Hacker News Reader

Comment by caeril | Hacker News Reader

All abstractions leak like a sieve. Being a developer at ANY layer of the stack without knowing what's happening underneath you is default gross incompetence and a recipe for eventual disaster.

Are we cool with surgeons not knowing what mitochondria are, or how cells work? All you gotta know is where to put the scalpel, bro. I'm sure it will work out just fine.

View on HN

This is laughably over blown.

I don’t expect my doctor to know the component parts of atoms. Nor do I need them to.

I don’t expect a designer to know how a pixel works.

At some point in the stack we have to draw a line and say this level of detailed knowledge is not generally useful to the majority.

In terms of generic web development today, I would be fine at drawing that line at low level system concerns (memory allocation, cpu cycles, hell even compilation)

I recently had a conversation with a senior React dev about Redux with years of React experience. I mentioned during a dry run that you can clear the store, if a local storage store (default), with localStorage.clear() from the dev console. Response: "Cool, I didn't know that.". This guy is good at creating UIs, but that's an example of 'How this works' knowledge I'd of expected him to have. It's a pervasive epidemic of learn just what you need to ship, instead of learn what you need to ship a quality product and hone the tools in your toolbox.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com