4 ms·

"When you explain what happens under the hood, they will ignore you. When you tell them what a certain setting probably does, they will ignore you." So teenage

• PeterisP 7y ago
  Sure, kids who need to figure stuff out will find a way, but the issue is that since the need for kids to figure stuff out has largely disappeared, the technical proficiency motivated by this has also disappeared. If some time ago we could implicitly assume all kinds of things that everyone "technical-minded" would know because they inevitably would have needed it as a kid, we now need to teach the very basics of how stuff works 'under the hood' explicitly without this assumption.
  • hinkley 7y ago
    Do we need more operating system maintainers or library writers if we have more developers? I propose that the number of low level people we need is logarithmic to the number of devs. Uncle Bob proposed that the number of devs had been doubling every five years for the last couple decades. That means five times as many people are available to fill these critical spots. If he’s right and I’m right, then if every 5-year generation of devs has 60% of the ratio of people interested in low level stuff as the one before, then we will have plenty of people to keep the wheels on. Which if my math is right is 5% of the rate of gearheads we had in the dotcom boom. Which honestly was not that high even then. I was using a lot more theoretical knowledge of hardware than nearly all of my coworkers would cop to.