Inflation is thing that make number bigger but no more money. Less, even.

Imagine a series of tubes.

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially. [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

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 that people just can't make the software --> hardware jump. Like they understand what machine code is, and what CPU registers are, but can't understand how a CPU with baked in hardware instructions (i.e. a seemingly fully deterministic piece of hardware) can drive transistors to high or low voltages in a random way.

The key is to see all software as hardware, and to envision the CPU as many many light bulb switches, with some wired into each other, creating flip/flopping latches.

Once you get the idea of a flipflop, you can maybe then start to understand how all you really want from the switches is to output a switch configuration that encodes a value in some representation. The switches are all initialized in some state, but then drive a known flipflop path towards a desired value, and this happens millions of time a second, often in parallel with isolated switches, or with switches that are virtually segmented from each other, or switches that can chaotically interact with each other

I mean the basic principles are very simple.

It's the scaling and the speed of it all that you can't really understanding. Also all the hackneyed unoptimized solutions that hold it all together that we're totally dependent on to this day.

Once you understand how internet works, you will understand that it's also pure bullshit

You can have a totally secure network and will never fail.

But nobody will ever be able to do anything useful on it because it will break every useful connection and ban every useful protocol on which most of your programs run.

You don't need to know all the details, but I think you should understand the basic network concepts way before starting your first job as a developer

Arguably an engineering (hardware) or systems programming issue, too. How many IT people (even the highly competent ones) could design a router, wifi chip etc.? Or know in detail what's going on in an internet exchange point?

Hiw did you get that? Put it back ontop of big ben!

The black box people entrust their secrets to? (TPM, encrypting disks, cloud, AI)

That's because an "IT engineer" is like an "engineer in chemistry". You have so many sub-disciplines that a given engineer can't be expected to know everything. Nobody is surprised if an organic chemist doesn't know much about heat exchanger optimisation, or a chemical process engineer is confused by organic synthesis.

In the same way, I've met devops guys that know surprisingly (to me) little about the intricacies of hand writing multi-threaded high performance calculation code. In the other hand, they're wizards at stuff like load balancing and optimising how we use sub-processes for I/O, CPU-bound or memory bound tasks. You would think the two are very similar, but even then it quickly becomes clear that people really become specialists in their field.

Those are the ones who can maintain eye contact, aren’t they?

Sure. I consider myself a fairly good dev. Not an amazing genius or anything but pretty competent in my area. Wouldn't have a clue how a load balancer works beyond what's in the name, I guess it balances loads. I can assume it does this by distributing requests to different servers because that just makes sense, but I don't even really know that. Networking might as well be black magic as far as I'm concerned. I'm grateful we have a decent infra team who knows about all that. So I'm not surprised.

You are not a real dev unless you can build your own CPU atom by atom

Yeah, but why is CIDR notation like that? You put a bigger number at the end and your subnet becomes smaller? Why would you want that?

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.

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.

..well I don't have to know that because AWS is like, serverless, dude.

Not just your industry. Every industry is like this.

Look I'm mostly in infrastructure and I don't know much beyond core principles behind software development, I can't really cast stones. But yeah they can be surprisingly ignorant sometimes.

The subwhat?

Came looking for this. Was not disappointed.

I'm a principle engineer, I'm broke as shit and I can see everyone else being incompetent (and outsourcing their brains to Claude) all day.

Gimmie one of these 130k jobs where I don't need to know anything, I'm sick of BS infra and k8s and shitass applications made as zillions of fucked microservices written by people who already bounced.

It's not something you just dump stuff on. It's not a big truck!

The amount of math needed depends massively on your desired field. If you want to go into gamedevelopment you will probably work a lot with vectors. If you go into embedded systems the basic knowledge of hexadecimal and the binary system are crucial and you will probably also need the basics of electric engineering.

I would guess, that webdevelopment or systems integration usually don't involve that much math.

I am not a professional but coding is more holding logic paths in your mind and translating large concepts into bite-sized steps.

In my (extremely amateur) solo dev project this weekend - a card game, I needed a trap that's invisible to opponents but visible to the player.

So we create an (invisible) control node with an (optionally visible) animated node with a text label that inherits the visibility of the immediately parent.

Then the top level node needs a "when I give you a place to be, animate appearing then animate moving to that place function" and it needs to respond to the card_played signal, and it needs to check the logic to see if that's the time to trigger, and if so which functions it needs to activate (the board, the "umpire" node, the opponent hand) in which order, then call the dialogue system to display dialogue, then query the dialogue database for which message to show, in which language (currently only English) which in itself has a controller that forces the order of animations and turns on/off clicks to various functions while this function resolves...

The only math involved is "how fast should the node move" and "if this trap blocks face cards, then block anything with a card value over 10" (jack queen king)

You don’t need math at all.

How to learn it? Think of a project you would like to tackle, and just start on your pc. Ask ChatGPT for a starting point

Laid off and back into NEETdom