HN is more about being argumentative for the sake of it than actually needed. May be more and more people feed on trying to prove others' wrong than proving themselves right.
As one of my previous comments said, "HN is not full of smart people, HN is full of people who think they are smart." And I may very well belong to the second category but I don't comment on every issue at least.
None of them became medical or PhD doctors. One became a lawyer. Two have Master's degrees.
Their classmates? 7 PhDs. 4 MDs. About 10 MBAs (that I am aware of), 8 lawyers, 2 psychologists, 3 SLPs, at least 5 with MEs, and several self-made millionaires.
Gifted doesn't mean genius. For most, it simply means they have a head start. Head starts don't last once your peers have a reason to compete.
This is why I don't care whether gifted programs live or die. Place the child in the system where he needs to be, but stop pretending that little Bobby with the parents who have been trying to teach him to read since he was crapping his diaper is a genius simply because people spent time forcing him to learn something. For many kids, telling them they're gifted compared to their peers simply inflates their egos past their talent.
After a few decades of relying on coding to feed my family, I miss the way it felt magical, writing in Basic on a ti 99/4a.
I thought I was going to tell computers to do wonderous things. In reality most of us are telling them to serve ads or sell crap to people. Most of the rest of us are telling them to serve data to companies doing the above.
>This statement makes me concerned that they have greatly devalued technical skills. [...] When technical ability is devalued so much in a company,
I'm not going to justify their thinking but I'll attempt to explain where it probably comes from.
The context for their perspective is crucial. Notice that their assertion for "less time to develop technical skills" is followed by a sentence praising graduates of "code bootcamps". They also prominently espouse Ember.js[1].
To make sense of that, we can (roughly) divide programmers into two groups: (1) CRUD LOB Line-Of-Business (2) algorithmic/embedded
(1) is programming the enterprisey, forms & fields, "back office" apps. It was COBOL, dBASE/Clipper, Visual Basic, Microsoft Access, C# Winforms, 4GLs like Oracle Forms & SAP ABAP, and now Javascript frameworks such as Ember.js/Angularjs. Basically, slapping a client GUI in front of a database backend. Whether that client GUI technology is Visual Basic, or mobile phone Javascipt, or iOS Swift app... that choice is more about whatever zeitgeist of programming you happen to be living in rather than any inherent difficulty levels between the technologies. The idea is to take the high-level frameworks+libraries and glue them together to deliver value to the business.
(2) is programming of realtime kernel schedulers, complex distributed computing algorithms, search engines, database storage engines, machine learning, ray tracing graphics and physics engines for video games, audio DSP, traversing graph nodes, control theory for drones and Mars Rover, etc. This would be more "engineering" type of coding rather than "integration/glue" coding. Typical programmers we'd think of in this group would be Jeff Dean (Google MapReduce/Tensorflow), John Carmac (Doom), Fabrice Bellard (ffmpeg).
The programmers in group(2) wouldn't say it's easy to take "leaders" and add programming skills to them. However, that sentiment is often expressed by group(1) programmers. I'm not saying it's the "right" philosophy but it's an observation I've seen repeatedly. The CRUD programming is often seen as just a longer more elaborate version of programming the Tivo / thermostat / lawn sprinkler system. It doesn't seem like group(1) is "devaluing" themselves but instead, they honestly just think "programming skill" isn't really a big deal.
17 years ago, a Mozilla engineer called it "the single most braindamaged file format that I have ever seen in my nineteen year career".
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241438