421–430 of 564 posts
One cause I've seen of this is the "college is not needed to be a coder" trend from the past few years (decade?). it is true that most of my skills were acquired after college, but there is some sort of global system understanding that you get from college (in my case computer+software+network engineering) where you can quickly narrow down potential sources of a problem, all the way down to say, the TCP/IP stack, CPU…
So is the argument that everyone should be a mechanic? Including the long haul truckers, the race car drivers, stunt people, taxi drivers, etc? Such people use their vehicles professionally, full time. Obviously technical knowledge is useful to them in case of a problem or to fine tune their vehicle. But in general, no, being able to steer without a steering wheel doesn’t really do much for them. It’s okay to special…
> Question everything. Especially things that don't make any sense to you. Don't just assume that someone else knows better - that's how you quickly turn into a blind follower. That’s what I do by default since I was a kid, and I can tell you the social pressure not to is significant. I recall an interview I did once, and one reason I failed it was "questioning everything". It didn’t even felt like it, I was just ask…
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I once worked with a back-end dev who didn't know what RAM was. He knew C# and ASP.NET but couldn't point to RAM on a motherboard or explain what it really did. About all he could describe it as was "temporary storage". Their lack of basic knowledge of how computers work really showed in the crap code they wrote. It was no wonder it was their code that ate up all the RAM on the server because they never put much thou…
> but couldn't point to RAM on a motherboard or explain what it really did. To be fair, the last time I "opened up" a computer and changed its RAM was about 10-12 years ago, and since that time I've only worked on a Mac Mini and on a laptop meant that "opening up" computers became a thing of the past.
Suppose someone is a relatively well versed professional but they have a hole in their understanding…They don’t know X - where X is HTTP verbs or linear algebra or Assembly or the difference between Java and JavaScript or how to write vanilla JavaScript in general… it’s very likely that those skills are immaterial to their job. It’s also very likely that they will never need those skills. All of computing is layering…
The technology that underlies vacuums is a lot more mature and stable than those that in modern software development. So even if modern-day vacuum engineer doesn’t understand AC at the same depth as their predecessors, it’s less likely to be the Achilles heel that the author is referring to for modern devs having little understanding of computer technology.
Software simply mirrors the development of modern society. Highly complex and relying on countless abstractions to tame that complexity and be able to operate. This design is sort-of working under plain sailing conditions (lots of available resources, booming markets, peaceful cooperation). But it is very non-resilient under stress (subdued expectations, broken promises, resource scarcity, hostility and strife). Reme…
It is all about how much risk do we tolerate in the western world. People are getting nervous because if a war with China would happen with a rapid de-globalization something akin to the "1970s energy crisis" would happen in the semiconductor and digital world. Well price of our beloved computers and devices would probably need to go more than 10x and around 100x for things to get really interesting. If this would ha…
>> Some students today apparently don't even know what files and folders are? This isnt just coders. I work with people every day who do not understand directory structures. I blame "cloud" apps like o365. They dont understand that the human can dictate where a file is saved and stored. They just expect that the machine will save it somewhere according to the type of file, or that all files for a project will be in o…
Old man yelling at cloud vibes. Yes some people are experts and some are just adequate. Nothing new here. Not everyone can be a messiah like the author, who spends half of this short essay telling us how great he is. This article has almost nothing to do with abstraction. The author loses interest in his own thesis after the first two paragraphs.
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With all due respect, this is some elitist nonsense. Sure, a frontend dev who strictly works on that won’t know much about, say, the OS layer. But they don’t have to, it’s not part of their job in any way. There is no shortage of young people that work on areas that makes them require deep knowledge of many different layers of the stack, it is simply not necessary for every IT-related job. But one can absolutely pick…
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've started nearly every position in my career in a different domain without prior knowledge, including workflows, protocols and the languages that implement them. I may be an extreme case, but we exist and your process inherently excludes us. I've worked in robotics, consumer electronics, healthcare, fintech (not even in that order, although that probably would have made more sense.) I've delivered in each domain as well as my expert colleagues. But if you asked me to implement a LLM, I'd shug and tell you I don't know how, but I _would_ explain my process for HOW I would learn to.
(Edit: typo)