So I was thinking of something the other day that surprised me, and continues to surprise me about once every five years since I started working in IT.
Software developers are, to put it succinctly, just only a little bit more computer literate than the general population.
Many of them know how to use the software in their own workflow quite well, but this is true for any profession. They don't usually have deep knowledge about how computers work in general however.
I know how what IP and TCP and UDP do in general. I couldn't tell you the specifics of how the protocols work in great detail, but I can at least competently explain what they do and how that applies to the application layer.
And, if pressed, should there ever be a situation where I need to know those details, I can always look them up because I know where to find that information.
I also know what a transistor is. So I got that going for me. 😅
@zalasur
I did a lot of work debugging communications at the protocol level, so I understand TCP-IP, but haven't written code implementing those levels. I have written Bisync code.
The first time I wrote a multiply routine (in 8-bit assembly) I did it from a schematic of the custom processor chip I worked on. 🙂
I happened to work in system administration (this was before devops was a "thing") and later on I worked in enterprise level technical support (I had to support system administrators manage and recover from their backups).
So I sort of took it for granted that the other leg of IT, i.e. the development side, had the same level of systems knowledge as their counterparts in the other subfields.
I keep finding out this is not the case, and every time I do I'm completely caught off-guard by it.
Obviously there are counterexamples to this. But I can think of specific examples I've run into over the years.
You know network ports, right? Those numbers that correspond to specific services at the operating system level? Port 80 for http, 23 for ssh, etc.
Those are an abstraction provided by the TCP/IP driver in the operating system. They don't actually correspond to anything hardware related. Everything still goes out the same physical port out the back of the computer.
I've talked with web developers, whose apps are dependent of this layer to even function at all, who have no idea this is the case. They have no idea what TCP or IP even does, or even that they are two separate things.
They just write the code and it "runs". They don't have to know.
So yeah. Sometimes in a code reviews when I talk to devs, you run into those knowledge gaps and when it happens I'm just like... How? How did you make it this far without knowing that?
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