When we recruit we ask "if we tell you no more Spring and we'll work on any language as long as there's a problem to solve, how do you feel". Most either say they d feel horribly sad, or dont even comprehend how it's possible. Some are indifferent because they need the job. Still looking for the guy that says "anything can be learned in a reasonable amount of time" so it s not that obvious I suppose :(
What I think is missing is there are serious diminishing returns with more experience in a specific language or framework. 10 years of experience split 3 in Java and 7 in C# is very similar to 7 in Java and 3 in C#.
Maybe the base "lawyering" or "nursing" does change but they'll have seen a lot more examples and be able to pattern match quicker.
Also I'd rather a 20 year nurse was the Charge Nurse rather than a 5 or 10 year one, I'd expect they'd know more how to lead others (although time served isn't always an indicator of a good leader).
They've also been burned out by being 20 years in the field. Motivation is a very very crucial thing for success and motivation often times declines due to burnout. Yes said lawyer saw more cases as mine than his younger colleague but he might not be super motivated to fight for me in court as he was 20 years ago, and in any case there are constant tiny changes to laws that make the 20 years experience worth less.
Btw I think 55 year old lawyers/accountants who look for a job face pretty much the same discrimination as software developers - they are expected to be director level or there's not that many jobs for them. This thing is definitely not unique to our profession...ageism is a thing everywhere.
It's what I do at work for fun, in between my "real" development / support tasks. I profile and optimize our internal application, its loading time, user interactions, etc.
Sometimes when it's a long term I make a proof of concept and ask for permissions later, so for a while optimization becomes my actual job. Just finished a couple of months of performance tuning, actually, which I did in parallel to other tasks.
TBH there are plenty of easy, low hanging fruits since the team who wrote it wouldn't recognize a performant code if it smacked them in the face. Or they concentrated on very minor optimizations in rarely executed parts of the code and tended to bikeshed them for hours instead of actually checking what the real problems were.
I actually almost never use an actual profiler when starting, I just run under the debugger and pause the application at random instances when it appears to be stuck.
In almost all cases I find it's executing some unnecessary batch of queries, or reading from a table using an unindexed column, or redrawing parts of the screen which shouldn't be updated, or throwing and catching exceptions that were used instead of if statements, or blocked when it could run in parallel to some other computation, or doing some other unnecessary O(n^2) loops instead of using a hash table. A combination of such improvements will sometimes gain up to 20%-40% speed or even more.
When I'm done with these simple cases I start using a profiler for the that extra optimizations for those extra percentages.
I can definitely see why some people might hate that situation, because it feels like nothing is working and you dont know anything at first. But if you aren't demoralized by that, and instead find joy in learning/figuring out all those new things on a regular basis, it all feels extremely rewarding. Like, why would I dislike being paid to essentially learn a bunch of new stuff regularly and solve actual real world impact problems using that new knowledge.
I learned so much in that job, and probably would have kept it had they not relocated it to Santa Clara.
If you can work in an environment like this for a few years you definitely should, that's my advice to everyone. You'll learn so many things that will be useful over the rest of your career.
But most software aren't the linux kernel, they're small systems solving a class of specific problems as fast as possible with rotating teams, so it sometimes is just a matter of profiling this stupid hashcode function or asking why the mouse is freezing during high trading volume on the C# GUI :D
You wouldnt believe how common optimization problems are and are not related to GC, a belief I have to disprove very often (look 300ms of GC a day, but hey, you're checking an unindexed table each calculation for a trivial non essential decision, what if we fix it)
Beyond that, it's just making sure you do less stuff, and being really aggressive with profiling (what looks like it takes the most time in the code almost certainly isn't what's really taking the most time).
I routinely say something to this affect in jobs for which I a interviewing. I tell them I am not an expert in anything, but I feel I can learn anything given enough time. The caveat is in some businesses time is the limiting factor and the business doesn't have the time for me to learn.
But I'd love to work for your company or one like it.
k8s surfaced and I tried to learn about it, but it's just too complicated. After I had spent 2 weeks of intensive mind bashing at it, I still wasn't able to manually set up a 3 node initial control cluster. I gave up on it, never looked back.
Spring boot time and again, medium difficulty picking up, mostly because of the exclusive Java community, if something like that even exists. Very arrogant bunch that speaks in implicit ways and assumes you just magically know stuff.
