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Comment by gota | Hacker News Reader

Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true:

> Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell.

This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship. You, the junior, tag along a senior. You work under a shop that is led by a senior-senior that is called a master. Apprentices become craftsmen, craftsmen become masters. AFAIK, the master does not 'offload' project guidance into non-craftsmen, it is an expected part of the craftsmen role to be project/product managers/owners.

I've said this a million times to close friends and at this point I'm only half joking. We, and I'm including myself in the 'developer' crowd although I may not deserve it, have really dropped the ball in not being a 'guild' since way back when. At least since the late 1980's; and certainly since before the Original Boom of software dev as a profession (I'm assuming it was late 90's? I know not)

(Although I suspect that if that were the case we'd have fewer developers throughout the 00s and 10s, which may have impacted the development of the field itself in unexpected, but likely negative, ways)

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Creating new projects from scratch can trip up even experienced professional developers because in most jobs you come in, work an existing codebase, and iterate. Even if you need a new service or app, you often start with a copy-paste or a common template. When the team needs something more new, usually there's just one person who sets that up. Setting up the whole project from scratch and making all the 0-to-1 choices is much less common.

An apprentice model doesn't really change that. Your average electrician gets called to many more "here's new construction that we're wiring from scratch" jobs than your average corporate engineer gets "we need to set up a new project from scratch without copying any of our existing files or folders."

> Creating new projects from scratch can trip up even experienced professional developers because in most jobs you come in, work an existing codebase, and iterate.

I’ve worked on greenfield projects for so long (15+ years at this point) that my experience is the exact opposite. The few times I’ve had to contribute to an existing code base was a painful experience of figuring out where everything is, and why everything is done in such a weird way.

There is no better feeling than doing that first `git commit -m 'initial commit'`

In a way, it is interesting and a bit frightening to know that my experience is very different than most engineers are socialized and molded for team work and daily standups and code review which are alien (and scary) to me.

What are you doing, where you're solely working on greenfield projects? I remember a professor of mine saying something specifically on never trusting a Software Engineer that has never had to work on legacy code.

I'm a full-stack consultant (the actual full stack, not whatever kids mean these days) and deliver "solutions" to clients. I've got my fair share of legacy code to maintain, don't worry. (I have this Django app I wrote 15 years ago that I should really port to Elixir which is my main thing these days - but there's no money in rewriting an entire application that's in production for that long)

Here's my 2 cents: take any advice on professional matters from someone that has never left academia with a heaping dose of salt.

(the actual full stack, not whatever kids mean these days)

Can you clarify what that means to you? The full stack of modern web solutions spans from datacenter hardware selection to client device PCB design, and I don't think any single person can realistically manage all of that by themselves.

I think "modern fullstack" is knowing React/Svelte/whatever frontend tech and being able to plug that in to Firebase or some all-in-one backend system that provides everything from user management to databases and messaging.

They wouldn't be able to spin up a RabbitMQ queue and Postgres on bare metal.

Please, don't ever spin up a PostgreSQL instance for a client on bare-metal in $CURRENT_YEAR. Some jerk-off did that for a current customer of mine, and now they're having issues with their migration from SUSE to RHEL in production.

Also, this dick measuring contest on who is the fullest-stack developer sounds ridiculous.

I've worked on very VERY brown field projects for 25 years, no green in sight, so I actually have no clue how to bootstrap many of the languages I use professionally (Java + C#) :D

Maybe that's why I like LLM-enhanced programming, I can use it to get the project up to speed and I'm perfectly capable of taking over after that. I'm not that precious about the scaffolding used to bring the project up.

When I worked at a startup (ans therefore where these skills are useful) and was interviewing, this was actually one of my questions - I’d ask people what they would do on setting up a new Python project. It is quite telling to learn who has never done anything from scratch (some people couldn’t even get as far as creating a Git repository) vs those who have done the full process and understand what “good” looks like. It wasn’t a “no hire” signal but it certainly set seniority.

> This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship.

And in our modern world, universities are still the best place for such apprenticeship. Not the ones per Mark Trevor's words (https://marktarver.com/professor.html), of course, but a self-respecting university will train their students with progressively challenging and practical assignments. We started with implementing simple data structures and algorithms and solving simple puzzles all the way to implementing toy OSes, databases, persistent data structures, compilers, CPUs, discrete simulations, machine learning models. We started with implementing functions and individual components and quicly to building things from scratch. I'm forever grateful to the training I received in my univerity.

