5 ms·

This is like telling a student learning an instrument never to practice scales or études because there are other skills necessary for playing in an orchestra. T

by tehnub 3y ago

This is like telling a student learning an instrument never to practice scales or études because there are other skills necessary for playing in an orchestra. Those other skills are important, but you have to develop your chops at some point, and being a better a programmer will certainly help with basically all those skills you listed anyway.

p-e-w 3y ago
> This is like telling a student learning an instrument never to practice scales or études No, it's like recognizing that an orchestra conductor doesn't need to play every instrument (or even any instrument!) in order to make music. Or alternatively, that a violin player doesn't need to understand the physics of acoustic dispersion in order to be the best in the world at playing the violin.
- tock 3y ago
  Yes a software engineer understanding data structures and runtime complexity is akin to a violin player understanding the physics of acoustic dispersion.
  - p-e-w 3y ago
    Is it not? I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
    - Arch-TK 3y ago
      I would say, given how absurd the statement is, sarcastic.
    - khazhoux 3y ago
      The analogy would be a software engineer having to understand resistors and capacitors and transistors. Also, I don’t think you’ll find a single conductor on this planet who is not skilled in at least one instrument. Terrible analogy.
  - tonyarkles 3y ago
    So here’s the thing… I did an EE/CS dual degree. I’m going to focus on the EE side of it for a bit. We learn the high level practical behaviour of devices: resistors, capacitors, BJT and MOSFET transistors, opamps, logic gates, etc in 2nd year. What we learn there is enough to be an effective practical circuit designer. We also dive deep into how that stuff works under the hood. One course I remember fondly started the first lecture with “This course is called semiconductor physics. To understand semiconductor physics you need to understand solid state physics. To understand solid state physics, you need to understand quantum mechanics. We have a lot of material to cover so let’s get started.” A similar course was Electric and Magnetic Fields, where we spent a ton of time applying vector calculus to situations of varying complexity to get a better understanding of how the things we learned in 2nd year actually work and some of the limitations that you wouldn’t pick up on from the practical (generally first-order) models. You don’t get to graduate with an EE degree without learning this stuff. And in my mind, that stuff is like a mixture of data structures, runtime complexity, assembler, and cache coherency. Fundamental understanding that while you won’t use directly in your day-to-day work but underpins everything you do.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      The job market for EEs...still isn't as hot as for CS people. However, you could also focus on DSPs in EE and use it to get a heads up on machine learning. This assumes you are ready to specialize, however. Anyways, none of it should go to waste.
      - tonyarkles 3y ago
        I’m quite a ways into my career and being able to dance up and down the “full stack” from designing circuit boards, to writing low level firmware, to backends in Python/Elixir/Java/etc, to frontends in JS/ObjC/Kotlin/Swift/Dart has been a lot of fun. I did the dual EE/CS degree because the “computer engineering” program wasn’t introduced until a few years after I graduated. That’s all kind of missing the point though. This whole thread has been a discussion about whether Software Engineers need to get down into the nitty gritty low-level stuff. My take is absolutely yes. You might not use it directly every day, but you’ll make consistently better design decisions if you really feel it in your bones. Over on the electrical engineering side of the world you don’t get to graduate without that background understanding. In the software engineering world some people seem to take pride in their ignorance of the foundations they’re building in; in my 20-ish years of experience, those people often end up building things that work poorly and they don’t have the background understanding needed to fix it.
- MikeTheGreat 3y ago
  > an orchestra conductor doesn't need to play [...] any instrument! in order to make music Ok, this is clearly a side-topic AND at the risk of being pedantic: Is this actually true? Like, I can see how theoretically one could learn to sight-read music well enough to be able to direct an orchestra of individual musicians, then do enough ear-training to identify enough notes to keep tabs on everyone (especially if you're conducting a high school or (god help you :) ) middle school orchestra), etc, etc. But does anyone actually do that? Has anyone ever done that? "I'm going to learn how to conduct an orchestra without learning any instruments" kinda feels like "I'm going to become a software engineer using an LLM instead of learning any foundations)" (To be clear - the LLM path might be viable in the future, possibly the near future, but at least today it's not quite there. My apologies in advance if my analogy doesn't work in the future :) )
