Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by visarga 655 days ago
We all use abstractions, and abstractions, good as they are to fight complexity, are also bad because sometimes they hide details we need to know. In other words, we don't genuinely understand anything. We're parrots of abstractions invented elsewhere and not fully grokked. In a company there is no single human who understands everything, it's a patchwork of partial understandings coupled functionally together. Even a medium sized git repo suffers from the same issue - nobody understands it fully.
1 comments

Wholeheartedly agree. Which is why the most valuable people in a company are those who can cross abstraction layers, vertically or horizontally, and reduce information loss from boundaries between abstractions.
Some executive: "That's nice, but what new feature have you shipped for me recently?"
Hey, you read my review!