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Anecdotally, what I've seen is that older programmers, in addition to being programmers, also have the skills of a computer helpdesk technician. They can debug

Anecdotally, what I've seen is that older programmers, in addition to being programmers, also have the skills of a computer helpdesk technician. They can debug Windows problems, hardware problems, know how to mess with the BIOS, and have no problem installing or configuring any piece of software. This helps immensely when setting up your IDE or debugging weird problems with compiling. Younger programmers seem to commonly have zero knowledge in this area. If they run into some problem with their environment, they are completely stuck. Oh, they're asked to install a VPN client but it doesn't work and they have to debug it? They're completely blocked. They have no idea how to continue. For me, I learned these basic computer skills first (because I was obsessed with computers as a child). Then I learned to program. I think this is a side effect of teaching programming as a career skill. You have people that want to be programmers but don't include "computing" as one of their hobbies. So of course they don't know anything about how to debug computer problems. This is totally expected. Teaching these skills in CS curriculum would probably be a good idea.

deleted 9y ago
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leggomylibro 9y ago
But those skills have nothing to do with computer science as a field of study - wouldn't they be more useful to teach in general education like K-12? Like I remember in middle school, we had an elective option between woodshop and CAD. The 'CAD' class was really more about performing simple automation in programs like MS Word/Excel, but that sort of thing is still useful in just about any job these days - not just programming. I really like the idea of starting to call 'CS' something like 'Informatica' so people might stop looking at the field as just a valuable career skill. Google tells me that there is now a startup called 'Informatica', but that is also what the field is called or translates to in some other countries like the Netherlands; I think https://www.cwi.nl/ https://www.cwi.nl/ could probably claim prior use. Speaking of, it seems odd to try to use an existing commonplace phrase as a trademark in the industry that the phrase was born from - it seems like it'd be impossible to argue that anyone was infringing - but I guess I'm not a corporate lawyer.
- chuckdries 9y ago
  ASU has a degree called 'informatics' that's run by the computer science faculty but focused more on <the application of technology to other things> rather than <the technology and creation of technology itself.> I just transferred into it from computer science, because I spend all my free time making games anyway, and the informatics program lets me take an elective track to get credit for that. I do think CS is probably a better fit for what I see as my long term plan, but I think this program has a lot of potential for people who wouldn't otherwise call themselves engineers.
- currymj 9y ago
  in some other languages it's basically called that. "Informatik" in German. there's still the vestigial title in some department names in the US, "Department of Computer Science and Informatics". I agree it would be a better name but I think the battle is lost, informatics now refers to an applied discipline (closely related to library science) involving building up big systems to store and organize data.
- zerkten 9y ago
  I think you are trying to make some good points, but your language could have been clearer. If I'm understanding correctly you mean: 1. Treat Computer Science (CS) as a specific field, and don't dilute the curriculum with related items. 2. Introduce a course that covers these broader, non-CS items, and actually push it out beyond the audience of CS? Did I get that right? I think you might have meant the term "informatics" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics). Depending on your position CS is either subordinate, equal, or above informatics. I have a degree from a UK university and there is a much wider spectrum degree types in this field than exist here in the US where I now live. I'm conflicted on the original post that elicited your response. I have that background where I inherited a broken PC, a bunch of floppy disks, and some manuals. In some ways this gives me an advantage, especially given that I'm comfortable being dropped into a messy project or some problem that is debugged. I've seen lots of folks who can't handle this, but can churn out code on to need more support around the edges. I now see more and more folks attempting things like devops and at least being able to learn some of these skills later on. I think where it stands me in better stead is problem avoidance, but even that is subjective.
mirashii 9y ago
> Teaching these skills in CS curriculum would probably be a good idea. This is the one thing I don't agree with. A better placement for these skills is a generic course required for any degree, or an optional course that anyone could take to shore up these skills (and you could recommend it for your CS major). Importantly though, this isn't part of the field of computer science, and so it doesn't really belong in that curriculum. Now, if we had more of a "software development" or "software engineering" major, or even trade school, I think that would be a perfect area to cover practical aspects of tooling that are required to work in the field. There's a large gap between what you need to learn to become a reasonably competent programmer at most organizations and what you learn in a computer science major, and it really shows if you've ever interviewed a lot of fresh graduates. Great algorithm and theory skills, but no idea how to set up a build system. There's definitely room for a more practical education that transitions more directly into industry.
- tj-teej 9y ago
  I don't think the experienced engineers earlier referred to learned these things in a CS curriculum.
- Retric 9y ago
  There are a lot of useful skills. Teaching people how to fix a flat tire would also be rather useful. Basic computer administration falls into that huge category of useful skills that are not worth teaching to a general population who have completely viable alternatives. Specialization is extremely valuable for society and having more competent doctors etc is worth doctors having a more narrow focus.
  - Griffinsauce 9y ago
    I disagree. Having a broader skill set means you can be more creative with problems. The separation between doctors and computer science is holding both fields back. Think of machine learning and big data, we are _just now_ starting to apply those ideas to medical problems, while those problems are fundamental to our existence as a species. Computers in hospitals are a chore and a drain on doctors. They should be empowering, instead doctors spend the majority of their time typing reports. Reports of things that are already registered in other parts of the system. (You're already thinking of a solution right? That proves my point) Hearing about how hospitals handle technology from my SO (neurologist) makes me want to rip my hair out. Specialization is a great thing but we need generalists to bridge the gap to help specialists empower each other.
gricardo99 9y ago
I have not seen any age-correlation in what you describe. For sure there are "career" programmers who don't know much about computers beyond their narrow scope of expertise. You're admittedly obsessed with computers, which presumably means you spend a lot of your free timing tinkering and learning. You've picked up a lot of very useful knowledge, but surely there's room in a profession for those who are not obsessed with their field? The programmer who doesn't know anything about a BIOS perhaps spends their free time bike riding.
- sametmax 9y ago
  Yes but computing is a very young field. It's not like architecture or cooking. Everything sucks. Most stuff breaks, are buggy, badly documented and poorly explained. Things gets obsolete fast. If you are "just a programmer", you will be half productive and very dependent on others.
- namelost 9y ago
  Being a programmer without advanced computer skills is like being a paramedic who can't drive. Sure it's possible and there's probably some niche where such a person can fit in, but definitely career limiting.
- adrianN 9y ago
  I know a couple of grey haired professional programmers who have only rudimentary "computer" skills. They're still decent programmers though.
el_benhameen 9y ago
I think this skill is what kept me going through the frustrating patches after I decided that I wanted to be a programmer. I started programming later than many here (after I had obtained a degree in an unrelated field), but I'd always enjoyed breaking and fixing computers and software as a kid and so I'd picked up "computing", as you put it, as a hobby. That sort of hobby teaches you to keep ramming your head against the wall until the bricks start to crumble, which is helpful when you're trying to learn a language but the package you want fails to install on Ubuntu, or your program won't run despite you having checked the syntax a thousand times, or a concept doesn't click until you've re-read it every day for a week. You learn to see computers and software as a mess that you will necessarily have to untangle and rearrange for things to work properly, instead of thinking of things that don't yet work as "broken". And you learn to Google until your eyes start to melt.
zappo2938 9y ago
I'm a relative newcomer and didn't have a problem downloading Android Studio and setting it up on Ubuntu to run an emulator to develop React Native apps. Learning to program is getting harder because the programs are far, far more complicated than they were 10 years ago.
blackbagboys 9y ago
I agree with your observation, but I don't agree with your diagnosis of the cause. I think it's mostly down to the increasing abstraction and ease of using software. When I was a kid, I wouldn't have described "computing" as a hobby, but just getting certain games to install and run on my parent's cheap Gateway PC would require a lot of fiddling around. My younger siblings have no more or less interest in computing than I did, but if they want to play a game they can seamlessly download and run it from Steam or the app store.
- mathgeek 9y ago
  > but just getting certain games to install and run on my parent's cheap Gateway PC would require a lot of fiddling around Ah, that brings me back to memories of boot floppies in order to change the memory settings of the system.
  - stryk 9y ago
    IRQ conflicts! Holy mother of hell IRQ conflicts! particularly when dealing with those early gen Sound Blasters -- and trying to get that Roland MT32 you borrowed from the greasy weirdo in your big brother's band hooked up and pumping out that sweet, sweet midi
    - stinos 9y ago
      IRQ conflicts! Recently I had this surface, some RT kernel extension we use would display possible conflicts. Despite programming a lot these days, my background is electronic engineering, so I still have a rough idea of what an IRQ is and does even on the lowest level. However had no luck trying to explain that to a 'pure' programmer.
      - ZenoArrow 9y ago
        > "However had no luck trying to explain that to a 'pure' programmer." Interrupt requests are easy to explain to even a novice computer user if you frame them in the context of something they're familiar with. For example, when you press a key on your keyboard an interrupt request will be created to make sure the computer knows you've pressed the key. So in simplified terms, you could say when you press the "A" key on your keyboard, there is a part of the computer that says "pause what other things you're doing, respond to the "A" key press, then continue with what you were doing before".
xbryanx 9y ago
