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Career advice for young system programmers

Much of the advice I see online targeted at “developers” is really bad. And the funny thing is: it is bad advice, even if it is completely true.

That’s because in developers’ minds, it is very easy to say that a “developer” is someone who does the same things I do. But in practice, there are many kinds of developers, focusing on drastically different problems.

Much of the advice online takes the form of “who needs this anyway?”. As a quick detour, that is one of the reasons I appreciate ThePrimeagen so much: he is the rare kind of influencer that is always happy to take a step back, and invite his audience to ask “ok, let’s understand the problem and the domain first”, as opposed to “whoever is doing this or that is doing it wrong”.

Modern storage is plenty fast. It is the APIs that are bad.

I have spent almost the entire last decade in a fairly specialized product company, building high performance I/O systems. I had the opportunity to see storage technology evolve rapidly and decisively. Talking about storage and its developments felt like preaching to the choir.

This year, I have switched jobs. Being at a larger company with engineers from multiple backgrounds I was taken by surprise by the fact that although every one of my peers is certainly extremely bright, most of them carried misconceptions about how to best exploit the performance of modern storage technology leading to suboptimal designs, even if they were aware of the increasing improvements in storage technology.

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