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You can pry my files from my cold dead hands. What amuses me about all of this is that it seems to just further cement software developers as magicians. Back i

You can pry my files from my cold dead hands. What amuses me about all of this is that it seems to just further cement software developers as magicians. Back in the day it was the Windows control panel. Nowadays? I have direct experience with tons of people navigating cloud service settings or whatever else via endless GUIs. Just give me the filesystem. It's all a bunch of JSON configs or whatever anyway. find -name blah -execdir sed -i blah. Bosh. Well, I'll never struggle for work at least. Perhaps this is our 'guild'...?

jkp56 7y ago
We'd call this karma, I think. On the one hand these big corps create siloed software environments that not only take all control away from users, but also remove the necessity to think. From their pov, users are as dumb as rocks and should stay at that level. At the same time the same corps cry about the lack of supply of new engineers and pretend to promote CS in college (by giving out ipads and watching a colorful presentation about software, I guess).
- the_pwner224 7y ago
  > pretend to promote CS in college Potentially because that means in 5-20 years they'll have a much bigger pool of labor available? They've already done illegal market-manipulating collusion which resulted in billions of dollars of salaries not being paid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 ; in the end they got hit with fines for a few million bucks and some developers got a paycheck for a few thousand bucks (two orders of magnitude less than the wages stolen from them). I'm just a college student, but I find it hard to not think that when I see the big companies spending tons of money to push people to learn to code.
  - pm90 7y ago
    I think you're reading too much into conspiracy theories. That can be fun and all but I can assure you these things are emergent and not some concerted effort to keep wages lower. The Steve Jobs market manipulation was def a dick move, but.. well, its Steve Jobs. There will be other such efforts too, but that alone doesn't indicate the kind of concerted market manipulation that you think exists. The emphasis on coding is similar to the emphasis on schooling and mathematics at the dawn of the industrial revolution: societies realized then that basic mathematical literacy can be immensely beneficial to people. And we understand today that basic programming skills can have a similar transformative effect. Jobs in tech are increasing at a tremendous rate. As we shift to more automation, the demand for computer literacy will only increase.
    - mpweiher 7y ago
      > The Steve Jobs market manipulation It wasn't "Steve Jobs", it was most/all of the tech giants colluding.
      - pm90 7y ago
        If I understand the case correctly it was a plot hatched and masterminded by Jobs. No other individual holds as much charisma and economic power as he did in his prime.
  - jkp56 7y ago
    What I meant is these corps really want to increase the workforce and then cut the salaries, but at the same time they want to profit from dumb users who are easy to rip off. But the corps can't get both.
mukti 7y ago
I'm often able to mystify people by fixing something by dropping to a shell and modifying files.. even some developers. I think the one thing that this article points out is how unaware some developers about what they're doing. The author had an example where he used NPM to download dependencies and said "websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies." While that is not wrong, its too often how people think, and they forget that the dependencies are actually just a bunch of files. I actually end up helping tons of random people in my company use conda, because they can't get the concept of virtual envs. They don't understand that the libraries are actually files on the disk, and your virtual environment is just a directory and some variables. That's not to say all developers are like this, but I think the numbers that think like this are growing. Ultimately, I'm like you - they can pry the files from my cold dead hands, if I didn't know what/where/how files were used, I wouldn't fundamentally understand how a lot of different technologies even work.
- Zee2 7y ago
  I think the author's point of "made of dependencies, not files" is that they are not human files. They are autogenerated webs of dependent repositories, not to be touched by the user, unless something has gone seriously wrong. I wouldn't qualify personal files that are directly created and managed by a human user as being the same thing as a mass of folders curated and managed by a dependency manager utility.

jkp56 7y ago

We'd call this karma, I think. On the one hand these big corps create siloed software environments that not only take all control away from users, but also remove the necessity to think. From their pov, users are as dumb as rocks and should stay at that level. At the same time the same corps cry about the lack of supply of new engineers and pretend to promote CS in college (by giving out ipads and watching a colorful presentation about software, I guess).

the_pwner224 7y ago
> pretend to promote CS in college Potentially because that means in 5-20 years they'll have a much bigger pool of labor available? They've already done illegal market-manipulating collusion which resulted in billions of dollars of salaries not being paid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19666545 ; in the end they got hit with fines for a few million bucks and some developers got a paycheck for a few thousand bucks (two orders of magnitude less than the wages stolen from them). I'm just a college student, but I find it hard to not think that when I see the big companies spending tons of money to push people to learn to code.
- pm90 7y ago
  I think you're reading too much into conspiracy theories. That can be fun and all but I can assure you these things are emergent and not some concerted effort to keep wages lower. The Steve Jobs market manipulation was def a dick move, but.. well, its Steve Jobs. There will be other such efforts too, but that alone doesn't indicate the kind of concerted market manipulation that you think exists. The emphasis on coding is similar to the emphasis on schooling and mathematics at the dawn of the industrial revolution: societies realized then that basic mathematical literacy can be immensely beneficial to people. And we understand today that basic programming skills can have a similar transformative effect. Jobs in tech are increasing at a tremendous rate. As we shift to more automation, the demand for computer literacy will only increase.
  - mpweiher 7y ago
    > The Steve Jobs market manipulation It wasn't "Steve Jobs", it was most/all of the tech giants colluding.
    - pm90 7y ago
      If I understand the case correctly it was a plot hatched and masterminded by Jobs. No other individual holds as much charisma and economic power as he did in his prime.
- jkp56 7y ago
  What I meant is these corps really want to increase the workforce and then cut the salaries, but at the same time they want to profit from dumb users who are easy to rip off. But the corps can't get both.

mukti 7y ago

I'm often able to mystify people by fixing something by dropping to a shell and modifying files.. even some developers. I think the one thing that this article points out is how unaware some developers about what they're doing. The author had an example where he used NPM to download dependencies and said "websites were made of files; now they are made of dependencies." While that is not wrong, its too often how people think, and they forget that the dependencies are actually just a bunch of files. I actually end up helping tons of random people in my company use conda, because they can't get the concept of virtual envs. They don't understand that the libraries are actually files on the disk, and your virtual environment is just a directory and some variables. That's not to say all developers are like this, but I think the numbers that think like this are growing. Ultimately, I'm like you - they can pry the files from my cold dead hands, if I didn't know what/where/how files were used, I wouldn't fundamentally understand how a lot of different technologies even work.

Zee2 7y ago
I think the author's point of "made of dependencies, not files" is that they are not human files. They are autogenerated webs of dependent repositories, not to be touched by the user, unless something has gone seriously wrong. I wouldn't qualify personal files that are directly created and managed by a human user as being the same thing as a mass of folders curated and managed by a dependency manager utility.