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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Heh, the people who can dabble in Assembly for a living won't be able to (typically) setup a major Web PHP + Database and all that. Assembly optimization is a different skill than web development, or other stuff in the stack.

We all gotta pick our specialties. For me, low level high-performance stuff is more of hobby project level. I got a few cool things I've learned by myself but it isn't really what I do for a living.

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I dabbled in assembly, for a living, at a major software firm. I can still do it after brushing up a bit. And I have no trouble setting up a pg database with web frameworks and writing optimized code.

Web isn't some magical beast- its just rote programming.

Actual business logic is where the categorization starts.

It's all plumbing and bookkeeping.

If you want to be humbled, go to a conference on high energy physics.

sooo... where is SUSY .)

They've spent their lives studying high energy physics. It's going to seem impressive to a non-expert, but to them it's mostly plumbing and bookkeeping.

Not true at all; someone with the brains to understand how software works at the lowest level can figure out the higher levels easily, while the reverse apparently doesn't hold.

I've worked with enough backend developers who complain on how much tooling there is in frontend to know that this isn't true. And being a "fullstack developer" myself I've seen the stuff that sysadmins deal with and I know that thats a job I could never do. Knowing one part of the stack doesn't automatically qualify you for the other parts. Knowing assembly doesn't make you an expert in CSS, Webpack nor configuring IIS servers.

> Knowing assembly doesn't make you an expert in CSS, Webpack nor configuring IIS servers.

That isn't what the poster stated.

I friend of mine is a senior compiler engineer for a living (in a major player of the console gaming field). He said multiple time that he would not be able to keep up with the incredible mess that is web development nowadays (frontend in particular).

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