3 ms·

The affinity for bleeding edge, and working higher up the stack, is not a genz specific trait, it's every younger developer since the beginning of developers. E

The affinity for bleeding edge, and working higher up the stack, is not a genz specific trait, it's every younger developer since the beginning of developers. Every next generation goes through this and rediscovers all the concepts the previous generation did.

xxs 3y ago
Mostly true but not fully. In the earlier days late 70s, mid 80s (even early 90s) working with assembly down was not uncommon, and often necessary. There wasn't such a clear distinction between the layers.
- Rinzler89 3y ago
  Because that's as high as SW abstraction would go back then, meaning it was relatively common (and a lot of times required) to be a true "full-stack" developer for almost any dev job. Nowadays software is orders of magnitude more complex with layers and layers of abstraction and containerization to make app development and deployment as quick, easy, reliable and secure as possible, to expedite time to market and profit, that it's become unrealistic and unprofitable to expect your devs to be proficient across the whole stack from cloud, web, to kernel and hardware. The vast majority of average dev jobs nowadays are a lot more specialized and containerized, and companies mostly care about your ability to grind through the stack of CRUD Jira tickets to solve the business problems the company needs to make money, not dig through the Linux codebase to find some bug/race condition in the kernel/libraries. Outside of embedded/kernel dev and big-tech, where low level bug fixes and optimizations can translate to real $ at scale, jobs that need low level knowledge or that reward it, are very niche.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Wasn't BASIC most popular language though? Which really was as high as it went.
  - cyco130 3y ago
    But any non-trivial BASIC program had to include a few machine language subroutines here and there for speed. And people knew how to “hand-assemble” them without even an assembler.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Popular as a "my first language" kind of thing .. not especially popular for making useful functional technical software. In the late 70s and 80s Assembler, Pascal, C, Fortran, Modula-2, Forth, Lisp were all used to create CAD, GIS, robot control, symbolic math, abstract algebra, etc. type programs.
- oldsecondhand 3y ago
  Yeah, but back then you had to pay $600+ for a C compiler.
- raxxorraxor 3y ago
  I think that also had to do with communication being much harder and internet ressources not being widely available yet since fewer had access to computer systems. Otherwise there probably would have been some popular synthwave script language that is optimized for vinyl storages.
  - xxs 3y ago
    It has mostly to do with the extremely tight requirements. For instance nowadays the hashmap is the single most popular datastructure but it's rather memory intense compared to plain arrays (even when implemented via a backing array). Having enough memory changed the development process a lot. Apple II had 48KB for everything (incl. video buffer). Many things became a lot easier with the resource abundance like having flat memory model with the 32bit systems in a stark contrast via the segment switch on 8086.
plugin-baby 3y ago
Thanks for writing this - I guessed from the headline these would be in the conclusions, and agree it’s a general trait of less experienced developers.
- neuronic 3y ago
  It's the same with life in general... An old geezer can tell you all his wisdom when you're 22 and you will listen and understand, but it will still take a long time to really "get it". It's weird like that. When I was a young developer all the "old farts" annoyed me with their seemingly static and stagnant attitudes. Some devs really were the epitome of "old man yelling at cloud" (pun intended). Onboarding fresh devs by yelling at them to never use the mouse and showing off your "development skills" by demonstrating your use of vim to work on a modern Spring Boot project is not helpful, it's just narcissist... But as I grew older and more experienced, I started to really internalize why resistance to change was not always ultimately bad. Repercussions actually hit me for some bad decisions about new software, updates and the hot trends on the market and I was able to experience the resulting pain directly which was the "do not touch the hot plate but then I touched the hot plate" moment for me. I looked directly into the trap after it was opened. Also, older generations will always yell at younger generations for seemingly making everything worse. It's been like this since the advent of humanity and if that were objectively true then everything went straight downhill since 12,000 BC. I doubt it! As a middle aged dude my goal is now to retain enough flexibility while valuing stability. There is a balance to be had and while I have grown to understand some older devs not ever moving away from certain antics it's important to not be unreasonable about it.
  - ghomem 3y ago
    OMG, a reasonable person on the Internet. Nice to meet you neuronic :-)

xxs 3y ago

Mostly true but not fully. In the earlier days late 70s, mid 80s (even early 90s) working with assembly down was not uncommon, and often necessary. There wasn't such a clear distinction between the layers.

