Comment by stackedinserter
14 days ago
Unlike weightlifting, the main goal of our jobs is not to lift heavy things, but develop a product that adds value to its users.
Unfortunately, many sdevs don't understand it.
14 days ago
Unlike weightlifting, the main goal of our jobs is not to lift heavy things, but develop a product that adds value to its users.
Unfortunately, many sdevs don't understand it.
Yes but the goal of school is to lift heavy things, basically. You're trying to do things that are difficult (for you) but don't produce anything useful for anyone else. That's how you gain the ability to do useful things.
Even after school, you need to lift weights once in a while or you lose your ability.
I wouldn't want to write raw bytes like Mel did though. Eventually some things are not worth getting good at.
Let's just accept that this weight lifting metaphor is leaky, like any other, and brings us to absurds like forklift operators need to lift dumbbells to keep relevant in their jobs.
2 replies →
I kinda get the point, but why is that? The goal of school is to teach something that's applicable in industry or academia.
Forklift operators don't lift things in their training. Even CS students start with pretty high level of abstraction, very few start from x86 asm instructions.
We need to make them implement ALU's on logical gates and wires if we want them to lift heavy things.
We begin teaching math by having students solve problems that are trivial for a calculator.
Though I also wonder what advanced CS classes should look like. If they agent can code nearly anything, what project would challenge student+agent and teach the student how to accomplish CS fundamentals with modern tools.
1 reply →
> Even CS students start with pretty high level of abstraction, very few start from x86 asm instructions.
> We need to make them implement ALU's on logical gates and wires
Things must have certainly changed since I was a CS student :-/ We did an assembler course in second year, and implemented a basic adder in circuitry in a different course.
This was in the mid-90s, when there was definitely little need for assembly programmers outside of EE (I was CS).
> the main goal of our jobs is not to lift heavy things, but develop a product that adds value to its users.
Well, whether we like it or not, we are all eventually going to find out if "developing a product that adds value to its users" can be done when you have no more skill than aforementioned users.
Skills atrophy is a real thing.