I can’t tell you the number of devs I’ve met that know jack shit about infrastructure and networking. Even simple questions like understanding their subnet or how a load balancer works.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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I’ve been developing for decades so obviously I know that the subnet is where the Lord Marshall went and returned with powers beyond mortal comprehension.
You keep what you kill.
That's because they're back end devs. There is one way to do things, you learn the one way to do the thing, you do it that way, you're done.
The fun is in front end, there is 15 different ways of doing things, but you don't like any of them, so you develop a 16th way, eventually you get bored of the 16th way so come up with a 17th way. Eventually you get sick of all of this and go back to SSGs as God intended.
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..well I don't have to know that because AWS is like, serverless, dude.
You are not a real dev unless you can build your own CPU atom by atom
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Not just your industry. Every industry is like this.
Look I'm mostly in infrastructure and I don't know much beyond core principles behind software development, I can't really cast stones. But yeah they can be surprisingly ignorant sometimes.
The subwhat?
It's the water based version of skynet.
Those are the ones who can maintain eye contact, aren’t they?
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Hiw did you get that? Put it back ontop of big ben!
The black box people entrust their secrets to? (TPM, encrypting disks, cloud, AI)
No, this, Jen, is the internet.
Ooh, that one!
Btw, i'm not Jen.
How the internet works would be more so an IT thing than a backend developer thing at least on a high level. Setting up a database doesn't mean one knows networking well in the same way they probably don't know cpu logic gate design well.
You don't need to know all the details, but I think you should understand the basic network concepts way before starting your first job as a developer
At least TCP/IP, DNS, and similar things, yeah. Maybe not so much the intricate details of the wifi6 or Bluetooth protocols.
Arguably an engineering (hardware) or systems programming issue, too. How many IT people (even the highly competent ones) could design a router, wifi chip etc.? Or know in detail what's going on in an internet exchange point?
True and how many of those guys are well versed in fiber optics at IXPs. Maybe with like 20 dudes you could get an extremely in-depth snapshot of how the internet works from transistors to transformers and everything in-between.
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I'm a principal engineer making a killing and often feel like
I'm a principle engineer, I'm broke as shit and I can see everyone else being incompetent (and outsourcing their brains to Claude) all day.
Gimmie one of these 130k jobs where I don't need to know anything, I'm sick of BS infra and k8s and shitass applications made as zillions of fucked microservices written by people who already bounced.
Knowledge without networking: low pay
Networkung without knowledge: hi pay
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To anyone feeling like this, nobody understands fully how computers work. You find your niche and you do your bit.
I don't think there's anyone alive who understands it all.
nobody understands fully how computers work
I mean, tap the breaks a little bit, here. "Fully" is doing a lot of lifting.
I will concede most people don't understand the concept of transistors, much less the electrical engineering that turns a series of transistors into a CPU. And I'll spot you that - for any given computer - it would take multiple extended papers to explain every piece of functionality.
But - broadly speaking - if you a computer engineer, you understand how a computer is engineered. If you're working in IT, you have enough of a functional knowledge that you can tell what each general component does.
And if you're a full stack developer (rather than someone who just does business logic on the backend), you should have a generalized understanding of client versus server versus database and how these pieces fit together. You should also probably have some grasp of the network stack, if for no other reason than you occasionally need to troubleshoot it.
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I mean the basic principles are very simple.
It's the scaling and the speed of it all that you can't really understanding. Also all the hackneyed unoptimized solutions that hold it all together that we're totally dependent on to this day.
The very basic principles of 1 and 0 and using them to make logic gates is easy enough to understand. Its somewhere between doing that and getting hundreds of millions of them in a space smaller than your fingernail to all work at exactly the right way to send a specific series of them to space and back in a way that cant be interpreted by anyone but the intended recipient and then translate that information to a picture of someones dick that the confusion starts up.
it's all monads bro.
god bless Leibniz.
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The Internet is a series of tubes
The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material
Came looking for this. Was not disappointed.
The worst part is when you do finally understand the protocols and standards, you still have to follow different procedures depending on where you work.
You can have a totally secure network and will never fail.
But nobody will ever be able to do anything useful on it because it will break every useful connection and ban every useful protocol on which most of your programs run.
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Imagine a series of tubes. Imagine they are connected in a manner such that it spells "study computer networking: a top-down approach."
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I see we learned nothing from the "just learn code" blowback and are trying to make the industry even more barren.
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$130k after 2 years? 2 years after I started I was making like... $60k? That's not even counting the 4.5 years I spent starting a startup and making nearly nothing.
That said, I don't live in Silicon Valley or anything. Pretty low cost-of-living here. Probably a big part of the discrepancy. I didn't reach $130k until like 20 years of experience in the industry.
Inflation is thing that make number bigger but no more money. Less, even.
You just launch Wireshark and watch packets going back and forth, and you understand it in like 10 minutes.
You don't what to know how the internet works.
It's boring and it's complex and it's fragile and basically dependent on corporations and nations being nice to each other.
Much more exciting to agonize about your self hosted DNS server.
Once you understand how internet works, you will understand that it's also pure bullshit
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that’s the rub, it doesn’t
I know this is a joke, but most people don't realize the diversity of the internet specializations where if you're not in that specialization, you can't do it
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