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Then one day your Hadoop installation starts acting up, and you thank your dear lord that you have someone on your team with experience in the arcane. Unix is

by nikanj 8y ago

Then one day your Hadoop installation starts acting up, and you thank your dear lord that you have someone on your team with experience in the arcane. Unix is well over 20 years old, so is Ethernet, TCP, GCC, and an endless plethora of technologies that stand tall behind the thin curtain of a Node.js installation. Full-stack nowadays means "I know how to write a Dockerfile and deploy it", but a senior dev might actually understand the full stack. This is of course assuming they have 20 years of experience, not one year of experience * 20.

mgkimsal 8y ago
Possibly apropos of nothing, but I just got back from a tech conference, and ... talking to vendors and hiring folks was odd. Whenever asked "what do you do?", even after a few times, I still... paused. I heard plenty of folks saying "I do full stack development" and then struggle to communicate basic ideas and tech stuff (not everyone, but more than a couple times). And yeah, i get it, we all start some place, and no one is perfect, but... I don't want to be using the same words as people who demonstrably struggle with some basics. But that meant that I struggled with quick 5 second definer intro statements. More interesting, I found, was on 3 separate occasions today when speaking with some tech vendors, they all mentioned "file descriptors". "When installing, you gotta make sure you up your default file descriptors - system defaults won't work". A MySQL tuning guy said "almost no one ever has enough, and almost no one knows about these - you need 60000 minimum, but distros usually default to 1024". And I nodded, because I've hit that issue many times in the last 20+ years, and now recognize symptoms and that's now in my diagnostic bag. "Senior dev" seems to mean 3+ years of work, and "full stack" seems to mean they know "npm install" and have built create-react-app samples. (I'm tired and cynical, I know).

by nikanj 8y ago

mgkimsal 8y ago

Possibly apropos of nothing, but I just got back from a tech conference, and ... talking to vendors and hiring folks was odd. Whenever asked "what do you do?", even after a few times, I still... paused. I heard plenty of folks saying "I do full stack development" and then struggle to communicate basic ideas and tech stuff (not everyone, but more than a couple times). And yeah, i get it, we all start some place, and no one is perfect, but... I don't want to be using the same words as people who demonstrably struggle with some basics. But that meant that I struggled with quick 5 second definer intro statements. More interesting, I found, was on 3 separate occasions today when speaking with some tech vendors, they all mentioned "file descriptors". "When installing, you gotta make sure you up your default file descriptors - system defaults won't work". A MySQL tuning guy said "almost no one ever has enough, and almost no one knows about these - you need 60000 minimum, but distros usually default to 1024". And I nodded, because I've hit that issue many times in the last 20+ years, and now recognize symptoms and that's now in my diagnostic bag. "Senior dev" seems to mean 3+ years of work, and "full stack" seems to mean they know "npm install" and have built create-react-app samples. (I'm tired and cynical, I know).