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A lot of developers only know the new, needlessly complicated ways of doing things. I have met professional software engineers who have never heard of shared we
by csande17 5y ago
A lot of developers only know the new, needlessly complicated ways of doing things. I have met professional software engineers who have never heard of shared web hosting, for example.
It's also surprisingly possible to learn enough about programming to get a job without understanding basic computing concepts. I've met professional software engineers, with multiple years of experience and promotions under their belt, who did not know the difference between hard drives and RAM in a server context. I've literally code-reviewed attempts to deploy a database server with 1 TB of RAM in order to store 1 TB of data.
- easton 5y agoI thought that was crazy, but reflecting over my CS education they haven’t gone over the difference between disk space and RAM. I suppose they figure everyone already knows?
- kyawzazaw 5y agoI think that's why Scott Hanselman started this series https://www.hanselman.com/blog/new-youtube-series-computer-things-they-didnt-teach-you-in-school https://www.hanselman.com/blog/new-youtube-series-computer-t...
- firebaze 5y agoBut can you really be, let's be modest, around the baseline of developer competence not knowing the difference between RAM and disk space? Hard to believe to me.
- sam0x17 5y agoYou sure you didn't have a computer architecture course? Most CS programs it is a required course
- mod 5y agoWhat is a required course?
- easton 5y agoI did (actually it was last semester) but they didn’t do basic definitions, it came with an assumption you knew what the parts of a computer were.
- sam0x17 5y agoThat's unfortunate. Luckily there are tons of good resources online like OSSU https://github.com/ossu/computer-science https://github.com/ossu/computer-science
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoIt could be meant not in a way of "this is ram vs this is disk", but "we have a 1tb dataset, what kind of a server do we need?", and the person not knowing enough about databases to think they need 1tb of ram to be able to run it.
- ozfive 5y agoNo, how can you not know the difference between RAM and disk in a server context? What sort of programmers are these?
- drusepth 5y agoI know the different between RAM and disk in a server context (what sort of programmer wouldn't?!), but I've worked pretty exclusively in no-persisted-storage environments (mostly Heroku) for ~5 years now, where referring to "saving" files/data outside of a DB context almost exclusively means "save to memory" and I routinely run into problems whenever my stack requires downloading any sort of third-party library that would have to persist outside of RAM (e.g. downloading NLP libs). When you abstract "storage" into "my library/tools save state somewhere" (and god forbid you include localStorage into the mix!) and don't deal with the hardware itself, I could see how a lot of new-ish coders wouldn't be able to differentiate RAM and disk.
- ozfive 5y agoThanks for the great explanation! I haven't messed with Heroku myself. Might be a sign I'm getting old...
- vsareto 5y ago>A lot of developers only know the new, needlessly complicated ways of doing things. Yeah that was inevitable in an industry that moves quickly, likes new stuff, and prefers fast, superficial learning when that's all you need to get your product out of the door. Google and StackOverflow are probably controlling a decent chunk of decision making these days such that you don't need to think about solutions too much.