Comment by sumuyuda
2 years ago
I find it funny they try to make people not devoting their full time/energy to a capitalist company as lesser. Trick’s on them, the company is there to exploit to you, you aren’t part of some greater cause. The more of your time you give the company, the more value they get.
While I can understand some getting bent out of shape from that kind of comment I know what he means.
I'm a grey-haired .NET dev (pushing 50 now!) and for me that comment means there is no desire for new devs to learn beyond what they need for the day-job!
As an example: I learned programming in the 90s at a time when computer resources had to be managed - You couldn't just throw more servers at it since they cost so much money and you had to host them on-prem at the time.
So I learned the OS inside out. I knew how Windows worked to quite a low-level - Not Mark Russinovich levels but way, way more than colleagues did and all my code, even today, has an eye on performance all the time!
Back then, when I learned SQL, I spent lots of time tweaking SQL to get it to run faster - I mean the tables, indexes and such, as well as the SQL queries that I had to fix (I wasn't coding then but I had to fix much of the $hit that third parties produced).
Fast forward to now and you are lucky if 20% of our devs at my company understand SQL properly. They can write basic SQL statements but that's it! They all learned to program using ORMs and can't troubleshoot slow queries. I'm not joking! I had to fix a system that used EF and one of the queries that EF generated caused the DB to try to sort through 14B rows of data when we don't even have that much data in the DB! Our largest database had almost no indexes on it and they kept adding more CPU's to get it to run faster... it didn't! I've subsequently fixed it and we've dropped the CPU count quite a bit too.
I think Scott Hanselmann talked about it a few years ago. The analogy he used was to do with the kitchen taps in his house: they broke, and his wife's understanding of how the plumbing worked stopped at the point where the pipe went into the wall, so she had no idea what could be wrong! His argument (if I remember correctly) was that if you just try to understand what happens when the pipe goes into the wall then you'll open up a whole new world of understanding.
So I agree with the sentiment: we live in a world of abstraction and new devs are coming onboard without that desire to know what happens under the covers and it'll bite us in the ass when guys like me retire.