Yes. But a hill is easy to push up when it’s small and sticks to the snow. As it gets bigger, you can still go uphill but you just have to be strategic about it (as mentioned in the story). But small snowballs can go uphill all day long, they just have to make it to the top of the hill before they get too big.
And to add to this: virtually every programming language allows you to define multiple entry points. So you can have your workers in the exact same codebase as your api and even multiple api services. They can share code and data structures or whatever you need. So, if you do need this kind of complexity with multiple services, you don’t need separate repos and elaborate build systems and dependency hell.
If you hop off the modern treadmill ... you'll very quickly be thinking about survival. I once ate a salad off the ground, I was so hungry. It only takes a few days and we regress to degenerate animals.
I'm pretty sure governments know this and want to prevent it at all costs beyond a certain point.
I’d push back on this framing a bit. There's a subtle ageism baked into the assumption that someone who stepped away from day-to-day coding has "ancient skills" worth mocking.
Yes, specific frameworks and tooling knowledge atrophy without use, and that’s true for anyone at any career stage. A developer who spent three years exclusively in React would be rusty on backend patterns too. But you’re conflating current tool familiarity with engineering ability, and those are different things.
The fundamentals: system design, debugging methodology, reading and reasoning about unfamiliar code, understanding tradeoffs ... those transfer. Someone with deep experience often ramps up on new stacks faster than you’d expect, precisely because they’ve seen the same patterns repackaged multiple times.
If the person you’re describing was genuinely overconfident about skills they hadn’t maintained, that’s a fair critique. But "the actual engineers making jokes about his ancient skills" sounds less like a measured assessment and more like the kind of dismissiveness that writes off experienced people before seeing what they can actually do.
Worth asking: were people laughing because he was genuinely incompetent, or because he didn’t know the hot framework of the moment? Because those are very different things.
This has nothing to do about ageism. This applies to any person of any age who has ego big enough to think that their knowledge of industry is relevant after they take prolonged break and be socially inept enough to brag about how they are still "in".
I don't disagree with your point about fundamentals, but in an industry where there seems to be new JS framework any time somebody sneezes - latest tools are very much relevant too. And of course the big thing is language changes. The events I'm describing happened in the late 00s-early 10s. When language updates picked up steam: Python, JS, PHP, C++. Somebody who used C++ 98 can't claim to have up to date knowledge in C++ in 2015.
So to answer your question - people were laughing at his ego, not the fact that he didn't know some hot new framework.
I beg to differ. I started with C in the 90s, then C# in '05, then PHP in '12, then Go in '21. The things I learned in C still apply to Go, C#, and PHP. And I even started contributing to open source C projects in '24 ... all my skills and knowledge were still relevant. This sounds exactly like ageism to me, but I clearly have a different perspective than you.
Yes, we clearly have different perspectives. I observed an arrogant person who despite their multi-year break from engineering of any kind strongly believed that they still were as capable as engineers who remained in the field during that time.
Literally the reason’s for git’s existence is to make merging diverging histories less complicated. Adding back the complexity misses the point entirely.
> Now crap has turned into revenue sucking subscriptions
So much this. Each subscription is literally a small percentage of your revenue. You can't reinvest it ... it's just gone. Hopefully it enables more productivity ... but most likely, it is only marginal.
Even then, I'd wait until it's had a chance to iterate and correct itself in a loop before I'd even consider looking at the output, or I end up babysitting it to prevent it from making mistakes it'd often recognise and fix itself if given the chance.
True. I’ve been strictly in the terminal for weeks and I have a stop hook which commits each iteration after successful rust compilation and frontend typechecks, then I have a small command line tool to quickly review last commit. It’s a pretty good flow!
I just want to be productive, not fly a plane.
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