I think another big culprit in this situation is the IT department. I visited a research university recently in a computer science related field. The IT department wouldn't allow even graduate students and researchers to have admin access on their machines. Even if the programmers could debug basic issues, they often had to go track down and IT staff member to install some library or program for them. If this is happening at the computer research level it's happening even more in non-tech company business environments. How do we expect staff at non-tech companies to experiment with new skills in programming if they can't even use their computers at their full potential?
- Clubber 9y ago
  Ya, I had an intern position at my school that did computer lab build support (the hardware and network, not as a teacher). We installed Windows NT 4 Workstation everywhere and it wasn't overly secure. At least 4 times, someone changed the default background to a porn still. Blame that guy.
Clubber 9y ago
I'm and older programmer. I learned how to build a computer because my parents scraped enough money to buy a computer when I was young, but not wealthy enough to get it fixed when I inevitably broke it. This was back when PCs were friggin expensive as were parts. Fellow computer friends (we had few back then) would let each other borrow hardware (parts) and whatnot, so we had to learn how to install it and configure it (IRQ's COM ports, etc), but it was fun, and without internet! It's what I liked to do in my spare time. The funny thing is the C64 and VIC-20 were self contained, for the most part. You didn't have to add cards and swap out processors and all that. All you really had to do is know how to put wad of aluminum foil where your fuse should go when your fuse goes out. :) When the dot boom came around, I had to learn how to not only write web sites, but I had to learn how to host a website out of my house, which includes everything you would need to host a website, which involves a lot. DNS server, mail server, database server, server admin, TCP/IP, security, and more. I still host out of my house today.
- drharby 9y ago
  I tried hosting my own mailserver out of an ec2 instance in an excercise. Learned lots in those hours and hours
  - behringer 9y ago
    It took me a month to setup a mail server including redundancies. But now I can postfix like none other :)
AlexCoventry 9y ago
I too am obsessed with computers, and will push through "helpdesk" type issues to get my work done. However, I don't consider that to be a remarkable skill. Such issues can almost always be resolved with a bit of googling. Perhaps I'm too close to see the foundational knowledge I'm depending on, though.
- fenwick67 9y ago
  Here's the thing: You need to know what to look for. You can't just google "The internet won't work" or "blue screen help" or "I can't see files". Web search is a super powerful tool but it requires some fundamental knowledge before it can help.
  - megaman22 9y ago
    Actually reading error messages is an apparently very rare skill. Almost always, if you just google what it tells you, you'll hit something... Yet I constantly see people automatically click through popups milliseconds after they appear, only to fume about things not working. It takes a surprising amount of effort to get them to do it over and slow down long enough to figure out what went wrong.
    - DoreenMichele 9y ago
      I confess, I was very guilty of that at my old job, which was very fast paced. Whenever reflexively closing the pop up resulted in things not going as I expected, I would, indeed, do it over, slow down and carefully read the messages.
    - nikofeyn 9y ago
      i would just like to get error messages that actually said something more than something went wrong. yea, no shit something went wrong, i already know that, but what and why and how do i fix it are questions i want answered. i know the code knows what went wrong, so just tell me.
      - 9y ago
rhizome 9y ago
There's lots of money in computers, which has increased the proportion of graduates who know only how to add an IDE to the factory install of their computer. I saw this a lot back in my desktop support days.
- shagie 9y ago
  This brings up another interesting point... "back in my desktop support days." I had a few jobs once out of college (phone support, QA (before automation was much of a thing), sysadmin, back to phone support) before I got a programming job. That was a good two years out of learning the other parts of a computer. It was because I knew perl that I was able to do the sysadmin - web programmer transition. That wasn't too unusual of a path back in the mid-late 90s. A good chunk the developers over in the engineering department and nearly everyone in the programing wings of IT and customer support had done tech support or system administration. It was just part of the "working your way up" within the career path. Many of my classmates in college went to a "the computer guy" job which did all of the computer stuff for a small company (hardware, software, helping with excel, writing programs to serve dynamic text to the web server). Being a computer person back then was a much more generalized skill set. As an aside, recently I was tapped on my team (Java developers) to do work on an older website. LAMP. I had to brush up on Linux from the past decade (I was another decade out of date with some of the package management)... but being able to do that sysadmin, read perl (I know of one other perl coder in the department, but he doesn't have any sysadmin background) and get it running was a skillset that didn't exist much of anywhere else.
  - mattmanser 9y ago
    I was telephone support for people installing freeview boxes in the UK in the early 2000s. Same skills. Same skills as programming your VCR without the manual. Same skills as getting Doom to work over a direct pc to pc connection. None of that crap worked first time. We had to learn how to debug to get basic stuff working. In some ways computers are too usable these days. In other ways the experienced programmers are too sloppy and put in too many barriers to get their tools to work flawlessly in the modern world. We don't live in the tinker world any more. But ultimately to be a good dev you must learn to debug. Hard problem to solve.
rconti 9y ago
I absolutely agree with your first few paragraphs. As a hobbyist before I was a professional (Linux desktop since '95), I'm surprised when I meet people who have a technical skill but not a hobbyist background. I first encountered it with Oracle DBAs who sometimes were amazing at Oracle but had rudimentary Unix skills, and that's becoming more commonplace as people do things like phone app development but without the background "we" expect (whether rightly or wrongly). That said, my background as a Sysadmin/Ops person also landed me in my own silo. I don't have much programming experience, and running production systems means NO, the environment does NOT give you access to wide-open CPAN, RPM, pip, whatever downloads. It's a regimented release process where someone upstream has to provide the relevant dependancies and you don't just go around installing stuff, running services, etc. As a result of my background and not being a developer, on HN I hear of new languages/frameworks/libraries/methodologies on a daily basis. Things that, clearly, a large number of readers hear must already be familiar with, even though many of them will be out of fashion in 6 months. And then the process to install a lot of these things is "oh, just pipe a wget of this script into bash, RPM install this, pip install that, don't worry, it's all quite safe for your system..." In many ways, it feels like worlds are diverging.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  > In many ways, it feels like worlds are diverging. We are specializing. Enterprise shops have always wanted stability, and so they develop ever more elaborate build processes to control exactly what versions go into production. Embedded systems have always wanted to run only what needed to run, and so we have developed ever-improving systems to pick out only exactly what needed to be run. Developers, in the meantime, have always wanted the newest and shiniest, and so have gotten 10,000 ways to install newer and shinier toys. Edit: typo
TallGuyShort 9y ago
I think that's a side-effect of degrees that focus only on coding or applied math, whereas before the computing industry was as developed as it is now and there was less specialization within it, a CS degree would have covered the basic data structures and algorithms that were common knowledge then and still had plenty of time to cover systems things. My degree wasn't in CS - it included basically a CS minor, but it also focused on network protocols and hardware architectures that most CS students had never heard of. So when I was interviewing for jobs around graduation and was asked to explain everything that happens after someone types "google.com" in their browser, I could explain all the network protocols in detail right down to how binary was encoded into specific 5V fluctations on certain lines, DNS resolution, routing algorithms, the server's filesystem, etc. But when I was doing a coding problem and they asked me what the invariant was in my loop, I had to ask what an invariant was. And yet I had been coding full time for 4 years by that point and never needed to know that term. I knew stuff CS majors didn't, and they knew stuff I didn't. It was different specialities, each of which really filled 4 years of heavy, heavy semesters.
- NTDF9 9y ago
  Reminds me of a recent interview where they asked me, "How does the client to a server?" I replied "over the socket" To which they replied, "Using REST over HTTP" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - __blockcipher__ 9y ago
    I would have murdered them on the spot for that response
    - aurelianito 9y ago
      Probably both are correct. But which one is more useful in this context?
      - __blockcipher__ 9y ago
        The interviewer or whoever should provide the context. Otherwise it’s a pointless question. The issue is when they don’t provide context and expect you to list off some random framework or something.
Globz 9y ago
You couldn’t have said it better, I had the same kind of learning path as you did and I believe it makes everything a lot easier to understand since you can clearly see the full spectrum of what you are dealing with while programming and usually it helps open new doors so you can explore a problem from a different angle since you have a deep knowledge of your stack available to you from the start.
pasabagi 9y ago
I don't really think of programming as a career skill - I'm a hobbyist. But I love it, and I love learning about it, even the really low-level stuff. I like reading about algorithms, and data structures, and architecture. Computers, on the other hand, I despise. Every piece of knowledge I have to learn about how a specific computer works, not in the sense of ALUs and registers and whatnot, but in the sense of 'if Windows gets a BSOD it's probably the boot usb you've left plugged in', I hate - and only let into my brain with a great deal of teeth-grinding and swearing. Fundamentally, computers are interesting devices. Using them, however, is generally horrible. So I can see why people get into programming without really taking an interest on the devices we normally use to program on. I think programming would be an interesting activity if you were just doing it with pen and paper. For me, it's really a shame that the best device we have available for it is some kind of crazy-house compendium of horrors and bizarre compromises.
ghrifter 9y ago
This is a good example. Im in my mid twenties and just discovered yesterday that (at least on Windows 10) that a user and a computer have _entirely_ different permissions. I always thought it was account based! At least thats what my coworker and IT guy explained it to me as.
southphillyman 9y ago
That's something that shocked me as I began to help onboard new developers. Some of them can't set up an IDE, local server, or get a build to compile in the first couple of days. Onboarding documentation is key to smoothly integrate new team members if your process is convoluted. Even without documentation I feel like guys should be able to get projects up and running just by having general familiarity with how most set ups are configured. My first "project" as a newbie developer was performing pseudo dev ops setting up continuous integration and then creating a project set up guide for the existing project, with no help.
