Recently I read Joel's software ruminations and it was as if I was being called out on my nose. “The vast majority of software students have no talent for making software”. “Schools that teach only Java are just producing a surplus of crap”. “Dumbasses who just learn to build blocks with instructions.”
In fact, this book was even written ten years ago. But whether it's Linus, Rob Pike, Thompson, Graham, or Bryan, these old men are speaking from their own experience. These people are excessively “elitist” and have extraordinary skills and senses that often make people feel powerless.
Maybe as a normal person they don't have the “talent to do something”. My choice of technology stack and career planning as an ordinary person is like a fog, so to speak. The structure of university education programs is also very divorced from the industry, from tools to technology stacks to workflows, so to speak.
In 2024, if you want to do an undergraduate program in software, the average person is likely to have a mediocre student who reads from a book and lacks academic training and systematic thinking. If you want to go to graduate school, you'll spend three years following a mentor who's probably struggled to survive the last decade, following an unknown number of people to cross-discipline CV and NLP, and then running back to the inflationary software industry.
Precious and incompetent 18 years old, difficult to see the development of the industry, into the inflated and monstrous software undergraduate education, in the year of graduation with the state-oriented and amazing depreciation of qualifications, had to go to the roll of a graduate degree. There is no exact practice, no clear direction worth going deeper, to some extent, there is no reflective life, as if waiting for the dice box named fate.
The concept of software engineering was established in the 1960s, and the construction of engineering is still going on today. Technological developments have led to the invention of inexplicable things and overly repetitive concepts, and this bullshit “reinvention” continues. The Js community has even started to experiment with “native Js development” after inventing thousands of Js frameworks. Sometimes I wonder if the average person should have been a project manager for a while before learning how to develop software, and maybe becoming a contractor would have given them more “software development talent”.
The devaluation of education and the CS craze and the separation of industry and education have brought a lot of mediocre people like me. In the last few decades, the elite have invented most of the things that softwares do. Even the “safety shovel” for the average person is a “recent development”. In 2024, a few large companies contribute and control a huge amount of “infrastructure software”. The flagbearers of the open source movement, FSF and RMS, are themselves almost as dead as Emacs. The fact is that ordinary people pay for big companies, take their tools, develop for them, and are proud to be part of them. For example Google controls almost the entire browser market with the Chrome kernel.Redhat holds the entire Linux community hostage.
Maybe this is something that has shifted to a technical philosophy. Maybe the average person should become a philosopher before they become a software developer or contractor. Maybe one day it will be like Bryan's “Great Bazaar” but different. Ordinary people can escape elitism altogether, pick up a safety shovel, and go purely “cybercivil”.
Top comments (0)