Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

I have an alternate theory: about 10% of developers can actually start something from scratch because they truly understand how things work (not that they always do it, but they could if needed). Another 40% can get the daily job done by copying and pasting code from local sources, Stack Overflow, GitHub, or an LLM—while kinda knowing what’s going on. That leaves 50% who don’t really know much beyond a few LeetCode puzzles and have no real grasp of what they’re copying and pasting.

Given that distribution, I’d guess that well over 50% of Makefiles are just random chunks of copied and pasted code that kinda work. If they’re lifted from something that already works, job done—next ticket.

I’m not blaming the tools themselves. Makefiles are well-known and not too verbose for smaller projects. They can be a bad choice for a 10,000-file monster—though I’ve seen some cleanly written Makefiles even for huge projects. Personally, it wouldn’t be my first choice. That said, I like Makefiles and have been using them on and off for at least 30 years.

> That leaves 50% who don’t really know much beyond a few LeetCode puzzles and have no real grasp of what they’re copying and pasting.

Small nuance: I think people often don’t know because they don’t have the time to figure it out. There are only so many battles you can fight during a day. For example if I’m a C++ programmer working on a ticket, how many layers of the stack should I know? For example, should I know how the CPU registers are called? And what should an AI researcher working always in Jupyter know? I completely encourage anyone to learn as much about the tools and stack as possible, but there is only so much time.

> I completely encourage anyone to learn as much about the tools and stack as possible, but there is only so much time.

That seems like a weird way to think about this. I mean, sure, there's no time today to learn make to complete your C++ ticket or whatever. But yesterday? Last month? Last job?

Basically, I think this matches the upthread contention perfectly. If you're a working C++ programmer who's failed to learn the Normal Stable of Related Tools (make, bash, python, yada yada) across a ~decade of education and experience, you probably never will. You're in that 50% of developers who can't start stuff from scratch. It's not a problem of time, but of curiosity.

> I mean, sure, there's no time today to learn make to complete your C++ ticket or whatever. But yesterday? Last month? Last job?

That seems like a weird way to think about this. Of course there was no time in the past to learn this stuff, if you still haven't learned it by the present moment. And even if there were, trying to figure out whether there perhaps was some free time in the past is largely pointless, as opposed to trying to schedule things in the future: you can't change the past anyhow, but the future is somewhat more malleable.

To be clear: I'm not suggesting a time machine, and I'm not listing any particular set of skills everyone must have. I'm saying that excusing the lack of core job skills by citing immediate time pressure is a smell. It tells me that that someone probably won't ever learn weird stuff. And in software development, people who don't learn weird stuff end up in that 50% bucket posited upthread.

You don't seem to understand that make is not a core skill.

In an ideal world build tools would just work and people wouldn't have to think about them at all.