If You Want to Be a Senior Developer, Stop Focusing on Syntax | Hacker News Reader

If You Want to Be a Senior Developer, Stop Focusing on Syntax

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22 pointskiyanwang10 comments

I totally understand the message the author is trying to convey - but I don’t think throwing syntax under the bus is the right approach. That would be like telling an aspiring writer to stop focusing on grammar and punctuation.

I think the real takeaway is something that has been echoed more and more recently: we only have so many cognitive cells in our battery and one must choose their battles wisely.

Some engineers will StackOverflow their way through the company until they're a senior engineer, then they don't even have to know the language.... A common mindset:

"Why should I learn the language, syntax, ecosystem etc... When I can just Google my problem"

It's amazing we live in an age where anyone's programming problem can be solved through a simple query to the Google...

> Some engineers will StackOverflow their way through the company until they're a senior engineer

This says more about the company's definition of "senior engineer" than about StackOverflow.

(Nothing wrong with StackOverflow, and knowing how to search for answers there is definitely a valuable skill, but it's not enough to become a senior engineer)

There is significant value in being able to understand what one needs to google to begin. Then from there it is not as trivial as it may seem to determine the most appropriate answer, and then to adjust that answer to work within your code base.

You seem to be speaking of this behaviour in a way that implies negativity. Of course it is bad is a Sr. Dev truly can't write any original code, but there's nothing wrong with the vast majority of ones codebase being snippets of solutions from the internet. As a matter of fact this method likely saves the company that employs the developer a good deal of time and therefore, money,

There's a lot of value in StackOverflow, but it basically teaches programmers error-driven development where you stumble through a problem by mindlessly Googling errors until you've cobbled something together that works...

Even Joel Spolsky (creator of SO) has brought up some negative impacts of StackOverflow (on his old podcast at some point), saying nobody needs to learn anything anymore, just jump into the code and google the error messages.

I'm guilty of this too, I just think it's a shame that Googling is preferable over learning...

It wouldn't be so bad if most library documentation wasn't so poor on average.

I’m curious if you programmed professionally before SO.

I feel the average junior developer’s, or even senior developer’s, for that matter, code was a lot worse than the average SO response, which has now become the baseline for all types of devs, so their code is at worst as bad.

I think the main reason is many developer lacks the skill of systematic learning. Never attempt to read the basic manual / document and understand the basic theory behind the technology

> just jump into the code and google the error messages.

You cannot develop an app, evaluate different solutions, choose an architecture, address performance problems, etc, via StackOverflow. StackOverflow is for specific problems; it can help you sort out some errors, because most of them aren't exactly coding problems.

A senior engineer's job isn't just to make an app compile, so you cannot reach this position just by searching SO.

Maybe it's just the sort of questions I have, but almost every programming question I have seems to end up having at least 2-5 different answers, and the easiest to find one is wrong, or maybe not exactly wrong, but really terrible in the approach.

When I look for an answer, I do look to Google and/or stackoverflow, but then I immediately turn to figuring out how to find the "real" answer.

Also, a lot of times, Google's approach to identifying the single answer to your question means it masks any similar question, making it severely handicapped in answering anything difficult. But if it wasn't a difficult question, I wouldn't be asking!

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