The grass is always greener on the other side - many low-level programmers feel like an imposter when it comes to high-level systems such as CRUD apps.

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Rick76 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Can confirm, my buddy who is someone I respect immensely, is an embedded programmer.

He will talk about OS events, or any low level concept and it makes me feel like I don’t know anything, but he acts like I’m a genius if I talk about JavaScript Runtimes, browser engines, anything frontend.

It’s cool he teaches me new things, I teach him some

	▲	throwawaytea 27 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think your friend is just being kind. Most people know that there is a big difference between experience in something pretty easy vs mastery of something very difficult. A rocket scientist acknowledges a concrete guy knows way more than he does about concrete, but also knows that doesn't make him a genius because it's easy enough to learn just being around it. Plus, the rocket scientist also knows that since he knows so little about concrete, he wouldn't even be able to judge if the guy is really a concrete genius or just saying things a real pro would label wrong. Your example isn't that crazy, but still, you should realize your friend is just being nice.
	▲	__natty__ 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Some people are exceptional at solving difficult but hard to explain problems while other are great solving direct business problems. No need to feel ashamed for both it’s just different work

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-drews 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I felt this way moving from embedded into backend for the first time and having no idea where to start. Was incredibly daunting, but both domains become trivial over time.

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irishcoffee 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They don't. The "simplicity" of using a "high-level" framework for someone who bit-shifts for a living is almost comical.

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phist_mcgee 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sure mate. And the guy who can do binary sums in his head would think of assembly as mere childsplay.

Jog on.

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nurettin 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I met someone who bit shifts for life, uses opengl shaders for compute, but has no sql experience and is afraid of opening a tcp socket.

	▲	anthk 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Trivial under plan9/9front. Under Win32/POSIX, run way. On bit shifts, pick any Forth programmer and shaders will be almost like a toy for them. They are used to implement double numbers (and maybe floats) themselves by hand by just reusing the only integer numbers they have and writting custom commands to output these pairs of integer as double numbers. They can probably implement multithreading processing by hand in Forth and also know the IEEE standards for floats better than C programmers over 20 years.

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whateveracct 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

bit shifting isn't impressive lol

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chistev 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Really?

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bombcar 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I know literal kernel developers who can handle drivers and race conditions any day of the week who can't wrap their mind around Outlook, let alone GUI updates.

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anthk 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Myself. Forth it's easy, 9front C it's manageable but POSIX it's hell and managing both Unix descendants are a piece of cake.

GUI interfaces for the enterprise came from Dante's hell themselves. I hate them, they are like the Madhouse from that Asterix movie making satire of the European bureucracy of the day. The often are oddly designed and they are not documented at all, you must guess the meaning by chance of with a senior tutoring you.

The same with anything corporate from Microsoft with AD roles/group policies and the like. Or anything coming from IBM.

	▲	timacles an hour ago \| parent [-]
		lol you guys are being too nice. Building CRUD apps is just implementing business logic by gluing APIs together, there is nothing to understand except the business domain, which is only done through exposure, because business logic is random. And then the APIs which are all essentially a kludge because of the shifting business logic. Understanding low level code puts you on entirely different level because you can reason about a problem using logic and how systems operate. No disrespect to any crud devs here but from my personal experience they just know a particular implementation of their domain and rarely even consider how the code base even operates as a whole

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kitsune1 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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