4 ms·

I just wanted to add on to what you're saying: > I think partly DNS and the core protocols may seem confusing to younger people in the industry because so much

by monksy 3y ago

I just wanted to add on to what you're saying: > I think partly DNS and the core protocols may seem confusing to younger people in the industry because so much stuff “just works” now. I've noticed it's become much worse since universities have been teaching Python to start with and with the whole aggressive comodization of developers. To some extent the social justice polices inacted in our communities to exclude people*. ("unsavory" people) We no longer have the culture where we had kids in early ages get a desktop, learn the ins and outs, play video games, trying to pretend to be a hacker, etc. We're getting developers who barely can script in javascript, barely do html, ignore the edge cases, and generally don't have a lot of interest in the craft. It's pretty frustrating to see this.

NikolaNovak 3y ago
I may agree with your point but don't understand the social justice aspect at all; makes it feel like it's something just added in. I think both our perspective as a society and thereforo educational goals have changed over decades, laterally to any social justice aspect. If nothing else, there are order of magnitude more developers of all sorts today than 25 years ago, both as absolute numbers and as relative percentage of population. Basically the enthusiastic nerds who geek out about anything and everything and want to be hands on are still there, but also a LOT of people who just want a paycheck or just have more limited / specific interests. And they do ok. And education system will provide for them. But I just don't see e.g. for-profit bootcamps with their simplified curriculum as any kind of social justice project.
- Spivak 3y ago
  And when there is social justice or involved it's about getting more people involved in engineering. I can see where "hey, quit being gross to women" can be read as excluding the unsavory but that framing presumes that a world where that's an intrinsic immutable property of a person. I really don't buy the "some people just can't help being an asshole so having a rule against assholes is exclusionary." The most controversial CoC is by far the Contributor Covenant and rules are be kind and empathetic, show others respect, don't insult or demean others, don't be creepy or sexually harass others, don't doxx people, and behave like adults at work. Like the bar is so low.
  - monksy 3y ago
    This is kind of where I was going with that, but I don't agree with the way its being described. I 100% agree with cracking down on individuals who are hostile based on identity, that was unreasonable and should continue to be excluded from projects. The history of the developer circles is that we've been a bit rough with the language. (mount, finger, touch, zip, etc are perfectly acceptable things for linux commmands.. theres even a joke about it). Unsavory jokes in mailing list/code bases, etc. However, we've come upon a bunch of people who take the aggressively negative view on the words and interactions used and have taken it upon themselves to rename things and force changes. (Master/main, master/slave, whitelist/blacklist, [theres a whole list of these "undesirable" language things] etc ). On top of that the CoC has implemented toxic positivity rules on projects. Implementers overlook the fact that they have been used as a weapon to be put in the project it's self. (There have been examples of racial, and gender based discrimination in the enforcement of the rules) All of this brings in people who do not contribute in a UX, DX, engineering, management sort of way. Even when these things are abused/enforced poorly it still has a significant silencing effect and distancing effect from those who would be a positive contributor but is reluctant to participate.
- fipar 3y ago
