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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

Well, at least it's obvious where this is coming from.

> You will look like a genius because you'll have an encyclopedic knowledge

> You can learn esoteric knowledge about programming

– and you will pay an incredibly steep price for it.

If you want to be effective, stay clear of this one. Systems are going to be increasingly complex to the point where it's absolutely impossible for any one person to understand it all and your best bet is getting efficient at poking them to figure out what's going on.

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How so? Knowing as much as possible about the systems should be the norm, it is a super power because most people are too lazy to be bothered with this.

Knowing the system makes it very easy to poke the relevant people, find the relevant people and have meaningful discussions with those. Heck, it might even turn you into a meaningful person yourself.

The alternative is stumblong aimlessly around and parroting input from others without understanding the smallest thing about it. This is something LLMs excel at, for free. The former not so much.

Because mental capacity is finite, and knowing as much as possible doesn't work for everyone, especially if it's disconnected from actual problem solving. Reading a book cover to cover and have everything in there stick in the mind is great if it works for you, but there are plenty where it does not.

The problem isn't that mental capacity is finite, it's not (or the limit is too high to be relevant). The problem is that by spending time learning esoteric knowledge, you're only displacing time for more applicable knowledge.

It saves you time, reading is quick, debugging without a good understanding is extremely slow.

Is it laziness or is it the fact that brains are different and many people (me included) can't absorb that much material and then retain it as well with so many other things going on in our work/lives. I would struggle just to read the entire docs, front to back, of anything in a sitting. Then to retain all that?

"lulz" -my brain

The point is not retaining it all so. The point is to remember where to look, and know exactly which parts of the documentation are relevant to you, and retain those. Added bonus if you know owns the stuff not relevant to you and if you understand how those parts are linked.

That is, honestly, something I expect from people in a professional environment.

The ability to retain information is mostly fueled by your interest towards the topic, and not by your inherent ability to retain in general. This is what neuroscience has figured out. And it confirms very much my own observations during my life time. Inherently uninteresting topics or things I was forced to learn but which never resonated with me were always difficult to impossible to remember. Things I care about, or which interest me greatly, were almost easy to learn. Reading a document about an interesting topic cover to cover is easy. Keep that in mind next time you think you have a hard time learning something.

It isn't as much learning as maintaining focus. I struggle badly with that regardless of my interest in a topic.

I submit maintaining focus is also easier if the topic is inherently interesting. However, you sound like yu are describing something like ADHD, which probably needs a more specific approach.

How much is it possible to know about the systems? The app I work on now uses MariaDB (multiple versions at this point), postgres, Cassandra, and InfluxDB. Those are just the databases I can recall offhand; there may be others and there were others before my time at the company. And those are just the databases. I’m also responsible for hardware, networking, cloud infrastructure to include IaaS and container orchestration plus tons of services. Say it I should read the docs on all that is like a cruel joke. Not only are there not enough hours in the day, I doubt there are enough years in my life to imagine such a task. And it would be Sisyphean anyway because at any given moment one of them will make a “minor” update that breaks functionality and a bit of my knowledge will be useless. Welcome to the world of postmodern system administration; I guess we call it DevOps or SRE now or something; even that’s a philosophical debate these days.

The margins are infinitely expensive. "As much as possible" has no meaningful boundary, when working in a system that is too big to hold in your head.

Mastery is alluring - it's just not very effective and certainly really bad advice for new software devs, who are in the worst possible position to judge the margins and what is useful.

Exactly why new people, new to the job in general or just the system in question, need mentoring and leadership in doing so. And guess what you can do if you went through all of this? You can mentor and teach others, and if combined with doing, there is no better way to mastery than this, at least not one I am aware of.

You should try this for C++ and Linux. Read the spec of each cover to cover.

Of the language? Propably not. The documentation for the piece of software written in C++ you are working on? Absolutely yes.

Edit: Regarding Linux, you are propably not touching every function or component of Linux neither. The less you are concerned, the less important it is for you. And less you uave to read it. That being said, a fulltime Linux OS dev propably should have a solid understanding of the complete OS to begin with.

