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Comment by gtsop | Hacker News Reader

> But you don't have to understand lower layers to provide value to your customers, and developers who now find themselves overinvested in low-level knowledge don't want to believe that.

This is the weakest point which breaks your whole argument.

I see it happening ALL the time: newer web developers enter the field from an angle of high abstraction, whenever these abstractions don't work well, then they are completelly unable to proceed. They wouldn't be in that place if they knew the low-level and it DOES prevent them from delivering "value" to their customers.

What is even worse than that, since these developers don't understand exactly why some problen manifests, and the don't even understand exactly what their abstraction trully solves, they wrongly proceed to solve a problem using the wrong (high level) tools.

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Yeah … but

That has some amount to do with the level abstraction but almost everything to do with inexperience. The lower level you get, the harder the impact of inexperience.

New web developers are still sorting themselves out and they are at a stage where they’ll suck no matter what the level of abstraction.

I get what you say but I must insist. Abstractions don't properly surface the underlying causes when they break.

This creates a barier in gaining experience on the topic that matters in order to solve your problem. Let me try to give an example (please don't neat pick, it is just an example):

A front-end dev who has never bundled an app like we did in the old days (manual scripts or manual gulp, grunt, webpack pipelines) but use a off-the-shelf webpack config (lets say CRA) has great trouble understanding why some webpack plugin doesn't work as expected, or they might not even understand how importing an svg into their jsx actually works. Yes this is due to lack of experience, but their current level of working isn't exposing those details directly so they can't gain experience, the waters are way too deep.

> Abstractions don't properly surface the underlying causes when they break.

"Abstractions" in the abstract neither do nor do not do this, as it is orthogonal to what an abstraction is; concrete implementations of abstractions can either swallow or wrap information about the underlying cause when they break, both are valid approaches.

> but their current level of working isn't exposing those details directly so they can't gain experience

This isn't really true. They absolutely can gain experience; they don't pay a (very high) extra effort with the side benefit of maybe gaining some experience on routine tasks where nothing breaks, and tend to gain experience only if they expend extra effort in situations where things fail or their are unusual challenges to resolve.

> They absolutely can gain experience

Not sure where you are getting with this. Yes, literally speaking they can, but what matters is if they actually do, in general, in the real world. My admitedly biassed opinion, based on personaly observating other colleagues, shows that in general, they don't learn and they give up.

Have you noticed an other trend in your circles?

> Not sure where you are getting with this. Yes, literally speaking they can, but what matters is if they actually do,

And, despite the fairly consistent bias people used to working at lower levels of abstraction have against people who usually work at higher levels, we all work with some level of abstraction, and most people gain experience at lower levels by dealing with problems that emerge, and those that don't don't fail to do so because they can't but because they choose not to bother either because they have other people that they can rely on for lower-level problems, or because they aren't interested and are doing things where they can afford to simply change what they are doing in response to those problems.

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