The rise of judgement over technical skill

Post by zelphirkalt » Tue, Jun 03, 2025, 9:52 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #164

zelphirkalt wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have built _a lot_ of things on top of shaky foundations. It is one of the tragedies of human society, that we are too resistant to rebuilding parts and accept the status quo too easily. There are network effects at play and probably other effects as well. Basing our work on solid foundations, we shouldn't need to look towards the ground, when reaching up.

I remember reading a rather silly fantasy book, back in the '90s. It was obviously written by a UNIX guy, and it featured a software geek that gets transported into a realm where magic works. He then started to build a foundation of spells, even giving them UNIX names like "Grep," and "Sed." It was all about how he built a powerful magic system, from scratch, starting with basic components, and combing them, into mor…

Post by tekno45 » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 3:35 AM UTC

dsjoerg wrote: post #125

physicsguy wrote: post #28

A similar debate has happened in education where people seem to think that having ability to critically analyse texts is more important than knowledge. and to some degree that’s true but personally I think that without building on some decent level of foundational level of knowledge and having a mental model of a subject, you can’t tackle thorny questions because you don’t have enough to draw upon as examples and cou…

> a relatively hostile setup without even local admin rights Taking a diversion into this -- how about local admin rights to a virtual VM / sandboxed machine? I imagine that would allow developers to be productive, while protecting everything that IT wants to protect. Once you do that, I imagine everyone will discover the issue isn't actually _local_ admin rights, but having admin rights to a machine that's on the in…

Post by eweise » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 2:36 PM UTC

virgilp wrote: post #108

eweise wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"these require deep understanding of the domain, the codebase, and good software engineering principles" Most of this AI can figure out eventually, except maybe the domain. But essentially software engineering will look a lot like product management in a few years.

As a (very good I would say) product manager once told me - the product vision and strategy depends very much on the ability to execute. The market doesn't stand still, and what you _can_ do defines very much what you _should_ do. What I mean to say here is that not even product management is reduced to just "understand the domain" - so it kinda' feels that your entire prediction leans on overly-simplified assumption…