3 ms·

On the one hand, sure, percentage-wise you learn less in year 20 than in year 10, because you already know a lot more in year 19. But that is no more true of th

by wrs 7y ago

On the one hand, sure, percentage-wise you learn less in year 20 than in year 10, because you already know a lot more in year 19. But that is no more true of this field than any other field. Is a doctor, architect, civil engineer, or auto mechanic with 20 years experience more valuable than one with 10 years experience? Heck yes.

scarface74 7y ago
20 years ago,much of what I used today didn't existed there was no AWS, no C# (but C++ was close enough I guess), mobile where you had to worry about semi-connected networks and syncing, etc. There is no part of the human body that exists today that didn't exist 20 years ago.
- wrs 7y ago
  All of which is just details, which are much less important than the fundamental skills of building systems with whatever people and tools are available. (And I'm sorry, are you implying no significant changes have occurred in the tools and practice of medicine in 20 years?)
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Thinking that moving from on prem to AWS for instance is now you end up with “AWS Architect” who were old school net ops guys who only know how to do a “lift and shift” and end up costing clients more. Because they pattern matched thought AWS was just an implementation detail and they could just set up everything like they would on prem.
- purerandomness 7y ago
  You could argue the opposite is true: 20 years ago, there were dangerous misconceptions about how some body parts work. Many chemical pathways were completely unknown. Medicine and biology both evolved a lot in the 20 years. The big picture however is still valid. Concepts and paradigms hold for decades. We still use TCP/IP. Computers still use the Von Neumann Architecture. Looking at the details however, AWS is just a fancy GUI over time sharing on a mainframe. C# is just new syntax for concepts that are older than I am. While mobile brings new challenges, you now don't have to deal with the challenge of customers connected through a 330 baud modem.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    In 1986 I had to not only know 65C02 assembly language to get any performance out of my 1Mhz Apple //e, I had to know that I could get 50% more performance for every access I did to memory on the first page as opposed to any other page. If I spent time doing that type of micro optimization today, I would be fired. I couldn’t imagine doing the types of things I could do today with modern technology. In 1995, when I wrote my first paid for application in college, Internet was a thing for most colleges where I did some work on a HyperCard based Gopher server (long story), that wouldn’t have been possible in 10 years earlier. In 2006, I was writing field service software for ruggedized Windows Mobile devices, architecting for semi connected smart devices is a completely different mindset than terminal programming or desktop programming. That wasn’t feasible before hardware became cheap and at least 2G was ubiquitous. Even then what we could do, pales in comparison to the type of field service implementation I did in 2016 when mobile computing was much more capable, much cheaper and you could get a cheap Android devices and 3G/4G was common place. But people thinking cloud computing is just “sharing mainframes” and don’t rearchirect either their systems or their processes is how we end up with “lift and shifters” and organizations spending way too much money on infrastructure and staff. Also anyone who equates managing AWS to a “GUI” kind of makes my point, if you’re managing your AWS infrastructure from a GUI - you’re doing it wrong. 10-15 years ago you didn’t set up your entire data center by running a CloudFormation template or any other type of infrastructure as code.
  - vonseel 7y ago
    How has medicine evolved in the last 20 years? I don’t doubt your statement, but you make it sound like common knowledge, and from my point of view (average non-medical person) not much has changed.

by wrs 7y ago

scarface74 7y ago

20 years ago,much of what I used today didn't existed there was no AWS, no C# (but C++ was close enough I guess), mobile where you had to worry about semi-connected networks and syncing, etc. There is no part of the human body that exists today that didn't exist 20 years ago.

wrs 7y ago
All of which is just details, which are much less important than the fundamental skills of building systems with whatever people and tools are available. (And I'm sorry, are you implying no significant changes have occurred in the tools and practice of medicine in 20 years?)
- scarface74 7y ago
  Thinking that moving from on prem to AWS for instance is now you end up with “AWS Architect” who were old school net ops guys who only know how to do a “lift and shift” and end up costing clients more. Because they pattern matched thought AWS was just an implementation detail and they could just set up everything like they would on prem.
purerandomness 7y ago
You could argue the opposite is true: 20 years ago, there were dangerous misconceptions about how some body parts work. Many chemical pathways were completely unknown. Medicine and biology both evolved a lot in the 20 years. The big picture however is still valid. Concepts and paradigms hold for decades. We still use TCP/IP. Computers still use the Von Neumann Architecture. Looking at the details however, AWS is just a fancy GUI over time sharing on a mainframe. C# is just new syntax for concepts that are older than I am. While mobile brings new challenges, you now don't have to deal with the challenge of customers connected through a 330 baud modem.
- scarface74 7y ago
  In 1986 I had to not only know 65C02 assembly language to get any performance out of my 1Mhz Apple //e, I had to know that I could get 50% more performance for every access I did to memory on the first page as opposed to any other page. If I spent time doing that type of micro optimization today, I would be fired. I couldn’t imagine doing the types of things I could do today with modern technology. In 1995, when I wrote my first paid for application in college, Internet was a thing for most colleges where I did some work on a HyperCard based Gopher server (long story), that wouldn’t have been possible in 10 years earlier. In 2006, I was writing field service software for ruggedized Windows Mobile devices, architecting for semi connected smart devices is a completely different mindset than terminal programming or desktop programming. That wasn’t feasible before hardware became cheap and at least 2G was ubiquitous. Even then what we could do, pales in comparison to the type of field service implementation I did in 2016 when mobile computing was much more capable, much cheaper and you could get a cheap Android devices and 3G/4G was common place. But people thinking cloud computing is just “sharing mainframes” and don’t rearchirect either their systems or their processes is how we end up with “lift and shifters” and organizations spending way too much money on infrastructure and staff. Also anyone who equates managing AWS to a “GUI” kind of makes my point, if you’re managing your AWS infrastructure from a GUI - you’re doing it wrong. 10-15 years ago you didn’t set up your entire data center by running a CloudFormation template or any other type of infrastructure as code.
- vonseel 7y ago
  How has medicine evolved in the last 20 years? I don’t doubt your statement, but you make it sound like common knowledge, and from my point of view (average non-medical person) not much has changed.