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A comment on Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads. Parent comment

Re:Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older W... by busterarm on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @08:14PM (#15975519)
> about 70% of my knowledge today will be outdated in 5 years

I really hope this isn't the case for you, and in general I don't really believe it to be true either. Most of what makes me successful as a developer today I knew 20 years ago, in a prior career.

You have to differentiate between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. The former changes very little and the latter changes a lot. You're also best off retaining almost _none_ of the latter. Those "Teach Yourself <language/framework> in <number> <days/weeks>" books you used to see were written for serious professionals, not newbies.

I can often get more done with less using tried, tested tools that change little than my peers can do with 'the new hotness'. It seems every language/stack has its own implementation of cron. Stop that. Use cron.

Networking protocol, binutils and SQL don't really change and that's literally 99% of the "make stuff happen" part of my job. A lot of "Full Stack" developers don't know any of this shit. They don't know what tools will tell them if a client's traffic is coming into their network at all or being rejected at their server.

Con artists, honestly.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older W... by tracker1 on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @08:56PM (#15975716)
Not to be offensive, but the front end is quite often far more work than the SQL that goes on in the back. I've worked strictly on the back, the front, and in between. I've also had to work in a number of platforms and languages.

In the end, keeping things as simple as possible is usually best. If that means using language features that someone might not be familiar with, it should still be more understandable in the end.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older W... by busterarm on Wednesday December 20, 2017 @09:36PM (#15975930)
Not offensive at all. I actually would say in the best case scenario, you can't do one without the other.

I will agree that frontend is full of churn. I have to do it, but I wouldn't specialize in front end -- most of your role is relying on explicit knowledge rather than tacit knowledge.

[ Parent | on HN ]