userbinator 9y ago
I agree completely --- being one of the "older programmers" --- and think it could be phrased thus: a new generation of "coders" is being forced to learn how to write instructions for the machine, when they are barely computer-literate. Having taught some introductory CS courses a few years ago, the amount of struggling with basic things like file naming, directory hierarchies, and even simple hardware use was a constant distraction. On one memorable occasion, I had to help a student by turning on the monitor: he would sit down at a workstation, move the mouse and tap the keyboard, and seeing nothing show up on the monitor after a moment, go to another unoccupied one. I watched, without intervention, him try this with all the unoccupied workstations in the lab until he finally came to me and said, in an exasperated tone, "all the computers left are broken!" I lead him over to one, and upon pressing the power button on the monitor, the expression he made was quite unforgettable...
- skookumchuck 9y ago
  There aren't really any clues as to how a computer works on an iphone. There isn't even a visible filesystem. It's no wonder students today have no idea how a computer works.
  - ajmurmann 9y ago
    This! I'm very concerned that we are growing a population that is more and more monitored by their devices and has less and less understanding of how they work and how they or even if they are being monitored.
  - Arkight 9y ago
    Aye, I second this, got me really pissed off when fellow CS student told me he has ''experience'' in using Iphone extensively, and that counts towards computing. Makes you wonder what does computing mean to people nowadays.
    - mrexroad 9y ago
      I ask this out of genuine interest... why does it matter? Why’d it piss you off?
northwest66 9y ago
I've never met a good programmer that wasn't (at least initially) self taught. Presumably they exist, but I've never met one. I do agree though, I find when I'm teaching my juniors I sometimes have to give a little history lesson as part of it (things like why 8.3 filenames).
- sevensor 9y ago
  > why 8.3 filenames Why is that, exactly? I grew up in that era, I remember when floppies were actually floppy, and I've been well into computers ever since, but I don't believe I could tell you why. If I had to guess, I'd guess that FAT used a fixed number of bytes for each filename.
  - jclulow 9y ago
    It did.
  - northwest66 9y ago
    Yep you got it. My first actual PCs (I don't count the Apricot PCs haha) were DOS 3.3, and I still remember the transition away from 33MB partitions although it's so long ago I can't remember if that came in with DOS 4.0 (abort abort!) or 5. I thought I was so cool having a PC with drives A B C D E F G H I.
    - u801e 9y ago
      I had a 486 PC with a 100 MB hard drive running Dos 5.x (can't recall the minor version). The hard drive was definitely a single partition.
    - FranOntanaya 9y ago
      Oh man, rich kids had a D: drive. The rest of us had to make do with A: and C:
  - skookumchuck 9y ago
    It was 6.3 before that. The PDP-10 system :-)
piracykills 9y ago
Yeah, I'm always amazed when someone my company hired as a developer doesn't understand what "open a terminal" means on Windows or I have to coach them through digging up the environment variables screen in control panel. I assume it's because I was a power user before I became a developer and so had that foundational knowledge and interacted with OS APIs to build on it... now people just go right into mashing JS code at web browsers which seem to be hacked into everything.
acdha 9y ago
One other factor I've wondered about over the years is how quickly they give up when they hit a problem. In the 90s and early 2000s people had to develop local diagnostic skills, read documentation, etc. more before things like Stack Overflow were so pervasive. I wouldn't say it's a scientific observation but I've definitely gotten the impression that it's taking people longer to outgrow the cycle of immediately searching for a copy-paste answer and moving on without developing a better understanding of the issue for the next time something similar shows up.
- eadmund 9y ago
  > I wouldn't say it's a scientific observation but I've definitely gotten the impression that it's taking people longer to outgrow the cycle of immediately searching for a copy-paste answer and moving on without developing a better understanding of the issue for the next time something similar shows up. I wonder if that's a phenomenon on the same spectrum as HN-Driven Development, where whatever one has last seen posted on HN is clearly the New Best Thing Evar. It's a bit like a voluntary outsourcing of one's own agency.
  - acdha 9y ago
    I definitely see a connection between that and complexity: people think that they need what someone else with a bigger, different problem did and amplify the number of things they need to learn.
  - gonzo41 9y ago
    Your right there arnt that many top rated post on HN about someone running up a small ec2 instance with wordpress and mysql. A lot of web stuff is plugging in the DB and not tripping over the cord. Yet thing of all those crazy frameworks that keep popping up and they look so impressive! Just something to think about aswell. When things were simpler and there was less choice there was also more concentrated documentation. It wasn't a bad investment to by a book about a language.
waxwander 9y ago
I've had the opposite experience, with older programmers balking at new libraries, techniques, and setting up any environment they're not used to. If it doesn't work right away they go back to what they know. I know one guy who absolutely refuses to learn c++ because it doesn't compile for him and he only "trusts" c. Another who writes only in good ol' python2.7 (scipy dropping support; subprocess bugs; cough cough). Younger people tend to be aware of and use newer tools. But we're all bias I suppose.
- telchar 9y ago
  I dream of the day I'm happy and productive enough with one set of tools that I refuse to switch to another. I still largely feel like I'm wandering the desert when it comes to tooling, where a new toolset looks good from a distance but when I start using it I discovered the ugly underside and start looking for greener pastures.
  - blt 9y ago
    Tell me about it, I'm using tensorflow now and it does amazing things, but the API is so bulky for anything besides setting up the computational graph... Planning to check out pytorch for next project. Imo most dev environments and software leave a lot to be desired, we should not settle.
matchagaucho 9y ago
The downside of growing up on Commodores was their default imperative and procedural programming environment. My introductions to object-oriented and functional programming came much later in life, and I can't help but wonder how many bad coding habits I had to "unlearn" as a result of my Commodore foundation.
- u801e 9y ago
  > The downside of growing up on Commodores was their default imperative and procedural programming environment. That could be an upside if you wanted to learn assembly since BASIC really wasn't that far removed from it in terms of what you could do and how you did it.
  - matchagaucho 9y ago
    Good point. The commands were really hands-on with memory and CPU.
- KMag 9y ago
  One thing about non-imperative languages (functional, logic, etc.) is that they tend to encourage a much higher level of abstraction that's useful for dealing with complexity, but difficult for most novices to deal with. In particular, young children have relative trouble with abstract reasoning. If your standard library makes pervasive use of higher order functions, and you haven't yet wrapped your head around elementary algebra, you're going to have a bad time. I'm having a hard time thinking of an existing functional or logic programming language that requires a minimum of abstract thinking. You can use many languages in a functional style, but if e.g. you're using Python with a low level of abstraction, then you're likely using it as an imperative language.
hobs 9y ago
I am 31 years old. Reading this makes me feel like a million years old.
- sdwisely 9y ago
  perfectly normal - it's quite overwhelming to think about how much computing has changed in the last 30 years.
  - hobs 9y ago
    Right, except I wasnt using computers when I was born, and really wasnt using them well until I was maybe 24. We are taking half a decade until my cadre is unfamiliar to me. That's insane.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
I know plenty of younger programs who can diagnose their own problems, so the generalization doesn't hold so well. I think the issue is more about experience and need: when we were learning to program, we HAD to do those things. For the younger generation, it is totally possible to get by without because the ecosystems are so much easier, coupled with a lot of online knowledge that they can access quickly, which was mostly missing in our age. On the other hand, those young programmers that are faced with a complex ecosystem will usually learn how to deal with it. Heck, with the web and its many step backwards in programming environments (e.g. try debugging in Chrome!), many things are actually harder for them and they acquire skills that I didn't need!
titanix2 9y ago
Personal anecdotes here. I never occurred to me that people who could program couldn't do some sysadmin stuff to some extends until I work a small contract in a company. A day I was to demoing something there was a problem, so I fired Powershell to to some command line stuff... and someone asked "why do you have IT skills?". At first, I didn't even understand the question, I mean, installing systems, playing with VM, and the like was my daily bread, so I thought it was the some for every programmers... Another day, I went to the local of the university's CS student association. I was excited about what I did the previous day so I told after entering: "yesterday I installed FreeBSD in a virtual machine and did XX". One people replied by what is a virtual machine, and another by what is FreeBSD. I explain to them briefly then left wondering where the people actually interested by the field were. It turns out I met some of them a few months/years later. Both mostly self learners, one with formal training in theology and the other a musicology.
xstartup 9y ago
I have these skills too and yes they prevent me from getting blocked when I run into these issues. I hate relying on others for help on small issues like this. But I also get not everyone would want to waste their time with issues with do not challenge them. As a company owner, I will prefer a dedicated help desk to sort my programmers with these issues but as an entrepreneur, I want to be self-reliant.
ende 9y ago
I disagree. These skills might be applicable to a Software Engineering degree, but not Computer Science.
analog31 9y ago
>>> I think this is a side effect of teaching programming as a career skill. You have people that want to be programmers but don't include "computing" as one of their hobbies. It may be the result of the competitiveness of the education system. Everything is more competitive. As I understand things, CS is the hottest undergraduate major right now. You can't just sign up because you learned to program in high school and think it's cool. You have to be a top student just to get admitted. So it may be that the kids who want to be computer scientists just aren't able to have hobbies at all, or their hobbies are chosen to look good on their college applications. One of the things I've noticed between then and now, is that when I was in high school, I learned programming because I had a lot of spare time to kill. My kids have no spare time. >>> Teaching these skills in CS curriculum would probably be a good idea. Granted, I didn't study CS, but instead math & physics, decades ago. But I think that some things don't belong in a college curriculum, especially given the price tag. I didn't take college courses to learn soldering, or even programming. But also, not all CS majors are destined to become hackers, and there has to be room for a student who might be all thumbs but really has a deep interest in the subject matter of the field. In physics, we called them "theoreticians." A deeper question is why someone is studying theoretical computer science for 4 years in order to become a coder. Programming is getting harder, but that much harder? When my mom taught programming in the early 80s, her students were getting jobs after one year of coursework.