  > But I just don't see e.g. for-profit bootcamps with their simplified curriculum as any kind of social justice project. And you're right not seeing them that way! While I'm sure there are now good-faith bootcamps that have the goal of improving the career options of people who may otherwise never get those, the first time I saw the programming/sysadmin bootcamp concept implemented was around 2002, where a company was recruiting kids still in high school to train them for their openings. They did that because there were not enough skilled IT workers back then. Right, what that really meant is, they did that because there were not enough skilled IT workers they could afford back then. Someone did the math and estimated that for some openings, it would be more profitable to train first-time-job-seekers (in a lot of cases, not-yet-job-seekers) than to offer a better deal. They're still in business so I guess it worked!
- monksy 3y ago
  The SJ part I gave more context in a reply to: Spivak But to address the level of statements: I see SJ as one part of it, not the only or major part. > enthusiastic nerds Maybe it's the spaces I'm in but I'm not seeing that these days. I'm not hearing about personal projects people have made anymore. I'm not seeing a lot of enthusiastic young presenters at conferences etc. I'm just seeing younger people trying to stand out in the rat race and they aren't similar to when I was growing up. (I.e. lan parties, identifying as nerdy people and grouping together, etc). The last young person I recall being like that was a guy who did a presentation on using Joycons at Scaladays 2017? This was a kid that did have experience in the us first robotics group. But f me.. a high schooler pretty good at Scala.. that's awesome!
Arcanum-XIII 3y ago
I don't know, I would be curious to meet out of school dev from 20 years ago. Those I meet at my current job are... young. The lack of experience shows. I guess at the time I was not better. Different, because using C I could still destroy hardware. Hard to program a CGA card from Python :D Maybe with MicroPython on an arduino now?
- fipar 3y ago
  > I don't know, I would be curious to meet out of school dev from 20 years ago. Those I meet at my current job are... young. The lack of experience shows. I was a stil-at-school dev/sysadmin/multi-purpose nerd 23 years ago, if that works, nice to meet you! I had more experience than average on some tasks because I was lucky enough that, against my own will, when I was a little kid my parents bought a computer and not a videogame console. I still spent most of my time in front of it playing games, of course, but I also learned to program a little bit, and by the time we had our first PC at home, I also learned troubleshooting because every time I broke it I had to get it working before one of my parents needed it. Other than that, I think school prepared me well in terms of foundations (perhaps better than what some kids see today, at least I'm surprised how few people who went through formal CS/SWE university training recently know enough about the reasons the relational model was introduced, or how operating systems work). On the other hand, practical skills taught at school were not immediately useful to me. In particular, the software stack most used at school (Pascal, then Delphi, we did have some courses using C, Prolog, ASM, COBOL, and SQL, but most of my programming hours in school were spent in Pascal/Delphi) was not used in any of the jobs I've had, with the exception of COBOL), so I did a lot of learning on the job. I make a living working on databases now, and I sometimes like to tell the story of how I got into them: while working at a bank, the web banking application had an SQL Server backend database for its frontend (actual banking happened in another network, on a mainframe, I don't know which DB it used but it was some IBM thing and it was not DB/2). There was a settings table that was basically a key/value store controlling different config options of the app. One of them was a maintenance flag which, if set to whatever the value for true was, would show a "we're under maintenance" page when serving any user request. One day they asked me to go put the site on maintenance ("go put the site" because I had to go walk upstairs and enter the datacenter to do this back then), so I went to the console, opened the query editor, and entered something like: update settings set value = 1; Notice the lack of a where clause. When I saw the number of rows affected, I panicked, ran downstairs, explained what I had done, and a colleague (who was also young but I think at his second job after school, and way more experienced than me) calmed me down, walked up with me again, showed me where the backups where, and helped me restore one. I've been hooked on databases since that day!