  - ofcourseyoudo 3y ago
    No, it's not true, there are no prominent conductors that cannot play an instrument (or sing at a high level). A conductor should have a deep understanding of music, theory, and rehearsal pedagogy. At least in current western schools of music I don't see how you would explore these topics outside of the study of an instrument. Maybe there is some esoteric path to this; I just can't imagine how you go to Berklee and begin to explore the nuances of a composition without ever engaging with it as an instrumentalist. On top of that, the conductor isn't just engaged at performances, they're also responsible for leading rehearsals. If they've never deliberate practiced the learning of music from an instrumentalist perspective I think they would be very hard-pressed to structure strategies for getting the larger group to a high level.
  - darreninthenet 3y ago
    I guess it depends what you mean by "play an instrument" - almost all proficient conductors have proficiency in at least one orchestral instrument. There is at least one (so I'm speculating he's not the only one, but it is likely to be rare) proficient conductor (Leopold Stokowski) who had no real proficiency with any instrument but he did have some very rudimentary piano training... and then pretty much taught himself conducting. Whether that rudimentary piano ability counts as "play an instrument"
- hurril 3y ago
  This is correct, a conductor does not need this. But you are not the conductor in this analogy, you are a player of one or more instruments.
- lodovic 3y ago
  I'd rather put the violin player with understanding of acoustic dispersion in the same bracket as a software engineer who understands the effects of magnetic interference on a memory controller.
- wiseowise 3y ago
  Are you an orchestra conductor or a professional violin player?
- kragen 3y ago
  > it's like recognizing that an orchestra conductor doesn't need to play (...) any instrument i heard this before and it seemed dubious to me on investigating, it turned out that there were literally zero famous orchestra conductors who don't know how to play any instruments. most of them know how to play numerous instruments and do so in their spare time, though there were one or two who had stopped. from my experience with musicians i think it's likely that they could play any conventional orchestra instrument after a short exploration period, even if they don't have documented histories of playing it i suspect that this is true of non-famous orchestra conductors as well, but i could only find public information about the famous ones of course that doesn't prove anything about programming, which is not the same skill as playing a musical instrument or conducting an orchestra, but it does show that you're constructing your arguments without much concern for veracity the fact that in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769008 you claimed that web search engines are not built by people who work on string matching or distributed database transaction consistency further calls your credibility into question
hilux 3y ago
Nowadays (and increasingly, going forward) it's possible to be a very productive programmer without knowing much low-level stuff. This may seem unfair to those who spent years wrestling assembly and then C pointers but that's just today's reality. It's not possible to be a "productive" musician on a traditional instrument (i.e. excluding iPads) without knowing how to play scales, chords, etc.
- snovv_crash 3y ago
  This is also the reason a computer with 4GB of RAM can't run Gmail and Spotify at the same time.
  - ttoinou 3y ago
    Google and Spotify are supposed to get among the best / most productive developers though
    - deterministic 3y ago
      According to what evidence? I have worked with developers who later ended up working for Google and they were OK but not great. They didn’t stand out in any way.
      - ttoinou 3y ago
        yeah I kinda don't even believe what I'm writing, hence why I'm saying "supposed"
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    > This is also the reason a computer with 4GB of RAM can't run Gmail and Spotify at the same time. That’s demands for faster delivery of software and ridiculous demands on user experience. Does looking down on higher level devs make you feel superior or something like that?
    - 3y ago

