[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/3195285/java-and-c-continu...
A lot of the principles, idioms, patterns, and instincts experts pick up transcend technology. Sure, they won't be able to optimize a framework they've never interacted with, and some bugs will probably require a trip to stack overflow, but they know how different pieces fit together, where to go for help, what it looks like when something isn't working, best practices for avoiding a huge catastrophe, and - probably most importantly - the wetware people skills required to get things done and done right.
Being a master software engineer, in other words, has almost nothing to do with the particulars of the software.
When I was working with a react code base, there are a lot of brittle and bloated components, which didn't follow React idioms at all. Make a lot of data flow out of sync.
It turns out there are a lot of senior programmers use their experiences from Java or other background to build things. They've read some redux docs, but they refuse to use follow those idioms just because it looks weird.
I don't about master software engineers. But I see front-end development or WebSocket programming differs from plain old stateless HTTP back-end programming because there's a major partaway from request response programming model. For those scenario even typical hexagon pure domain model starts to falling apart, because the model is simply not reactive.
It’s rather like mechanical engineering. Every decade brings new equipment, software tools, and manufacturing techniques but the problems (and solutions) of stress, strain, and heat transfer remain stubbornly similar.
I did some front and back-end development in the mid 00s and almost nothing still applies. Even the HTML standard is different, CSS has gotten much more complicated and JS has changed immensely.
Most importantly, people don't build web sites any more, they use various frameworks to build so-called SPAs.
The front-end is in eternal turmoil and front-end skills expire fast, good thing I got off this carousel.
That’s an interesting premise, but how do we know? What if expert beginners aren’t cost-effective but the true cost of relying on them is hidden because there isn’t enough evidence available about the success of alternatives built by developers who have reached higher levels of skill and experience?
By the time someone reaches the expert level, the technology in which they are an expert is obsolete.
I respectfully disagree. Focussing on specific tools seems to be exactly the kind of danger we’re talking about with the expert beginner syndrome. Someone who sees the bigger picture will understand common principles and techniques that are applicable with many tools, allowing them to reach proficiency with new but similar tools very quickly. This leaves them free to focus on any genuine differences and, more importantly, on the problem to be solved rather than the tools used to solve it.
Though even with those systems, there's the danger of people becoming experts of those specific systems, and resisting any push for an upgrade, no matter how important.