- Nullabillity 9y ago
  > It may be the result of the competitiveness of the education system. Everything is more competitive. As I understand things, CS is the hottest undergraduate major right now. Hardly. Looking at the Swedish admissions statistics[1] from this year (because that's what I'm familiar with): - Of the top 5 programmes, 3 were for physicians (doctors), with the required GPA ranging 22.09-22.29 - The hardest engineering programme to get into was no. 8, technical physics, requiring 21.98 - The hardest computer-related programme to get into was no. 56, software engineering, requiring 20.73 That said, it was above 20.0 (straight As), so the requirements do seem to have increased in the last few years [1]: https://statistik.uhr.se/uhr.html https://statistik.uhr.se/uhr.html, to see applications to programmes based on high school GPAs you'll want to pick "Bara program", "Urval 1", and then set "Visa urvalsgrupp" to "BI". You'll want to sort by "Antagningspoäng".
Figs 9y ago
> Teaching these skills in CS curriculum would probably be a good idea. It was included in my college CS curriculum, using the most obvious text (Debugging, by Agans) almost 10 years ago -- though I had a head start, since I read a copy of it from my public library about 4~5 years before that. If other schools haven't followed suit, I have to ask "What on earth is taking them so long?"
- kbwt 9y ago
  The consensus seems to be that those types of skills do not belong in a Higher Learning institution. In Germany, the saying is "You do not need a Computer to study CS", although it sounds wrong in English because CS literally contains the word "Computer" while the German term for CS (Informatik) is a mashed-together version of Information and Mathematics. Some German Universities (TUM, KIT) pride themselves on that last point so much, they actually pass off the CS degree as an Informatics degree on the English version of their diploma transcripts.
PeterStuer 9y ago
(btw, I'll use 'older' and 'younger' as a sort of statistical reference, not implying a strict age separation exists and all on either side are clones of a prototype) I recognize this. My 'younger' colleagues can't install a computer from scratch, a get completely stuck on the slightest network issue. But I don't thin it is related to education. The 'older' programmer had to squire these skills by necessity as it was completely impossible to use a computer otherwise. For us getting a new release of Windows or VS usually meant wiping everything clean and install from scratch a we all knew how dodgy 'upgrading' was. My 'younger' colleagues wouldn't know where to begin when they can't hit update and everything works. They have to wait and rely on a system manager to re-image their machine for them.
- cheschire 9y ago
  The youngest guy on my team refuses to reinstall his development environment like the rest of us when new major platform changes occur. Then every few months complains when his environment causes an error in the build.
  - deleted 9y ago
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rorykoehler 9y ago
Another anecdote... My experience with older programmers and sys admins is that the vast majority of them know a lot about how a computer works (as you mentioned) but many also haven't kept up to date on tools available to simplify and automate processes. This leads to unnecessarily convoluted and confusing configurations that are far from optimised considering todays available tooling. This frustrates me to no end as it creates a load of needless busy work which at the same time makes the dev/admin feel both smart and productive whilst not optimising for what the business actually cares about.
- bazfoo 9y ago
  On the flipside, I see a lot of tools pushed that are more complicated, less flexible, and far buggier than the old tools. And then inevitably in a few years they're deprecated in favour of something newer and shinier and the old tools are still perfectly fine (e.g. Make).
mixmastamyk 9y ago
Interesting, I'm old enough to have grown up before the scourge of Wintel PCs in the 90s. Had a Commodore Vic-20 instead. You'd hit the power button and about 5 seconds later a BASIC interpreter started. There was no complicated debugging to be done to get it working. Still, I learned to manage/hate computers by the Win '95 era and grow to love them again by the time Linux became tolerable about 10 years later.
btschaegg 9y ago
I think this is a side effect of teaching programming as a career skill. My guess is that you don't even have to go as far as "computing" in order to see the negative effects of this. I've had a couple of encounters where I helped out a peer that was stuck in a particular problem merely by applying some basic deduction. And I had those situations both with fellow students and later on in the workplace. In all those situations, the underlying problem was that the person in question didn't have a firm grasp of the programming language they were using, but seemed to program in terms of "patterns" -- they knew how a for loop has to look like, but as soon as there was a slightly more nuanced problem (say a parsing expression in Boost.Spirit), they weren't able to see how the underlying syntax was treated by the respective language. While I get that it's almost impossible (and certainly impractical) to learn every edge case in most modern programming languages, I couldn't help but think of cargo cults. Edit: On second thought: OTOH, it seems to me that it isn't helpful to view what a software engineer does merely as "programming" in this regard. I don't see a problem if, say, an electrical engineer is missing said "computing" skills, but they are in their way to complete a program. Many modern professions benefit greatly if the respective person is able to program (maybe only in a specific language, e.g. Matlab or LabView), but that doesn't mean they have to know their working machines inside out.
j45 9y ago
This is a subtle and sublime point - it may not just be a function of age, maybe somewhat about having a wider interest in computers and tech. 10-20 years ago, it was a requirement to learn the layers support your own hardware, network, security, hosting.... all for the opportunity to try to build a piece of software. You could spend a few years improving at each and it was perfectly normal. Now there seems to be a rush to get through it all to become awesome by skimming the surface. As a result of learning multiple layers (because there was little other choice), one picked up a lot of transferable skills. You can sometimes literally traverse debugging an issue between all of these layers. In school computers were taught, first from how a computer physically worked, booted up, etc. Then, you learned some basic operating system, applications, and how they interacted with the computer. Once that was completed, you started some amount of creation, whether it was visual design, games, programming, etc. Not to create a programmer, but as a form of creation with the computer.
klum 9y ago
Agreed. The article sort of presents these kind of "computer problems" as a barrier to getting started with programming. I don't quite agree -- or maybe they are, but only in the sense that they "filter out" those who don't really want to be programmers at an earlier point in time. Don't get me wrong; I don't think there's any point in making new programmers jump through arbitrary hoops because "programming should be hard". But I think that today, programming is necessarily intertwined with computing and problem-solving in general, and all the Dockers and specialised positions in the world don't change that. To be a good developer, you need to have some idea about the systems your code will be running on. A program doesn't just exist in a bubble. (This is more true for some kinds of applications, less for others, of course.)
gutnor 9y ago
Well, that's an effect of experience. You don't just become a better programmer with experience, you become better at software development. Better handling stress, better understanding requirement, gathering requierment, better navigating political corporate structure, better explaining yourself, better defending yourself, ... and yes, better getting your environment sorted. That said, the specific point you raised is interesting because I was having the same problem at work. Except it was caused by automation. We have automated pipeline for everything, zero downtime deployment, containers, ... all of that is working very well - so well that there is just no enough big stuff to do so that newcomer on the project can build enough experience with the pipeline to master it. The best people achieve is some sort of very rudimentary debugging capability, earned from the monthly minor tweak the system require. Basically either you build similar pipeline on another project, something that is extremely unfrequent, or you missed the train.
andredublin 9y ago
Interesting point, I'll add that we don't see many desktop computers any more. Kids or those wanting to learn to program don't see the whole machine. Instead we have these slim downed devices that require existing knowledge to take apart and put back together again.
SophosQ 9y ago
Perhaps it's more to do with the stock of people who learnt CS. In the older generation, CS was a relatively obscure and difficult skill with little to no easy-guides that it filtered the set of students to only those who were insatiably curious and were fuelled by learning new things. In contrast, CS has become so ubiquitous that nearly everything has a "how do it" guide that eases the entry of nearly anyone, with little or not interest or whose motivation might be less than ideal. Thereby, possibly leaving room for more anecdotal evidence for this perceives shift in skill.
koffiezet 9y ago
Has little to do with age, but more with the amount of people in the CS field right now. Only a fraction of them are enthusiasts. I notice that especially with my "front-end" developer colleagues - of whom 3/4th is here to do a job and at home many of them don't even have their own computer. Sure they play video games on their XBox or PS4, but that's the extent of their technical interest. For them it's simply a well-paid 9-to-5 job. Now my other colleagues are mostly doing back-end and embedded C++/Python stuff, and are in general a lot more interested in the technical side. I think it's more or less the other way around, 1 out of 4 is not really tinkering with tech at home - but even they are more interested in tech outside of their field. I show them stuff like docker, kubernetes, time-series databases and metrics collection stuff, ansible/tower and what we can do with those things, and how they could make changes in the way they design their software to make things more reliable or easier to deploy/monitor - and their reaction is "oh cool!". Our front-end team? Completely the opposite attitude and completely averse to changing the way they work. I hear "we'll do this manually" or "why? this works too"... Most of the front-end dev roles seem to attract people who're not really into tech, but can code a bit. I think because of the immediate visual feedback? They end up hiding behind their frameworks with a lack of even basic understanding of HTTP or networking. Me as an embedded developer rolled into sysadmin role then has to tell them what the hell HTTP2 is, catch their screw-ups when they serve mixed http/https content on their site, ... Now they're not all like that, there are some pretty good guys there - but the majority can write basic code, and that's where it ends. Sadly it's no surprise their team-leads all fall in the wrong category. On the other side, I have the last say when stuff is deployed in production, so they are forced to adapt to certain things - but they'll always complain.