Probably not? So your advice is wrong.

You are obviously picking and choosing your documentation based on how easy it is to read. So your advice isnt universal. Clearly you don't fully follow it.

There's a lot of contrarian opinions here due entirely to the fact that people won't read certain documents for the same reason you avoid reading the c++ spec.

I don't need to read C++ docs, I am not concerned with it. If C++ is part of your, what's it called, stack, read the part of it that matters for your use case and read those parts directly related to your part of C++ or whatever other language you are using. Do that for every other language in your stack. I never said anything else, did I?

How deep and broad your understanding has to be depends on:

- your team, nobody can know everything alone, it is a team sport

- your specific use case, I cannot help you with that

- complexity of your use case

- your role, if you are responsible for graphics under Linux, sure as hell you read that part of the Linux documentation, front to end, multiple times and master it

- and, as always, know your system, stack, tools and documentation well enough to realize when you have to look stuff up and where

>your specific use case, I cannot help you with that

I don't need your help. You need it. I'm helping you realize your statement is wrong.

First you make a statement saying one should read all the docs. Now you say devs should read the relevant docs. Devs do the later anyway. Your argument just evolved into the point you're arguing against.

Clearly you didn't mean to do that. You just meant to read more docs then you normally would on topics a little further from the relevancy at hand. But people are responding to you based not off what you meant but what you said.

All the docs, if taking literally, would mean all the docs for everything you interact with in your life. Obviously impossible, isn't it?

Not every statement has to be taken literally, it seems so that on HN, more often than not, one has to be incredibly specific in ones comments. That is like talking to genie or something, really frustrating. I kind of assumed, and without going through all my comments I think I also mentioned it, that by "all the docs" the meaning was all the relevant docs, I even specified that explicitly later on, didn't I?

So, ehy exactly do you think that reading jib and task relevant documentation is not necessary, or even the comoletely wrong approach? Seriously curious, because I run into such people ever so often at work and usually fail to explain to them why they actually have to read that stuff if they want to be a usefull member of the team. Understanding why they have that opinion would really be helpful.

>All the docs, if taking literally, would mean all the docs for everything you interact with in your life. Obviously impossible, isn't it?

No but even if C++ is the central language of my stack your comment can reasonably be interpreted as suggesting me to read the entire C++ spec. That's not an outlandish interpretation given how many people interpreted what you said this way.

>So, ehy exactly do you think that reading jib and task relevant documentation is not necessary, or even the comoletely wrong approach?

Did I say this? No.

Man, you just did. If your job is C++ development, yes, I absolutely expect you to be familiar with the full C++ documentation and master the parts relevant for your specific usage of it. If C++ is only part of your stack, replace familiarity with C++ specifically with familiarity of your whole stack.

I do the same with everyone, actually, myself included. Plumbers have to know the specs of their tools, materials and the regulations as well as principles of installation. And they do, the good ones at least.

And the easiest way to get that familiarity is reading the damn documenents. If you cannot be bothered with that, well, let me say I am happy I don't have to work with you.

>Man, you just did.

I just did what. Be clear with Your sentences.

>If your job is C++ development, yes, I absolutely expect you to be familiar with the full C++ documentation and master the parts relevant for your specific usage of it.

So you were unclear. You want someone to master only parts of of the stack but read the full spec. This is completely inconsistent with what you said earlier. You are moving the goal posts. Still it doesn't Make sense to read 1800 pages of the C++20 spec.

Do you read the English dictionary because you use English?

>And the easiest way to get that familiarity is reading the damn documenents. If you cannot be bothered with that, well, let me say I am happy I don't have to work with you.

Then you would be happy to not have to work with the overwhelming majority of programmers on the face of the earth. You being in the minority would make you the problem. Not others. Programmers in general read the spec and docs relevant to the task at hand. They do not generally read the full formal specifications and documentation of what they need.

Reading is actually cheap. You don’t have to understand everything, but being aware of the area map in general helps avoiding reinventing the wheel or looking for complex paths.

Systems are going to be increasingly complex

Coincidentally that’s where compensable expertise is.

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