by tehnub 3y ago

p-e-w 3y ago

> This is like telling a student learning an instrument never to practice scales or études No, it's like recognizing that an orchestra conductor doesn't need to play every instrument (or even any instrument!) in order to make music. Or alternatively, that a violin player doesn't need to understand the physics of acoustic dispersion in order to be the best in the world at playing the violin.

tock 3y ago
Yes a software engineer understanding data structures and runtime complexity is akin to a violin player understanding the physics of acoustic dispersion.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  Is it not? I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
  - Arch-TK 3y ago
    I would say, given how absurd the statement is, sarcastic.
  - khazhoux 3y ago
    The analogy would be a software engineer having to understand resistors and capacitors and transistors. Also, I don’t think you’ll find a single conductor on this planet who is not skilled in at least one instrument. Terrible analogy.
- tonyarkles 3y ago
  So here’s the thing… I did an EE/CS dual degree. I’m going to focus on the EE side of it for a bit. We learn the high level practical behaviour of devices: resistors, capacitors, BJT and MOSFET transistors, opamps, logic gates, etc in 2nd year. What we learn there is enough to be an effective practical circuit designer. We also dive deep into how that stuff works under the hood. One course I remember fondly started the first lecture with “This course is called semiconductor physics. To understand semiconductor physics you need to understand solid state physics. To understand solid state physics, you need to understand quantum mechanics. We have a lot of material to cover so let’s get started.” A similar course was Electric and Magnetic Fields, where we spent a ton of time applying vector calculus to situations of varying complexity to get a better understanding of how the things we learned in 2nd year actually work and some of the limitations that you wouldn’t pick up on from the practical (generally first-order) models. You don’t get to graduate with an EE degree without learning this stuff. And in my mind, that stuff is like a mixture of data structures, runtime complexity, assembler, and cache coherency. Fundamental understanding that while you won’t use directly in your day-to-day work but underpins everything you do.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    The job market for EEs...still isn't as hot as for CS people. However, you could also focus on DSPs in EE and use it to get a heads up on machine learning. This assumes you are ready to specialize, however. Anyways, none of it should go to waste.
    - tonyarkles 3y ago
      I’m quite a ways into my career and being able to dance up and down the “full stack” from designing circuit boards, to writing low level firmware, to backends in Python/Elixir/Java/etc, to frontends in JS/ObjC/Kotlin/Swift/Dart has been a lot of fun. I did the dual EE/CS degree because the “computer engineering” program wasn’t introduced until a few years after I graduated. That’s all kind of missing the point though. This whole thread has been a discussion about whether Software Engineers need to get down into the nitty gritty low-level stuff. My take is absolutely yes. You might not use it directly every day, but you’ll make consistently better design decisions if you really feel it in your bones. Over on the electrical engineering side of the world you don’t get to graduate without that background understanding. In the software engineering world some people seem to take pride in their ignorance of the foundations they’re building in; in my 20-ish years of experience, those people often end up building things that work poorly and they don’t have the background understanding needed to fix it.
MikeTheGreat 3y ago
> an orchestra conductor doesn't need to play [...] any instrument! in order to make music Ok, this is clearly a side-topic AND at the risk of being pedantic: Is this actually true? Like, I can see how theoretically one could learn to sight-read music well enough to be able to direct an orchestra of individual musicians, then do enough ear-training to identify enough notes to keep tabs on everyone (especially if you're conducting a high school or (god help you :) ) middle school orchestra), etc, etc. But does anyone actually do that? Has anyone ever done that? "I'm going to learn how to conduct an orchestra without learning any instruments" kinda feels like "I'm going to become a software engineer using an LLM instead of learning any foundations)" (To be clear - the LLM path might be viable in the future, possibly the near future, but at least today it's not quite there. My apologies in advance if my analogy doesn't work in the future :) )
- ofcourseyoudo 3y ago
  No, it's not true, there are no prominent conductors that cannot play an instrument (or sing at a high level). A conductor should have a deep understanding of music, theory, and rehearsal pedagogy. At least in current western schools of music I don't see how you would explore these topics outside of the study of an instrument. Maybe there is some esoteric path to this; I just can't imagine how you go to Berklee and begin to explore the nuances of a composition without ever engaging with it as an instrumentalist. On top of that, the conductor isn't just engaged at performances, they're also responsible for leading rehearsals. If they've never deliberate practiced the learning of music from an instrumentalist perspective I think they would be very hard-pressed to structure strategies for getting the larger group to a high level.
- darreninthenet 3y ago
  I guess it depends what you mean by "play an instrument" - almost all proficient conductors have proficiency in at least one orchestral instrument. There is at least one (so I'm speculating he's not the only one, but it is likely to be rare) proficient conductor (Leopold Stokowski) who had no real proficiency with any instrument but he did have some very rudimentary piano training... and then pretty much taught himself conducting. Whether that rudimentary piano ability counts as "play an instrument"
hurril 3y ago
This is correct, a conductor does not need this. But you are not the conductor in this analogy, you are a player of one or more instruments.
lodovic 3y ago
I'd rather put the violin player with understanding of acoustic dispersion in the same bracket as a software engineer who understands the effects of magnetic interference on a memory controller.
wiseowise 3y ago
Are you an orchestra conductor or a professional violin player?
kragen 3y ago
> it's like recognizing that an orchestra conductor doesn't need to play (...) any instrument i heard this before and it seemed dubious to me on investigating, it turned out that there were literally zero famous orchestra conductors who don't know how to play any instruments. most of them know how to play numerous instruments and do so in their spare time, though there were one or two who had stopped. from my experience with musicians i think it's likely that they could play any conventional orchestra instrument after a short exploration period, even if they don't have documented histories of playing it i suspect that this is true of non-famous orchestra conductors as well, but i could only find public information about the famous ones of course that doesn't prove anything about programming, which is not the same skill as playing a musical instrument or conducting an orchestra, but it does show that you're constructing your arguments without much concern for veracity the fact that in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38769008 you claimed that web search engines are not built by people who work on string matching or distributed database transaction consistency further calls your credibility into question

hilux 3y ago

Nowadays (and increasingly, going forward) it's possible to be a very productive programmer without knowing much low-level stuff. This may seem unfair to those who spent years wrestling assembly and then C pointers but that's just today's reality. It's not possible to be a "productive" musician on a traditional instrument (i.e. excluding iPads) without knowing how to play scales, chords, etc.

snovv_crash 3y ago
This is also the reason a computer with 4GB of RAM can't run Gmail and Spotify at the same time.
- ttoinou 3y ago
  Google and Spotify are supposed to get among the best / most productive developers though
  - deterministic 3y ago
    According to what evidence? I have worked with developers who later ended up working for Google and they were OK but not great. They didn’t stand out in any way.
    - ttoinou 3y ago
      yeah I kinda don't even believe what I'm writing, hence why I'm saying "supposed"
- wiseowise 3y ago
  > This is also the reason a computer with 4GB of RAM can't run Gmail and Spotify at the same time. That’s demands for faster delivery of software and ridiculous demands on user experience. Does looking down on higher level devs make you feel superior or something like that?
  - 3y ago