Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by anakaine 733 days ago
This is elitist and frankly, unhelpful. The answer to a skills shortage is not a practitioner lockdown, but policy, training, guidance and mentoring. If you're stuck in start up land and you have this issue, you have hired the wrong skills. If you're encountering this in enterprise land, your organisation, and potentially you depending on your position of influence, should be angling to improve compliance and literacy not through obstruction but through policy and upskilling. Failing to do so will kill your ability to innovate.
3 comments

FWIW, while I disagree with the parent comment, I don't see you arguing against it.

They actually implied that you should try upskilling first — but if that fails, you shouldn't be doing ETL yourself.

I mostly disagree with the parent comment because there's so many things one can easily do up to a level, and then when the going gets tough, you need to call in an expert. Eg. most people can operate a screwdriver or impact driver to fix things, but to fix some problems, you really need a trained technician (or well, an experienced DIY person, but that's not everybody).

The fact that you are not strong enough to screw in an M14 bolt does not mean you should be forbidden from using an impact driver: tools are there to help you. The logic of the parent comment was seemingly that if you are not strong enough to tighten an M14 bolt, you probably don't know what you are doing regardless of the type of the bolt you are tightening, so you should simply not do it.

The point I agree with in a parent comment is that not everybody can achieve a similar level of proficiency: while upskilling and improving/simplifying tools can get you most of the way there, there's always going to be that extra bit that requires a sudden, sharp jump in knowledge, smartness or experience to be able to deal with it.

I’m all for upskilling.

On your example, when I was an intern in a factory, I was banned from the pneumatic tools with a counter grip. Because if you use them incorrectly your finger/ hand / arm is a flesh pancake.

My solution suggestion here is definitely to empower more people to work on this by teaching them basics of data base design and enough python to write a dag in airflow.

>This is elitist and frankly, unhelpful. The answer to a skills shortage is not a practitioner lockdown, but policy, training, guidance and mentoring.

I think the point is that these tools have their own learning curve, and non-tech business people are not doing it well, either; how much different is it from learning SQL? Which one is more broadly valuable and transferrable as skill?

If this is the career you want (data or data-adjacent), why not just learn SQL? There are far more learning resources and the value of the knowledge will assuredly outlast any low-code tool.

Skills shortage?