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Forklifts require training

zacsweers.dev

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Re: Forklifts require training

#11

Post by dingnuts »

sokoloff wrote: post #9
libraryofbabel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Honestly my advice to a junior dev right now would be: 1) Keep up with the trends by reading hacker news. Be on the lookout for decent blog posts but ignore social media and most of youtube. 2) BUT your best bet for actually leveling up is reading these ten books I'll give you (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, etc. etc.), plus doing side projects to get hands-on practice.

Hacker News is social media. It just lacks a pretty UI and is overall less vapid.

oh no it's just as vapid lol, basically equivalent to LinkedIn and if you think otherwise you're deluding yourself

Re: Forklifts require training

#12

Post by andyjohnson0 »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #7
elzbardico wrote: post #2

> How do junior developers level-up to get into private Slack spaces? Where do they learn from if Stackoverflow is hostile, Reddit is hollowed out, and social squares are empty? Books seem to still work very well. I am not even sure all this social media learning was that much positive. A lot of it was based on trend chasing, shiny object syndrome and stuff like that in a completely a-historical context. It was alway…

Yeah. Honestly my advice to a junior dev right now would be: 1) Keep up with the trends by reading hacker news. Be on the lookout for decent blog posts but ignore social media and most of youtube. 2) BUT your best bet for actually leveling up is reading these ten books I'll give you (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, etc. etc.), plus doing side projects to get hands-on practice.

> BUT your best bet for actually leveling up is reading these ten books I'll give you

On the whole, junior dev-age people don't read books much. They read short-form stuff on screens.

Re: Forklifts require training

#13

Post by elzbardico »

sokoloff wrote: post #9
libraryofbabel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Honestly my advice to a junior dev right now would be: 1) Keep up with the trends by reading hacker news. Be on the lookout for decent blog posts but ignore social media and most of youtube. 2) BUT your best bet for actually leveling up is reading these ten books I'll give you (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, etc. etc.), plus doing side projects to get hands-on practice.

Hacker News is social media. It just lacks a pretty UI and is overall less vapid.

It is, but it is way harder to self-promote yourself and derive other than intellectual satisfaction. It was not purposely built as a platform for advertising and branding like social networks.

You don't even have the dopamine hit of counting your content upvotes.

Re: Forklifts require training

#14

Post by sokoloff »

dingnuts wrote: post #11
sokoloff wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is social media. It just lacks a pretty UI and is overall less vapid.

oh no it's just as vapid lol, basically equivalent to LinkedIn and if you think otherwise you're deluding yourself

If I’m deluded, so be it, but I see a massive gulf between the content on LinkedIn and HN.

Re: Forklifts require training

#15

Post by baq »

A very good article, I’ve had similar thoughts, expressed them in conversations, but never written down anywhere.

> Mentor your junior colleagues, give them the space to learn and make mistakes.

I’d love to. My company stopped hiring juniors during the mini saas recession and then cursor launched. There are no juniors to mentor anymore.

Juniors nowadays are expected to perform senior work. It’s a recipe for disaster.

Re: Forklifts require training

#16

Post by Dilettante_ »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #7
elzbardico wrote: post #2

> How do junior developers level-up to get into private Slack spaces? Where do they learn from if Stackoverflow is hostile, Reddit is hollowed out, and social squares are empty? Books seem to still work very well. I am not even sure all this social media learning was that much positive. A lot of it was based on trend chasing, shiny object syndrome and stuff like that in a completely a-historical context. It was alway…

Yeah. Honestly my advice to a junior dev right now would be: 1) Keep up with the trends by reading hacker news. Be on the lookout for decent blog posts but ignore social media and most of youtube. 2) BUT your best bet for actually leveling up is reading these ten books I'll give you (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, etc. etc.), plus doing side projects to get hands-on practice.

>these ten books I'll give you (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, etc. etc.)

Well don't leave me hanging boss!

Re: Forklifts require training

#17

Post by libraryofbabel »

dingnuts wrote: post #10
libraryofbabel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Honestly my advice to a junior dev right now would be: 1) Keep up with the trends by reading hacker news. Be on the lookout for decent blog posts but ignore social media and most of youtube. 2) BUT your best bet for actually leveling up is reading these ten books I'll give you (Designing Data-Intensive Applications, etc. etc.), plus doing side projects to get hands-on practice.

> Keep up with the trends by reading hacker news frankly terrible advice, especially now that this website is just AI News. If you want to be a better programmer, there are better places, but I'm not going to advertise them here because I do not want to infect them with the HN commentariat which is much too focused on trends. Engineering fundamentals have not changed in decades. Screw trends, especially at the beginn…

I mean, the whole point of my post was to say that books are more useful than anything else, and it would certainly better to have access to 10 good books and no hacker news at all than the reverse. But I do think there is value in keeping an eye on trends. They shape our industry; you may wish they didn’t, I wish they didn’t sometimes, but they do. Obviously good fundamentals are more important, but I think it’s doing a disservice to juniors if you tell them to ignore the “commentariat” completely.

Re: Forklifts require training

#18

Post by thegrim33 »

elzbardico wrote: post #13
sokoloff wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is social media. It just lacks a pretty UI and is overall less vapid.

It is, but it is way harder to self-promote yourself and derive other than intellectual satisfaction. It was not purposely built as a platform for advertising and branding like social networks. You don't even have the dopamine hit of counting your content upvotes.

What do you mean? Every post and comment can receive upvotes, your account has total upvotes, the dopamine hit is there when you can simply look at the top of the screen next to your username and see the number go up after posting. There's even rewards if you make the number go high enough, such as being able to downvote and flag stuff once you reach a certain level.

Re: Forklifts require training

#20

Post by lordnacho »

Possible futures in my mind:

- Junior jobs become scarce. You either jump to senior very fast, or you are dumped out of the industry. The juniors that make it are those special unicorns that somehow learn everything about the job, including how to do it with AI, within a couple of years. There's a little bit of guidance, but mostly it's the kids who have good taste in blogs/books/videos that end up learning it all on their own. Also the kids who have the motivation to keep studying without a syllabus.

- Instead of junior devs, we just have domain experts who are crap at coding. Quants who can write a model in pandas, but when they venture offpiste, they get AI to build them a monstrosity. Working monstrosity, but if you could code, you would cry. This ends up happening in every industry: there's very few coders left anywhere outside of FAANG, everyone just does the modern equivalent of thinking Excel has solved their problem. Balls of spaghetti the size of which the world has never seen are written, hidden in various domains.

- Universities wisen up about how to teach people to use AI. Once upon a time, they used to teach you how to punch holes. Assembler was taught. Systems languages like c++. Java, JS, Lua. Kids who came out of these universities were somewhat ok for industry. Why not AI as well? There are going to be lessons learned roughly this decade that will be useful to teach the kids. What to tell the AI, what not to. How to leverage it to make the most progress.

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