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Yeah, I was just chatting with another principal eng friend recently where maybe a whole new generation of programmers may be several degrees away from topics l
by tzhenghao 3y ago
Yeah, I was just chatting with another principal eng friend recently where maybe a whole new generation of programmers may be several degrees away from topics like operating systems, compilers, computer security and networking.
Once in a while, (lower level) software needs to be rewritten as underlying invariants go out of fashion. Think filesystems due to hardware access patterns etc. - to unlock magnitudes of performance improvements. The scary part is maybe we'll never have enough programmers to know how to do "the hard stuff" anymore. I hope I'm proven wrong though!
- pc86 3y agoThis is sort of a FUD argument IMO. There will always be people who focus on low level software engineering. There will always be people who want to learn about the hardware of computers much more than the software. Proportionally there will almost certainly be less (we don't need nearly as many computer engineers as we do software engineers) but as long as the salaries remain competitive there will be plenty.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoIt's not just this but also the fact that there are many more layers of abstraction now than there were even 10 years ago, never mind 20/30/40 years ago, and the real world incentive to understand the entire stack of those abstractions is virtually nil in modern engineering environments.