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Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

this is the kind of thing you say during an interview, get rejected and then wonder if you just experienced ageism instead of any introspection about your own rant

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A charitable interpretation of the article is of course a balance is what actually matters. It is good, on some level, that abstractions free up developers or whoever to focus on the business instead of just tiny little details. Their example, however, proves you need escape hatches sometimes, and you need to have a mind for the details at times, and right now the balance is far in the "abstract everything" direction which has its own issues.

I think you might've missed the point a little bit. It doesn't read to me like "abstractions bad", it's saying if you're going to use an abstraction you should learn how it works (and that we've built so many that nobody bothers to learn them, which is true).

I know Javascript, React and Express like the back of my hand. I can solve absolutely any problem I've run into with that stack, I can't even remember the last time I was stuck on something. But I've ended up on like 5 projects in a row with stuff like Typescript, NextJS and NestJS because they are red hot on the fad scale right now. Despite that, I still don't feel like I know much about them because I set that bar reasonably high, and out of all the people forcing me to use tech I don't want to use, none of them even come close to reaching that bar.

I'm sick of asking fairly basic questions about frameworks and libraries I'm not as familiar with, and getting back "oh, I dunno, have you tried...?" 15 times in a row before solving the problem. That's not an efficient way to work, no matter what 90% of the industry seems to think.

No, this is the kind of thing you say during an interview, get rejected, and then realise you were probably not going to like the work environment anyway.

That’s cope, none of the flags in an interview have anything to do with anything, especially after taking enough jobs to you realize that you’ll probably get called in last minute to interview additional people with no preparation whatsoever on the interview process so you just google a couple things to ask and wing it yourself

Can you elaborate on that? What kind of introspection do you think the author is missing?

yes too much abstraction is bad

In the example at the end, people don’t necessarily need to know what files and folders are so its not bad that they dont know, it’s better for a new developer that they have a blank slate to learn about trees of storage paths, as the skeumorph is outdated. just like the save icon being a floppy disk was so outdated that instead of replacing it, people realized we dont actually need save icons anymore and everything should just always save

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