Comment by adelmotsjr
20 days ago
Reading these posts always make me feel like an imposter. People are dealing with such low level things, while i'm outta here building simple CRUDs.
20 days ago
Reading these posts always make me feel like an imposter. People are dealing with such low level things, while i'm outta here building simple CRUDs.
Not only do the CRUDs have value but they're good for your sanity. I knew a guy back in the dot-com era. Very skilled coder. Backbone of the company. He pulled off miracles. Fulfilled impossible deadlines. Then one day, out of the blue, he quit. Took a job at a non-technical corp. They put him in a cubicle where he wrote Visual Basic CRUDs on an 8-5 schedule. No weird deadlines, no sleeping under the desk. He called it his paid vacation.
> He called it his paid vacation.
As a fellow CRUD writer you're kinda seconding the OP's point here...
Personally I say oh well, some people are smarter and/or harder working than me. Now watch this drive -
I was seconding his point. I personally ended up in educational software which is CRUD-adjacent in terms of stress and sanity. Never regretted it.
> They put him in a cubicle where he wrote Visual Basic CRUDs on an 8-5 schedule. No weird deadlines, no sleeping under the desk. He called it his paid vacation.
That was all nice and good for a while, but the times are ending.
I suspect there will still be a human involved in the production of software, but it will be domain experts, not CRUd monkeys who picked up just enough domain knowledge to be dangerous.
The really valuable CRUD monkeys are already domain experts as well. The threatened ones are junior developers whose output is barely better than AI slop.
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ai slop
Looking at the user's other comments, I disagree.
Looking at your comments however, while probably not AI, they're still not helpful.
Never seen an LLM write so many short, halting sentences in a row. Very human.
You can tell from my comment that I'm not AI. I've had a lifelong habit of using commas instead of dashes in situations where the dashes would have been more appropriate. AI would always go for the dash.
First time I've been accused of AI.
All good. I tell people how to add another mailbox to their Outlook, "click here, now there". Not glorious. Necessary anyways.
The grass is always greener on the other side - many low-level programmers feel like an imposter when it comes to high-level systems such as CRUD apps.
Can confirm, my buddy who is someone I respect immensely, is an embedded programmer.
He will talk about OS events, or any low level concept and it makes me feel like I don’t know anything, but he acts like I’m a genius if I talk about JavaScript Runtimes, browser engines, anything frontend.
It’s cool he teaches me new things, I teach him some
Some people are exceptional at solving difficult but hard to explain problems while other are great solving direct business problems. No need to feel ashamed for both it’s just different work
I think your friend is just being kind.
Most people know that there is a big difference between experience in something pretty easy vs mastery of something very difficult.
A rocket scientist acknowledges a concrete guy knows way more than he does about concrete, but also knows that doesn't make him a genius because it's easy enough to learn just being around it. Plus, the rocket scientist also knows that since he knows so little about concrete, he wouldn't even be able to judge if the guy is really a concrete genius or just saying things a real pro would label wrong.
Your example isn't that crazy, but still, you should realize your friend is just being nice.
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Yeah exactly. High-level people think the low-level stuff is magic, and us from the other side think the high-level stuff is magic (how can you handle all that complexity?...)
> how can you handle all that complexity?...
You don’t. Someone else smarter than you handled it already and you just need to integrate their solution.
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Yup. AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean and SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstanceFactory agree as well :)
I felt this way moving from embedded into backend for the first time and having no idea where to start. Was incredibly daunting, but both domains become trivial over time.
They don't. The "simplicity" of using a "high-level" framework for someone who bit-shifts for a living is almost comical.
I met someone who bit shifts for life, uses opengl shaders for compute, but has no sql experience and is afraid of opening a tcp socket.
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Sure mate. And the guy who can do binary sums in his head would think of assembly as mere childsplay.
Jog on.
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Thruth to be told, Dunning–Kruger effect is common among those who "shift bits" :)
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bit shifting isn't impressive lol
Really?
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I work on compilers, and have bounced several times off trying to write my own full stack crud app for a personal project (tried doing it in rails, phoenix and django at various times). I'm finally getting somewhere with claude's help, but it really is its own set of skills - easy to get started with but hard to do well.
You may be surprised by how much easier it is to dump the framework/stack and just write it from scratch. I say this because I too work on compilers and have a crud app as a personal project. The first versions were a nightmare in various frameworks and since I switched to a C++ backend / vanilla .js frontend it has been incredibly easy to write.
interesting, how did you manage the db interactions in c++? and did you have a single executable for the app and the web server combined?
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You can probably learn to do these things too with enough determination, but don't sell yourself short. Some CRUD apps can get deceptively complicated. Businesses have a way of coming up with just the right requirements to completely invalidate your architecture if you don't know what you're doing.
As someone who works on systems at this level, believe me, it’s a learnable skill. And at least an intellectually valuable one I think too. Even if you never really need the knowledge for the things you do, there’s a nice feeling that comes from seeing something done at a high level and understanding how that makes its way down into the system and why those design choices were made.
If I were more money motivated I’d probably be building CRUD apps too. I just like weird puzzles XD.
Start working through the layers! It's incredibly rewarding to go from just typical day job stuff to understanding bits and pieces of esoteric low level implementation. One level at a time, it's not that bad, although it is hard and takes effort. I know next to nothing either, but having felt the same way a few years ago, these kind of posts now at least excite me instead of just intimidate.
Play with low level things. It'll help you in your daily job in ways you do not yet imagine. Start here: nandgame.com
Don't feel too bad - I had to Google what CRUD means. :D
I am a normal web dev / CRUD app coder. All of this isn't beyond your ability.
Every so often I hit a problem that requires me to go all the way down to the OS level and find out what is going wrong or into the core framework and you find out that most of the code is actually less complex, better documented and clearer than a lot of the garbage bespoke applications you have to deal with at the higher levels.
Same. I feel like a plumber compared to real engineers.
You’re still an engineer. Knowing the right places to click in an esoteric app is like knowing where to hit the boiler with a hammer to get it working again.
Engineers & architects leave a lot of detail out of their designs, relying on the plumbers and other trades to figure out the Right Thing. (-:
Engineers feel like plumbers compared to the plumbers
Why do people belittle CRUDs? Or even call them that? I have written quite a few applications, where there was a frotend which displayed things stored in a SQL db, with certain operations allowing you to modify said db, which I guess would fall into the CRUD variety, but the least of the complexity, and usefullness lay in that fact.
CRUD = Create, Read, Update, Delete
Plenty of business apps don't really ask for much more than that, and those are the CRUD apps. They're not particularly challenging to write, nor is it very interesting to do so.
>People are dealing with such low level things, while i'm outta here building simple CRUDs.
CRUDs do pay the bills.
If it's any consolation I can out-imposter you: lately I've been mostly reviewing LLM-generated code.
Meanwhile, I can't really do either because the job market sucks and I don't have time to contribute the way I want to to project like this.
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