from Hacker News

Programmer in Wonderland

by BinaryIgor on 10/9/25, 3:56 PM with 14 comments

  • by mfro on 10/9/25, 5:56 PM

    I think this correlates more to individual culture and interest in general computing than anything else. As you said yourself, the 'lost programmer' isn't curious, isn't interested in the details. They are interested in getting their specific tasks done and collecting a paycheck. Many may have ended up in a field they are not excited about. That's not something you can fix.

    As an aside, it will only get worse as the technical implementations get easier. Probably a lot of AI generated SQL queries being put into prod nowadays.

  • by bashmelek on 10/9/25, 7:51 PM

    I do often feel like a Lost Programmer.

    C# is my Blub. I use Visual Studio (and not Visual Studio Code). I also use some T-SQL and JavaScript, and sometimes C++ on the weekends. In all of these, my understanding is still rather shallow. And for my day job, and most of my hobbies, it works.

    But there is a definite next level I haven’t pierced, the level of “real programmers”. I want to understand the code I see on GitHub, even contribute. I want to be capable of more. But it is hard when I can’t even tell what I’m seeing, when I’m just trying to Make It.

  • by Nab443 on 10/10/25, 7:03 AM

    Interesting, my path is a bit like the opposite. I tend to avoid categories of tools that abstract too much the problem in a "magic" way for the same reason: you can't easily understand what's going on behind the scene, and you have to dive in each time you enter a corner case. If you can't control what it is doing on each step, then you can't be sure it will be doing what you expect and this can become a mental effort that outweight the tool benefits.

  • by cadamsdotcom on 10/10/25, 9:15 AM

    This is a case of the “everyone except me is an idiot” fallacy.

    What actually happens with these people is they are pragmatically cargo-culting - because it helps them achieve some other aim, like delivering business value - until their abstractions leak and they have to go uncover the truth.

    People grow and learn when they need to :)

  • by djoldman on 10/9/25, 6:02 PM

    Similar to Chesterton's Fence.

    We should probably learn CS from the least abstraction to the highest.

    So that when the abstraction breaks, we know where to look to understand why.