I'm self-taught and did pretty much all of those things. All it took was reading the docs.

I downvoted you because you are exceptional but the rest of the world is not. Most people benefit from traditional education, software engineering is not different.

BS. Everything I learned from college was me anki and youtube. Lectures were wasting me time from actually studying. Most people I talked to they said. They didn't follow the lecturer at all just sat there like me for the attendence. There is no reason why we should continue to have mandatory lectures when you can just record them like Gilbert Strang did.

its not THAT exceptional. I myself know several people who bootstrapped themselves into being descent software engineers. Traditional education is certainly fine for some people but its not the only way for the masses to learn. whats missing is the discipline of pushing yourself when you have no immediate extrinsic motivation.

You might have had a point a few decades ago when the information itself was difficult to fine but with the internet and online courses, its easier than ever to teach yourself in a "nontraditional" setting.

I was a self-taught software developer who already made money with programming for ~10 years before I took my first computer science classes.

Those classes unlocked a whole new level of programming for me. I just didn't know what I didn't know before.

People keep reinventing the same shit if they haven't learned about it before.

Sure, you can learn many things online. But for most things you just don't even know that they exist, you wouldn't know to search for them.

I downvoted you because I kindly disagree. Seems like that's how you do it.

it only becomes exceptional after you start and continue doing it. I was not capable of self-learn before I applied to it.

> And in our modern world, universities are still the best place for such apprenticeship.

I spent a good portion of my life in Universities -- and went as far as one can go in terms of educational credentials and taught at the university level -- and I cannot disagree more.

Universities produce job skills incidentally, if at all. It's simply not their goal [1]. Even today, at the best CS programs in the country, it's possible to get a degree and still not be better than a very junior engineer at a software company (and quite a few graduates are worse).

> We started with implementing simple data structures and algorithms and solving simple puzzles all the way to implementing toy OSes, databases, persistent data structures, compilers, CPUs, discrete simulations, machine learning models.

This was not my experience, nor is it what I have seen in most university graduates. It's still quite possible for a CS grad to get a degree having only theoretical knowledge in these topics, and no actual ability to write code.

This leaves open the question of where "the best place" is to learn as-practiced programming [2], but I tend to agree with the root commenter that the best programmers come up through a de facto apprenticeship system, even if most of them spend time in universities along the way.

[1] Their goal is to produce professors. You may not realize this if you only went as far as the undergraduate diploma, but that is mostly what academics know, and so it is what they teach. The difference between the "best" CS programs and the others is that they have some professors with actual industry experience, but even then, most of them are academics through and through.

[2] Code academies suck in their own ways.

> Universities produce job skills incidentally, if at all. It's simply not their goal [1]. Even today, at the best CS programs in the country, it's possible to get a degree and still not be better than a very junior engineer at a software company (and quite a few graduates are worse).

Having been self taught in both software and electrical engineering, I’ve experienced a lot of this.

In EE, it’s amazing how many graduates come into the job without ever having used Altium/KiCAD/Cadence for a nontrivial project or who can give you a very precise definition of impedance but don’t know how to break out an engineering calculator to set design rules for impedance controlled differential pairs. Or worse yet, people who can give you all the theory of switching model power supply but can’t read datasheets and select parts in practice.

Yeah the practical part is what does it. Students need time on their particular niche's software programs. Outside of Altium/KiCAD/Cadence there's also Mastercam, ANSYS HFSS, LTspice / SIMetrix/Keysight/CATIA/Synopsys/Dymola, among others.

Yea, I started to learn how to program in my early teens and made a lot of progress just messing around on my own. Then I went to University for a CSE degree and spent 4 years basically doing applied math. Yuck. Finally once I got out of University and into industry, I started learning again practical things like debugging, build systems, unit testing, application development, and so on. My programming skill growth quickly restarted.

Looking back, I'd consider my University degree to be essentially a 4 year pause on growing my programming skills.

Thank you for saying this clearly. I love universities. They are so far from supporting apprenticeships. Even phds — they don’t do enough work for the senior professors to count as apprenticeships. Maybe postdocs. But the system is not great—we need guilds.

I studied computer science in a university, not because I wanted to learn programming, but because I wanted to study computer science.

