alt Hacker NewsI've been around a while. As in I've installed Linux from floppies kind of vintage.
I get new grads with great grades, who are decent junior devs that are productive in, say, Java and one or maybe two related things like SpringBoot or Hikari, but don't even know about simple/common things that sometimes baffle me.
They seem to think I'm some sort of wizard because I can quickly put together simple commands line pipelines using things like grep, awk, sed, sort, uniq, wc - and dig useful answers or insights out of log files or csv files or database exports, or even JSON by using jq as well.
It amazes me that some of them have never even heard of the existence of tools like that, or how easily you can pipe the output from one to the input of another and chain them up in such useful ways.
(At the same time, I'm fairly sure I have similar black holes in my knowledge and mental map of how things that other people specialise in work. :shrug: )
> It amazes me that some of them have never even heard of the existence of tools like that
I'm not a recent grad by any means. I have heard of those tools and even used them on occasion. The problem is "on occasion". There's no way I want to keep relearning awk every time it might be useful.
These days, though, LLMs are a saving grace. It's rare that I ask it to provide me with a command line to solve a problem and it gets it wrong. I still have the burden of verifying, but it's a happy medium between your expertise and my writing everything in Python.