4 ms·
A similar debate has happened in education where people seem to think that having ability to critically analyse texts is more important than knowledge. and to s
by physicsguy 1y ago
A similar debate has happened in education where people seem to think that having ability to critically analyse texts is more important than knowledge. and to some degree that’s true but personally I think that without building on some decent level of foundational level of knowledge and having a mental model of a subject, you can’t tackle thorny questions because you don’t have enough to draw upon as examples and counterpoints about how to proceed.
My current employer is currently going on a top down driven “one tech” mission and trying to rationalise the technology stacks across diverse product lines. Which is all fine but the judgement is a poor one because the biggest developer bottleneck that comes up in internal developer surveys is the corporate mandated IT things and a relatively hostile setup without even local admin rights, which make sense for general office workers and don’t make sense at all for software developers.
- Wololooo 1y agoReminds me of that concept that I saw pop up in HEP in recent years between "users" and "experts". This distinction in that case is so dumb I cannot wrap my head around it: You first encounter the code, are unfamiliar with it but very quickly you become expert in order to solve your problem and advance the thing forward. It does not matter which codebase you start on, what matters is that you understand what the actual stack does and what is involved in there because people are supposed to understand deeply what they are doing. But this comes from the "corporatisation" of every single entity, where random metrics are used in order to assess performance instead of asking the simple question of "does it work" or "does it need fixing" or "will this thing break". There is a clear disconnect between the manager type people that are removed from the work and the managers still doing things practically, which understand what the stressors are and where some work of deep understanding and extra contextualisation of the systems, is required, in order to not mess the whole thing up. This being said, this is coming from a very peculiar perspective and with a very specific tech stack which is and is not industry standard at many levels...
- mihaaly 1y agoEducation itself is supposed to teach us learning, not the mere facts/methods, not just the hard knowledge. Hard knowledge comes with it anyway as some sort of 'side product'. You cant learn on nothing, something will be used for it, that something forms the hard knowledge eventually. Typically broad set but shallow hard knowledge. Ironicly, this is what I feel chipping away in modern collaborative developments. The appreciation of learning capability. In the self interest of the organization (short term self interest, long term is too unpredictable, so does not exists in the practice) specific technical knowledge parcticed individuals are sought out for the purpose of easy replacement: not to be dependent on personnel, have it like a plug and play component. The ability to learn is not valuable while inside the organization. Should be practiced enough for years beforehand and applied intensely after joined. For the sake of claiming evolving organization the teaching may be outsourced in a very limited time to some sort of external enterprise making money on disseminating hard knowledge with made up examples or generic (artificial) applicability, instead of doing it in the actual context of the organization. Be part of the organization. Daily. Application of the new hard knowledge in the specific context of the organization will be casual by the random enthusiast. If they can break through of the company policy and established ways of management. Eventually the policies and practicies must be rigid as well, shouldn't they, so the personnel working in the management could be as easily replacable as the foot soldiers of code. For the sake of the organization. Call this approach the Organization Oriented Development.
- physicsguy 1y ago> You cant learn on nothing, something will be used for it, that something forms the hard knowledge eventually. Typically broad set but shallow hard knowledge. As a counterpoint though, the way things have gone in the U.K. is to go deep on niche topics without building up appreciation of the broad strokes. To give an example, there’s a GCSE History course for 14-16 year olds where the syllabus is effectively “medicine through time” and “the American West” without ever going near the British Empire, colonialism, the Tudor or Elizabethan periods, the reformation, the Industrial Revolution, Irish home rule and independence, etc. etc. any one of which gives much more insight into the formation of the state and cultural affairs as it stands today. To my mind it’s too narrow a focus at too young an age when teaching a subject that a lot of children take. It also means there are constantly “we don’t even teach that at school” debates.
- dsjoerg 1y ago> a relatively hostile setup without even local admin rights Taking a diversion into this -- how about local admin rights to a virtual VM / sandboxed machine? I imagine that would allow developers to be productive, while protecting everything that IT wants to protect. Once you do that, I imagine everyone will discover the issue isn't actually _local_ admin rights, but having admin rights to a machine that's on the internal network and can access internal company resources. Which might mean that IT has taken a strategy that once you're inside the local network, you have access to lots of valuable goodies. Which is a scary strategy.
- tekno45 1y agosounds like a containerized workspace. You can do this without a VM.