Except it's a bad analogy. Rails is not the next step up from systems level programming, it's a completely different (and honestly far less difficult) domain. Most of those rails devs could never be good at the hard stuff.

It is worth a lot to be good at assembly these days. It's a big piece of how my team makes a living. As one of my older colleagues puts it: there are fewer relevant jobs, but those jobs pay significantly more money, and you can only hold one job at a time.

Are you mocking the parent poster? Why?

Nah, I thought it was a good point. It's easy to forget that we either change or become obsolete. It's one thing to know it abstractly, but it's hard to make any lifestyle changes, especially if it involves switching to a job in a completely new domain.

http://thecodist.com/article/the_programming_steamroller_wai... is a good essay on this.

EDIT: previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7204515

That's an amazing article. Thanks for sharing.

Yes and no. My response to that article is "The more things change, the more they stay the same." There is no steam roller. The fundamentals are not changing. So much touted (even here on HN) as new and innovative are little more than re-hashed versions of what we were already using 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago, just prettier. Sure the syntax is always changing a little, and the frameworks and tools are evolving, but at a fundamental level the job of a programmer is little different now than it was in any of those eras. I have no doubt that a competent programmer from then, if picked up and plopped in front of a MacBook in 2017 could do a little reading up and perform proficiently in most programming jobs today. Probably more proficient because 1. they've seen it all before including the bugs and pitfalls and 2. I'd argue programming is much easier today than it ever has been.

EDIT: I swear I did not read the top comment in the (newly) linked HN discussion of that article before I wrote my response. I agree completely.

I really wonder about this. It seems true to me that it's easier now and anyone who could do it back when it was harder could do it now.

But then, I wonder if it just seems that way to me because I'm a product of "now", which makes me more proficient in how we do things now, which makes it seem easier. It's possible neither is easier, that they are just different, and for everyone, the other seems harder than the one they already know.

I'm not trying to argue that this is the case: I could see it being either way and I sincerely wonder which way it is.

grep for "fundamentals" | "first principles" in that article.