alt Hacker NewsI encountered juniors straight out of school who don’t know what tar is, or rsync, or what a symlink is.
It’s all learnable and everyone starts somewhere. But you’d think natural curiosity would kick in and they’d have picked up some of this on their own by the time they have a job.
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If they were Windows game developers, they wouldn’t have to touch any of that. I guess it depends on where their interests lie and what platform they developed on.
Ok, sure, windows.
But here’s one I heard literally two days ago: we counted three engineers (out of many) who knew that physical memory was not actually a giant flat space of contiguous addresses, and that there were multiple layers of address-mapping and region-joining glue logic between a program and the hardware, including in os libraries, and even inside the hardware.
Maybe knowing such information is archaic or useless for most engineers. But the good ones (or at least a certain flavor of the good ones) ask questions that lead them there.
For what it’s worth, I recently retired from a 30 year career as a developer and while I’m aware of all three of those things, I’ve never used any of them in or out of work.
And I’ve hosted my own web server these last 20 years.
If all you do is write code for Windows, why would you need to know what any of that is?
I didn't even know about tar or rsync until I started to use Linux, and I don't really see how else one get to the point where you need to know about them. And even symlinks are still in my mind as 'shortcuts but [...]' (even though the other way around is probably more accurate). Even as a dev, it's very possible to go through life without touching Linux.