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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know what niche you inhabit, but anecdotally the overwhelming majority of engineers I know have consulted an RFC. RFCs are an active component in the Internet; you need to at least reference them (if not fully read them) to understand how various parts of the Internet interoperate.

(It seems extremely unlikely that the average non-junior engineer hasn’t opened up RFC 3339 or one of the HTTP caching RFCs, just for example.)

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I dunno, I think many dev are aware of the existence of RFCs, but if your work occurs at higher levels of the stack there is frequently not a pressing need to read them.

For example, you don't have to read the specific RFC to know the difference between 200, 400, and 500 status codes. Any layman's blog post (or literally just reading the response messages accompanying those codes in actual use) is enough knowledge to get you real far.

That said; if a senior dev isn't aware of 3339, the holiest of RFCs, then that's a problem.

There's a strong inverse correlation in my career between how often a dev refers to RFCs by number alone and how much I ever want to interact (let alone work) with them again.

Doubly so for the "meta" RFCs (eg 1925).

I understand that PKI engineers are not a very fun lot, but it seems unfair to blame them for having the various X.509 RFCs beaten into them :-)

I think it's more a correlation than a causation, and I think it's the other way around.

It's not "I tend to not want to work with people who name-drop RFCs", it's "people I don't want to work with tend to name-drop RFCs".

And PKI engineers are cool (and a lot smarter than me).

Would you mind elaborating on why you believe people need to have that number memorized to deserve the title senior?

Not the number

RFC 3339 describes how to record time in a consistent and interopable manner, expanding onto ISO 8601.

Thanks for the summary of the document, but not quite what I asked for. Why would e.g. a VHDL engineer need to have read it to deserve the title senior?

Well you are kinda straw manning me, considering my own words were "that's a problem" and not "don't deserve a title senior engineer". I also specifically said "senior dev" and not "senior engineer", which are very different things. Maybe re-read the comment chain with fresh eyes, since you seem to have taken a very antagonistic interpretation?

I think most people here can agree that seniors should be aware of standards for recording time. If you know you should write a date as "yyyy-MM-dd hh:mm:ss" (add precision or timezone information as required) then congratulations you are aware of the necessary standards.

> That said; if a senior dev isn't aware of 3339, the holiest of RFCs, then that's a problem.

I’d love to read it, but I don’t have the time.

Personally, I have about a dozen related RFCs on my bookmarks toolbar due to a project that I worked on. I was referencing them constantly when I was actively working on that project.

I always thought RFC 2324 was more of an obligatory reading material.

I'd say the same of RFC 1149¹

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¹https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149

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