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Ask HN: Is the world suffering from shallow knowledge?

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Re: Ask HN: Is the world suffering from shallow knowledge?

#61

Post by giantg2 »

"I couldn't help but notice that many young people don't want to spend months pulling their hair off to get a deeper understanding of what they do... they want to obtain value very quickly."

It might be that we have to obtain value quickly.

I'd love to dive deep into my systems and tech. My company doesn't want that. They want someone who can just knock out half-decent code as dastardly as possible. There's no thought to actually allowing or helping employees become experts. They don't want experts because they can't afford them, so they create an environment where everyone is mediocre.

Re: Ask HN: Is the world suffering from shallow knowledge?

#62

Post by origin_path »

Syonyk wrote: post #9

The tech industry has "eaten its young." By this, I mean that it has systematically destroyed the source of people who grow up with the passion to learn tech at the deep levels that make for the people the tech industry likes to hire for the core, foundational stuff that makes things run. About a decade ago, I understand Google's SRE hiring pipeline was struggling, because Google had singlehandedly destroyed their be…

That's probably just due to lack of demand. Competitive new operating systems are so expensive that nobody writes them anymore, they just use Linux, and then you don't need so many people working on that for anything except drivers.

In the unlikely event that there starts to be shortages of kernel and firmware devs then salary changes will be enough to sort it out. Fundamentally, that sort of work isn't that hard to learn. C is not a complex language, the design is normally fixed by the hardware and software environment that's provided, the APIs don't churn every five minutes and so on.

As for SGX. Security is always hard. If your metric for deciding if someone understands something is "they never make security bugs ever" then you'll be perennially disappointed in how nobody seems to understand any really existing system.

Re: Ask HN: Is the world suffering from shallow knowledge?

#64

Post by lwswl »

issa wrote: post #28
boredemployee wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Statistically, the opposite is happening: human knowledge is becoming deeper. Do you have a source to point to? (honestly wondering) >> to converse intelligently about things outside one's area of expertise Just had this conversation the other day. 90% of my old college teachers (engineering) could talk about and explain in depth many many topics out of their field (philosophy, history, geography and what not). Th…

I think it is important to remember not to value judge these sorts of widespread skills. Does it matter today that I can't shape a flint or ride a horse?

Presumably you can use a lighter and drive a car though.

One of those two may no longer be the case for people soon...

Re: Ask HN: Is the world suffering from shallow knowledge?

#66

Post by cosmodisk »

I think the number of people that are deep down into some specific knowledge is always fairly low. Our world currently works in a way that big majority can benefit from the work of a few. There are only a few thousand people in the world who design and create new medication, nuclear plants,or some high end microprocessors.
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