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We have used too many levels of abstractions

unixsheikh.com

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Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#361

Post by paiute »

flatline wrote: post #294
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually see this with new frontend devs. They know only full SPA frameworks, they have never seen a dump of an HTTP message, headers and verbs are abstract things to them. Hell, many of them don't know you can have fully functional websites with zero JS, including payment, video, login, etc. I started to write an HTMX tutorial ( https://www.bitecode.dev/p/a-little-taste-of-htmx-part-1 ) because I noticed a l…

I have worked with interns and young devs just out of school who are sharp as tacks. I had an intern a few years ago, the first task we paired on was to figure out why our MySql connections from Qt were misbehaving. We stepped through the application code, the Qt code, found where it was failing, and ended up backporting a Qt patch from upstream to fix it. Yes, I gave him some guidance, but once he caught on he was a…

I also see plenty of smart young guns. And if i think back I was better myself when I was younger. I’m less excited by digging into problems with each passing year.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#363

Post by CapstanRoller »

bogota wrote: post #349

This is a constant source of pain for me since I started working 12 years ago after finishing college. I noticed when most people came to me with issues it was because they were afraid or just too lazy or didn’t know they could just read the source code or docs and go one level under the abstraction to figure something out. My entire career so far i spent trying to get onto teams where others were doing the same as m…

What sort of jobs do you look for in order to be able to do this work?

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#364

Post by lr4444lr »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #12

I think there is one interesting angle to this problem. I am someone who grew up with the technology, as the levels of abstractions were being added. I am now benefiting from all those accumulated decades of knowledge. As the IT / development world was changing, I had enormous privilege and comfort to learn the things at the pace they were happening. Being able to assimilate changes over long decades. Be a witness to…

I suspect this happens in all technical professions as things advance: you learn first principles and low level implementations in a formal training program/degree, but the demands of the industry to be productive require that you use and trust abstractions.

Even my doctors don't know some things about various drugs they prescribe me, because I can afford to spend the time reading the literature that only pertains to me. I'm sure their biochemistry background means they could definitely outperform me if they wanted to do a deep dive, but they know the important parts, and they know how my condition stacks up in the compendium of total knowledge and clinical experience they have. I don't think anything important is lost if they cannot at the drop of a hat tell me the half life and mechanism of action if I grill them on it.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#365

Post by sgarland »

kazen44 wrote: post #118
onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I mean by "precious few". I am continuously hiring new people, mostly senior devs and tech leads. Maybe one in a hundred has any understanding of what virtual memory is. Or why one process can't access memory of another process and, if you really want it, how to set it up. Two decades ago that was common knowledge. It went away just as the knowledge of how networking works. Currently, if they try to open…

>It went away just as the knowledge of how networking works. Currently, if they try to open a connection and it does not work they are pretty much at a complete loss to what happened, where and how to fix it also, devs seem to not understand that a computer network is basically a massive distributed system (on the routing level anyways), and that things inside this system can and do fail nearly constantly. things lik…

The number of times people write code that immediately tries hitting the DB again upon failure - with no back off or jitter - is entirely too high.

Assume everything is broken, all the time.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#366

Post by sgarland »

maccard wrote: post #76
onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I mean by "precious few". I am continuously hiring new people, mostly senior devs and tech leads. Maybe one in a hundred has any understanding of what virtual memory is. Or why one process can't access memory of another process and, if you really want it, how to set it up. Two decades ago that was common knowledge. It went away just as the knowledge of how networking works. Currently, if they try to open…

How often does a front-end developer need to know about /proc/pid/mem? I think it's important to keep things in perspective here - when I took my first programming job the first week was setup. On my team, our onboarding has you branch, review and merge on your first day. Those abstractions allow for people to focus on the areas they're working on, and iterate there. A game developer doesn't need to understand the co…

Great question - is their app deployed to a container? In that case, they should know about it, because buried deep under layers of abstraction are cgroups. Answering questions like “why did Node try to use 32 cores” is much easier when you understand this.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#367

Post by codegeek »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #324
codegeek wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not elitist to point out the flaws in modern web devs who don't know what an HTTP protocol is and the structure of an HTTP request (headers vs body etc). I interview a lot of them who cannot explain the difference between a form submitted directly vs through Ajax but they surely know how to send a POST request through node/express.

I don’t even know the difference between a form submitted through JS vs a browser. Who cares? Unless there’s a problem, there’s no reason to know such things. And I’ve written http webservers by hand. People here have way too much confidence in their interview questions being a good signal for experience. It’s pretty wild.

"Who cares? "

You are proving my point. You should care.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#368

Post by euniceee3 »

klysm wrote: post #275
MyFirstSass wrote: post #236

As a 15+ years webdev my recent projects in the front-end are almost pure "vanilla JS" (Just JS) + Html, and CSS with only Petite Vue / Alpine on top. I find the modern Vue, React etc. stacks absolutely insufferably complex and prone to breaking in 1000 places each time you upgrade some package, or change som random thing in the already stupidly complex "Tooling/Build" chains people are setting up by default. And it'…

Although I agree that many sites could get away without the bloat of client side JavaScript frameworks, sometimes the complexity is truly justified and it enables you to deliver a better product. Complex dashboards with data intensive interactions and explorations are so much easier with React or something similar

Agree with you here. Also need the frameworks to scale work out to a team.

But that is what subdomains are for, dashboard.example.com will deal with all that over head, but forcing the marketing-friedly splash page on example.com to be in React is overkill.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#369

Post by nemo »

foxhop wrote: post #174
bongobingo1 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there good historical examples of this happening, where foundational knowledge is completely lost? I know I have read about it in books as a fiction, but I assume it must have already happened here before. Maybe its an oxymoronic question to ask, seeing as if its lost we might not even know its lost, but more in the vein of "We put the lime in the mortar because this is what we have always done", unaware of the a…

[flagged]

With the tech and politics of the late 1960s it would have been far easier to actually land on the moon than fake it with the vast reams of evidence we have.

Re: We have used too many levels of abstractions

#370

Post by IgniteTheSun »

lebuffon wrote: post #225

This situation was predicted in a sci-fi short-story that I read a very long time ago. Unfortunately I cannot remember the title nor the author. It makes me wonder if we are a hitting a pyramid depth in tech that exceeds a practical limit for the human mind and life-span. One solution is to get a better mind. Interesting coincidence that there are few in the works...

Are you thinking of the short story "The Feeling of Power" by Isaac Asimov.

(A technician discovers how to do simple arithmetical calculations in a world where no remembers arithmetic since its all automated away.)

More information regarding the short story on its Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

The short story itself can be found online.

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