I can’t tell you the number of devs I’ve met that know jack shit about infrastructure and networking. Even simple questions like understanding their subnet or how a load balancer works.
I’ve been developing for decades so obviously I know that the subnet is where the Lord Marshall went and returned with powers beyond mortal comprehension.
You keep what you kill.
That's because they're back end devs. There is one way to do things, you learn the one way to do the thing, you do it that way, you're done.
The fun is in front end, there is 15 different ways of doing things, but you don't like any of them, so you develop a 16th way, eventually you get bored of the 16th way so come up with a 17th way. Eventually you get sick of all of this and go back to SSGs as God intended.
There’s a perfect way to do anything in frontend but only on the dev’s one computer. Everyone else will get garbage.
The one correct way to do back-end is obviously to have lots of microservices all talking to a shared database so they can take each other down and also they’re never updated because you’d need about 10x the devs you have to maintain all of them. I know this because that’s everywhere I’ve worked for over a decade.
You are not a real dev unless you can build your own CPU atom by atom
..well I don't have to know that because AWS is like, serverless, dude.
It's in the cloud
It’s a series of clouds.
Not just your industry. Every industry is like this.
Look I'm mostly in infrastructure and I don't know much beyond core principles behind software development, I can't really cast stones. But yeah they can be surprisingly ignorant sometimes.
Those are the ones who can maintain eye contact, aren’t they?
Sure. I consider myself a fairly good dev. Not an amazing genius or anything but pretty competent in my area. Wouldn't have a clue how a load balancer works beyond what's in the name, I guess it balances loads. I can assume it does this by distributing requests to different servers because that just makes sense, but I don't even really know that. Networking might as well be black magic as far as I'm concerned. I'm grateful we have a decent infra team who knows about all that. So I'm not surprised.
Hiw did you get that? Put it back ontop of big ben!
The black box people entrust their secrets to? (TPM, encrypting disks, cloud, AI)
No, this, Jen, is the internet.
Ooh, that one!
Btw, i'm not Jen.
To anyone feeling like this, nobody understands fully how computers work. You find your niche and you do your bit.
I don't think there's anyone alive who understands it all.
nobody understands fully how computers work
I mean, tap the breaks a little bit, here. "Fully" is doing a lot of lifting.
I will concede most people don't understand the concept of transistors, much less the electrical engineering that turns a series of transistors into a CPU. And I'll spot you that - for any given computer - it would take multiple extended papers to explain every piece of functionality.
But - broadly speaking - if you a computer engineer, you understand how a computer is engineered. If you're working in IT, you have enough of a functional knowledge that you can tell what each general component does.
And if you're a full stack developer (rather than someone who just does business logic on the backend), you should have a generalized understanding of client versus server versus database and how these pieces fit together. You should also probably have some grasp of the network stack, if for no other reason than you occasionally need to troubleshoot it.
I think that people just can't make the software --> hardware jump. Like they understand what machine code is, and what CPU registers are, but can't understand how a CPU with baked in hardware instructions (i.e. a seemingly fully deterministic piece of hardware) can drive transistors to high or low voltages in a random way.
The key is to see all software as hardware, and to envision the CPU as many many light bulb switches, with some wired into each other, creating flip/flopping latches.
Once you get the idea of a flipflop, you can maybe then start to understand how all you really want from the switches is to output a switch configuration that encodes a value in some representation. The switches are all initialized in some state, but then drive a known flipflop path towards a desired value, and this happens millions of time a second, often in parallel with isolated switches, or with switches that are virtually segmented from each other, or switches that can chaotically interact with each other
How the internet works would be more so an IT thing than a backend developer thing at least on a high level. Setting up a database doesn't mean one knows networking well in the same way they probably don't know cpu logic gate design well.
You don't need to know all the details, but I think you should understand the basic network concepts way before starting your first job as a developer
At least TCP/IP, DNS, and similar things, yeah. Maybe not so much the intricate details of the wifi6 or Bluetooth protocols.
Arguably an engineering (hardware) or systems programming issue, too. How many IT people (even the highly competent ones) could design a router, wifi chip etc.? Or know in detail what's going on in an internet exchange point?
True and how many of those guys are well versed in fiber optics at IXPs. Maybe with like 20 dudes you could get an extremely in-depth snapshot of how the internet works from transistors to transformers and everything in-between.
Some developers that know both networking and developing will make those chips, the avarage developer will know about TCP/IP, DNS and those basics, at max
Imagine a series of tubes. Imagine they are connected in a manner such that it spells "study computer networking: a top-down approach."
The worst part is when you do finally understand the protocols and standards, you still have to follow different procedures depending on where you work.
You just launch Wireshark and watch packets going back and forth, and you understand it in like 10 minutes.
$130k after 2 years? 2 years after I started I was making like... $60k? That's not even counting the 4.5 years I spent starting a startup and making nearly nothing.
That said, I don't live in Silicon Valley or anything. Pretty low cost-of-living here. Probably a big part of the discrepancy. I didn't reach $130k until like 20 years of experience in the industry.
The Internet is a series of tubes
The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material
Came looking for this. Was not disappointed.
I see we learned nothing from the "just learn code" blowback and are trying to make the industry even more barren.
I know this is a joke, but most people don't realize the diversity of the internet specializations where if you're not in that specialization, you can't do it
ngl this got me wondering what kinda jobs are fairly easy to enter (not too difficult or not too few availability), have good job prospects (salary, labour terms and conditions)... like how do i even learn how to do front/backend, etc., if i am bad at math?
You don’t need math at all.
How to learn it? Think of a project you would like to tackle, and just start on your pc. Ask ChatGPT for a starting point
Bugger off, i'm not going to use aislop. blocked
Well thanks to you too for that constructive comment…
They got a point, the amount of bs I have to deal with because of people using slop is unbearable.
Please don't be a part of encouraging this kind of LLM applications
I said to use it as a starting point, not to solve all issues.
then follow youtube tutorials
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