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Comment by anateus | Hacker News Reader

This always happens when a scene/subculture hits the mainstream. You could madlibs this article and get a description of every musical genre. It's sad to see what you were so passionate about appear in a diluted form, and external perception be distorted by this new image.

But there always remains an underground where true innovation and passion thrives.

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This isn't music, or anything like it. The article touches on the Millenials' refusal to learn anything below their chosen layer of abstraction to be a systemic risk to anything they build.

It's more akin to every bridge engineer not bothering with materials science or integral calculus because they know how to throw a bunch of trusses together than it is akin to every hipster on the planet learning to play Stairway to Heaven.

Blaming this on millenials rather than the training they receive by employers and professors is insane.

I would love to dig down into every nuance and detail. I don't have time for that because I'm working 60 hour weeks churning out deliverables to keep up velocity. My employers don't have time or budget for me to drill down into the details, they just want features and they want them yesterday.

My employers are not millenials. The VCs who fund my company are not millenials.

It's absurd to blame the most powerless group of people for this. Blame the powerful--the ones who dictate the work culture.

Everyone's knowledge is at some layer of abstraction. Very few people know all the details of every field connected to every other field. There's no reason the person who understands the details of band bending, the person who understands the details of Hindley-Milner type inference, the person who knows the ins and outs of the unified shader model in both OpenGL and Direct3D, and the expert in routing algorithms need to all be the same person, even if all their fields may ultimately play a role in one product. And bridge engineers, quantum physicists, automobile engineers, geologists, politicians, emergency rescue personnel, etc., all work together to keep your favorite bridge functioning smoothly and our understanding of the behavior around it progressing, with only a partial or even negligible understanding of the areas of expertise of each other.

Refusal to learn is no great virtue, but that one is specialized in their knowledge is no great vice either; the world is large and no one can wrap their arms around the whole thing. You grab a piece and trust your neighbors will help you out with theirs.

God, you people who don't understand silicon culture and polishing make me sick. A bunch of hipster poseurs who just want to play with their little "programs" without even understanding the wafers that make it all possible! Get a clue!

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