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Comment by caeril | Hacker News Reader

The LLVM layoffs notwithstanding, OP is still largely correct in general. Your typical developer could solder, knew how the CPU works, knew roughly how many clocks would retire a MOV, ADD, MUL, etc, was cognizant of wait states, understood cache lines, protection rings, instruction decode, memory mapping, etc.

Try asking a typical Django or React developer today what a cache line even is.

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Not 10 or 15 years ago. Maybe that level of knowledge was common in the 70s or 80s.

It is not possible either now - there is just too much complexity for people to know all layers of a stack. Look at how much more complex just a CPU is. Transistor counts in CPUs have gone up by five or six orders of magnitude since the 8 bit era. We now have all kinds of complex optimisations like out of order execution.

I still marvel our younger IT workers when I mention that in the 1990s, a very large percentage of sysadmins could not only program, but knew C and regularly wrote ad hoc tools in C (or Perl. Perl? What's Perl?).

These days, if you're a sysadmin who can program, you're considered some sort of wizard.

Senior sysadmins in the late 2000's knew how to code for sure, usually perl and some C (though not to the level you'd want them writing code full time).

More fancy sysadmins who were "modern" would learn Ruby.

The issue with "sysadmin" was that it suffered an inflation treadmill, what used to be a very difficult job where you would need to understand programming, debugging, compilers, OS design, distributed systems and so forth became a title for senior helpdesk staff; who, naturally, did not know those things.

Yeah the OP is quite correct. Ask your generic web developer about nuances of HTTP, SSL or even networking in general.

Ask your VB veteran about the same topics ))

Steve Wozniak, the Steve that built the first Apple computers, knew what every component on it did, and he wrote every line of the ROM. Nowadays it's, "Well a Stackoverflow comment said if I add this line in the config, it will work, and it did, so... I closed the ticket.", but the complexity of computers nowadays makes it unfeasible to learn everything inside out, at least not if you need a gazillion developers (I think only a low low sub-percent of them know their software and hardware stacks inside out) because everything needs to be software-ized.

That's nonsense. Your typical developer had to deal with all those things in the past maybe, but is no more than specialization knowledge.

You don't care about how many ticks you need to MOV with indirect addressing when you are developing Django.

Feels like complaining because someone that is not a Django developer doesn't know how proxy model inheritance works.

All abstractions leak like a sieve. Being a developer at ANY layer of the stack without knowing what's happening underneath you is default gross incompetence and a recipe for eventual disaster.

Are we cool with surgeons not knowing what mitochondria are, or how cells work? All you gotta know is where to put the scalpel, bro. I'm sure it will work out just fine.

This is laughably over blown.

I don’t expect my doctor to know the component parts of atoms. Nor do I need them to.

I don’t expect a designer to know how a pixel works.

At some point in the stack we have to draw a line and say this level of detailed knowledge is not generally useful to the majority.

In terms of generic web development today, I would be fine at drawing that line at low level system concerns (memory allocation, cpu cycles, hell even compilation)

I recently had a conversation with a senior React dev about Redux with years of React experience. I mentioned during a dry run that you can clear the store, if a local storage store (default), with localStorage.clear() from the dev console. Response: "Cool, I didn't know that.". This guy is good at creating UIs, but that's an example of 'How this works' knowledge I'd of expected him to have. It's a pervasive epidemic of learn just what you need to ship, instead of learn what you need to ship a quality product and hone the tools in your toolbox.

Which one is able to deliver a web app faster?

Lots of people here completely missing the point - understanding assembly in the age of infinite cloud computing resources is equivalent to saying a guy who can build a wood hut on his own is more able to get jobs than a modern day construction worker. Even though they have some random or deeper technical knowledge, it doesn’t make them any more employable or relevant

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