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leggomylibro 9y ago

But those skills have nothing to do with computer science as a field of study - wouldn't they be more useful to teach in general education like K-12? Like I remember in middle school, we had an elective option between woodshop and CAD. The 'CAD' class was really more about performing simple automation in programs like MS Word/Excel, but that sort of thing is still useful in just about any job these days - not just programming. I really like the idea of starting to call 'CS' something like 'Informatica' so people might stop looking at the field as just a valuable career skill. Google tells me that there is now a startup called 'Informatica', but that is also what the field is called or translates to in some other countries like the Netherlands; I think https://www.cwi.nl/ https://www.cwi.nl/ could probably claim prior use. Speaking of, it seems odd to try to use an existing commonplace phrase as a trademark in the industry that the phrase was born from - it seems like it'd be impossible to argue that anyone was infringing - but I guess I'm not a corporate lawyer.

chuckdries 9y ago
ASU has a degree called 'informatics' that's run by the computer science faculty but focused more on <the application of technology to other things> rather than <the technology and creation of technology itself.> I just transferred into it from computer science, because I spend all my free time making games anyway, and the informatics program lets me take an elective track to get credit for that. I do think CS is probably a better fit for what I see as my long term plan, but I think this program has a lot of potential for people who wouldn't otherwise call themselves engineers.
currymj 9y ago
in some other languages it's basically called that. "Informatik" in German. there's still the vestigial title in some department names in the US, "Department of Computer Science and Informatics". I agree it would be a better name but I think the battle is lost, informatics now refers to an applied discipline (closely related to library science) involving building up big systems to store and organize data.
zerkten 9y ago
I think you are trying to make some good points, but your language could have been clearer. If I'm understanding correctly you mean: 1. Treat Computer Science (CS) as a specific field, and don't dilute the curriculum with related items. 2. Introduce a course that covers these broader, non-CS items, and actually push it out beyond the audience of CS? Did I get that right? I think you might have meant the term "informatics" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatics). Depending on your position CS is either subordinate, equal, or above informatics. I have a degree from a UK university and there is a much wider spectrum degree types in this field than exist here in the US where I now live. I'm conflicted on the original post that elicited your response. I have that background where I inherited a broken PC, a bunch of floppy disks, and some manuals. In some ways this gives me an advantage, especially given that I'm comfortable being dropped into a messy project or some problem that is debugged. I've seen lots of folks who can't handle this, but can churn out code on to need more support around the edges. I now see more and more folks attempting things like devops and at least being able to learn some of these skills later on. I think where it stands me in better stead is problem avoidance, but even that is subjective.

mirashii 9y ago

> Teaching these skills in CS curriculum would probably be a good idea. This is the one thing I don't agree with. A better placement for these skills is a generic course required for any degree, or an optional course that anyone could take to shore up these skills (and you could recommend it for your CS major). Importantly though, this isn't part of the field of computer science, and so it doesn't really belong in that curriculum. Now, if we had more of a "software development" or "software engineering" major, or even trade school, I think that would be a perfect area to cover practical aspects of tooling that are required to work in the field. There's a large gap between what you need to learn to become a reasonably competent programmer at most organizations and what you learn in a computer science major, and it really shows if you've ever interviewed a lot of fresh graduates. Great algorithm and theory skills, but no idea how to set up a build system. There's definitely room for a more practical education that transitions more directly into industry.

tj-teej 9y ago
I don't think the experienced engineers earlier referred to learned these things in a CS curriculum.
Retric 9y ago
There are a lot of useful skills. Teaching people how to fix a flat tire would also be rather useful. Basic computer administration falls into that huge category of useful skills that are not worth teaching to a general population who have completely viable alternatives. Specialization is extremely valuable for society and having more competent doctors etc is worth doctors having a more narrow focus.
- Griffinsauce 9y ago
  I disagree. Having a broader skill set means you can be more creative with problems. The separation between doctors and computer science is holding both fields back. Think of machine learning and big data, we are _just now_ starting to apply those ideas to medical problems, while those problems are fundamental to our existence as a species. Computers in hospitals are a chore and a drain on doctors. They should be empowering, instead doctors spend the majority of their time typing reports. Reports of things that are already registered in other parts of the system. (You're already thinking of a solution right? That proves my point) Hearing about how hospitals handle technology from my SO (neurologist) makes me want to rip my hair out. Specialization is a great thing but we need generalists to bridge the gap to help specialists empower each other.

gricardo99 9y ago

I have not seen any age-correlation in what you describe. For sure there are "career" programmers who don't know much about computers beyond their narrow scope of expertise. You're admittedly obsessed with computers, which presumably means you spend a lot of your free timing tinkering and learning. You've picked up a lot of very useful knowledge, but surely there's room in a profession for those who are not obsessed with their field? The programmer who doesn't know anything about a BIOS perhaps spends their free time bike riding.

sametmax 9y ago
Yes but computing is a very young field. It's not like architecture or cooking. Everything sucks. Most stuff breaks, are buggy, badly documented and poorly explained. Things gets obsolete fast. If you are "just a programmer", you will be half productive and very dependent on others.
namelost 9y ago
Being a programmer without advanced computer skills is like being a paramedic who can't drive. Sure it's possible and there's probably some niche where such a person can fit in, but definitely career limiting.
adrianN 9y ago
I know a couple of grey haired professional programmers who have only rudimentary "computer" skills. They're still decent programmers though.

el_benhameen 9y ago

I think this skill is what kept me going through the frustrating patches after I decided that I wanted to be a programmer. I started programming later than many here (after I had obtained a degree in an unrelated field), but I'd always enjoyed breaking and fixing computers and software as a kid and so I'd picked up "computing", as you put it, as a hobby. That sort of hobby teaches you to keep ramming your head against the wall until the bricks start to crumble, which is helpful when you're trying to learn a language but the package you want fails to install on Ubuntu, or your program won't run despite you having checked the syntax a thousand times, or a concept doesn't click until you've re-read it every day for a week. You learn to see computers and software as a mess that you will necessarily have to untangle and rearrange for things to work properly, instead of thinking of things that don't yet work as "broken". And you learn to Google until your eyes start to melt.

zappo2938 9y ago

I'm a relative newcomer and didn't have a problem downloading Android Studio and setting it up on Ubuntu to run an emulator to develop React Native apps. Learning to program is getting harder because the programs are far, far more complicated than they were 10 years ago.

blackbagboys 9y ago

I agree with your observation, but I don't agree with your diagnosis of the cause. I think it's mostly down to the increasing abstraction and ease of using software. When I was a kid, I wouldn't have described "computing" as a hobby, but just getting certain games to install and run on my parent's cheap Gateway PC would require a lot of fiddling around. My younger siblings have no more or less interest in computing than I did, but if they want to play a game they can seamlessly download and run it from Steam or the app store.

mathgeek 9y ago
> but just getting certain games to install and run on my parent's cheap Gateway PC would require a lot of fiddling around Ah, that brings me back to memories of boot floppies in order to change the memory settings of the system.
- stryk 9y ago
  IRQ conflicts! Holy mother of hell IRQ conflicts! particularly when dealing with those early gen Sound Blasters -- and trying to get that Roland MT32 you borrowed from the greasy weirdo in your big brother's band hooked up and pumping out that sweet, sweet midi
  - stinos 9y ago
    IRQ conflicts! Recently I had this surface, some RT kernel extension we use would display possible conflicts. Despite programming a lot these days, my background is electronic engineering, so I still have a rough idea of what an IRQ is and does even on the lowest level. However had no luck trying to explain that to a 'pure' programmer.
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      > "However had no luck trying to explain that to a 'pure' programmer." Interrupt requests are easy to explain to even a novice computer user if you frame them in the context of something they're familiar with. For example, when you press a key on your keyboard an interrupt request will be created to make sure the computer knows you've pressed the key. So in simplified terms, you could say when you press the "A" key on your keyboard, there is a part of the computer that says "pause what other things you're doing, respond to the "A" key press, then continue with what you were doing before".

xbryanx 9y ago

I think another big culprit in this situation is the IT department. I visited a research university recently in a computer science related field. The IT department wouldn't allow even graduate students and researchers to have admin access on their machines. Even if the programmers could debug basic issues, they often had to go track down and IT staff member to install some library or program for them. If this is happening at the computer research level it's happening even more in non-tech company business environments. How do we expect staff at non-tech companies to experiment with new skills in programming if they can't even use their computers at their full potential?

Clubber 9y ago
Ya, I had an intern position at my school that did computer lab build support (the hardware and network, not as a teacher). We installed Windows NT 4 Workstation everywhere and it wasn't overly secure. At least 4 times, someone changed the default background to a porn still. Blame that guy.

