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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I did three years of maintenance programming on a proprietary enterprise Java Big Feaking Web App framework, fighting fires and making minor changes. I learned more about engineering in those years than in college, first job, and building two software businesses from scratch. Possibly combined. YMMV.

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I learned a lot in the six months or so (of the job I have in mind), but it very quickly plateaued and from then on it was all very much self-directed learning, automating as much of my work as possible and writing tools to make my life easier and to learn new technologies. But there's only so much of that you can do without sufficient external challenges.

Most colleagues did nothing of the sort and were roughly as productive without developing any broader skills, as far as any performance evaluations showed. It's spending an hour performing repetitive manual changes to some code, or spending 55 minutes doing it programatically in Vim and gaining some precious Vim-fu in the process. The output is the same at the end but the programmer isn't.

When there is no further scope to learn from my work (apart from pipe dream re-write projects that never materialise) and I am not doing any significant critical or analytical thinking, I leave. It sounds like your place had a lot more to teach you.

Writing and maintaining terribly-designed software is actually a really great way to learn software design. It makes it so that when you read about a technique or pattern, the application of that pattern is very real to you, in the sense of "Oh, if we had done this on component X of product Z, it would have prevent bugs like Y."

Understanding what to avoid can be as valuable as having an idea of what specifically to do. I feel like I'm learning a lot about the software development and management fields where I am now, mostly because I'm starting to realize why some things are so important as I learn about ways that the system can be terribly inefficient even while following the letter of Best Practices.

At least, I'm telling myself it's valuable experience so I can stick it out for the next six months.

You always learn a lot in your first job, whatever it is.

I think the job he referred to was not his first job

Oops, you are right. I misread.

Still your statement stand corrected. We learn a lot from our first job that is.

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