube while watching software engineer videos — multiple people would make videos that essentially had the same title and filled their content with the same template. I thought this was really bizarre…it looked like tech influencers were simply churning out content while blatantly ripping off other people.
“I’m Bad At Coding” is a pretty bold admission if you have your real face and name on a popular YouTube channel and write code for a living. I find the admission considerably less bold if you are just bandwagoning.
I posted a blog post to ask why social media influencers do this (I noticed the same trend outside of tech — people just take video titles and video formats from each other) and received an interesting response, but the tl;dr of this instance is that it does not seem anything unethical was going on. Pooja Dutt made a video that got 564K views. About two weeks later, Jason Goodison made a video with the same title. They know each other. They have collaborated.
Not sure about TiffInTech, though.
My One Interaction With Software Engineer Influencers
I wrote a blog post called “If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a software engineering job?” A little while later, a really popular social media influencer/tech influencer made a video called “If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a software engineering job?” She made the same points I had, even taking exact phrases I had used word-for-word, but did not acknowledge me at any point. After some back-and-forth she at least put a link to my article in the description, but not in a good faith way…instead, she just googled the title and put the first six results in her description, even though the majority were just forum posts that went back to my article.
I’ve already shared this story ad nauseam, and I am still upset about it to this day. It just left such a bad taste in my mouth and made me wonder how many tech influencers just rip off content and monetize it without any acknowledgement or contribution. Compare this to what the Tech Team Weekly and ChangeLog podcasts did…they cited my work, said my name, and added something to the conversation. All this YouTube influencer did was repurpose a blog post into video format without permission.
While looking up the blog post again to write this article, I found this
Some site called FlexSub made an article with the same title as well, but in this case it was blatant plagiarism — in the case of the tech influencer, it was not technically plagiarism (just annoying). They used the same images, they used the same anecdotes, they basically just copy and pasted the whole thing. The only thing they did was remove my name and description at the bottom of the post, which was irritating because it indicates to me that this was an actual human.
This part is…interesting. Whenever I find my blog content lifted, which is rarely, I realize that they do change some words with synonyms. Obviously I didn’t write, “If you expand the other threads in this post, you will find other debates over whether or not the software engineer procedure is incorrect.” That’s just not a natural-sounding sentence. They took something I wrote and rephrased it.
I thought I would send them a very stern email, which would be really funny for this blog. I would write, “What am I going to do in 24 hours? Nothing. But it sure sounds threatening.”
Well, I’m about to share with you the biggest plot twist of all. They actually removed it within 24 hours. Nice.
Did not see that one coming.
What Is A Tech Influencer?
A social media influencer is defined in this way:
Influencers are someone (or something) with the power to affect the buying habits or quantifiable actions of others by uploading some form of original — often sponsored — content to social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat or other online channels.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influencer_marketing
A good way into the conversation on tech influencers is in this reddit post. By the way, another user tried to plagiarized this post for karma. In this case, it wasn’t a rephrase-everything content scrape…they quite simply copy and pasted it as their own.
I don’t know if it’s fair to mention names, but we all know who these people are: Jo. Tech, S. Raval. These “influencers” run down stream to lesser influential people on medium/towardsdatscience.com/etc…
So why do they to (sic) this? It’s painfully clear; they just want to sell courses or make money on medium. They are only interested in their own brand, they have little of your own interest. How can you tell? How can you distinguish legitimate content from illegitimate content? By this simple trick; if there’s something they would lose if their words are found inaccurate, you know it’s illegitimate content.
This is what I mean. I mentor Berkeley/Stanford students all the time, being an Alma Mater in there. If my advice to them on finding employment turns out to be wrong, I have little if not nothing to lose. Because I have nothing to gain whether or not my advice turns out to be correct. But that’s not the case for these “influencers”. This is what I mean. If their advice turns out to be wrong, it has implications on their revenue, their branding, their ability to sell courses.
— https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/o8zdqu/these_tech_influencers_are_the_reason_why_you/
While “social media influencer” has a clear definition, “tech influencer” seems to be a looser term — if you google for a definition, you are likely to find results about people who purchase and review tech content…which is a different topic. By the way this Reddit user defines it, I can only surmise that anyone who makes money on social media sharing tech content is a tech influencer.
The only reason I would argue that this blog does not make me a tech influencer is because I have not made money on it — I would define myself as a tech influencer, maybe, because between my various Medium accounts I have made about $1000 on the paywall. I would also describe anyone who successfully uses affiliate links as a tech influencer, but this is where I think the argument gets shaky.
If anyone questions this definition, I may just start writing “software engineer influencer” in the future. At least that is a somewhat made-up term with a looser definition.
NeetCode, Nick White, and Back To Back SWE are all excellent coding interview resources. Some people on various forums have defended NeetCode in particular, whom I would describe as the Khan Academy of software engineer interviews. Some of them are starting their own courses. They don’t have the greatest qualifications — you can purchase books instead by people who have founded billion-dollar companies, or invented popular programming languages — but these three are very good teachers and the video format is a helpful learning style.
So I’ll say it again: I think some of these tech influencers are way better than others.
Why It Matters
Software engineering is actively creating alternatives to a traditional education. I went to a college, which has professors — when you take a bootcamp or self-learn, you have to do your own vetting.
I think this is part of the reason the Reddit post about was so critical. Some of these tech influencers are not very qualified. Some tech influencers are much better at being influencers than they are at their actual field. It could be more beneficial, instead, to simply find very successful and/or experienced people and ask them questions. Though the Reddit user did not say it, I would add that it might be useful as well to…
…I don’t know…
Read books.
I don’t, but you should. Like watching an actual college lecture on YouTube, at least books go through some degree of editing/vetting.
Closing Thoughts
This has become my blog topic of the week. I have been writing at length about social media, and all the dangers I think it poses. I also have to grapple with the irony of blogging this, as Medium is just another form of social media that dresses itself up like informative content and news.
There are much deeper problems in the age of TikTok, Meta, and the fall of the YouTube dislike button…but that is for the other blogs to explore.