Rinzler89 3y ago
Because that's as high as SW abstraction would go back then, meaning it was relatively common (and a lot of times required) to be a true "full-stack" developer for almost any dev job. Nowadays software is orders of magnitude more complex with layers and layers of abstraction and containerization to make app development and deployment as quick, easy, reliable and secure as possible, to expedite time to market and profit, that it's become unrealistic and unprofitable to expect your devs to be proficient across the whole stack from cloud, web, to kernel and hardware. The vast majority of average dev jobs nowadays are a lot more specialized and containerized, and companies mostly care about your ability to grind through the stack of CRUD Jira tickets to solve the business problems the company needs to make money, not dig through the Linux codebase to find some bug/race condition in the kernel/libraries. Outside of embedded/kernel dev and big-tech, where low level bug fixes and optimizations can translate to real $ at scale, jobs that need low level knowledge or that reward it, are very niche.
Ekaros 3y ago
Wasn't BASIC most popular language though? Which really was as high as it went.
- cyco130 3y ago
  But any non-trivial BASIC program had to include a few machine language subroutines here and there for speed. And people knew how to “hand-assemble” them without even an assembler.
- defrost 3y ago
  Popular as a "my first language" kind of thing .. not especially popular for making useful functional technical software. In the late 70s and 80s Assembler, Pascal, C, Fortran, Modula-2, Forth, Lisp were all used to create CAD, GIS, robot control, symbolic math, abstract algebra, etc. type programs.
oldsecondhand 3y ago
Yeah, but back then you had to pay $600+ for a C compiler.
raxxorraxor 3y ago
I think that also had to do with communication being much harder and internet ressources not being widely available yet since fewer had access to computer systems. Otherwise there probably would have been some popular synthwave script language that is optimized for vinyl storages.
- xxs 3y ago
  It has mostly to do with the extremely tight requirements. For instance nowadays the hashmap is the single most popular datastructure but it's rather memory intense compared to plain arrays (even when implemented via a backing array). Having enough memory changed the development process a lot. Apple II had 48KB for everything (incl. video buffer). Many things became a lot easier with the resource abundance like having flat memory model with the 32bit systems in a stark contrast via the segment switch on 8086.

plugin-baby 3y ago

Thanks for writing this - I guessed from the headline these would be in the conclusions, and agree it’s a general trait of less experienced developers.

neuronic 3y ago
It's the same with life in general... An old geezer can tell you all his wisdom when you're 22 and you will listen and understand, but it will still take a long time to really "get it". It's weird like that. When I was a young developer all the "old farts" annoyed me with their seemingly static and stagnant attitudes. Some devs really were the epitome of "old man yelling at cloud" (pun intended). Onboarding fresh devs by yelling at them to never use the mouse and showing off your "development skills" by demonstrating your use of vim to work on a modern Spring Boot project is not helpful, it's just narcissist... But as I grew older and more experienced, I started to really internalize why resistance to change was not always ultimately bad. Repercussions actually hit me for some bad decisions about new software, updates and the hot trends on the market and I was able to experience the resulting pain directly which was the "do not touch the hot plate but then I touched the hot plate" moment for me. I looked directly into the trap after it was opened. Also, older generations will always yell at younger generations for seemingly making everything worse. It's been like this since the advent of humanity and if that were objectively true then everything went straight downhill since 12,000 BC. I doubt it! As a middle aged dude my goal is now to retain enough flexibility while valuing stability. There is a balance to be had and while I have grown to understand some older devs not ever moving away from certain antics it's important to not be unreasonable about it.
- ghomem 3y ago
  OMG, a reasonable person on the Internet. Nice to meet you neuronic :-)