The defense industry lost the ability to make weapons when crisis hit. The same pattern is eroding software engineering skills. The timelines are identical.
  • sunbeam60@feddit.ukEnglish
    01·
    2 months ago

    I’m sorry but I’m not buying it. We’ve been sitting on top of abstractions for years.

    What, you think the average engineer knows assembly? You think they know how to design gates? You think the gate designers know how to make lithography work?

    How do you build a new factory, of anything? By using machines that have been built in other factories! We’ve got a highly redundant, interwoven mesh of things that rely on others things to be made. There is no “starting point” that you can trace today - all is done with something else that’s also complex.

    • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Ignoring rapid deskilling being forced on us by the tech sector is naive at best. This is not like the things you tried to compare it to.

      It’s about as naive as insisting man-made climate change is no big deal because climate change has always been around.

      • sunbeam60@feddit.ukEnglish
        01·
        2 months ago

        You propose we do what exactly with AI?

        And I’m not ignoring “rapid deskilling”. I’m specifically arguing against the very specific point that TFA made that “we will forget how to code”. That’s clearly not what will happen.

        Some people today still know assembler. Some people still how to design CPUs. Some still know lithography. Not as many as before, because we just don’t have the need.

        I marvel at the number of engineers who don’t think about memory allocations at all. But it’s ok - they probably don’t need to, for the task they’re solving.