Good morning, folks, how are you? This morning the new Savastano morning podcast kicks off, and I’d like to wake you up with a reflection. The reflection is about the grumpy old-timers.
I was teaching a course - Reskill, the one I bring into companies about artificial intelligence - and in a moment of downtime an interesting debate came up about the generations of technicians. And this parallel emerged around the old grumps.
Who the old-timers were for us
For those of us who are now, say, 30, 40, 50 years old, the old grumps were the ones who’d say: if you haven’t done C, you’re not a real programmer. The ones who freaked out because everything had to be ultra fast - pointers, garbage collection done by hand, types, classes. Manual memory management. And we grew up in the world of scripting: zero types, all web, all interactive - which was the thing that interested us. Involving people, spreading culture, more about the service, the exchange of information, sharing. (“Sharing” - a word ruined by Facebook, because it was a beautiful word before Facebook.)
Anyway, those were the old grumps to us: the ones obsessed with low level, while we were more of the scripting crowd. Now, clearly that’s a niche that’s necessary in certain contexts - so don’t comment saying “ah, because you can’t program.” Yes, I know that in certain contexts those things are necessary. Don’t get worked up, please, I’m making a philosophical point for the morning podcast.
The new old-timer is us
So the thing that came out - and these were the six minutes of preamble to say what I wanted to say, that’s how podcasts are, folks - is this: the new grump is us. It’s me, it’s you. The new grump is the one who still wants to program. Because these new kids coming up, the AI natives, in my opinion don’t want to look at code at all.
I’ll tell you more: we, becoming the old grumps ourselves, will insist that code must be known - because that way you know what’s underneath. And they, instead, will happily have a career of great dignity and respect without ever looking at a single line of code, and they’ll be the new technicians.
So, folks, we have to look to the future. Code isn’t worth a damn anymore.
