If you don't even know the basics, why do you think you can talk about more advanced things?
First, learn the basics of the trade: reading and writing code efficiently and painlessly... then you can think about high level architecture or whatever makes you feel more important. I see a lot of people who think they know the former but they can't even find a definition without clicking through some GUI menus, which takes 10x more time than if they'd just learned a couple of shortcuts. This is what is really going to compound over time, as you do this hundreds of times a day.
Besides, the author addressed your criticism in the second paragraph: _There's a lot more than just writing code that goes into being an effective software developer..._
Sure, nothing against this perspective and glad that this line was mentioned. My main point is that this kind of article doesn't deserve to be front page HN since it mostly distracts people away from more important things. I find these 'productivity porn' articles to be overly superficial and limiting to the true progress of developers... I miss articles like those written by Martin Fowler, Alan Kay and others which tried to tackle the big problems. I feel that a lot of valuable programming knowledge from the past is being swept under the rug. The software industry seems to be getting dumbed down over the past decade.
I think you're still missing the point. Knowing system architecture is not more important than knowing how to read/write code efficiently, specially when you're not designing systems most (if not any) of the time. If you can't do that latter, you most likely can't do the former... this article is good advice for those who need it... once you know those things, you will have a much easier time learning higher level concepts and software architecture - and I, unlike you, find that those are actually the large majority of articles as they're, paradoxically, easier to write as you can bullshit your way through buzzwords and make empirically unverifiable outlandish claims about "microservices", "serverless", "blockchain" or whatever else may make you sound smart, without actually providing anything of real value.
First, learn the basics of the trade: reading and writing code efficiently and painlessly... then you can think about high level architecture or whatever makes you feel more important. I see a lot of people who think they know the former but they can't even find a definition without clicking through some GUI menus, which takes 10x more time than if they'd just learned a couple of shortcuts. This is what is really going to compound over time, as you do this hundreds of times a day.
Besides, the author addressed your criticism in the second paragraph: _There's a lot more than just writing code that goes into being an effective software developer..._