Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

> What's really frustrating about all this is how passive and helpless the current generation of web developers seem to be in all this. It's as if they've all been lulled into complacency by convenience. They seem afraid to carve out their own ambitious paths, and lack serious gusto for engineering. If there isn't a "friendly" bot spewing encouraging messages with plenty of emoji at every turn, they won't engage.

> As someone who took a classical engineering education, which included not just a broad scientific and mathematical basis, but crucially also the necessary engineering ethos, this is just alien to me. Call me cynical all you want, but it matches my experience. Coming after the generation that birthed Git and BitTorrent, and which killed IE with Firefox and Konqueror/WebKit, it just seems ridiculous.

> Fuck, most zoomers don't even know how to dance. I don't mean that they are bad at dancing, I mean they literally won't try, and just stand around awkwardly.

> Just know: nobody else is going to do it for you. So what are you waiting for?

It seems like ranting about how the older generations were better, and conversely the younger generation is decadent, is as old as history itself. Anybody know why this is the case? Is it that our overall character has really been heading downhill for all of history? Or is it something else, like how we generally remember the best of the past but mostly notice the worst or merely average in the present?

I didn't read the article, but just based on the passages you have quoted and based on my recent experience, I will have to agree with the author.

I recently learned that GitHub has a discussions page which is separate from the issues pages. To pass the time and to give back to the community I try to help people and answer their questions.

It's a bit concerning to me that when I point some people to the right direction by making suggestions, linking to the docs, or linking to a relevant stackoverflow answer, they are unable to formulate an answer for their problem. Sometimes I literally have to create a reproduction repository so that they can see how the answer I gave can solve their problem.

I am not concluding anything here. But this has been my experience so far when engaging the community of an open source frontend framework.

This isn't a new phenomenon. This strategy is proven to work largely because of people like you who put in time and effort to answer those types of questions with quality information. Stack Overflow was literally built on this very premise.

On the one hand I hate help vampires who appear to show no effort and just want "gimme da codez!"

On the other hand, it's impossible to remember what it was like to not know something. So often, just giving hints isn't enough. When I used to spend too much time answering S.O. questions I tried to, as often as possible, include a working snippet. One, to prove the solution worked, but two, so the questioner could start with working code.

Starting with working code is the number 1 thing for me because then I can start adding to it until it breaks and can always go back to working.

Maybe, but in some (many) cases you’d be better off spending the time developing your general knowledge of whatever it is you are working on to the point of solving your problem. This will not only solve your problem but also make you a better engineer. This is especially true with complex/dense material (e.g. kubernetes) where a lot of the learning is generally applicable.

> I recently learned that GitHub has a discussions page which is separate from the issues pages.

The people who are good won't be using that.

When I was a student working on my thesis I realised I was too advanced to ask questions on stackoverflow and I would not be receiving useful help there. My issues were too uncommon and specific, because the simple ones that stackoverflow is good at solving were not blocking me.

I guess something similar happens there, with the extra thing that very few people know and use discussion pages.

The fun of programming begins at the point that stackoverflow/Google begins to cease providing ready-made answers.

This is the reason why blogs should exist

The only things worth posting to them are information you yourself weren't able to find on the internet.

I don't know if it's the whole new generation or only the web/nerdy part of it.

Mostly likely it's neither, and the problems we notice is due to a very biased sample.

We don't see the many thousands who solve problems quietly, and even when we see them we tend to make note only of the most unskilled ones.

Compounding this with the fact that all over the world more people are motivated to learn and work in IT we are simply bound to see more extreme outliers.

Back in the day these phenomena were also observed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

Things used to require much more competency.

For instance, I've been looking at old Byte Magazine issues on archive.org

Let's take November 1982. Here's an article on building a video digitizer (https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-11/page/n175/...) complete with circuit diagrams, signal examples, and a control program in 6502 assembly.

Hobbyist magazine. For enthusiasts.

If I had a candidate that did things like that for fun I'd hire them before getting their name.

Dev work has gotten too abstract and covered in bullshit.

Not that 6502 assembler is useful in 2022, but computers were a focused study that would result in productive capacity. For whatever reason that's been diffused and our attention is spent less fruitfully.

> Dev work has gotten too abstract and covered in bullshit.

That's a reflection of modern business (especially tech).

Quite intentionally so. The more that its abstracted (well) the more accessible it is. Compare assembly to python.

With AI tools I think there will be a similar if not greater distance between python and something else.

No it's not.

It's an hourglass where the width is accessibility and the height is abstraction. In the center is the sweet spot. Basic was near there. Pascal probably was. Ruby, PHP and Python are capable of being there...

As an example outside of computers, think about highly abstract art, highly abstract philosophy or poetry.

It comes across as obdurate and diffusive, aloof and needlessly distanced from materiality.

Now in programming you see the same thing. Abstract language that seems to exist in pure vapor. Factory, interface, provider, service, oh and a provider service and a service provider which are not the same things of course.

All these things mean very specific things that change depending on whose lips are moving - they're defined in code somewhere - they do something deterministic - there is a real materialist function here that's being obscured by confusing language. We've entered the age of Jurgen Habermas style programming.

It's fine if you want that, but don't pretend it's successfully easier to understand when poorly, vaguely, and also precisely defined.

