> But I'd argue the opposite: it does matter whether the carpenter knows the tools they use as well as possible, because this will affect both the quality & speed of their work
You chose a strange analogy, because CNC woodworking is far and away the superior choice over hand tools for producing cabinets. CNC cut and drilled wood is going to be orders of magnitude cheaper, more accurate, and allow the cabinet professional to focus on what really matters (installing them properly) rather than wasting huge amounts of time trying to do everything the manual way.
Ironically, this might be a great analogy to support the OP's point: Someone who gets so caught up in the tools and methods and doing everything the manual way for the sake of flexing their knowledge is at risk of wasting a lot of time and energy.
Personally, I have a lot of fun doing things the hard, manual way when I'm working on a hobby project. But when it's time to get work done, I choose the efficient abstractions and tools that let me focus on the core work without wasting time.
If you have a CNC system, then I'd say you should absolutely be using that in preference to other things. But you should also come to as deep an understanding of the CNC system as possible, so as to be able to grasp what you can do with it, and how you could use it to carry out specific tasks that might arise in the course of your work.
What you should not do, IMO, is to say "Oh, I have a CNC system, but I never interact with it directly, I let CNC-Foo on my computer control it whenever I need to do anything".
> What you should not do, IMO, is to say "Oh, I have a CNC system, but I never interact with it directly, I let CNC-Foo on my computer control it whenever I need to do anything".
I have experience with CNC machines, and I would still not recommend that anyone try to control their CNC machine by typing in G-Code directly. Understanding G-code can be helpful, but you really need to learn to use the higher-level tools properly to get anything done.
HN is really strange on the topic of knowing the underlying details of complex systems:
- When the topic of CS interviews comes up, the comment section is irate that companies are testing for low-level knowledge that isn't used in day to day programming tasks. Asking someone to reverse a linked list is blasphemy because we have libraries for that.
- When the topic of Git comes up, the comment section is insistent that the only possible way to use tools is to have intimate working knowledge of the underlying low-level concepts. Insisting that people know the ins and outs of every git command instead of using a GUI is the only acceptable option.
I suspect there's a lot of overlap between the two positions, which boils down to: "I do things a certain way and I'm convinced my way is the correct and only way."
1) I don't think it ever makes much sense to have a concept such as "HN is really strange on ...". This place is a collection of thousands of individuals, and you're going to see a wide range of opinions, many of them contradictory. Since not everyone comments on every article, you'll see patterns that are not reflections of a single position held by any particular person. If you see contradictions in things that I've written, I'd love to have them pointed out, but saying that "one set of people on HN say X and another set of people on HN say !X or X'" just doesn't really convey anything that seems actionable or even that interesting. "People have different opinions! News at 11!!"
2) After I posted the comment you're replying to, I was absolutely certain that the question of which level of control was appropriate would come up (since that's really what we're discussing in the context of git). It doesn't seem obvious to try to carry the analogy too far, but for both systems there are obviously different levels that one can think about. I haven't used a CNC system, but I would imagine that there are very high level control systems that maybe start from some sort of design data and take it from there, some mid-level control systems that let you specify what you need and then program the machine to create it, and low-level control that would be rarely used unless the higher level tools just couldn't do what was needed.
If indeed this is an accurate description, then it seems to match the case with git quite well, and I'd still argue that even if you often/sometimes use the very high level control tool, you should understand and be aware of the possibilities of the lower level ones too.
> 1) I don't think it ever makes much sense to have a concept such as "HN is really strange on ...".
I enjoy HN, but I've also been here long enough to accept that HN is an echo chamber. Yes, we have downvotes and a variety of opinions, but the reality is that if you come into certain threads expressing certain unpopular opinions you're going to get hit with a wave of downvotes. Eventually you learn to just stop posting those opinions, which results in an echo chamber effect.
No social media site is free of echo chamber effects. HN is not an exception.
> I haven't used a CNC system, but...
Friendly suggestion: If you're not familiar with how something works, maybe it's not the best subject for an analogy?
"Haven't used" isn't the same as "have never been in a shop with a CNC system installed, never worked around people using them, and have no close friends who use them regularly".
As for the echo chamber, you won't be suprised that I disagree with you on this point.
You chose a strange analogy, because CNC woodworking is far and away the superior choice over hand tools for producing cabinets. CNC cut and drilled wood is going to be orders of magnitude cheaper, more accurate, and allow the cabinet professional to focus on what really matters (installing them properly) rather than wasting huge amounts of time trying to do everything the manual way.
Ironically, this might be a great analogy to support the OP's point: Someone who gets so caught up in the tools and methods and doing everything the manual way for the sake of flexing their knowledge is at risk of wasting a lot of time and energy.
Personally, I have a lot of fun doing things the hard, manual way when I'm working on a hobby project. But when it's time to get work done, I choose the efficient abstractions and tools that let me focus on the core work without wasting time.