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Comment by koala_man | Hacker News Reader

The article starts off saying that if you want people with real full stack experience, from kernel to UX, you need to grow it.

It goes on to say that it's hard to find and develop expertise for low level software like hypervisors.

What's the connection between the topics? It feels like two different rants.

If it's difficult to find kernel developers then wouldn't it help to not require them to also know web UX?

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> If it's difficult to find kernel developers then wouldn't it help to not require them to also know web UX?

That means hiring two people, and in $current_year, companies expect one person to know everything. Sysadmin, backend programmer, frontend programmer, designer and a DBA used to be different people not that long ago, now they expect one person to do all that... + it seems they want kernel development experience now.

Before they were multiple people they were one person.

A single person can in fact write a program for a computer.

Sure, some C code, some html, a table here, a colspan there, and you can have a website made by a single person... if we want a website to look like it was made on an 1980s computer by a single person.

Or, you can have a decent website made by a single person. It's not that hard to learn basic HTML5, enough ARIA semantics to know not to use ARIA, a programming language with decent synchronisation primitives that supports CGI, an SQL dialect and the principles of relational database design, enough JavaScript to use MDN, enough CSS to use MDN, the basics of server maintenance, TLS certificate provision, and DNS.

If you want to do your own networking, or run email, that's a whole 'nother specialism; but just running a website is easy enough for one person to do.

It transplants to other eras. A Webmaster managed the server, code and graphics where it looks like sites from the eras.

People who came after you would write it vb6 people who came latter bootstrap.js or use material icons.

If you're not that person, it's fine. Some people still just use notepad and write html like it's 1999. Other have both kernel experience, and have picked up react at some point in the past ten years. Plus LLMs write css these days, so no colspan needed.

Is an LLM gonna write your kernel too?

At the rate LLMs are improving, that certainly seems like a possibility, but until they do, why would you need one for that? Kernel C makes sense. CSS is the problem here.

On the 1990s maybe, on the 1980s hardly. :)

Good, that's the way it was until the splitting of roles for commodification. A programmer is more like the Renaissance man who makes it a goal to do everything from different disciplines than a drone who has been trained to do one thing and can only be trusted to do one thing.

It's not commodification, it's acknoledging that tech got exponentially more complex over the decades.

just think of your favorite video game character in 2000 and then one in the 2020's and consider how much tech is needed to render, animate, light, and conceptualize it. in 2000 this was all done by maybe one artist and one gamedev, probably making a character with some hundreds of polys at best. now that artist has a pipeline of riggers, material artists, animators, and concept artists, while that single dev became a graphics programmer, gameplay programmer, tech artist, and build engineer.

My point was unnecessarily they split the roles. An artist can cover concept and materials. A programmer can do gameplay, graphics, rendering and builds. In fact having people who understand the entire project makes for a better project.

It's like moving from custom built cars to the assembly line where someone's job is putting in one screw. I understand it's cheaper/faster because you can hire anyone unskilled for cheap but cars were all suppose to be identical. Software should be unique (if not just copy the last thing built) but I guess when it comes to major games things are more of factory throwing millions of pixels of characters at existing game engines while copying gameplay of successful games. That's why games are shovelware these days like a netflix original.

But we now expect a single person to design the engine, the bodywork, both aesthetically and technically, make an engine, actually make all those parts, assemble them together, pain the car and test it.

Jack of all trades, master of none. This is why we need clusters, "stacks" and "clouds" on the server side and gigabytes of ram on the client side + many megabytes transfered, just to show one simple weather forecast website that gives the user the same amount of information as a WAP site did on a five line mobile phone back in GPRS times.

Sure, let me explain it a bit better. It's more like in the sense of the "stack" is very deep now. Clearly, we have/hire Xen/hypervisors specialist, and we do not ask them to be CSS experts. However, deeper in the stack (at lower levels) harder it is to find them, because of the lack of expertise in universities and/or appeal of doing such job.

And if you find or train those low-level/system-oriented people, they also need to understand how a feature they build will be exposed functionally to a user (and why they need it in the first place). Because things are not make into thin-air but required to work in a bigger picture (ie: the product).

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