I admit that most development tasks don't need the knowledge you get from a CS degree, but some do.

But in computer science, it's also totally possible to be self-taught. I've learnt a lot on my own, especially after university. Computer science is good for that because it's generally accessible: you don't need an expensive lab or equipments, you can just practice at home on your laptop.

I'll disagree with your "disagreement" - of course, I went to a relatively unique school: Waterloo computer engineering with co-op in the 90s. 8 study semesters, 6 work semesters. Clearly lets you see what "work" is like, and which parts of your studies seem relevant. Obviously, no one will use 100% of their engineering courses - they're designed to cover a lot of material but not specialize in anything.

True, grad school was focused on making professors - I did a master's, ended up being a lecturer for a while. Now a 20+ year software developer in the valley. But undergrad was focused on blending theoretical and practical skills. If they didn't, employers would have stopped coming back to hire co-op students, and would stop hiring the students at a high rate when they graduate.

I COULD have learned a lot of software myself - I was already coding in multiple languages before attending and had a side-software-contract before ever going in - and that was before the "web", so I had to buy and study books and magazines and I was able to do that reasonably well (IMHO).

Yet I never regretted my time in school. In fact, I had a job offer with my last employer before going back to grad school, and they hired me as a summer contractor at a very nice hourly rate back then.

> Even today, at the best CS programs in the country, it's possible to get a degree and still not be better than a very junior engineer at a software company (and quite a few graduates are worse).

I think it's important to differentiate the personal achievement of students and the training offered by their universities. For instance, the courses offered by CMU and MIT are super useful - insightful, practical, intense, and sufficiently deep. That said, it does not mean that every MIT/CMU graduate will reap the benefit of the courses, even though many will.

It goes without saying that it does NOT mean people can't teach themselves. I'm just saying universities offer a compelling alternative to training next gen of engineers.

Polytechnic schools seem to do this well, research universities not so much.

I agree, however the model was clearly designed that the university considers first employment to be the apprenticeship and the university education to be rhetorical background education that makes it possible to follow and keep up in an apprenticeship. So really, the issue is companies don’t properly invest in training juniors… because they will leave after 2 years anyway… which is because they won’t provide them pay bumps equivalent to a change in position, which is also their fault, leading them to hire pricier individuals who just left another company looking for a pay bump instead. They pay the same in the end but trade individuals around pointlessly to do it, and have to retrain them on their software stack.

Kinda funny when you think about it.

I went to a good university with a decent CS program, and I'd definitely say I learned a lot more on the job than I did in school. I didn't always have any mentors to speak of but I did have at least a couple who were good.

I think both can true. I learned a lot in my university, and my learning has been carrying me ever since. Case in point, it was never a problem for me to pick up functional programming or programming-language concepts in general because the courses on programming languages were so wonderful. I had no problem tap into formal verifications or data science or distributed systems because my universities gave me solid fundamentals. Heck, I was not even a good student back then. It was Sam Toueg of the failure detector fame who taught us distributed systems, yet I was lost most of the time and I thought he was talking some abstract nonsense. Only after I graduated could I appreciate the framework of analyzing distributed systems that he taught us.

On the other hand, we certainly learned more after graduation (or something is wrong, right?). When I was in the AI course, the CS department was all about symbolic reasoning I didn't even know that Hinton was in the same department. I think what matters is the core training stayed with me and helped me learn new stuff year after year.

My own experience: https://www.quora.com/Could-online-coding-programs-and-codin...

And my wife's experience: https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-learn-computer-scie...

In short, the training that we got from our universities was invaluable, and I always feel fortunate and grateful to my CS department.

I use LLMs for teaching me how code exactly like that, I am the apprentice and the LLM move forward only If I say so, it does only explaining and teaching I do the writing. I much prefer it than looking for the next course or tutorial. The tutorial hell is mainly a problem of the people who decided that they can be teachers. From the countless books and courses I have purchased nothing actually teaches you anything, the whole model of teaching someone how to code is completely wrong in my opinion. At this point it is just plain frustration I rather prefer to tell the LLM to look for the latest documentation of a language or just go and look the documentation myself, a library, or whatever, and come up with a plan from it. My only gripe is that I am not sure if the LLM hallucinates and it is actually looking at the thing I pointed to or just spits the things that It was pre-trained on.