Clubber 9y ago

I'm and older programmer. I learned how to build a computer because my parents scraped enough money to buy a computer when I was young, but not wealthy enough to get it fixed when I inevitably broke it. This was back when PCs were friggin expensive as were parts. Fellow computer friends (we had few back then) would let each other borrow hardware (parts) and whatnot, so we had to learn how to install it and configure it (IRQ's COM ports, etc), but it was fun, and without internet! It's what I liked to do in my spare time. The funny thing is the C64 and VIC-20 were self contained, for the most part. You didn't have to add cards and swap out processors and all that. All you really had to do is know how to put wad of aluminum foil where your fuse should go when your fuse goes out. :) When the dot boom came around, I had to learn how to not only write web sites, but I had to learn how to host a website out of my house, which includes everything you would need to host a website, which involves a lot. DNS server, mail server, database server, server admin, TCP/IP, security, and more. I still host out of my house today.

drharby 9y ago
I tried hosting my own mailserver out of an ec2 instance in an excercise. Learned lots in those hours and hours
- behringer 9y ago
  It took me a month to setup a mail server including redundancies. But now I can postfix like none other :)

AlexCoventry 9y ago

I too am obsessed with computers, and will push through "helpdesk" type issues to get my work done. However, I don't consider that to be a remarkable skill. Such issues can almost always be resolved with a bit of googling. Perhaps I'm too close to see the foundational knowledge I'm depending on, though.

fenwick67 9y ago
Here's the thing: You need to know what to look for. You can't just google "The internet won't work" or "blue screen help" or "I can't see files". Web search is a super powerful tool but it requires some fundamental knowledge before it can help.
- megaman22 9y ago
  Actually reading error messages is an apparently very rare skill. Almost always, if you just google what it tells you, you'll hit something... Yet I constantly see people automatically click through popups milliseconds after they appear, only to fume about things not working. It takes a surprising amount of effort to get them to do it over and slow down long enough to figure out what went wrong.
  - DoreenMichele 9y ago
    I confess, I was very guilty of that at my old job, which was very fast paced. Whenever reflexively closing the pop up resulted in things not going as I expected, I would, indeed, do it over, slow down and carefully read the messages.
  - nikofeyn 9y ago
    i would just like to get error messages that actually said something more than something went wrong. yea, no shit something went wrong, i already know that, but what and why and how do i fix it are questions i want answered. i know the code knows what went wrong, so just tell me.
    - 9y ago

rhizome 9y ago

There's lots of money in computers, which has increased the proportion of graduates who know only how to add an IDE to the factory install of their computer. I saw this a lot back in my desktop support days.

shagie 9y ago
This brings up another interesting point... "back in my desktop support days." I had a few jobs once out of college (phone support, QA (before automation was much of a thing), sysadmin, back to phone support) before I got a programming job. That was a good two years out of learning the other parts of a computer. It was because I knew perl that I was able to do the sysadmin - web programmer transition. That wasn't too unusual of a path back in the mid-late 90s. A good chunk the developers over in the engineering department and nearly everyone in the programing wings of IT and customer support had done tech support or system administration. It was just part of the "working your way up" within the career path. Many of my classmates in college went to a "the computer guy" job which did all of the computer stuff for a small company (hardware, software, helping with excel, writing programs to serve dynamic text to the web server). Being a computer person back then was a much more generalized skill set. As an aside, recently I was tapped on my team (Java developers) to do work on an older website. LAMP. I had to brush up on Linux from the past decade (I was another decade out of date with some of the package management)... but being able to do that sysadmin, read perl (I know of one other perl coder in the department, but he doesn't have any sysadmin background) and get it running was a skillset that didn't exist much of anywhere else.
- mattmanser 9y ago
  I was telephone support for people installing freeview boxes in the UK in the early 2000s. Same skills. Same skills as programming your VCR without the manual. Same skills as getting Doom to work over a direct pc to pc connection. None of that crap worked first time. We had to learn how to debug to get basic stuff working. In some ways computers are too usable these days. In other ways the experienced programmers are too sloppy and put in too many barriers to get their tools to work flawlessly in the modern world. We don't live in the tinker world any more. But ultimately to be a good dev you must learn to debug. Hard problem to solve.

rconti 9y ago

I absolutely agree with your first few paragraphs. As a hobbyist before I was a professional (Linux desktop since '95), I'm surprised when I meet people who have a technical skill but not a hobbyist background. I first encountered it with Oracle DBAs who sometimes were amazing at Oracle but had rudimentary Unix skills, and that's becoming more commonplace as people do things like phone app development but without the background "we" expect (whether rightly or wrongly). That said, my background as a Sysadmin/Ops person also landed me in my own silo. I don't have much programming experience, and running production systems means NO, the environment does NOT give you access to wide-open CPAN, RPM, pip, whatever downloads. It's a regimented release process where someone upstream has to provide the relevant dependancies and you don't just go around installing stuff, running services, etc. As a result of my background and not being a developer, on HN I hear of new languages/frameworks/libraries/methodologies on a daily basis. Things that, clearly, a large number of readers hear must already be familiar with, even though many of them will be out of fashion in 6 months. And then the process to install a lot of these things is "oh, just pipe a wget of this script into bash, RPM install this, pip install that, don't worry, it's all quite safe for your system..." In many ways, it feels like worlds are diverging.

yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
> In many ways, it feels like worlds are diverging. We are specializing. Enterprise shops have always wanted stability, and so they develop ever more elaborate build processes to control exactly what versions go into production. Embedded systems have always wanted to run only what needed to run, and so we have developed ever-improving systems to pick out only exactly what needed to be run. Developers, in the meantime, have always wanted the newest and shiniest, and so have gotten 10,000 ways to install newer and shinier toys. Edit: typo

TallGuyShort 9y ago

I think that's a side-effect of degrees that focus only on coding or applied math, whereas before the computing industry was as developed as it is now and there was less specialization within it, a CS degree would have covered the basic data structures and algorithms that were common knowledge then and still had plenty of time to cover systems things. My degree wasn't in CS - it included basically a CS minor, but it also focused on network protocols and hardware architectures that most CS students had never heard of. So when I was interviewing for jobs around graduation and was asked to explain everything that happens after someone types "google.com" in their browser, I could explain all the network protocols in detail right down to how binary was encoded into specific 5V fluctations on certain lines, DNS resolution, routing algorithms, the server's filesystem, etc. But when I was doing a coding problem and they asked me what the invariant was in my loop, I had to ask what an invariant was. And yet I had been coding full time for 4 years by that point and never needed to know that term. I knew stuff CS majors didn't, and they knew stuff I didn't. It was different specialities, each of which really filled 4 years of heavy, heavy semesters.

NTDF9 9y ago
Reminds me of a recent interview where they asked me, "How does the client to a server?" I replied "over the socket" To which they replied, "Using REST over HTTP" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- __blockcipher__ 9y ago
  I would have murdered them on the spot for that response
  - aurelianito 9y ago
    Probably both are correct. But which one is more useful in this context?
    - __blockcipher__ 9y ago
      The interviewer or whoever should provide the context. Otherwise it’s a pointless question. The issue is when they don’t provide context and expect you to list off some random framework or something.

Globz 9y ago

You couldn’t have said it better, I had the same kind of learning path as you did and I believe it makes everything a lot easier to understand since you can clearly see the full spectrum of what you are dealing with while programming and usually it helps open new doors so you can explore a problem from a different angle since you have a deep knowledge of your stack available to you from the start.

pasabagi 9y ago

I don't really think of programming as a career skill - I'm a hobbyist. But I love it, and I love learning about it, even the really low-level stuff. I like reading about algorithms, and data structures, and architecture. Computers, on the other hand, I despise. Every piece of knowledge I have to learn about how a specific computer works, not in the sense of ALUs and registers and whatnot, but in the sense of 'if Windows gets a BSOD it's probably the boot usb you've left plugged in', I hate - and only let into my brain with a great deal of teeth-grinding and swearing. Fundamentally, computers are interesting devices. Using them, however, is generally horrible. So I can see why people get into programming without really taking an interest on the devices we normally use to program on. I think programming would be an interesting activity if you were just doing it with pen and paper. For me, it's really a shame that the best device we have available for it is some kind of crazy-house compendium of horrors and bizarre compromises.

ghrifter 9y ago

This is a good example. Im in my mid twenties and just discovered yesterday that (at least on Windows 10) that a user and a computer have _entirely_ different permissions. I always thought it was account based! At least thats what my coworker and IT guy explained it to me as.

southphillyman 9y ago

That's something that shocked me as I began to help onboard new developers. Some of them can't set up an IDE, local server, or get a build to compile in the first couple of days. Onboarding documentation is key to smoothly integrate new team members if your process is convoluted. Even without documentation I feel like guys should be able to get projects up and running just by having general familiarity with how most set ups are configured. My first "project" as a newbie developer was performing pseudo dev ops setting up continuous integration and then creating a project set up guide for the existing project, with no help.

