Tech ain't that deep - and that's a problem | deadSimpleTech
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With that in mind, it became fairly clear to me that the tech industry these days has a depth problem: as much as tech is becoming quite a bit more complex, it's also becoming shallower. Learning new things in tech these days, as often as not, simply doesn't give me the same feeling of satisfaction or achievement as learning or writing C back in the first years of my career did. Being effective in tech these days feels as though it's less about understanding than it is about memorising a big list of buzzwords and all of the catches associated with them. And while LLMs have certainly pushed this into overdrive, the issue has existed, in one form or another, for quite a while now.

Why is learning C so much more generally useful than learning React? What I mean by the last point is that learning C tends to develop skills that are useful in a lot of other parts of software and tech work: if you know how to write decent C, you’ll have a much easier time of understanding PostgreSQL internals, for example, while if you’ve learned React, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether or not that’ll actually improve your HTML skills, for example.

  • vanillama@programming.dev
    5·
    15 hours ago

    I was taught by my teachers years ago that it was great that I wouldn’t have to pick up C thanks to higher level languages and I trusted them, and I regret it deeply. It took me years of curiosity and reading unrelated stuff to parse some stuff that would have probably taken so little time if I had simply started with C.