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Before, you only needed domain experts. Nobody thought they could do more complex things w/o education. Now, knowledge is google/wiki shallow even in simpler do

Before, you only needed domain experts. Nobody thought they could do more complex things w/o education. Now, knowledge is google/wiki shallow even in simpler domains. I've seen "experts" who really did not invest in depth and before they couldn't even try because it was obscured enough that you had to actually work to find it. It scares me to think how much engineers or doctors may be just googling around because Material Thermodynamics/Vascular course got split up into electives because the domain wouldn't fit into a semester anymore. Chip engineers tell me they used to actually understand what was going on and could converse about any part of the chip. They understood a lot about the fab process. Software people knew a lot about the chip. Now, no one has the big picture. Scale this up to airplanes, civil construction, large embedded systems, power grids... people may know their domain if lucky but the integration of complex projects is filled with gaps people don't know how to bridge - they don't even know where the gaps are. It's not brand new - no known engineer/software person grok'd speculative execution exploits for the two decades it was possible. Now, kernel people know a lot more about chip pipelines and cache architectures because they got bit.

kungito 6y ago
Oh please, only thing happening was people shot themselves in the foot more often. This reminds of the whole debate "C engineer who never makes security mistakes vs 10 years younger Rust developer who uses a tool which makes sure it doesn't happen". Planes didn't suddenly start falling from the sky because people chose wrong electives. That why we have PROCESS where we make sure dumb things cannot happen because we explicitly check for them. When you add automated checking on top of that you get way further than some galaxy brain old school chip designers. Besides, things are moving way to fast for people to get to know too much about one thing
ivan1783 6y ago
I work in automotive, its the same here. There isn't a single person who you can find that has a big picture detailed understanding of the whole system.

kungito 6y ago

Oh please, only thing happening was people shot themselves in the foot more often. This reminds of the whole debate "C engineer who never makes security mistakes vs 10 years younger Rust developer who uses a tool which makes sure it doesn't happen". Planes didn't suddenly start falling from the sky because people chose wrong electives. That why we have PROCESS where we make sure dumb things cannot happen because we explicitly check for them. When you add automated checking on top of that you get way further than some galaxy brain old school chip designers. Besides, things are moving way to fast for people to get to know too much about one thing

ivan1783 6y ago

I work in automotive, its the same here. There isn't a single person who you can find that has a big picture detailed understanding of the whole system.