by monksy 3y ago

NikolaNovak 3y ago

I may agree with your point but don't understand the social justice aspect at all; makes it feel like it's something just added in. I think both our perspective as a society and thereforo educational goals have changed over decades, laterally to any social justice aspect. If nothing else, there are order of magnitude more developers of all sorts today than 25 years ago, both as absolute numbers and as relative percentage of population. Basically the enthusiastic nerds who geek out about anything and everything and want to be hands on are still there, but also a LOT of people who just want a paycheck or just have more limited / specific interests. And they do ok. And education system will provide for them. But I just don't see e.g. for-profit bootcamps with their simplified curriculum as any kind of social justice project.

Spivak 3y ago
And when there is social justice or involved it's about getting more people involved in engineering. I can see where "hey, quit being gross to women" can be read as excluding the unsavory but that framing presumes that a world where that's an intrinsic immutable property of a person. I really don't buy the "some people just can't help being an asshole so having a rule against assholes is exclusionary." The most controversial CoC is by far the Contributor Covenant and rules are be kind and empathetic, show others respect, don't insult or demean others, don't be creepy or sexually harass others, don't doxx people, and behave like adults at work. Like the bar is so low.
- monksy 3y ago
  This is kind of where I was going with that, but I don't agree with the way its being described. I 100% agree with cracking down on individuals who are hostile based on identity, that was unreasonable and should continue to be excluded from projects. The history of the developer circles is that we've been a bit rough with the language. (mount, finger, touch, zip, etc are perfectly acceptable things for linux commmands.. theres even a joke about it). Unsavory jokes in mailing list/code bases, etc. However, we've come upon a bunch of people who take the aggressively negative view on the words and interactions used and have taken it upon themselves to rename things and force changes. (Master/main, master/slave, whitelist/blacklist, [theres a whole list of these "undesirable" language things] etc ). On top of that the CoC has implemented toxic positivity rules on projects. Implementers overlook the fact that they have been used as a weapon to be put in the project it's self. (There have been examples of racial, and gender based discrimination in the enforcement of the rules) All of this brings in people who do not contribute in a UX, DX, engineering, management sort of way. Even when these things are abused/enforced poorly it still has a significant silencing effect and distancing effect from those who would be a positive contributor but is reluctant to participate.
fipar 3y ago
> But I just don't see e.g. for-profit bootcamps with their simplified curriculum as any kind of social justice project. And you're right not seeing them that way! While I'm sure there are now good-faith bootcamps that have the goal of improving the career options of people who may otherwise never get those, the first time I saw the programming/sysadmin bootcamp concept implemented was around 2002, where a company was recruiting kids still in high school to train them for their openings. They did that because there were not enough skilled IT workers back then. Right, what that really meant is, they did that because there were not enough skilled IT workers they could afford back then. Someone did the math and estimated that for some openings, it would be more profitable to train first-time-job-seekers (in a lot of cases, not-yet-job-seekers) than to offer a better deal. They're still in business so I guess it worked!
monksy 3y ago
The SJ part I gave more context in a reply to: Spivak But to address the level of statements: I see SJ as one part of it, not the only or major part. > enthusiastic nerds Maybe it's the spaces I'm in but I'm not seeing that these days. I'm not hearing about personal projects people have made anymore. I'm not seeing a lot of enthusiastic young presenters at conferences etc. I'm just seeing younger people trying to stand out in the rat race and they aren't similar to when I was growing up. (I.e. lan parties, identifying as nerdy people and grouping together, etc). The last young person I recall being like that was a guy who did a presentation on using Joycons at Scaladays 2017? This was a kid that did have experience in the us first robotics group. But f me.. a high schooler pretty good at Scala.. that's awesome!

Arcanum-XIII 3y ago

I don't know, I would be curious to meet out of school dev from 20 years ago. Those I meet at my current job are... young. The lack of experience shows. I guess at the time I was not better. Different, because using C I could still destroy hardware. Hard to program a CGA card from Python :D Maybe with MicroPython on an arduino now?

fipar 3y ago
> I don't know, I would be curious to meet out of school dev from 20 years ago. Those I meet at my current job are... young. The lack of experience shows. I was a stil-at-school dev/sysadmin/multi-purpose nerd 23 years ago, if that works, nice to meet you! I had more experience than average on some tasks because I was lucky enough that, against my own will, when I was a little kid my parents bought a computer and not a videogame console. I still spent most of my time in front of it playing games, of course, but I also learned to program a little bit, and by the time we had our first PC at home, I also learned troubleshooting because every time I broke it I had to get it working before one of my parents needed it. Other than that, I think school prepared me well in terms of foundations (perhaps better than what some kids see today, at least I'm surprised how few people who went through formal CS/SWE university training recently know enough about the reasons the relational model was introduced, or how operating systems work). On the other hand, practical skills taught at school were not immediately useful to me. In particular, the software stack most used at school (Pascal, then Delphi, we did have some courses using C, Prolog, ASM, COBOL, and SQL, but most of my programming hours in school were spent in Pascal/Delphi) was not used in any of the jobs I've had, with the exception of COBOL), so I did a lot of learning on the job. I make a living working on databases now, and I sometimes like to tell the story of how I got into them: while working at a bank, the web banking application had an SQL Server backend database for its frontend (actual banking happened in another network, on a mainframe, I don't know which DB it used but it was some IBM thing and it was not DB/2). There was a settings table that was basically a key/value store controlling different config options of the app. One of them was a maintenance flag which, if set to whatever the value for true was, would show a "we're under maintenance" page when serving any user request. One day they asked me to go put the site on maintenance ("go put the site" because I had to go walk upstairs and enter the datacenter to do this back then), so I went to the console, opened the query editor, and entered something like: update settings set value = 1; Notice the lack of a where clause. When I saw the number of rows affected, I panicked, ran downstairs, explained what I had done, and a colleague (who was also young but I think at his second job after school, and way more experienced than me) calmed me down, walked up with me again, showed me where the backups where, and helped me restore one. I've been hooked on databases since that day!