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I don't think it's fair to frame this as specific to GitHub, or even as a thing to wring hands over. New devs - especially those coming from bootcamps (I say t

I don't think it's fair to frame this as specific to GitHub, or even as a thing to wring hands over. New devs - especially those coming from bootcamps (I say this without judgement) - mostly start with practical skills. Industry-standard ways to just get things done. That's how you get a job, that's how you get off the ground. This goes beyond source-control; languages/frameworks, tooling, etc. You enter the territory - with your finite bandwidth for learning - where it's most immediately useful. And then over the years you move out from there, incorporating more and more nuance and detail and auxiliary knowledge. There's no need for moral panic. "Where it's most useful to start" has shifted, sure. But that's natural; I don't think it's a new phenomenon or in a fundamentally worse place than before. GitHub is a higher-level tool that makes you dramatically more productive than raw git on its own. The details will be filled in as they work their first job.

masklinn 4y ago
> New devs - especially those coming from bootcamps (I say this without judgement) - mostly start with practical skills. I wouldn't say that it's "especially those coming from bootcamps". Those coming from uni are no better IME.
- brundolf 4y ago
  Depends on the uni. Mine focused on fundamentals, almost to a fault; we learned algorithmic complexity and relational normal-forms but never touched eg. JavaScript, Python, or - ironically - git. Practical skills were very much not the entrypoint; I had to learn most of that myself.
  - ryanmcbride 4y ago
    Yeah I had to learn Assembly in college. We also had to physically print out our C++ code and turn it in to the professor. Did it make me a better programmer? Maybe but to this day I still haven't had to use it. Most of my practical skills I picked up on the job. P.S. I've seen the professor grading the printed out programs and he'd do it by flipping to the last page which was supposed to have the result output, and then fold the corner of the papers so it looked like he read the whole thing and then put a grade on the top. It was pretty funny.
    - lovich 4y ago
      Did we go to the same school? Halfway through the semester he gave up on even that pretense and started throwing them out in front of us and giving everyone a C-
      - ryanmcbride 4y ago
        Never saw him do that but given his personality I wouldn't put it past him lol. He also cemented in me that there would be virtually no collaboration at a company and that we'd be given problems to solve/features to build and if we had trouble we'd get the can. I think most of his work experience might have been in a pretty hostile work environment. Or at least a good while before pair programming became the hot ticket item.
    - MacsHeadroom 4y ago
      My C class had weekly written programming tests. Not multiple choice tests. We had to write a program by hand and hope to god it would compile without any errors. Horrible way to teach C imho.
      - ryanmcbride 4y ago
        Hey we had that too! Good ol pen and paper. It was thankfully generally for simple algorithms
      - corrral 4y ago
        If they also made you do all the calculations the program would, by hand, and record the output, then penalized you if you made any errors on that... it'd be math class.
        ryanmcbride 4y ago
        When I had it it was primarily for logical problems. So it was more boolean logic than true math
        shreyshnaccount 4y ago
- ladberg 4y ago
  Not sure I'd agree, every CS student at my school had to take a class where one of the projects was implementing a mini version of git from scratch. And even before that class there was at least one lecture dedicated to git in the intro class.
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    In my experience, bootcamps and uni produce polar opposites. You either end up with devs who can do several practical things, but have no clue about fundamentals, or devs who know all the academic terms but have no idea how to apply them practically.
  - widjit 4y ago
    the only significant difference I've seen in brand-new devs from bootcamps vs CS programs is the devs from bootcamps are somewhat aware that they have a lot of learning to do
    - ratww 4y ago
      Not my experience. I found a lot of hubris in the few last batches of bootcamp devs I interviewed or worked with.
- CSSer 4y ago
  I suppose it depends on what one considers practical.
jrm4 4y ago
There is absolutely a need for moral panic if, like me, you believe that code and industry quality of product is more important than onboarding more people into the profession. I can't think of a worse idea than subconsciously letting the idea "By default, the way we are supposed store and write code is by putting it in the hands of a deeply centralized third party that will exploit you and owes you nothing" just sort of be the default deal.
- jjfoooo4 4y ago
  The ins and outs of version control solves a problem that has not yet existed for an intern. It’s not that big a deal to train them on the job, industry practices probably don’t map well to academic settings anyhow. Not to mention that git is plagued with, as a general rule, utterly confusing defaults for a newbie (and for me, when setting up a machine without my config files!)
- starik36 4y ago
  > I can't think of a worse idea There are lots of worse ideas. Things get abstracted from us over time. 99% of the code in active development today probably lives in a source control repo that's in the cloud. At one point, decades ago, I looked with amusement on devs that couldn't do C/C++. But the reality was that it wasn't really needed anymore for most tasks.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    This is different from what you're saying though. This isn't about "what basic knowledge is needed generally." This is about us frog-boiling ourselves into a world where we end up accepting the mentality that code is owned and controlled by the big company/entity in the center. For now it's "convenience," but if it continues it absolutely will turn into a center of power to be policed. "Dangerous code" will be censored, etc. In other words, yes, Stallman was right.
- shreyshnaccount 4y ago
  like we (atleast people my age) by default are expected to have Instagram Snapchat WhatsApp YouTube Discord Reddit Spotify Twitter accounts and when I left some of these sources my friends actually questioned me about why I'd do that and some people even told me it was weird and I'll end up giving up material possessions and becoming a "sanyasi". fascinating that becoming a sanyasi is considered bad it actually sounds rather nice to me
laserlight 4y ago
How difficult is it to teach “Git runs on everyone’s own machine. GitHub and GitLab run their own Git for their users to connect to and push code.”
- CRConrad 4y ago
  Apparently overwhelmingly.

