Comment by swyx
1 month ago
i mostly agree w you, but theres a wide spectrum of “understand the inner workings” given rising complexity.
consider:
- does a React/frotnend engineer need to know everything about react internals to be good at their job?
- does a commercial airline pilot need to know every single subsystem in order to do their job?
- do you, a sophisticated hackernewsian, really know how your computer works?
more knowledge is always (usually) better but as a thing diffuses into practice and industry theres a natural stopping point that “technician” level people reach that is still valuable to society bc of relative talent supply and demand.
> - does a React/frotnend engineer need to know everything about react internals to be good at their job?
Yes? Well, not everything (which I define as being able to implement React from scratch). But if you want to do good work, and be able to fix those pesky bugs which result from the arcane behavior of the framework itself, then you better know your stuff.
Besides, in practice very few people understand the most basic stuff about React. Just recently I had to explain to a veteran frontend dev what list virtualization was and why it's not a good idea to display a list of 100k items directly.
I personally found that people need to understand the layer of the stack they're working on (e.g. a frontend dev should understand React). Going a layer higher or lower (or two) seems only to be handy for troubleshooting, debugging or you're simply having an expanded role.
> does a commercial airline pilot need to know every single subsystem in order to do their job?
Not a great comparison. First off, nobody is suggesting that a self-purported "AI Engineer" has to understand EVERY SINGLE SUBSYSTEM, but they should still have a strong command of the internal workings of the modern foundational material (transformers, neural networks, latent space, etc.) to style themselves as such.
The better question is "does an aviation mechanic need to understand the internal systems of an airplane?" and the answer is a resounding yes.
>- does a commercial airline pilot need to know every single subsystem in order to do their job?
Haha explain this one to the APDs (aircrew program designee, the people signing off training at airlines) please.
Every airline pilot has their horror stories of being asked how many holes are in the alternate static port of some aircraft they've flown. Or through bolts on the wheel hub, or how many plys of glass on the side cockpit window, or the formula for calculating hydroplane speed, or the formula for calculating straight line distance to the horizon from altitude of X... it just goes on endlessly.
I do agree with your post overall though.