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Comment by mansoon | Hacker News Reader

Me.

I was the conceptologist. I learned by fitting things into chunks.

Then I got to the world of tables of apis and frameworks and shitty microservices and all of it ad-hoc, and found that my mind, tuned to do what I found valuable and beautiful in the world, was worthless.

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That's how I thought until I started going deep into some technologies that have very strong technical foundations:

- Databases: Postgres, ClickHouse - Back-end frameworks: Ruby on Rails - Front-end frameworks: Elm

I lost count of the times I was reading the documentation of these projects and had my mind blow thinking "The person that came up with this concept was a genius! I'm glad I get to learn it."

This is how I feel about FeathersJS. It just feels like a really sane way to design an API

Wow. That’s exactly how I feel. I’ve always focused on concepts over specifics, thinking that I’ll figure out the details as I do a thing. People don’t seem to want that, though. Maybe I’m looking for the wrong kind of work.

Please let me know if you ever figure out what kind of work fits...

I feel like the move would have been to go very deep on something. Too late for that now.

I think I've solved this for myself. I'm a concept-first learner too, but don't have that much of a problem learning ad-hoc details of random libraries and tools. I think what's going on is that, at some point early on, my brain figured out that if the thing doesn't seem to fit a coherent, sensible concept, then there's likely a story explaining the delta. I started to think mostly in terms of guessing what kind of problems and tradeoffs the author faced, which would explain the peculiar design. I found myself searching for information about past iterations, previous use cases - anything that could let me correctly guess at the story behind the seemingly random thing.

This works for me pretty well in software. I still have problems with things requiring memorization, though - like some bits of chemistry, or the grammar of German language.

I'm incapable of retaining the ad-hoc specifics. Most of the shit they want me to learn I use once and then it's on to other shit. I'll never improve like that.

Wow, this sounds like me. I'm good at conceptualizing and rarely needed to study for my comp sci classes. I was actually decently skilled when I first started, working on monoliths. Now I'm struggling because of poorly documented apis, incomplete requirements, and overbearing tech debt or messy technical design. If only I could find a job with an orderly structure.

Right???

I started out in a 300 kloc c++ codebase.

I've never had a better environment since =/

This is exactly how I feel, and why I don't understand why tech interviews are the way they are right now

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