The computer is a picky, unrelenting, uncompromising bratty jerk. Because of this programming concepts are best when they're nailed the fuck down and not dancing around in some abstract freeform jazz space pretending that it's more accessible that way.

All it does is create confusion and the emotion of confidence replacing the reality of competence. The computer is still going to be a bastard and we'll have to deal with it eventually.

Today would you look for someone who grew up doing Rasberry Pi builds?

I haunted Radio Shack back in the day, but would have loved to grow up doing single board computer stuff.

Raspberry Pi hobbyists are great in the IoT world. Almost an immediate hire if you can demonstrate an image recognition app.

Was about to upvote then you said 6502 asm isn't useful in 2022... If anything, learning 6502 asm is instructive because it isn't very abstract but forces you to turn abstract thinking to explicit instructions.

Any assembly language gets you the same thing, and 6502 assembly is likely not the one your current machine understands natively.

(if it is, I would like to read your blog)

A possible benefit of 6502 assembly is that the instruction set is relatively simple. And you get to implement stuff like multiplication. ;)

6502 is so bare bones, that programming it even over things like x86 is instructive, it really forces you (or it does for me) to think hard about doing things, even mundanely "easy" things that people who only program C say are fast and low level.

But anyway, it's not "useful" for actual everyday work, it's more of a nice challenge that keeps your mind sharp.

And for my c64, ah I need time to solder stuff so it can connect to another machine, much less the internet ;) one of these days...

> Anybody know why this is the case?

Because it's often true, although it's more cyclical than downhill. You have an open emerging technology and people start out self-reliant and have to learn from the ground up out of necessity, and over time things become so tower of babel like that new people can't or don't need to understand it anymore. Then it gets so bad that someone tears it down and you're back to the starting point

"Hard times create strong [developers]. Strong [developers] create good times. Good times create weak [developers]. And, weak [developers] create hard times."...?

maybe it's true for development, though unlikely :)

https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

It’s because older generations inevitably devalue an evolving culture they can no longer comprehend as a defense mechanism to avoid admitting they can’t keep up. Anyone who seriously makes this argument that the Kids These Days are lazy/bad/worse than their own generation is either delusional or just lazy.

(As an elder cusper due to being terminally online for 15 years) 2020s pop culture so far is miles better than what we had in the early 2010s and IMO the 20 year olds are far more tolerable than they were when I was 20.

All the complaints about them are still valid IMO but even then I see it as less of a problem than the pathologies of previous generations.

> All the complaints about them are still valid

Including the complaint from the OP about how zoomers are passive? If it's true (which I'm not convinced of), it seems like a fatal flaw, unless you're saying that inaction is preferable to some of the pathologies of previous generations (presumably including mine; I was born in 1980).

I think the OP means passive in terms of technology. They work entirely in walled gardens with constrained UIs and know of nothing different.

It’s not the zoomers fault though. It was the previous generation or two that built this hellscape of cloud software and addiction oriented UIs.

Ah, makes sense. But then, the OP also said zoomers don't know how to dance. But, as an admittedly curmudgeonly early forty-something, I wonder if that's at least partly because so much of current pop music is garbage. Then again, I guess most of any generation's pop music has always been crap; we only remember the classics from the past.

Back to technology, though, I worry about what computing will be like for Generation Alpha (born after 2010 according to Wikipedia), including my nieces and nephew. Perhaps I didn't help matters by buying them Amazon Fire tablets when they were little, though my siblings and in-laws certainly appreciated it. I feel like intervening to get them started on some kind of more open computing platform, but I fear I might sabotage the development of a new, better computing culture if I try too hard to replicate what things were like for me growing up with an Apple II and early PCs. Edit: And no, I don't feel qualified to become a father myself so I can avoid meddling with others' kids. So I guess I'll just stay on the sidelines, watch, and try to keep my opinions to myself.

It is as old as history itself. What you're witnessing is a result of what I call the problem of knowledge.

Realize that, everything that is learned, any knowledge gained, and new technology invented, will eventually be lost and forgotten - as the people who gained said knowledge or invented said technology will eventually die, and the next generation is born ignorant. Yes, we as a species try to pass our knowledge to the next generation, via teaching, books, or what have you, but it's a never ending problem that can't ever be resolved.

Think about it, If I were to invent - say a new programming language tomorrow, the entire world would be ignorant of its existence, let alone know how it even works. Now I could go on to teach others that my new programming language exists and how it works, but this takes time, and people don't have infinite time to learn things. So as time goes on, and we learn and invent more and more things as a species, the next generation has a greater amount to learn than previous generations. Eventually there comes a point where there's too much knowledge to learn, that even if you spent your entire lifetime trying to learn what your ancestors had recorded, you would die before having learned everything. So knowledge inevitably does get lost between generations, and thus, history tends to repeat itself, and the next generation seems decadent for not knowing what you came to know.

Computer technology is just a perfect microcosm demonstrating this problem, as new things get created all the damn time (often to be just reinventions of old things). Heck, even most old programmers I know say they struggle to keep up to date on things.

And it is as old as history itself, as this is what Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 is essentially talking about. Heck, look at most ancient civilizations, and how little we can comprehend what we still have of their writings.

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