I call it the rails problem because I love this example and think it's hilarious but it's basically the history of programming languages
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Replying to @alicemazzy @sonyaellenmann
people used to working in hex saw assembly languages as an extravagance that would sissify the next generation of programmers, people working in assembly said same of compiled langs, etc
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Replying to @alicemazzy @sonyaellenmann
personally I think anyone who doesn't know at least one level down from where they're working is reckless bordering on dangerous
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Replying to @alicemazzy @sonyaellenmann
webdevs should know enough C/C++ to have intuitions about how their languages are likely implemented and be able to read the implementations if needed, C devs should know their archs' assemblies, etc
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Replying to @alicemazzy @sonyaellenmann
this is perfectly reasonable to demand of ppl imo, expecting everyone to know "everything" under them (chip fab? EE?) probably isn't
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Replying to @alicemazzy @sonyaellenmann
but anyway the real issue is once more "programming" shifts from writing compiled/interpreted languages to offloading more work to machine learning frameworks they have zero understanding of the math behind
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Replying to @alicemazzy @sonyaellenmann
where they have some inputs and some desired outputs and as far as they know everything that happens in between is a magic black box because hackernews told them they don't need to know linear algebra
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Replying to @alicemazzy @sonyaellenmann
and these people are easily >90% of the field lol
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Replying to @alicemazzy @sonyaellenmann
sorry for writing a blog post lol anyway the paradox is standards are both higher than most people can achieve and much lower than they should be because most people in the industry are worse than useless
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Replying to @alicemazzy
It's really interesting! One of my takeaways is that it's cheaper (in the short-term) to pay e.g. people who know Rails but nothing below it to put together and run the product, then periodically bring in $$$ consultants to deal with the issues it causes
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oh definitely, the worst part is all this is probably fairly well incentives-aligned
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Replying to @alicemazzy @sonyaellenmann
moloch! who writes webapps that are "good enough for now"! etc etc
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