userbinator 9y ago

I agree completely --- being one of the "older programmers" --- and think it could be phrased thus: a new generation of "coders" is being forced to learn how to write instructions for the machine, when they are barely computer-literate. Having taught some introductory CS courses a few years ago, the amount of struggling with basic things like file naming, directory hierarchies, and even simple hardware use was a constant distraction. On one memorable occasion, I had to help a student by turning on the monitor: he would sit down at a workstation, move the mouse and tap the keyboard, and seeing nothing show up on the monitor after a moment, go to another unoccupied one. I watched, without intervention, him try this with all the unoccupied workstations in the lab until he finally came to me and said, in an exasperated tone, "all the computers left are broken!" I lead him over to one, and upon pressing the power button on the monitor, the expression he made was quite unforgettable...

skookumchuck 9y ago
There aren't really any clues as to how a computer works on an iphone. There isn't even a visible filesystem. It's no wonder students today have no idea how a computer works.
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  This! I'm very concerned that we are growing a population that is more and more monitored by their devices and has less and less understanding of how they work and how they or even if they are being monitored.
- Arkight 9y ago
  Aye, I second this, got me really pissed off when fellow CS student told me he has ''experience'' in using Iphone extensively, and that counts towards computing. Makes you wonder what does computing mean to people nowadays.
  - mrexroad 9y ago
    I ask this out of genuine interest... why does it matter? Why’d it piss you off?

northwest66 9y ago

I've never met a good programmer that wasn't (at least initially) self taught. Presumably they exist, but I've never met one. I do agree though, I find when I'm teaching my juniors I sometimes have to give a little history lesson as part of it (things like why 8.3 filenames).

sevensor 9y ago
> why 8.3 filenames Why is that, exactly? I grew up in that era, I remember when floppies were actually floppy, and I've been well into computers ever since, but I don't believe I could tell you why. If I had to guess, I'd guess that FAT used a fixed number of bytes for each filename.
- jclulow 9y ago
  It did.
- northwest66 9y ago
  Yep you got it. My first actual PCs (I don't count the Apricot PCs haha) were DOS 3.3, and I still remember the transition away from 33MB partitions although it's so long ago I can't remember if that came in with DOS 4.0 (abort abort!) or 5. I thought I was so cool having a PC with drives A B C D E F G H I.
  - u801e 9y ago
    I had a 486 PC with a 100 MB hard drive running Dos 5.x (can't recall the minor version). The hard drive was definitely a single partition.
  - FranOntanaya 9y ago
    Oh man, rich kids had a D: drive. The rest of us had to make do with A: and C:
- skookumchuck 9y ago
  It was 6.3 before that. The PDP-10 system :-)

piracykills 9y ago

Yeah, I'm always amazed when someone my company hired as a developer doesn't understand what "open a terminal" means on Windows or I have to coach them through digging up the environment variables screen in control panel. I assume it's because I was a power user before I became a developer and so had that foundational knowledge and interacted with OS APIs to build on it... now people just go right into mashing JS code at web browsers which seem to be hacked into everything.

acdha 9y ago

One other factor I've wondered about over the years is how quickly they give up when they hit a problem. In the 90s and early 2000s people had to develop local diagnostic skills, read documentation, etc. more before things like Stack Overflow were so pervasive. I wouldn't say it's a scientific observation but I've definitely gotten the impression that it's taking people longer to outgrow the cycle of immediately searching for a copy-paste answer and moving on without developing a better understanding of the issue for the next time something similar shows up.

eadmund 9y ago
> I wouldn't say it's a scientific observation but I've definitely gotten the impression that it's taking people longer to outgrow the cycle of immediately searching for a copy-paste answer and moving on without developing a better understanding of the issue for the next time something similar shows up. I wonder if that's a phenomenon on the same spectrum as HN-Driven Development, where whatever one has last seen posted on HN is clearly the New Best Thing Evar. It's a bit like a voluntary outsourcing of one's own agency.
- acdha 9y ago
  I definitely see a connection between that and complexity: people think that they need what someone else with a bigger, different problem did and amplify the number of things they need to learn.
- gonzo41 9y ago
  Your right there arnt that many top rated post on HN about someone running up a small ec2 instance with wordpress and mysql. A lot of web stuff is plugging in the DB and not tripping over the cord. Yet thing of all those crazy frameworks that keep popping up and they look so impressive! Just something to think about aswell. When things were simpler and there was less choice there was also more concentrated documentation. It wasn't a bad investment to by a book about a language.

waxwander 9y ago

I've had the opposite experience, with older programmers balking at new libraries, techniques, and setting up any environment they're not used to. If it doesn't work right away they go back to what they know. I know one guy who absolutely refuses to learn c++ because it doesn't compile for him and he only "trusts" c. Another who writes only in good ol' python2.7 (scipy dropping support; subprocess bugs; cough cough). Younger people tend to be aware of and use newer tools. But we're all bias I suppose.

telchar 9y ago
I dream of the day I'm happy and productive enough with one set of tools that I refuse to switch to another. I still largely feel like I'm wandering the desert when it comes to tooling, where a new toolset looks good from a distance but when I start using it I discovered the ugly underside and start looking for greener pastures.
- blt 9y ago
  Tell me about it, I'm using tensorflow now and it does amazing things, but the API is so bulky for anything besides setting up the computational graph... Planning to check out pytorch for next project. Imo most dev environments and software leave a lot to be desired, we should not settle.

matchagaucho 9y ago

The downside of growing up on Commodores was their default imperative and procedural programming environment. My introductions to object-oriented and functional programming came much later in life, and I can't help but wonder how many bad coding habits I had to "unlearn" as a result of my Commodore foundation.

u801e 9y ago
> The downside of growing up on Commodores was their default imperative and procedural programming environment. That could be an upside if you wanted to learn assembly since BASIC really wasn't that far removed from it in terms of what you could do and how you did it.
- matchagaucho 9y ago
  Good point. The commands were really hands-on with memory and CPU.
KMag 9y ago
One thing about non-imperative languages (functional, logic, etc.) is that they tend to encourage a much higher level of abstraction that's useful for dealing with complexity, but difficult for most novices to deal with. In particular, young children have relative trouble with abstract reasoning. If your standard library makes pervasive use of higher order functions, and you haven't yet wrapped your head around elementary algebra, you're going to have a bad time. I'm having a hard time thinking of an existing functional or logic programming language that requires a minimum of abstract thinking. You can use many languages in a functional style, but if e.g. you're using Python with a low level of abstraction, then you're likely using it as an imperative language.

hobs 9y ago

I am 31 years old. Reading this makes me feel like a million years old.

sdwisely 9y ago
perfectly normal - it's quite overwhelming to think about how much computing has changed in the last 30 years.
- hobs 9y ago
  Right, except I wasnt using computers when I was born, and really wasnt using them well until I was maybe 24. We are taking half a decade until my cadre is unfamiliar to me. That's insane.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

I know plenty of younger programs who can diagnose their own problems, so the generalization doesn't hold so well. I think the issue is more about experience and need: when we were learning to program, we HAD to do those things. For the younger generation, it is totally possible to get by without because the ecosystems are so much easier, coupled with a lot of online knowledge that they can access quickly, which was mostly missing in our age. On the other hand, those young programmers that are faced with a complex ecosystem will usually learn how to deal with it. Heck, with the web and its many step backwards in programming environments (e.g. try debugging in Chrome!), many things are actually harder for them and they acquire skills that I didn't need!

titanix2 9y ago

Personal anecdotes here. I never occurred to me that people who could program couldn't do some sysadmin stuff to some extends until I work a small contract in a company. A day I was to demoing something there was a problem, so I fired Powershell to to some command line stuff... and someone asked "why do you have IT skills?". At first, I didn't even understand the question, I mean, installing systems, playing with VM, and the like was my daily bread, so I thought it was the some for every programmers... Another day, I went to the local of the university's CS student association. I was excited about what I did the previous day so I told after entering: "yesterday I installed FreeBSD in a virtual machine and did XX". One people replied by what is a virtual machine, and another by what is FreeBSD. I explain to them briefly then left wondering where the people actually interested by the field were. It turns out I met some of them a few months/years later. Both mostly self learners, one with formal training in theology and the other a musicology.

xstartup 9y ago

I have these skills too and yes they prevent me from getting blocked when I run into these issues. I hate relying on others for help on small issues like this. But I also get not everyone would want to waste their time with issues with do not challenge them. As a company owner, I will prefer a dedicated help desk to sort my programmers with these issues but as an entrepreneur, I want to be self-reliant.

ende 9y ago

I disagree. These skills might be applicable to a Software Engineering degree, but not Computer Science.

analog31 9y ago

>>> I think this is a side effect of teaching programming as a career skill. You have people that want to be programmers but don't include "computing" as one of their hobbies. It may be the result of the competitiveness of the education system. Everything is more competitive. As I understand things, CS is the hottest undergraduate major right now. You can't just sign up because you learned to program in high school and think it's cool. You have to be a top student just to get admitted. So it may be that the kids who want to be computer scientists just aren't able to have hobbies at all, or their hobbies are chosen to look good on their college applications. One of the things I've noticed between then and now, is that when I was in high school, I learned programming because I had a lot of spare time to kill. My kids have no spare time. >>> Teaching these skills in CS curriculum would probably be a good idea. Granted, I didn't study CS, but instead math & physics, decades ago. But I think that some things don't belong in a college curriculum, especially given the price tag. I didn't take college courses to learn soldering, or even programming. But also, not all CS majors are destined to become hackers, and there has to be room for a student who might be all thumbs but really has a deep interest in the subject matter of the field. In physics, we called them "theoreticians." A deeper question is why someone is studying theoretical computer science for 4 years in order to become a coder. Programming is getting harder, but that much harder? When my mom taught programming in the early 80s, her students were getting jobs after one year of coursework.

