Yeah. I trust younger hackers — the smart ones - to invest time in what is useful and/or interesting to them. This stuff isn’t terribly useful (in comparison to

Yeah. I trust younger hackers — the smart ones - to invest time in what is useful and/or interesting to them. This stuff isn’t terribly useful (in comparison to all the other things out there to learn). Whether it’s interesting depends on your taste. I will add that older folks - myself included - have their idea of what’s interesting colored by a lot of nostalgia. Be suspicious of anything with the tone of “kids nowadays…”. (Isn’t there an xkcd comic about that?) The smart young hackers will do fine, as they always have. I see teenagers doing wonderful things with x86 assembly on hacker news on a regular basis. I love history; I trained as a historian. I just don’t think it’s always all that useful in our field, especially if it’s old technical trivia. (Social and economic history may be a different matter.) Sometimes it’s tangentially relevant. Mostly young engineers would be better off investing in learning timeless concepts, such as relational databases and SQL, networking, low level computer architecture, distributed systems theory, and so on. And they will (again, if they’re smart), because those things are useful and deeply interesting and will remain so thirty years from now. Get the foundations down and you will draw on that knowledge for your entire career.