+1 I dropped school relatively early (I was extremely bored and the way of education was certainly somewhere close from the Stone Age times). I did an apprenticeship as software engineer with some (extremely useless) school component. Most of the time in the late 90ties was trial and error, for me, the master and the master of masters. Playing around with Linux and make it ISDN routers with servers for websites built in HTML, Perl, PHP. This was devops (before it got hyped) and real engineering by figuring stuff out with almost no documentation, a lot of crazy creativity and push the boundaries of what’s possible. And it reminds me just a little like today’s world with AI and vibe coding just on a complete different level and with significant more pressure…fun times :-).

Tech has the issue where any sort of gatekeeping is seen as bad because people in the field have so much hubris they think they can never be replaced and there has been a coordinated effort by capital to flood the field with labor to drive salaries down. You could go further and say the complete lack of professional standards is why we have this leetcode humiliation ritual interview process which has nothing to do with the actual job has become the gatekeeper.

You learn by doing and thinking.

Not reading and watching.

Pure and simple.

Yes, but even if we all agree the problem with education at scale remains - there is a very finite and limited amount of 'attention' from craftsmen/masters to distribute, which limits the amount of apprentices.

The alternative has been to massify education for 'students' (not apprentices) in passive lectures with 'exercises/homework', which does not work as well for most things and particularly for crafts.

BTW for a very minor portion of the population the 'student' route is just as effective as the 'apprentice' route, but these are in my experience the exception

If you train at the gym with bad form, you will hurt yourself in the long run. A person with a personal trainer giving feedback at the right time, decreasing the feedback loop from years to seconds will always outperform someone trying to figure it out on their own(assuming the trainer is competent).

If you are trying to teach yourself programming and never read any documentation, you're going to make a mess of it.

If you're trying to work out at the gym on your without reading anythi g about it first, you'll probably make a mess of it.

There's a lot of info out there about how to train at the gym, as well as how to write code. People who know how to read can certainly get a long way by reading a few simple tutorials.

I disagree with the reading part, as that's a major component of learning.

Programming only clicked for me when I had a goal in mind and started reading documentation: change the color of the button when I click it. How to do something on click? How to change the color of an element? Etc. From there my goals became bigger and reading documentation and examples along the way got me to where I am today.

Video is the true deception. I was trying to design patterns for sewing recently, and as a novice I watched a few videos. And none of them ever stuck with me on how to design something myself. It was only when I read a book about pattern design that the concepts stuck. I think the friction of reading, parsing the info, and then acting on it is what allows learning to happen.

My point is reading does not provide substantial value, it provides barely any because you have to net out the opportunity cost of time spent reading. The gains are realised when you think and do something with the information consumed.

Therefore reading and watching are not the key to success.

Perhaps we're considering reading with different perspectives. Reading a novel? Yeah sure. Reading documentation just to read it? Sure.

But it's essentially impossible to learn without information about a subject.

How do you suppose someone learn programming without reading documentation? Without reading code examples? This is active reading compared to passive reading, such as reading a novel.

Let's take two hypothetical people:

One reads all of the C++ spec from cover to cover. Remembers every single word of it, doesn't write a line of code.

One just starts fumbling around, writing code, reading just enough docs to get where they need to go.

Which one is the better programmer?

Reading and watching fills your brain with whats possible

Doing and thinking solidifies it, teaches you to use the things you've read about

You need both

When I'm learning something new I like to skim a bunch of content upfront to get an idea of what's there

> fills your brain with whats possible

It doesn't. That's the problem.

It fills your brain with procedure. For a short time.

If you solidify the procedure, you will be able to perform that one task. What on software development is still useless.

Only at the next step, where you know so much that you can think of your own new procedures that you have basic competence at software development. There are other professions like this, but for most, basic competence happens before you even solidify the procedures.

If you understand the difference between greedy algorithms and non-greedy, you also understand the difference between learning by doing and building a solid foundation before tackling a problem.

For most simple problems, it's true that the taking the seemingly shortest path to solving the problem is good enough. There are other problems where you simply have to understand the abstractions at a deeper level than you can visualize in code. It's there that things like reading a textbook or taking a course can help.

Can you give an example?

