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Comment by ryeights | Hacker News Reader

...source?

Game industry would be one source. At least for many teams and projects, Git isn't very useful (horrible for large binary files common in AAA games). So many companies still use Perforce or sometimes you'll see SVN still. That means a whole bunch of really qualified engineers who have never or rarely used git.

I'm sure there are other industries for which that is true too.

It's a good reminder how small a section of the tech industry comments on Hacker News.

I've encountered this myself as someone who maintains small open source games. Engineers with vastly more experience than I do have approached me with contributions, but needed me to walk them through installing and using git. You could tell they were good engineers because they were so eager and happy to learn it. I can't speak for how big of a demographic these types of engineers are but they certainly exist.

> as someone who maintains small open source games

Are those public? Very intriguing, would you mind sharing a link?

Uh, git is how old? "Engineers with vastly more experience" might be how old?

Hate to tell you, but these engineers probably wrote code pre-Google, or pre-WWW, and actually got stuff done. Amazing, that.

Heaps of us.

A stack of manuals several feet thick...

I started at the end of this era, working on a monitoring team that supported mainframes, network and data center systems. My second week on the job, my delivery of books arrived. About 30 linear feet of documentation. Iirc, it was part of our ELA.

I kept a couple of the references that I spent a lot of time in, along with my Perl books. Good times.

Timeline of Github: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_GitHub

suggests that things really got started in 2013.

Thus anyone with over (2022 - 2013 approx 9 years) of experience might have had substantial pre-git experience.

Noting as well that even post 2013, github might not have been the default in many organizations.

Old people who manage legacy systems, like that one guy duct-taping a bank's online operations.

Are they really the "best" developers? It just sounds like a different skillset and mindset, not necessarily better or worse.

I am willing to wager in a broad sense, that the best COBOL, Fortran, and RPG, that "Old people who manage legacy systems" is probably a fair estimate, and there is probably narrow overlap between developers for those languages and git experience.

There are lots of younger folks who fall into supporting these platforms through experience, but I would also wager that the number of fresh, doe eyed engineers graduating from uni/college thinking "I am going to be the best COBOL programmer!" can probably be counted on one hand :P

I encountered such a person. Her parents were both mainframe nerds and she was a true believer. I think the shock of working as a 23 year old in a group of geezers that had been fighting each other since 1975 was traumatic.

We stole her and she was a pretty awesome DBA last I knew.

Nearly all DBAs i have worked with have been great. Not sure why that is, but it's been very consistent.

Not in GitHub, that's for sure.

SourceForge of course

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