The 'Hidden' Costs of Great Abstractions

I've come to the conclusion in the last couple years that being the guy who understands how the abstraction works under the hood is treated by companies as more of a liability than a virtue.

More and more places just want Jira tickets done fast instead of someone that's going to push back or question if this is the best way to build some thing. They want the thing, they don't care if it works well. They don't care if it's efficient. They want it now.

We've been moving to React, replacing an internal framework that's worked wonders for us we've been using for over a decade. The biggest part of the move is "hiring".

My general sense is that nobody understands how React works under the hood. The answer I get when I ask questions is generally just "don't worry about it".

Everything is giant overbuilt and terrible because most people never bothered to learn even a single level up from where they do most of their work. The people that do become unhirable. Everything takes hundreds or thousands more cycles and electricity it should because people can't be bothered to understand what they're doing.

More than ever is time to be stoic. Have things but live as having nothing. But as obvious as the author says it was predictable too.

By now... I see in my country high prices for laptops with only 4Gb of Ram and Celerons.

It could do wonderful things if in 2000s people didn't buy the argument that hardware is so cheap so lets write unefficient code. Same hardware that could play an Youtube video in 2000s today cannot even open the website. Electron send hugs...

Now people are mad about AI until when? Oceans be drought like in Oblivion movie?

And professionals? The generation of specialists will pass... and people will blindly depend on Ai soon if the course of things doesn't stop or at least be corrected.

I think the author could have brighter days in future (and still thing in present in some hidden niches) as knowledge will always precious.

The main lesson I have is buy less TI and every buzz promises and find the place where knoledge and craft walk side by side.

"Any problem in computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection, except of course for the problem of too many layers of indirection." Bjarne Stroustrup

That's why you see hundred level call stacks, polymorphism with a single implementation and still errors are hidden or root causes hidden behind "exception caught".

  “Duplication is far cheaper than wrong abstraction."

Oof. There are two pieces to this story. One is great and one his heartbreaking.

The fact that modern tech has disintermediated people with problems to solve from the need for a "priest class" to commune with the machine to solve the problem is a great thing. It's the goal. The more we do it the better we are making the world for humans.

... the fact that people need to work to eat or provide anything above a subsistence quality of life is not only tragic, it's increasingly abhorrent in a world where automation and simplification via machines has freed up this much raw resource and free time.

If we're pitting LLMs against people's ability to provide for their families, we have lost the thread on why we're doing any of this.