Frankly though, when I bring stuff like this up, it feels like I'm being mocked than the other way around - like we're the minority. And sadly, I'm not sure if anything can ultimately be done about it. People just don't know what they don't know. Some things you can't tell people despite trying to, they just won't get it.
And it wasn't redone in assembly, it was C++ with SIMD intrinsics, which might as well just be assembly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge3aKEmZcqY&list=PLEMXAbCVnm...
most programmers are not able to solve a problem like that in 20 lines of assembly or whatever, and no amount of education or awareness is going to change that. acting as if they can is just going to come across as arrogant.
> Half the things they are fixing, if not more, are created by the abstractions in the first place
Unlike the above post though, in my experience, it's less often devs (at least the best ones) who want to keep moving away from the silicon, but more often management. Everywhere I have worked, management wants to avoid control over the lower-level workings of things and outsource or abstract it away. They then proceed to wonder why we struggle with the issues that we have, despite people who deal with these things trying to explain it to them. They seem to automatically assume that higher level abstractions are inherently better, and will lead to productivity gains, simply because you don't have to deal with the underlying workings of things. But the example I gave, is reason for why that that isn't always necessarily the case. Fact is, sometimes problems are better and more easily solved in a lower-level abstraction.
But as I had said, in my experience, management often wants to go the opposite way and often disallows us control over these things. So, as an engineer who wants to solve the problems as much as management or customers want their problems solved, hope to achieve by "bringing it up" in cases which seem appropriate, a change which empowers us to actually solve such problems.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm not saying lower-level is always the way to go. It always depends on the circumstances.
Hold on there a sec: WHAT?!
Engineers tend to solve their problems differently and the circumstances for those differences are not always clear. I'm in this field because I want to learn as many different approaches as possible. Did you never experience a moment when you could share a simpler solution to a problem with someone and could observe first hand when they became one of todays lucky 10'000[0]? That's anything but arrogant in my book.
Sadly, what I can increasingly observe is the complete opposite. Nobody wants to talk about their solutions, everyone wants to gatekeep and become indispensable, and criticism isn't seen as part of productive environments as "we just need to ship that damn feature!". Team members should be aware when decisions have been made out of lazyness, in good faith, out of experience, under pressure etc.