Nullabillity 9y ago
> It may be the result of the competitiveness of the education system. Everything is more competitive. As I understand things, CS is the hottest undergraduate major right now. Hardly. Looking at the Swedish admissions statistics[1] from this year (because that's what I'm familiar with): - Of the top 5 programmes, 3 were for physicians (doctors), with the required GPA ranging 22.09-22.29 - The hardest engineering programme to get into was no. 8, technical physics, requiring 21.98 - The hardest computer-related programme to get into was no. 56, software engineering, requiring 20.73 That said, it was above 20.0 (straight As), so the requirements do seem to have increased in the last few years [1]: https://statistik.uhr.se/uhr.html https://statistik.uhr.se/uhr.html, to see applications to programmes based on high school GPAs you'll want to pick "Bara program", "Urval 1", and then set "Visa urvalsgrupp" to "BI". You'll want to sort by "Antagningspoäng".

Figs 9y ago

> Teaching these skills in CS curriculum would probably be a good idea. It was included in my college CS curriculum, using the most obvious text (Debugging, by Agans) almost 10 years ago -- though I had a head start, since I read a copy of it from my public library about 4~5 years before that. If other schools haven't followed suit, I have to ask "What on earth is taking them so long?"

kbwt 9y ago
The consensus seems to be that those types of skills do not belong in a Higher Learning institution. In Germany, the saying is "You do not need a Computer to study CS", although it sounds wrong in English because CS literally contains the word "Computer" while the German term for CS (Informatik) is a mashed-together version of Information and Mathematics. Some German Universities (TUM, KIT) pride themselves on that last point so much, they actually pass off the CS degree as an Informatics degree on the English version of their diploma transcripts.

PeterStuer 9y ago

(btw, I'll use 'older' and 'younger' as a sort of statistical reference, not implying a strict age separation exists and all on either side are clones of a prototype) I recognize this. My 'younger' colleagues can't install a computer from scratch, a get completely stuck on the slightest network issue. But I don't thin it is related to education. The 'older' programmer had to squire these skills by necessity as it was completely impossible to use a computer otherwise. For us getting a new release of Windows or VS usually meant wiping everything clean and install from scratch a we all knew how dodgy 'upgrading' was. My 'younger' colleagues wouldn't know where to begin when they can't hit update and everything works. They have to wait and rely on a system manager to re-image their machine for them.

cheschire 9y ago
The youngest guy on my team refuses to reinstall his development environment like the rest of us when new major platform changes occur. Then every few months complains when his environment causes an error in the build.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

rorykoehler 9y ago

Another anecdote... My experience with older programmers and sys admins is that the vast majority of them know a lot about how a computer works (as you mentioned) but many also haven't kept up to date on tools available to simplify and automate processes. This leads to unnecessarily convoluted and confusing configurations that are far from optimised considering todays available tooling. This frustrates me to no end as it creates a load of needless busy work which at the same time makes the dev/admin feel both smart and productive whilst not optimising for what the business actually cares about.

bazfoo 9y ago
On the flipside, I see a lot of tools pushed that are more complicated, less flexible, and far buggier than the old tools. And then inevitably in a few years they're deprecated in favour of something newer and shinier and the old tools are still perfectly fine (e.g. Make).

mixmastamyk 9y ago

Interesting, I'm old enough to have grown up before the scourge of Wintel PCs in the 90s. Had a Commodore Vic-20 instead. You'd hit the power button and about 5 seconds later a BASIC interpreter started. There was no complicated debugging to be done to get it working. Still, I learned to manage/hate computers by the Win '95 era and grow to love them again by the time Linux became tolerable about 10 years later.

btschaegg 9y ago

I think this is a side effect of teaching programming as a career skill. My guess is that you don't even have to go as far as "computing" in order to see the negative effects of this. I've had a couple of encounters where I helped out a peer that was stuck in a particular problem merely by applying some basic deduction. And I had those situations both with fellow students and later on in the workplace. In all those situations, the underlying problem was that the person in question didn't have a firm grasp of the programming language they were using, but seemed to program in terms of "patterns" -- they knew how a for loop has to look like, but as soon as there was a slightly more nuanced problem (say a parsing expression in Boost.Spirit), they weren't able to see how the underlying syntax was treated by the respective language. While I get that it's almost impossible (and certainly impractical) to learn every edge case in most modern programming languages, I couldn't help but think of cargo cults. Edit: On second thought: OTOH, it seems to me that it isn't helpful to view what a software engineer does merely as "programming" in this regard. I don't see a problem if, say, an electrical engineer is missing said "computing" skills, but they are in their way to complete a program. Many modern professions benefit greatly if the respective person is able to program (maybe only in a specific language, e.g. Matlab or LabView), but that doesn't mean they have to know their working machines inside out.

j45 9y ago

This is a subtle and sublime point - it may not just be a function of age, maybe somewhat about having a wider interest in computers and tech. 10-20 years ago, it was a requirement to learn the layers support your own hardware, network, security, hosting.... all for the opportunity to try to build a piece of software. You could spend a few years improving at each and it was perfectly normal. Now there seems to be a rush to get through it all to become awesome by skimming the surface. As a result of learning multiple layers (because there was little other choice), one picked up a lot of transferable skills. You can sometimes literally traverse debugging an issue between all of these layers. In school computers were taught, first from how a computer physically worked, booted up, etc. Then, you learned some basic operating system, applications, and how they interacted with the computer. Once that was completed, you started some amount of creation, whether it was visual design, games, programming, etc. Not to create a programmer, but as a form of creation with the computer.

klum 9y ago

Agreed. The article sort of presents these kind of "computer problems" as a barrier to getting started with programming. I don't quite agree -- or maybe they are, but only in the sense that they "filter out" those who don't really want to be programmers at an earlier point in time. Don't get me wrong; I don't think there's any point in making new programmers jump through arbitrary hoops because "programming should be hard". But I think that today, programming is necessarily intertwined with computing and problem-solving in general, and all the Dockers and specialised positions in the world don't change that. To be a good developer, you need to have some idea about the systems your code will be running on. A program doesn't just exist in a bubble. (This is more true for some kinds of applications, less for others, of course.)

gutnor 9y ago

Well, that's an effect of experience. You don't just become a better programmer with experience, you become better at software development. Better handling stress, better understanding requirement, gathering requierment, better navigating political corporate structure, better explaining yourself, better defending yourself, ... and yes, better getting your environment sorted. That said, the specific point you raised is interesting because I was having the same problem at work. Except it was caused by automation. We have automated pipeline for everything, zero downtime deployment, containers, ... all of that is working very well - so well that there is just no enough big stuff to do so that newcomer on the project can build enough experience with the pipeline to master it. The best people achieve is some sort of very rudimentary debugging capability, earned from the monthly minor tweak the system require. Basically either you build similar pipeline on another project, something that is extremely unfrequent, or you missed the train.

andredublin 9y ago

Interesting point, I'll add that we don't see many desktop computers any more. Kids or those wanting to learn to program don't see the whole machine. Instead we have these slim downed devices that require existing knowledge to take apart and put back together again.

SophosQ 9y ago

Perhaps it's more to do with the stock of people who learnt CS. In the older generation, CS was a relatively obscure and difficult skill with little to no easy-guides that it filtered the set of students to only those who were insatiably curious and were fuelled by learning new things. In contrast, CS has become so ubiquitous that nearly everything has a "how do it" guide that eases the entry of nearly anyone, with little or not interest or whose motivation might be less than ideal. Thereby, possibly leaving room for more anecdotal evidence for this perceives shift in skill.

koffiezet 9y ago

Has little to do with age, but more with the amount of people in the CS field right now. Only a fraction of them are enthusiasts. I notice that especially with my "front-end" developer colleagues - of whom 3/4th is here to do a job and at home many of them don't even have their own computer. Sure they play video games on their XBox or PS4, but that's the extent of their technical interest. For them it's simply a well-paid 9-to-5 job. Now my other colleagues are mostly doing back-end and embedded C++/Python stuff, and are in general a lot more interested in the technical side. I think it's more or less the other way around, 1 out of 4 is not really tinkering with tech at home - but even they are more interested in tech outside of their field. I show them stuff like docker, kubernetes, time-series databases and metrics collection stuff, ansible/tower and what we can do with those things, and how they could make changes in the way they design their software to make things more reliable or easier to deploy/monitor - and their reaction is "oh cool!". Our front-end team? Completely the opposite attitude and completely averse to changing the way they work. I hear "we'll do this manually" or "why? this works too"... Most of the front-end dev roles seem to attract people who're not really into tech, but can code a bit. I think because of the immediate visual feedback? They end up hiding behind their frameworks with a lack of even basic understanding of HTTP or networking. Me as an embedded developer rolled into sysadmin role then has to tell them what the hell HTTP2 is, catch their screw-ups when they serve mixed http/https content on their site, ... Now they're not all like that, there are some pretty good guys there - but the majority can write basic code, and that's where it ends. Sadly it's no surprise their team-leads all fall in the wrong category. On the other side, I have the last say when stuff is deployed in production, so they are forced to adapt to certain things - but they'll always complain.