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Sure, if what you're doing is trivial, and remains trivial, you can get by with low skills, that's tautological. It's just that people rarely really know the li

Sure, if what you're doing is trivial, and remains trivial, you can get by with low skills, that's tautological. It's just that people rarely really know the limit of their skills, and end up doing things they think are trivial, but aren't, and boom, you have a seemingly trivial screen in your app that takes 45 seconds once there are 2000 row in some table, and you have no idea why. There are pretty simple things that will blow up in your face performance-wise even at rather modest scale if you don't know what's going on under the hood. Do you know why you're not supposed to concate strings, especially at scale/in loops? Do you know what the N+1 performance problem is? I've seen simple webapps take out beefy servers at modest load because a dev didn't. So yeah, we're here to serve business needs, and for that we need devs who can reason at the most basic level of abstraction about what's going on under the hood.

quaunaut 10y ago
The N+1 issue is one that everyone ends up learning and understanding on the job fairly quickly. It doesn't require anything abstract to understand- "You're constantly hitting it over and over instead of doing things in one or two passes." Modern programming generally has you approaching any obscure issues like this the same way: You profile your code, figure out where something is going horribly wrong, then try to look up answers for why. If I noticed that my string concatenation was taking an inordinate amount of time, it'd probably take me under 5 minutes to figure out why via Google alone. Hell, I'd significantly wonder what someone was doing if they were concatenating strings enough to cause performance issues. I can't imagine any business need, for anyone, that could be brought together by that.