masklinn 4y ago

> New devs - especially those coming from bootcamps (I say this without judgement) - mostly start with practical skills. I wouldn't say that it's "especially those coming from bootcamps". Those coming from uni are no better IME.

brundolf 4y ago
Depends on the uni. Mine focused on fundamentals, almost to a fault; we learned algorithmic complexity and relational normal-forms but never touched eg. JavaScript, Python, or - ironically - git. Practical skills were very much not the entrypoint; I had to learn most of that myself.
- ryanmcbride 4y ago
  Yeah I had to learn Assembly in college. We also had to physically print out our C++ code and turn it in to the professor. Did it make me a better programmer? Maybe but to this day I still haven't had to use it. Most of my practical skills I picked up on the job. P.S. I've seen the professor grading the printed out programs and he'd do it by flipping to the last page which was supposed to have the result output, and then fold the corner of the papers so it looked like he read the whole thing and then put a grade on the top. It was pretty funny.
  - lovich 4y ago
    Did we go to the same school? Halfway through the semester he gave up on even that pretense and started throwing them out in front of us and giving everyone a C-
    - ryanmcbride 4y ago
      Never saw him do that but given his personality I wouldn't put it past him lol. He also cemented in me that there would be virtually no collaboration at a company and that we'd be given problems to solve/features to build and if we had trouble we'd get the can. I think most of his work experience might have been in a pretty hostile work environment. Or at least a good while before pair programming became the hot ticket item.
  - MacsHeadroom 4y ago
    My C class had weekly written programming tests. Not multiple choice tests. We had to write a program by hand and hope to god it would compile without any errors. Horrible way to teach C imho.
    - ryanmcbride 4y ago
      Hey we had that too! Good ol pen and paper. It was thankfully generally for simple algorithms
    - corrral 4y ago
      If they also made you do all the calculations the program would, by hand, and record the output, then penalized you if you made any errors on that... it'd be math class.
      - ryanmcbride 4y ago
        When I had it it was primarily for logical problems. So it was more boolean logic than true math
      - shreyshnaccount 4y ago
ladberg 4y ago
Not sure I'd agree, every CS student at my school had to take a class where one of the projects was implementing a mini version of git from scratch. And even before that class there was at least one lecture dedicated to git in the intro class.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  In my experience, bootcamps and uni produce polar opposites. You either end up with devs who can do several practical things, but have no clue about fundamentals, or devs who know all the academic terms but have no idea how to apply them practically.
- widjit 4y ago
  the only significant difference I've seen in brand-new devs from bootcamps vs CS programs is the devs from bootcamps are somewhat aware that they have a lot of learning to do
  - ratww 4y ago
    Not my experience. I found a lot of hubris in the few last batches of bootcamp devs I interviewed or worked with.
CSSer 4y ago
I suppose it depends on what one considers practical.

jrm4 4y ago

There is absolutely a need for moral panic if, like me, you believe that code and industry quality of product is more important than onboarding more people into the profession. I can't think of a worse idea than subconsciously letting the idea "By default, the way we are supposed store and write code is by putting it in the hands of a deeply centralized third party that will exploit you and owes you nothing" just sort of be the default deal.

jjfoooo4 4y ago
The ins and outs of version control solves a problem that has not yet existed for an intern. It’s not that big a deal to train them on the job, industry practices probably don’t map well to academic settings anyhow. Not to mention that git is plagued with, as a general rule, utterly confusing defaults for a newbie (and for me, when setting up a machine without my config files!)
starik36 4y ago
> I can't think of a worse idea There are lots of worse ideas. Things get abstracted from us over time. 99% of the code in active development today probably lives in a source control repo that's in the cloud. At one point, decades ago, I looked with amusement on devs that couldn't do C/C++. But the reality was that it wasn't really needed anymore for most tasks.
- jrm4 4y ago
  This is different from what you're saying though. This isn't about "what basic knowledge is needed generally." This is about us frog-boiling ourselves into a world where we end up accepting the mentality that code is owned and controlled by the big company/entity in the center. For now it's "convenience," but if it continues it absolutely will turn into a center of power to be policed. "Dangerous code" will be censored, etc. In other words, yes, Stallman was right.
shreyshnaccount 4y ago
like we (atleast people my age) by default are expected to have Instagram Snapchat WhatsApp YouTube Discord Reddit Spotify Twitter accounts and when I left some of these sources my friends actually questioned me about why I'd do that and some people even told me it was weird and I'll end up giving up material possessions and becoming a "sanyasi". fascinating that becoming a sanyasi is considered bad it actually sounds rather nice to me

laserlight 4y ago

How difficult is it to teach “Git runs on everyone’s own machine. GitHub and GitLab run their own Git for their users to connect to and push code.”

CRConrad 4y ago
Apparently overwhelmingly.