Great article. At 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week - 10,000 hours of practice will take 250 work weeks to achieve. That’s about 5 years of nearly non-stop programming.
Realistically, it takes closer to 10 years to achieve that goal.
Realistically, it takes closer to 10 years to achieve that goal.
Most days I program 12 hours a day, most weeks 6 or 7 days a week. On a day I'm feeling very motivated I'll program for 18 hours. I've been doing this for close to 10 years. Occasionally I'll take a month 'off' and gear down to 3-4 days a week, still long days. By my conservative estimates, I hit about 3500h/year.
I work this much because I fucking love programming, and there's nothing I'd rather do ( other than my daily surf in the mornings, of course :)
FWIW, 10 years professional experience seems to be about right, give or take, to make a solid developer. I don't think I've ever met anyone who really got there in 5. Some people shave a few years off by having done it obsessively as a teen also, but at some point that typically overlaps anyway.
Of course there is also the old saw about 1 year, 10 times being a problem. I've met plenty of developers with >10 years experience that weren't that solid, too...
Though it probably helped that I had two mentors at a job 2 years in who were ruthless about reviewing my code.
Which, among other things, are also vital.
Oversimplified: 1-2 years of not knowing what you don't know. Then 3-5 learning how to write code, then 3-5 learning how to really write software. Most of that last learning curve happens outside the editor. That's a little to linear and non-overlapping, but the essence is true I suspect.
Isn't this basically a software job? Like, get a junior role and work your way up over 5 years doing 40 hrs a week.
You can learn more about programming by giving yourself new and challenging projects at home. Doing both personal and professional work is the fastest way to progress while learning lessons from both. (commercial work teaches you the "professional" side of software engineering, which has almost nothing to do with programming)
Congrats you've found an edge case.
I've spent my whole life working in "commercial" settings, I've learned everything doing that, and it's all programming. I really don't know which places you work at where a software engineer doesn't do programming. That's the whole job, 8hrs a day.
Fuck going home and slugging another 4hrs software, unless you have the energy in which case good for you, you can fast track.