March 22, 2024 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item An Experimental Mindset
March 24, 2024 at 3:45 pm
I agree with every single word of this. One of my hardest challenges working with colleagues is how to handle people who have no curiosity about their chosen profession. This is different than not having enough time to learn every new piece of tech that comes our way. To me, a lack of curiosity is worse than simple incompetence (although they tend to go hand-in-hand). With plain old incompetence, at least there's a potential that someone can learn and grow.
The example you gave about Git hits the nail on the head, because I've encountered more developers than I'd expect who don't have a handle on the Git basics. It's hard to find time to become expert level at things, but to get a basic grasp on most tech only requires about an hour or two. In my mind, dedicating just an hour or two is such a wiser productivity tradeoff compared to stopping your work a few times a week to Google the solution because you're duct-taping your way through your development process.
March 24, 2024 at 11:50 pm
We don't use GIT where I work. I have no need of GIT outside of work. Until one of those change, I have no need to learn GIT.
I have a need for WMIC. I learned what I needed to know about WMIC. Do you know WMIC? If not, why not???
Chances are, it's because you don't need it. Maybe you don't even know about it.
I also know how to wire a house, sweat copper pipes, connect iron pipes, connect and disconnect PVC joints, hand dry wall and plaster the wall, strip and refinish a wood floor, tune an old car, truck or motor cycle that still has points. plumb a wall, sharpen and replace blades on my lawnmower, put a new belt on the mower deck without needing a routing diagram, build a brick chimney, sew, patch clothes, darn a sock, build complex quilt in just one weekend, ride a unicycle, hone knives, build furniture, build a house from the foundation up, build a brick patio, macrame hanging tables and the like, fish, cook, shoot, and write some absolutely bitchin' SQL.
The reason why I know how to do those things is because, at one time or another, I needed to.
GIT has not fallen into the category of "needing to" for me.
How about you, @bperry 32054? Shall I relegate you to the rank of a side-stepping-beach-creature that has no intellectual curiosity because you didn't take the time to figure out how to build a 100 million row, 52.3GB test table filled with random constrained data with a Clustered index in place in only 2 minutes and 41 seconds with Minimal Logging of only 600 MB? Everyone "in the business" should know how to create that kind of test data, right? How about a figuring out a way to replace a table in a Data Warehouse to allow a 100 million row table to be used as a CROSS TAB with reporting a dozen different ways from Sunday that virtually instantly updated and with no ETL and no report take longer than 90 ms all with a data footprint of less that 1.4MB for that >50GB table? Again, why wouldn't someone "in the business" not know how to do such a thing?
Would you say that I have no "intellectual curiosity" because I haven't needed to even look at GIT?
As for the people you work with at work, if GIT is required for their job, offer some training. Not everyone even has the time to be self-motivated outside of office hours because they have kids and other obligations, not to mention a commute because someone doesn't understand the benefits of working from home for both the employee and the company. 🙂
Yep... I learned the hardway, myself... Be careful of who and how you judge because you may be next to be judged.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
March 25, 2024 at 3:32 am
Hi Jeff, I wasn't trying to be controversial or upset anyone, so I apologize if it came off that way. As I said in my post, a lack of curiosity is not the same as learning every new piece of tech. I wasn't suggesting that you're stupid if you don't know Git. I should have clarified that I've come across developers who use Git regularly but don't seem to understand the basics even after using for years, and that's what I have difficulty understanding. If you don't use the tech, there's no reason to learn it for your job.
And as it happens, I have used WMIC extensively! Years ago I wrote an interactive VBScript client-side web application (I can't remember what they were called - web form? web app?) that queried AD for our org's computers and then used WMI to allow our IT team to remotely manage workstations, like shutdown, restart, and launch an RDP session. In fact I still find myself using the PowerShell equivalent (Get-WmiObject Win32_Product) to enumerate the installed software on Windows Server Core servers. WMIC is a great tool and I'd have to say that I had the same opinion when I using it back then: I wished more of colleagues bothered to learn even the basics of it. My job was so much harder not knowing WMIC than it was after I learned it.
If you don't use Git, then it would probably be a poor use of your time to learn Git. Whereas if a developer uses it everyday but barely understands it, I'd say learning Git would be a great use of their time. Similarly if one were to use WMIC regularly but don't know the very basics of how to filter the results in the query, then I'd wonder why that wasn't something they learned how to do.
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