3 ms·

Any thoughts on what the next generation of software devs is going to look like without as much manual experience?

by djeastm 7mo ago

_doctor_love 7mo ago
Honestly, I think it will look pretty much like this one. There’s a lot of manual experience that the current generation doesn’t have. For example, I haven’t racked and cabled a server in over 15 years. That used to be a valuable skill. I also used to know how to operate Cisco switches and routers (on the original IOS!). I haven't thought about CIDR and the difference between a /24 and a /30 since the year 2008. A class IP addresses, how do those work? What subnet am I on? Is thing running on a different VLAN? Irrelevant to me these days. Some people still know it! But not as many as in the past. The late Dr. Richard Hamming observed that once a upon a time, "a good man knew how to implement square root in machine code." If you didn't know how to do that, you weren't legit. These days nobody would make such a claim. So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point. So things will remain the same the more they change on that front.
- calvinmorrison 7mo ago
  > So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point. And there'll be a split too... like there's a giant divide between those mechanics who used to work on carburetors and the new gen with microcontrollers, injection systems, etc. People who think cars are 'too complicated' aren't wrong, but for someone who grew up in the injected era, i vastly prefer debugging issues over the canbus rather than snaking my ass around a hot exhaust to check something.
  - SpecialistK 7mo ago
    And to take the analogy even further, I'm sure there will be a subset of people who develop really strong opinions about a particular toolchain or workflow. Like how we have people who specialize in 70s diesel trucks or 90-00s JDM sports cars, there'll likely be programmers who are SMEs at updating COBAL to Rust using Claude.
    - calvinmorrison 7mo ago
      yup. I do early bosch EFI and K-Jet... thats what I know!
- a1o 7mo ago
  I am pretty sure network knowledge and all those things are still necessary for people running data centers and really big computers and I imagine we will build a lot more of that. Also anyone making a homelab has to know these stuff.
eloisant 7mo ago
When C arrived, programmers wonder how software devs would look like when they won't have assembly experience. Then the same happened with languages that managed memory. And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls. And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.
- calvinmorrison 7mo ago
  And over and over time proves that, when you need it, ASM or C or generals system knowledge was handy. One example, I am not a "Windows" or "NT" guy, mostly working in various Unixes and Linux in my professional career. I had a client who had battered every resource trying to fix some horrible freeze/timeout in their application. So I rolled up my sleeves, first search " is there dtrace on windows", found some profiling tools, found the process was stuck in some dumb blocking call loop, resource was unavailable, and the rest was history. So yeah i mean - who cares how it works - but also if you have experience in how things _do_ work you can solve problems other people cannot.
  - eloisant 7mo ago
    Sure, "it's handy" and once every few years you encounter a bug where ASM or C knowledge is valuable. Yet most programmers nowadays can't write ASM or C and still manage to produce useful software.
- bGl2YW5j 7mo ago
  I reckon there's a limit to how long this abstraction can go on before not understanding underlying mechanisms will seriously hamstring you.
  - wild_egg 7mo ago
    I think we're a long ways from that. But with that said, those who learn the underlying mechanisms will always be able to solve more problems than the folks who don't. When you know the lower pieces, your mental model tells you when and where the higher level pieces are likely to break. Legit superpower.

Any thoughts on what the next generation of software devs is going to look like without as much manual experience?

by djeastm 7mo ago

Any thoughts on what the next generation of software devs is going to look like without as much manual experience?

Honestly, I think it will look pretty much like this one. There’s a lot of manual experience that the current generation doesn’t have. For example, I haven’t racked and cabled a server in over 15 years. That used to be a valuable skill. I also used to know how to operate Cisco switches and routers (on the original IOS!). I haven't thought about CIDR and the difference between a /24 and a /30 since the year 2008. A class IP addresses, how do those work? What subnet am I on? Is thing running on a different VLAN? Irrelevant to me these days. Some people still know it! But not as many as in the past. The late Dr. Richard Hamming observed that once a upon a time, "a good man knew how to implement square root in machine code." If you didn't know how to do that, you weren't legit. These days nobody would make such a claim. So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point. So things will remain the same the more they change on that front.

calvinmorrison 7mo ago
> So some skills fade and others rise. And also, software has moved in predictable cycles for many decades at this point. We are still a very young field but we do have some history at this point. And there'll be a split too... like there's a giant divide between those mechanics who used to work on carburetors and the new gen with microcontrollers, injection systems, etc. People who think cars are 'too complicated' aren't wrong, but for someone who grew up in the injected era, i vastly prefer debugging issues over the canbus rather than snaking my ass around a hot exhaust to check something.
- SpecialistK 7mo ago
  And to take the analogy even further, I'm sure there will be a subset of people who develop really strong opinions about a particular toolchain or workflow. Like how we have people who specialize in 70s diesel trucks or 90-00s JDM sports cars, there'll likely be programmers who are SMEs at updating COBAL to Rust using Claude.
  - calvinmorrison 7mo ago
    yup. I do early bosch EFI and K-Jet... thats what I know!
a1o 7mo ago
I am pretty sure network knowledge and all those things are still necessary for people running data centers and really big computers and I imagine we will build a lot more of that. Also anyone making a homelab has to know these stuff.

eloisant 7mo ago

When C arrived, programmers wonder how software devs would look like when they won't have assembly experience. Then the same happened with languages that managed memory. And with IDE that could refactor your code in a click and autocomplete API calls. And with Stack Overflow where people copy/pasted code they didn't understand.

calvinmorrison 7mo ago
And over and over time proves that, when you need it, ASM or C or generals system knowledge was handy. One example, I am not a "Windows" or "NT" guy, mostly working in various Unixes and Linux in my professional career. I had a client who had battered every resource trying to fix some horrible freeze/timeout in their application. So I rolled up my sleeves, first search " is there dtrace on windows", found some profiling tools, found the process was stuck in some dumb blocking call loop, resource was unavailable, and the rest was history. So yeah i mean - who cares how it works - but also if you have experience in how things _do_ work you can solve problems other people cannot.
- eloisant 7mo ago
  Sure, "it's handy" and once every few years you encounter a bug where ASM or C knowledge is valuable. Yet most programmers nowadays can't write ASM or C and still manage to produce useful software.
bGl2YW5j 7mo ago
I reckon there's a limit to how long this abstraction can go on before not understanding underlying mechanisms will seriously hamstring you.
- wild_egg 7mo ago
  I think we're a long ways from that. But with that said, those who learn the underlying mechanisms will always be able to solve more problems than the folks who don't. When you know the lower pieces, your mental model tells you when and where the higher level pieces are likely to break. Legit superpower.