And when you got things wrong back in the day, you came home from school, saw a very weirdly behaving computer, grumbled and reinstalled the OS. Nowadays it is a very different story with potentially very severe consequences.
And this is just about getting things wrong at home, in corporate environment it is 100x more annoying. In corporate, anyway you spend 80% of the development time figuring out how to do things and then 20% on actual work, nobody will have the time to teach themselves something out of their domain.
OSes are more secure. Isolation is better. Languages are better. Hardware is vastly cheaper and faster and more reliable. Everything is easier and faster and better.
In the corp world we have this absurd embarrassment of riches. There are like ten choices in every category. Half of it is free. It’s easier to set up and run than it was back then. Way easier. Hosting is silly cheap if you compare cost / performance.
People are just incurious and brainwashed with this weird sense of helplessness.
This security phobia is so overblown if you take some basic precautions and don’t run crap service software.
If I were hosting something controversial that might draw the ire of one of the insane political cults out there I’d run it through a free CDN maybe. That’s easy.
Isn't it anyway better for admin and security folks to have developers not get any ideas and stick to the bounds of the box?
I’m sure the list of things that you don’t know that some other developers do know is long.
No one is an “expert” at everything. I know AWS well (trust me on this) and I’ve used more services than you can imagine in a production capacity. I choose not to know the intricacies of Linux and front end development for instance. That’s either “someone else’s problem” or in the former case, I just give a zip file with my code in it and run it in Lambda or a Docker container and run it using a managed Kubernetes/ECS cluster, use Lambda (yes you can deploy a Docker container to Lambda) or Fargate (AWS manages instances in Docker cluster).
I think of AI as a kind of floor, a minimum required skill to be able to get a job as a professional anything. If you want to find paid work as a developer, you have to at least be better than AI at the job.
Optimistically AI will filter out all the helpless Devs who can't get anything done from the job market. "Code monkeys" won't be a thing.
Juniors will have to enter unpaid trainee programs I guess, but that might not be such a bad thing
We have way less time unfortunately to dig into each tech, business is pressing us like lemon on the other side to ship quickly.
I'm only in my 30s but I was thinking recently "when I'm retired I feel like I'm going to be telling stories about how back in my day we had this thing called the filesystem and you'd just browse it directly..."
What happened is that as an Xennial (young genX / old millennial) I know way more about computers than either generation to the side of me. This includes younger devs. I knew way more than them when I was their age. As a teen I was hacking C to get my 386 with Slackware Linux that I installed from floppies online by modding SLIRP to run on the sun3 I had dial up access to so I could pipe serial SLIP through it. Learned all about everything happening under the hood on a network.
I don’t feel self congratulatory about this. I feel depressed. If the kids were all smarter than me it would give me more hope for the future.
Modern devs are helpless in the face of things I taught myself to do in a day or two when I was fourteen, and they’re paralyzed with terror at the thought of running something.
It’s “hard” goes the cliche. Networking is “hard.” Sys admin is “hard.” Everything is “hard” so you’d better pay an expert to do it.
Where do we get these experts? Ever wonder that?
It’s just depressing. Why even bother.
It really makes me worry about who will keep all this stuff running or build anything new in the future if we are losing not only skills but spine and curiosity. Maybe AI.