Comment by sdfsdfs34dfsdf
7 days ago
If you are not in an environment where it is being actively used it is not something you'll pick up. Not every programmer is on HN or being cool with blogs etc. I agree not knowing about source control at all is a .. different matter. Also, 20 years is less impressive once you subtract the time it wasn't popular. Even if it was 20 years, it is still not impressive. Perhaps if you are 15-30, but to older folks it's like a drop in the bucket.
Many people are not familiar with "git" and don't have to be. Picking up "git" is a one afternoon type of thing but the parent did not mention timelines. It was just about "knowing" git and I pushed back on that.
There are so, so many tools you guys on here find indispensable that don't actually get used by vast swaths of people in the field. I sometimes wonder where all you guys work.
If you're actively looking for a job, you should have some familiarity with the common dev stack when you're looking. Today you should be comfortable working on a Mac, know Bash / Zsh, a little bit of Vim for SSHing, git, docker, react, postgres, etc.
If you don't, spend a few weeks before you start your search. You're almost definitely going to need them. Unless you're in a niche where the common stack is different.
This isn't me gatekeeping or something, it's just common sense. When 80% of the jobs are Python + Javascript / Typescript, running in Docker, using Postgres, using React on the frontend, FastAPI on the backend, and git plus github for deploying and reviewing, you're going to stumble without cursory knowledge. You don't need to be an expert in it all…
> This isn't me gatekeeping or something, it's just common sense. When 80% of the jobs are Python + Javascript / Typescript, running in Docker, using Postgres, using React on the frontend, FastAPI on the backend, and git plus github for deploying and reviewing,
Then I don't apply. I'm not interested in working with garbage tech.
Interesting! I'd love to hear what type of work you do where you can get away without any of those because frankly I think most of those are pretty garbage too.
Postgres is decent for a free ($$$) database, although it's lack of clustered indexes and in-place updates (its MVCC approach) sucks for many use cases. I find it a sensible default but not the best at any one use case.
Python, frankly, sucks nowawadays. Maybe it had its time, but there are so many better lingos now. It's got type hints that are ignored, really bad patterns ("dependency injection" that's really just the singleton pattern, FastAPI encourages you to open a db connection and a transaction at the front of every request and commit at the end while you're making other requests, writing to disk, etc), and it's slow in both user experience and runtime (no real parallelism).
But generally I have to make some trades to get a great job. I love Go, personally, and the incredible simplicity it encourages.
Seriously, if you'd be willing to share, I'd love to hear what you do!
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Fair enough that I did not mention any timeline. And could’ve been general with “VCS”. And you are absolutely correct, that basics of some of these tools can be learnt in an afternoon.
In fact the industry i work in we don’t have git, but something similar to SVN (and proprietary, expensive and pathetic UI/UX)
Since, I am not in software industry, I won’t comment on whether such people might survive for more than 5 years without knowing about ‘VCS’.
However, I have slightly died inside when some Computer science students (graduate school, mind you) were using google drive with manually created timestamps as a backup strategy. The submission for this entire semester long actual project was on Github. as a final single commit uploaded a day before. (And no this wasn’t a squashed commit from a different repo.)
There might be a blurry line between people not sharpening their auxiliary tools vs never using or being slightly curious about them.
I am more of a glamour and bling on my tools person, and I don’t expect every engineer to derive the same pleasure that I derive just from tinkering with them; however, does make me wonder if there is a point when such an approach to not fully caring about simplifying your workflow (aka being lazy), might spill over into making poor engineering decision?