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by dvanduzer 4442 days ago
Everyone's piling on you because that wasn't the point of the example. Automation grants humans extraordinary powers, as long as humans aren't simply steps within the automatic system.

There's been an awkward growing phase of the technology industry that has led to technicians that don't have any real understanding of the systems they maintain. Compare and contrast Robert DeNiro's character in Brazil with the repairmen he has to clean up after. We could be training those poor duct maintenance guys better.
1 comments
dllthomas 4442 days ago
... what?
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dvanduzer 4441 days ago
If you haven't seen Brazil, you can safely ignore that part of the post. But you should see it.
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dllthomas 4441 days ago
I love Brazil, I'm just not tracking how all of that fits into the above.
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dvanduzer 4441 days ago
The article is about how DevOps is killing the role of the Developer by making the Developer be a SysAdmin.

Chuck points out that abstracting the Developer's work too far away from the system in question means the Developer doesn't really understand the system as a whole. Jeff refers to "purely development roles" and other "pure" roles that aren't necessarily natural boundaries.

The example of VHDL is not about hardware and software, but about learning that you didn't actually know something you thought you knew.

The repairmen in Brazil do not realize (or necessarily care) what they don't know about duct repair. The system allows them to function and even thrive, despite this false confidence in their understanding.

At one point at least, Google was investing in (metaphorically) having DeNiro cross-train those guys, instead of umm... Well, the rest of the movie.

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dllthomas 4436 days ago
I've read this a few times and it still doesn't really have any bearing on the aside I was making, which was that something was presented as a hypothetical (Imagine ...) that is the overwhelmingly typical case, and in some measure that amused and confused me.
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dvanduzer 4435 days ago
Well, it helped that I'd been discussing the topic out of band not that long prior to the original comments...

The initial detail was that VHDL, unlike "software" languages, has very different consequences. Can you imagine a language where (1 / 0) wasn't defined away as a DIVERR, but otherwise managed to remain mostly self-consistent? Where something can be logically / syntactically coherent, but not physically possible?

And if that example didn't hit home for you, so it goes, but there was plenty of detail unrelated to the specific example that I thought was more important / interesting to discuss. :shrug:

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