Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry to say you're completely wrong.

It took me 15 years of development to start feeling like i really knew what i was doing (eventhough i have a CS university degree), and i keep understanding new things every month on my job. And that's just the coding part, i'm not even mentionning the human aspects when working in a team.

The way i analyse a problem, approach technological solutions, design system architectures, pick a programming language, are all extremely different from how i did it 5 or 10 years ago.

For a lot of us, software development is much more similar to craftsmanship than breakthrough scientific research.

View on HN

This is a function of what youre exposed to. Go work for a big software company and switch teams to a different domain every six months. After three years, you will rival almost any engineer. The issue is people get mostly worthless or extremely siloed experience, and so they take a long time to build a complete picture of how to write software in their head.

Switch teams to a different domain every six months?

In the domains I’ve worked in, it might take six months just to get the basic idea sketched out and working. The current project has a timeline of 8 years to full completion — two years just to get to the first minimal release for a subset of our problem domain and the hardware to run it on.

It sounds like you’ve been doing unchallenging work in unchallenging domains and have acquired a much too inflated opinion of yourself in the process.

I've worked on teams with 6 month ramp up times. Almost always this happens because there is an absurd amount of domain/business knowledge encoded in some massive 500k line code base. Tenured engineers gate keep with domain knowledge. The real learning happens by switching between working on those types of systems and then moving to greenfield to implement the patterns you observed.

How do you know if you did a good job if you leave after a few months? Did you leave a beautiful work of art, a bug-ridden unmaintainable mess for others to clean up, or anything in-between?

A large part of experience is doing things that seemed like good and reasonable idea at the time, and then discovering that it actually wasn't. And how do you know what are and aren't good ideas? By sticking around and seeing what does and doesn't work.

I am really strongly against this. I do not like this kind of behavior. You only barely scrap the surface.

i've been doing both big corp, small start up, freelance gigs, backend, mobile app, web development, huge system migration with running customers, database design, etc.

I can guarantee you that 4/5 years xp is absolutely nothing. You can barely scratch the surface.

what you do start get after 5 years however, is the feeling that you've seen it all ( because you may have, but only very superficially). It makes people like that extremely dangerous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com