Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seiji | Hacker News Reader

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don't want to know how the system works internally.

I see this sentiment a lot. People seem to be proud of technical ignorance ("We don't even know where are servers are! lol!") because they are too busy doing whizbang gollygee Important Work like making the world's four billionth PHP CRUD app and setting up a DB without durability guarantees.

"But we don't have time to learn... we are busy being cool and popular!" Sometimes you have to slow down and actually learn things. Sometimes you should be an intern for a year before being a CEO. (It sounds like you've already resigned to not learn things: I probably wouldn't have the chance to learn all of that stuff.)

what I would call "ops" knowledge which is great for him

That's kinda impressive: dismissal condescension towards someone who knows more than you. It provides the ego with a nice padding. "They know more than I do, but what they know is silly and useless in these modern cloud-based times. I feel sorry they actually had to learn how things work."

Programming means manipulating a system. Basic/beginner programmers pretend the entire system is the API of their favorite (read: ruby) programming language. You can get pretty far not learning more than that, but you will always be limited. You will always be pretending to understand more than you actually do.

If you aren't a "computer person," you'll stop at the basic level. You'll spin your wheels cranking out things that feel the same forever. What separates a "computer person" from people just in it for the glory or money is their insatiable knowledge hungerness. They want to be good, better, and then optimally best.

Intermediate programmers realize (and have a mental model of) how everything works together including a basic CPU, bus, memory, network (from hardware up to packet switching through routing and DNS), your language stack and heap, calling conventions, directly attached storage, network attached storage, and half a dozen other things depending on speciality (graphics? wireless? robots? distributed system? embedded system? web?).

Advanced programmers do not exist.

>> don't want to know how the system works internally. > I see this sentiment a lot.

I like that sentiment a lot. We have finite time and finite brain cycles. Stand proudly on others' shoulders and build something bigger.

There's no shame in programming in high level languages to deliver more value more quickly. Ditto with operations, ditto with everything.

And there's no shame in standing on other peoples shoulders, but if you're building a web application you really need to think about having at least person with a devops background. Hell, even if they know how to compile from source and monitor properly that'd put them in a good place to go forward.

It's great to stand on the shoulders of others, but you ought to be able to look down without getting lost.

> There's no shame in programming in high level languages to deliver more value more quickly. Ditto with operations, ditto with everything.

There is shame in not understanding how that high-level language actually works, because it means you'll invariably be a worse programmer than the guy that does understand what he's actually doing.

I think it's the difference between a user and an engineer. As a user, you... use. You don't care how it works. You drive a car; you don't design a car.

Things get fuzzier in software development. Programmers are supposed to be users of everything they aren't programming. Things are supposed to be black boxes with fully isolated layers of abstraction. Ha. Doesn't work. To be competent, you must be aware of, at a minimum, what pieces are under you, at an intermedium, how they work, and at a maximum, how to create them yourself.

I'm only talking about people who want to be great technical workers though. If you just want to make a MVP to get funding then hire dweebs, who wasted their life learning computers, to make you rich, feel free to do that instead.

Have you taken an electron microscope to trace each line for every CPU you use in production to know how it actually works?

No? Well perhaps, not needing to dig into how things work is a useful feature of a well designed system.

How many software systems are even 1% as battle tested as a "CPU"? Even the most well designed software system doesn't have the kind of test coverage of a hardware.

CPU's are complex and far from perfect, often shipping with hundreds of 'errata' at the design level plus a wide assortment of random manufacturing errors in each chip. So, there is software that has fewer bugs and better coverage than a modern CPU. ex: Grep

EX: Pages 19-73 with 2 to 4 errata per page for a single popular CPU design: http://download.intel.com/design/processor/specupdt/320836.p... And that's just limited to stuff Intel knows about.

> There's no shame in programming in high level languages to deliver more value more quickly. Ditto with operations, ditto with everything.

Agreed. That isn't the same as the "don't want to know how the system works" mentality. High level languages are great tools for "encoding and automating processes you understand so you Don't Repeat Yourself, or perhaps Don't Need To Do It The First Time". They are great for "making all the initial decisions for you so you can get started and come back to those later".

They are horrid tools for "allowing you to be ignorant".

Now, I don't think everyone should know everything about computer systems (heck, just asking someone to know everything about C++ is a tall order ;-), and I certainly don't think you should have memorized all the configuration logic for hardware and software. However, if you are a technology professional, you really should see a key part of your professional value as your understanding of as much of how the system functions as possible. The understanding will never be total; it will never be complete; it ought to be an area of concern.

