Wild idea: maybe if more devs had good fundamental knowledge to begin with, the good systems engineering could be done along the way.
We’re all different at good things, and it’s usually better to lean into your strengths than it is to paper over your weaknesses.
We can wish everyone were good at everything, or we can try to actually get things done.
> We can wish everyone were good at everything, or we can try to actually get things done.
I want to be clear, there's no perfect code or a perfect understanding or any of that. But the complaint here about not knowing /enough/ fundamentals is valid. There is some threshold which we should recognize as a minimum. The disagreement is about where this threshold is, and no one is calling for perfection. But certainly there are plenty who want the threshold to not exist. Be that AI will replace coders or coding bootcamps get you big tech jobs. Zero to hero in a few months is bull.
Minimum knowledge is one thing; minimum time to apply it is another.
I could go from servers sitting on the ground to racked, imaged, and ready to serve traffic in a few hours, because I've spent the time learning how to do it, and have built scripts and playbooks to do so. Even if I hadn't done the latter, many others have also done so and published them, so as long as you knew what you were looking for, you could do the same.
There's a bunch of sayings from tradesmen that I think are relevant here. And it's usually said by people who take pride in their work and won't do shoddy craftsmanship
- measure twice, cut once
- there's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it twice
- if you don't have time to do it right when will you have time to do it again?
I'd kinda want to argue with that - it is true, but we don't live in vacuum. Most programmers (me included, don't worry) aren't that skilled, and after work not everyone will want to study more. This is something that could be resolved by changing cultural focus, but like other things involving people, it's easier to change the system/procedures than habits.
To your point I agree. I would argue that employers should be giving time for employees to better themselves. It's the nature of any job like this where innovation takes place. It's common among engineers, physicists, chemists, biologists, lawyers, pilots, and others to have time to learn. Doctors seem to be in the same boat as us and it has obviously negative consequences. The job requires continuous learning. And you're right, that learning is work. So guess who's supposed to pay for work?
I do agree with you, though. I have fears though on how much can that be a thing in reality - because I cannot disagree that this is a right approach.
If you look around I think you'll notice it's mostly shit...
There's a flaw in markets though which allows shit to flourish. It's that before purchasing you can't tell the difference between products. So generally people then make the choice based on price. Of course, you get what you pay for. And many markets people are screaming for something different that isn't being currently met, but things are so entrenched that it's hard to even create that new market unless you're a huge player.
Here's a good example. Say you know your customers like fruit that is sweet. So all the farmers breed sweeter and sweeter strawberries. The customers are happy and sells go up. But at some point they don't want it any sweeter. But every farmer continues anyways and the customers have no choice but to buy too sweet strawberries. So strawberry sells decline. The farmers not having much signal from customers other than price and orders, what do they do? Well... they double down of course! It's what worked before.
The problem is that the people making decisions are so far removed from all this that they can't read the room. They don't know what the customer wants. Tbh, with tech, often the customer doesn't know what they want until they see it. (Which this is why so much innovation comes from open source because people are fixing things to make their own lives better and then a company goes "that's a good idea, let's scale this)
I'm unsure what those terms mean. What are qualities that perfect code or perfect understanding would have?
Depending on your framing I may agree or disagree.
Just to lob a softball, I'm sure there are/were people that have a perfect understanding of an older CPU architecture; or an entire system architecture's worth of perfect understanding that gave us spacecraft with hardware and firmware that still works and can be updated (out of the planetary solar system?), or Linux.
These are softballs for framing because they're just what I could type off the cuff.
To answer your softball, no, I doubt there was anyone who understood everything except petty early on. But very few people understand the whole OS let alone do any specialized task like data analysis, HPC, programming languages, encryption, or anything else. But here's the thing, the extra knowledge never hurts. It almost always helps, but certain knowledge is more generally helpful than others. Especially if we're talking memory but things like caching, {S,M}I{S,M}D, some bash, and some assembly go A LONG way
But people never do. Instead they just scale up, get more funding, rinse and repeat. It isn't until the bill gets silly that anyone bothers to consider it, and they usually then discover that no one knows how to optimize things other than code (maybe – I've worked with many devs who have no idea how to profile their code, which is horrifying).
Yes because usually the other option is focus on those things you advocate for up front and then they go out of business before they get a chance to have the problems you're arguing against.
Outside of eng, nobody cares if your company has the prettiest, leanest infrastructure in the world. They care about product.
Different environments require different tradeoffs. The vast majority of startups will die before their systems engineering becomes a problem.
Unless of course you're in a leadership role, in which case it's going to be priority #1,000 in 99.9% of cases.
When I was at <FAANG> we didn’t control our infrastructure, there were teams that did it for us. Those guys knew a lot more about the internals of Linux than your average HNer. Getting access to the SSD of the host wasn’t a sys-call away, it was a ticket to an SRE and a library import. It wasn’t about limited knowledge, it was an intentional engineering tradeoff made at a multi-billion dollar infra level.
When I worked at <startup>, we spent 1hr writing 50loc and throwing it at AWS lambda just to see if it would work. No thought to long term cost or scalability, because the company might not be there tomorrow, and this is the fastest way to prototype an API in the cloud. When it works, obviously management wants you to hit the “scale” button in that moment and if it costs 50% more, well that’s probably only a few hundred dollars a month. It wasn’t about limited knowledge, but instead an intentional engineering tradeoff when you’re focused on speed and costs are small
And there is a whole bunch of companies that exist in between.
If an engineer costs $100/hour, scaling an extra $100/month (or even an extra $1k/month) is generally a no brainer. That money is almost always better served towards shipping product.
Seriously, I'm struggling to figure out how "we have servers that run containers / applications" would need to be redone just because the application changed.
I would always recommend "serverless" monolith first with the option to develop with mocks locally/offline. That's imo the best risk/effort ratio.