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Comment by nanis | Hacker News Reader

> Computers are scary things that fail in counterintuitive ways.

Not being scared of the tool and believing one's inherent supremacy over it must be the most basic criterion for practicing this craft, but these days this fear is nursed, at times encouraged, at times even exalted (corollary of the failure fetish) especially by those who publicly place themselves as ambassadors.

Any introduction to computers must start with the statement that they are all heaps of plastic and sand and the only things they are able to do are because some mortal sat down and spent time figuring it out.

People starting out now are at a disadvantage because their first encounters happen mostly through extremely polished looking apps and it is hard to see at the outset how one could go from weird incantations in a text editor to that.

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I think it's harder now than it used to be. When I started programming, any error message you saw would almost certainly originate from the beige box on the desk in front of you, which had only a single CPU core and often didn't really do multi-tasking. Over time, our computers, operating systems, applications and networks have become vastly more complex, with the effect that you can't easily build an intuition about which component is responsible for a failure and why.

Personally, I love debugging things. I have a very good "theory of mind" for dealing with computer failures, and figuring out why the computer isn't doing what I might naively expect it to do is a lot of fun. However, it's only fun because I've been able to stay on top of the curve as the systems I work with have become more complex. Starting from zero today sounds a lot more daunting.

True, the stacks are more complex today, but the resources are greater. Back in the days when the error was in the beige box, if the books/CDs/DVDs you had on your shelf didn't address the exact problem, you had to roll up your sleeves or you were SOL.

Nowadays, research skills are more important, but I see a lot of devs who just don't have them. Can't find the answer on the first page of your first (poorly formed) search? Run get the senior dev. To me it reads like incuriousity and laziness, or lack of training.

I don't mind doing some coaching, but if you're a dev, and you can't even be bothered to read the error message, what does that say about your effectiveness?

/rant

It gets a lot less fun when there's a customer visible outage and you need to know why things are failing NOW because dollars are on the line.

> Any introduction to computers must start with the statement that they are all heaps of plastic

This scales to everything IMHO, everything is simple once you understand it. Levels of abstractions is what makes it scary and complex. I.e. electricity or fire is also not scary once you know how to handle it.

One should not have an unreasonable fear of fire, but "unreasonable" is a quite key word there. One should have a healthy respect for it and feel some fear if those around you don't.

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