I mean: if you're learning a new language/library/framework it's really useful to have a broad idea of what the tooling for it looks like.. what features does it offer? You can look up the details when you need to

It's really useful to have a broad knowledge of algorithms and what problems they're applicable to. Look up the details later

If you're going into a new domain.. know the broad, high level pieces of it. You don't need to pre-learn the specifics of websockets but if you don't even know they exist or what they're useful for in web development.. that's kind of a problem

Even more abstract concepts like how to design code there's a lot of good info out there

If every generation had to re-invent the wheel from scratch we'd never get anywhere. The problem people have is they think ONLY reading is enough

> Reading and watching fills your brain [with dopamine] with whats possible

FTFY. Then you have to do it yourself, and none of that instant gratification comes. Tutorials are junk food that appear useful. Looking at one to solve a specific problem might help, trying to learn something by consuming an unspecified amount of hours watching randos with polished youtube videos is akin to scrolling TikTok and feeling you’re doing something useful.

Read/watch, do, fail, think, read/watch, do, fail, think, ...

Learning requires effort and access to knowledge. And of course, learning requires that you know how to learn. This is what school tries to teach.

Read, eval, print, loop.

Learn, apply, review, repeat.

A bit of a shameless plug: join a coding community [0] putting in-person meetups above online interactions [1]. It doesn't have to be ours, just any group of developers invested in the idea of craftsmanship. This may not solve your concerns directly but it's a step in the right direction.

From where I stand, we're never going to find what you want in the workplace for reasons which predate LLMs: job hopping, remote/hybrid work, incurious managers etc.

[0] https://handmadecities.com/meetups

[1] https://abner.page/post/exit-the-feed/

> This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship.

I would argue that, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is access to knowledge.

It used to be that you had to sit next to a master to access the knowledge of the master. Now in many fields, you can just find it on the internet and learn at home, at your pace.

Everyone is different, what's best for you may not be what's best for me. But what is absolutely necessary is access to knowledge.

Actually, even before apprenticeship comes drilling. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

My problem with apprenticeship is that my workflow simply isn’t optimized for performative demonstration. It’s messy, haphazard, and a junior would have to sit around watching me do a whole lot of nothing at times. I don’t want to teach, I want to get work done.

Juniors need to just accept they will have to learn the hard way, on their own, asking occasional questions and looking at tutorials until stuff sticks.

Any dev who consists themselves senior and hasn't developed some mentorship skills doesn't deserve the title. Even if it's just freeing up half an hour a week to pair program with a junior on something or talk through their current assignment.

performance aversiveness is a personal problem and should be worked through

Uncle Bob has been saying this for decades.

But - I'm not really sure it's necessary in software. The skillset can be entirely self taught if you're intelligent enough. There are an abundance of resources and all it requires is a terminal. Good software engineering principles can be covered in a 200 page book.

You can't say the same for trades like plumber, electrician, etc. which still use apprenticeships.

> The skillset can be entirely self taught if you're intelligent enough.

> You can't say the same for trades like plumber, electrician, etc. which still use apprenticeships.

Yes you can, and yet they still have apprenticeships.

Sorry, but in no way can you equate an electrical apprenticeship with being self taught. The variety and complete insanity of wiring in different installations requires wide exposure (under an experienced mentor) to be a competent electrician.

Sure you can be self taught in plumbing. Overall we are just much less accepting of big screw ups with plumbing and electricity than we are with most software.

I'm skeptical of this. There is an extremely large barrier to entry in terms of the cost of the supplies and hardware. And how would you even begin to realistically get practice/experience working on and solving the countless issues plumbers are responsible for, all in different contexts with different setups? And then there's also a safety issue - plenty of environments and tasks plumbers are responsible for can be quite dangerous. Danger and self-learning isn't entirely a non-starter, but it's certainly an part of the 'balance' here.

By contrast software just isn't comparable at all. You can sit at your desk, pay $0, and the only limitations to your experience is the amount of time you're willing to dedicate.

I am honestly very glad there was nothing like that when I was young. I could learn by doing things, reading things and maybe messing up and fixing after myself.

I also do not think history shows that was the most effective. That is how it was done when it was the only option.

> This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship.

Citation needed - at least for anything software development. Every single respectable software dev I met around my age bracket or older (40+), was self-taught. Mostly because in the 80s or 90s there wasn't much opportunity. But computers shipped with handbooks how to program them, at that time.

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