If it isn't, you aren't an technology professional. You might be an entrepreneur. You might even be a great product designer. You aren't an engineer.

That might sound like it is about semantics. It isn't. Computer systems are basically towers of babel where each brick is another leaky abstraction. Engineers are the people who build, maintain, and replace that tower. You can't do the job well if you only know about the roof.

Entrepreneurs have such a huge challenge just searching for a viable business model, that they tend to see all other problems as irrelevant. While the problems are usually smaller, possibly even trivial by comparison, they aren't irrelevant. If you are a tech company, doing technology right is more than just a tiny bit relevant.

Think of it this way: SQL provides a tremendously high level of abstraction to data systems. This makes it terribly efficient for quickly coming up with queries you want answers for. However, if something ever goes wrong, or if you are writing application code that is going to be run over and over again, you want someone who understands a lot more about the system than just how to translate a question in to SQL. That goes double if somehow the query is vital to your business' ongoing operations.

This is not a question of emotions. If you don't know how something works you won't be able to use it as well. If that's fine with you, okay.

If you want to drive a race car, you don't have to be a mechanic. You do have to understand some basic physics and simple parts of the car. For example, when you turn sharply into a corner, the wheel's camber helps determine how much of the tire's surface stays on the road, giving you more grip, keeping you in the corner at a higher G-force. Looking at the wear on the tire you can tell that your camber might need to be adjusted, and that might make 1/10th of a second difference, which is the difference between winning and losing.

If you want to program like a grandmother driving to the grocery store, all you need is gas. But if you want to program like a race car driver, try to learn how the internals work.

I'd also add that if you want to program for people like Google or Amazon, you need to understand how the internals work, or you will be seriously embarrassed at the interview. (From personal experience)

There is value in specialization. You denigrate the OP with your condescending "too busy doing whizbang gollygee Important Work" and mischaracterize him as using words like "silly and useless", but the OP never said that. All he said is that he's focused on one part of the work and doesn't know that much about the others.

I've been considering these choices a lot. In my own career, I've made a conscious choice to pursue lots of different things that I found interesting, but I've become a generalist, pretty good at lots of different things but lacking the deep domain knowledge in any one of them that a specialist gains. You seem to be arguing that specialists should not exist, everyone should go for broad rather than deep. I think there's a place for both, and becoming a specialist often requires the discipline to stay focused and not pursue every interest and curiosity that rears it's distracting head.

I think there's value in a programmer knowing the whole stack, from language APIs to hardware implementations, and being able to understand the consequences of every line of code. But time is finite and someone at the beginning of their careers must make choices on where to build their expertise.

I think you're interpreting it wrong.

What you see as celebrating ignorance, I see as celebrating simplicity: "We don't _need_ to know how it works any more!"

For many use cases, this is perfectly acceptable (and the article rightly notes this).

"That's kinda impressive: dismissal condescension towards someone who knows more than you."

I saw nothing dismissive about that statement whatsoever. I read it as "they know more than I do about that particular subject, but what they know is not useful for me to know at this moment in time".

I do think it's true that good programmers have a passion for understanding as much as they can. But there are so many levels and it's impossible to master everything. Not only that, but things are constantly evolving. If you set about to master everything you can drive yourself crazy.

I have a friend who is an incredible engineer, he writes high performance code at the C and Assembly level. He knows almost nothing about higher level code. You could say in a way that he's lazy because he wouldn't know how to write a simple web page, but that would be missing the point. He's critical for the work that he does.

Being a jack of all trades is helpful at times, but a team of people who specialize can go into depth that just isn't possible for one individual.

Personally I'm interested in the design of a many systems - but I can see a case for wanting other systems to present a single well-defined, correctly implemented interface.

There was a time when, to make a program with sound, programmers had to handle different sound cards differently. You used to get settings in games to choose whether your card was Sound Blaster 16 Compatible.

Were those the good old days, or the bad old days?

Very well put. Every good programmer knows the underlying parts of what he is using, and unfortunately the new trend is that programmers don't need to know this stuff anymore.

It's true that in some cases they don't have to, but they should, and for some reason people get offended when you tell them that...

so are you suggesting that everyone should learn everything?

or that people shouldn't attempt things without expertise?

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