> Some programmers, especially the kind to hang around on HN, would rather not work with people who don't understand the entire system they use. There's a reas

> Some programmers, especially the kind to hang around on HN, would rather not work with people who don't understand the entire system they use. There's a reason for this. I've worked with people that don't understand how things work and don't really want to learn. These people cause enormous amounts of damage in any system that contains architecture beyond php in the webroot and algorithms beyond brute force. You let one of those people on a large production database, it's game over. They will run queries that miss all the indexes. They will remove constraints because they don't understand why they exist. They will use flat files in place of a database because the database is scary and then not understand why stuff goes missing in the multi-server production environment. These people are a liability in a project beyond small scale. They are the same people whose wordpress blogs are repeatedly hacked.