Android is similar, always in flux, despite the many resources offered by Google you don't know what to pick. New Jetpack compose or old, ancient seeming xml layouts and configuration and navigation configuration. It's a hot mess. I tried to use AppAuth OIDC client, has a few questions, asked, the response was "We assume some prior Java and Android knowledge". Well, ok thanks for nothing.
Angular, aside from rxjs, which was royal pain in the ass to learn, straightforward, albeit a bit overly complicated and typescript gets in the way more than it should.
Jumped to Vue. Oh dear god, it's so nice and easy. None of the rxjs stupidity, no forced typescript and a large ecosystem. I can be super productive with it and create SPA, PWA, SSR, Electron apps, browser plugins, even hybrid mobile apps with it.
Rust, my arch enemy. I tried to get into it, I was drawn by hype and the promise of more performance. But knowing Go, which is just good enough for the backend, and where things make sense, Rust doesn't make sense for me. For someone coming from C++ it must seem like the 2nd coming of Jesus, for me - the Go guy - it's an abomination. Yeah I get the basics, but imports don't make any sense, structure doesn't make any sense, erorrs don't make any sense. I feel like a freaking transporter always worrying about crates and boxes and who they belong to. Not fun at all. Handle with care, careful breakable. UGH.
Yeah anything can be picked up but it depends on me being interested in what's to be picked up, the willingness of others to teach and the justification of why I need this added complexity.
I write monoliths and I'm happy with that. Now all jobs postings require Microservices and EDA. I'm unhappy with that because I don't see the need for it in most cases. Now I have to learn expensive cloud on my own, which I have ZERO motivation for. I have to make everything extra complicated, it's hard enough as is getting a project done start to finish, client and server, the monolith way. If I'd have to go Microservices I'd never finish anything and even if, when launching until people actually use my service, 3 years later I'd be bancrupt. So where am I supposed to learn about this unless employed by those people who want Microservice EDA? But they won't employ me because I have no experience with that.
Because if the garbage collector is the bottleneck you need to fix your code to not produce so much garbage.
The code had some sizable chunks of JavaScript in Strings and looked at each authorization the user had. Its been awhile, but in dynamically generating that JavaScript (ICK!) it generated several megabytes of garbage Strings by doing `script = script + "little bit more";` way too many times. This was done for each page load. 8am and hundreds of people click the page to get their start of day stuff... and... server has problems.
That particular issue was fixed by changing it all to a StringBuilder.
I've yet to see any sloppy garbage creating that is on the same order of magnitude as that JSP was.
String foo = "foo";
foo += "bar";
String foo = "foo";
foo = new StringBuilder(foo).append("bar");
String foo = "foo";
foo += "bar";
foo += "qux";
String foo = "foo";
foo = new StringBuilder(foo).append("bar");
foo = new StringBuilder(foo).append("qux");
The actual code was more complicated (and bigger strings), but the issue is that each statement is its own StringBuilder.
That prompted me to explore it and I looked at the byte code invocations at http://shagie.net/2014/08/17/what-goes-on-behind-the-scenes-...
To me that's noise and not much else.
Something I don't think a lot of folks realize is that there's two parallel industries (and pipelines to jobs in the industry). They almost never overlap.
One in which recruiting is largely done by non-technical folks who match keywords of frameworks, and where rote and learning whatever library is seen as the objective (bootcamps come to mind).
The other one where CS fundamentals are seen as the priority, and where hiring focusses on finding people who posses the skill of acquiring new knowledge.
You can guess in which one Google and FAANG or whatever the acronym is now and Stanford/MIT exists.
We routinely have & hire interns from top programs and many lesser known ones, or even non-CS degree holders.
Small aside. It describes Google and Facebook and the others several years ago. Speaking anecdotally, the impressive people at those firms are fewer and farther in between.
One of the key things that self taught developers miss is the instruction and review of the code. You write code differently if you're going to be graded or if its a throw away script.
In theory, job code that is going to last for more than a run should be written closer to the rigor of the graded code while people who have self taught have never had their code reviewed in their instructional period and tend to (not always, but tend to) write code that wouldn't stand up as well to review.
There are plenty of graduates who don't write code that stands up to review either... but there is a "you have spent a few hundred hours writing code and had it graded, and changed how you write code to get a better grade."
For a person who comes into a CS degree program without experience at coding, and they do their homework, I tend to believe that they will have code that stands up better to review and fewer bad habits than someone who followed a self taught progression.
The quality of reviewable code from a cs student is not surprisingly not great but languages like python force some standards.
Neither prepare a student like a community college. Usually the most successful group in the job market.