Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

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Sure? Your average 3 years of experience “senior” developer has mastered some tools but failed to abstract from them in a useful way, has a ton of growing to do, and hasn’t even considered some fundamental concepts. From there about 20% walk the hard path, 70% turn into expert beginners, and 10% fully stagnate. Of the 20% with the potential for competence, attrition knocks out a big fraction, and specialization means that you may never work with a peer in your area of expertise.

So yeah, I’m implying a pretty high bar. I guess an operational definition for me would be, “can adapt to an environment where most of their concrete skills don’t transfer.” A competent person will rise to the challenge, maybe even enjoy it if the reasons for the weird environment aren’t too stupid. The truth is, the rules change on us all the time, and if you don’t get the fundamentals, you’re a technician who needs to retrain from zero wherever that happens.

Your worldview seems incredibly harsh to me. You’re equating competence with excellence which maybe only 20% of people reach. So you’re calling 80% of software developers incompetent.

I don’t think that’s harsh at all. With the low barrier to entry and the high potential earnings, a lot of people joined for the paycheck and are profoundly uninterested in digging deeper. If anything, it’s surprising there’s as much competence as there is.

Excellence is something quite different. I’ve been in the presence of excellence. Excellence makes everybody in the room act smarter and smooths the path to competence. It shows you the way and gives you new ways of understanding the world. It’s truly rare, not 20%, maybe 0.2%.

I think I agree ( with some asterisks ). On this very forum, at one point someone suggested that lspci is some sort of higher level of command that is some sort of sign that the person is competent. They were not even arguing proxy for something else, but suggested that just knowing it somehow indicates a person that knows that area.

Obviously, knowing one command is not mastery. It is not even competence for that matter. It is just one piece of information and how you use it determines whether you are considered competent or not.

I work in heavily regulated corporate and I sometimes yearn for a fintech or other startup, but, honestly, after all those years, I am not sure if I even would make it. My mind has not been built for competent. It was built for compliance and CYA.

I've interacted with a lot of reasonably randomly selected companies after starting a consultancy last year, and honestly yes, 80% of software developers are incompetent.

It's honestly a stretch to say they're software developers as you're probably imagining, but if you walk into a random office, most people with that title won't use version control, won't ever ship, and are generally a bit concussed.

It can be hard to imagine because many times, when we find competent teams, many of the members have never directly experienced a truly average team, as the culture one acquires on those teams makes it hard to ever be accepted on a good team (frequently the weaker developers don't even understand there's anything lacking in their skillset).

I'm more sympathetic now than I was a year ago, but it's also pretty unacceptable when you remember they work at hospitals and the government!

Oh hey, love your blog! Glad I’m not alone in my assessment.

I guess i'm incredibly fortunate. I've never even heard of a team not using version control (for example) in any company i've worked in let alone experienced it myself

The "fullstack 1 week bootcamp", "learn TypeScript in 6 hours", overpayed generation was bound to breed incompetence. When people began openly embracing overemployment at a senior level it should have become clear how easy those jobs were

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