• 7 Posts
  • 409 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Yeah I don’t think we actually disagree much here. :)

    I think my angle is just slightly different? I see that ease of access (eg cloud) make it possible for a lot more uncurious and clock-out people to enter the field and pass as competent. To be honest, even the modest introduction of auto-formatting editors are easy to see as good and useful, but I also feel that they allowed shoddy work to look passable at first glance. AI will make this a lot worse.

    But as for the actual people who have it in them to be competent, people that were always there and still are, cloud is not going to make them worse.







  • Yeah I can see that.

    However, you are now arguing a different point than I am getting from your original post. Maybe my fault in interpretation ofc, but the main difference (in my view) is:

    You say “incompetent” and “less skilled” as general statements on senior engineers. Those statements are false.

    You also say “missing the skills you are looking for” which is obviously true.

    And the implication that before cloud, people developed the specific skills you need more naturally - because they had to. This makes sense and I believe it.



  • That is technically correct in a way, but I’ll argue very wrong in a meaningful way.

    Cloud services are meant to let you focus less on the plumbing, so naturally many skills in that will not be developed, and skills adjacent to it will be less developed.

    Buttttt you must assume effort remains constant!

    So you get to focus more on other things now. E.g. functional programming, product thinking, rapid prototyping, API stuff, breadth of languages, etc. I bet the seniors you are missing X and Y in have bigger Zs and also some Qs that you may not be used to consider, or have the experience to spot and evaluate.


  • Someone made a modified version of Quake back in the day, that rendered to stereoscopic 3D in a white noise pattern.

    It was such a mindfuck to play!

    You get 3D depth but no colors or shades or contrast. It’s just shapes moving. So doors that were flush with the wall were impossible to see, but enemies in dark rooms were fully visible because there is no light or dark.

    I like to imagine I got to experience what a bat sees with echolocation.