[jprete]

Eh. I think the peak of computer ability was GenX. I’m not in that group but made up for it with sheer intensity. If you grow up on a phone you’re not getting any of the mental modeling to get close to what the machine is doing and you’re only going to be able to work with the limited tools of that level until you deliberately dive deeper.

[shanusmagnus]

I think both you and the GP are onto something important. I am one of the vaunted Gen-Xers (this is the first time someone has said anything nice about us, so thanks) and there is something to the idea that my understanding of systems goes down to assembly language (fully) and even CPU architecture (very sketchily) all the way up to, like, web frameworks. So for the stuff I'm usually doing, I understand several layers up and down, and that often seems valuable.

This strikes me as the essence of expertise, the difference between talking to someone who's read a book or a review paper, vs someone who is a real expert at that thing. You can be quite competent and insightful from having done a modest amount of reading and thinking, but if you're seeing the Matrix, and know how all these forces are interacting with each other, that's just a whole other level. It makes an impression when you brush up against it.

However: it always weighs on me how this is all a matter of framing. Like, I don't know the electronics. There's a level of metal that I don't get. Some of the really high-level stuff is now beyond me, too. I catch myself saying "I should really take x {weeks, months, years} and really grok that." And yet my actual experience suggests this is a mirage.

More briefly: there are always more layers for a fuller understanding. It's hard to see how many of them are really useful. Maybe the kid who is 10x better than me at LLM collaboration will benefit more than from having a deeper stack. It's interesting to ponder how these different consequences will play out.

[sanderjd]

FWIW I'm a (geriatric) millennial, and we were totally taught all that same stuff. And yeah, it totally feels important to me to have this mental model up and down the layers. But I also do wonder whether we're just wrong about that, merely falling prey to nostalgia.

My messy answer is that for many projects it's either neutral or an actual hindrance - I have to remind myself to pragmatically not care about stuff that won't matter for years at the project's expected growth rate - but for other projects it's very useful. I think the way to go is to seek out those kinds of projects, in order to avoid frustration all around.

[shanusmagnus]

Always important to be on guard for things amenable to self-congratulation. At least, I sure need to be on guard against it :)