The black box people entrust their secrets to? (TPM, encrypting disks, cloud, AI)
No, this, Jen, is the internet.
I’m a principal engineer making a killing and often feel like
I can’t tell you the number of devs I’ve met that know jack shit about infrastructure and networking. Even simple questions like understanding their subnet or how a load balancer works.
I’ve been developing for decades so obviously I know that the subnet is where the Lord Marshall went and returned with powers beyond mortal comprehension.
…well I don’t have to know that because AWS is like, serverless, dude.
You are not a real dev unless you can build your own CPU atom by atom
That’s because they’re back end devs. There is one way to do things, you learn the one way to do the thing, you do it that way, you’re done.
The fun is in front end, there is 15 different ways of doing things, but you don’t like any of them, so you develop a 16th way, eventually you get bored of the 16th way so come up with a 17th way. Eventually you get sick of all of this and go back to SSGs as God intended.
To anyone feeling like this, nobody understands fully how computers work. You find your niche and you do your bit.
I don’t think there’s anyone alive who understands it all.
nobody understands fully how computers work
I mean, tap the breaks a little bit, here. “Fully” is doing a lot of lifting.
I will concede most people don’t understand the concept of transistors, much less the electrical engineering that turns a series of transistors into a CPU. And I’ll spot you that - for any given computer - it would take multiple extended papers to explain every piece of functionality.
But - broadly speaking - if you a computer engineer, you understand how a computer is engineered. If you’re working in IT, you have enough of a functional knowledge that you can tell what each general component does.
And if you’re a full stack developer (rather than someone who just does business logic on the backend), you should have a generalized understanding of client versus server versus database and how these pieces fit together. You should also probably have some grasp of the network stack, if for no other reason than you occasionally need to troubleshoot it.
I think there are very few if any people who understand computers from the transistor all the way to front-end JavaScript frameworks. At least not deeply and not without major gaps.
I mean, plenty of people use higher end coding languages to customize the tools they use to make advanced chipsets.
And, I’m sorry, but JavaScript isn’t that hard to understand - intentionally so. It’s one of the first languages you can learn in grade school.
I doubt anyone could go end-to-end on hardware manufacturing. But that’s more an issue of parts miniaturization. People build working computer kernels in Minecraft using torches and switches.
How the internet works would be more so an IT thing than a backend developer thing at least on a high level. Setting up a database doesn’t mean one knows networking well in the same way they probably don’t know cpu logic gate design well.
