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Comment by gitgood | Hacker News Reader

I'm always kind of aghast at the number of people who not only don't know git, but who cannot or will not learn it over years, or even decades.

Listen, I'm not that smart, and I managed to figure out how to solve even gnarly git issues one summer during an internship... 11 years ago? Ish? Now, I know git well, and not just "the three commands". I would be, honestly, so ashamed if it were a decade on and I still hadn't committed to learning this fundamental tool.

Version control is a hard problem, fundamentally, and a tool for experts will always take more effort to understand. I mean, aren't we supposed to be the software experts? If people can't learn git, I wouldn't trust them with the even harder parts of software development.

But this is a common attitude in industry now, unfortunately: a petulant demand for things to be easier, and for someone else to do the learning. Is it any wonder software today is so bad?

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If people can't learn git, I wouldn't trust them with the even harder parts of software development.

This idea breaks under pressure. People have limited concentration and the more you demand for daily routine, the less there’s left for the actual job. This argument only makes sense in a relaxed setting with lots of time and coffee breaks. But all these problems tend to happen at friday evening when you’re expected to get your kids in an hour or something and this damn repo got broken again.

Yes, things should be easier. Cause you get what you get. If you want people who have no issues with git, feel free to enjoy the greatly reduced hiring pool and stop whining about someone not being able to juggle fifty things at once in their mind - focus on your hiring process and where to get the budget for inflated compensation instead.

Is it any wonder software today is so bad?

I remember delphi and vb time, when people - who were unable to understand or use CVS and SVN - made full-blown apps for real sectors, and it worked. Because it was easy. Nowadays all we have is important dudes with pseudo-deep knowledge of git, css, framework-of-the-month and a collection of playbooks, who cannot make a db-enabled hello username message box in less than a day. I don’t think you’re moving in the right direction at all with this. This paradigm is going further and further from good software, actually.

> Nowadays all we have is important dudes with pseudo-deep knowledge of git, css, framework-of-the-month and a collection of playbooks, who cannot make a db-enabled hello username message box in less than a day.

Interestingly that is exactly the opposite of my experience. Git is a practical tool with practical appeal to people who want to do practical things. Egghead gedankentheorists hate it, as evidenced by this very subthread.

In point of fact I find the ability to accomplish workaday tasks with git to be a far better predictor of someone's success as a developer than stuff like being able to recite Rust minutiae. People who like git are people who like getting stuff done.

People, whom I knew since these times and who really like getting stuff done and have done it much, all facepalmed when seen things like git, webdev, etc. Getting stuff done is not performing hundreds of technical operations and thinking “good, I’m so skilled”. It’s actually getting it done. I can almost guarantee that it’s a guy with far better predictor skills who will deliver mvp a month later than everyone else. Been through this countless times.

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