[Tildey]

> I think it's so much harder now for developers to develop "mechanical sympathy"

This has always been something that’s fascinated me, how some people don’t have this feeling of “mechanical sympathy”.

Feeling “bad” (not the exact right term but I don’t know how best to describe this very intangible feeling) for a high-revving engine, or a CPU wasting cycles, or a structural component being under too much stress. Even if all of those things are within spec.

It feels like the drive to avoid that feeling ends up creating better solutions: more efficient code, a better distribution of stress across a structure, etc.

But I wonder if it’s something learned, or something that people just “have” to a certain degree. Not trying to pathologise everything, but it feels like the sort of thing that would be correlated with ASD

[wpietri]

I expect it's both! Easier to learn for some, but nobody's born knowing it.

However, we have to set ourselves up so that it's easy to learn. With my early gear, I could hear it. Hear the disk seeks. Hear the bits streaming down the wire. I could see it via the blinkenlights.

In recent years, I've had to activate it, even build it. E.g., at the top of my screen I've got mini graphs of CPU, RAM, net, and disk activity. I'm constantly re-confirming and re-challenging my intuition of what's going on. And with distributed systems, I find various ways to keep feeding myself the sort of data that, over time, turns into intuition.

And that's so hard these days! Not sure how fresh-out-of-college developers are developing those intuitions, but I hope they're finding ways.