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Comment by RealityVoid | Hacker News Reader

> Engineering has never been, nor will it ever be, about "repetition" or "memorization."

Having memory of how to do things and techniques and tools and patterns is absolutely important for solving problems. The very reason experienced engineers are just better at many classes of problems.

> This cleverness can't be augmented by AI, and it can't be rotted by AI: it's something that's innate to people

I argue "cleverness" is a learned and honed skill by exposure and exercise. I just reject the idea that some people are just incapable of original thought. They just didn't get the circumstances to flourish.

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> I argue "cleverness" is a learned and honed skill by exposure and exercise.

Even if I were to concede this point, it's certainly not honed by the kind of exercise that OP is advertising. We are deep in Max Howell's "invert a binary tree" territory here.

Doing leetcode absolutely makes your system design better and you don't deploy algorithms you don't know.

Invert a binary tree is kind of a strawman for the absolutist claim that you don't improve the cleverness by practice, but it's an example that not all the practice is useful

> Doing leetcode absolutely makes your system design better

Only up to the pretty low point. After that, it becomes completely absolutely useless. And people collectively spent astonishing amounts of time training that for job interviews long after the "absolutely useless" bar was passed.

> Having memory of how to do things and techniques and tools and patterns is absolutely important for solving problems. The very reason experienced engineers are just better at many classes of problems.

At least in my experience, the best engineers have a vast catalog of problems and solutions, algorithms, architecture patters, data structures etc and almost nothing comes from scratch. The worst engineers do everything from scratch without much/any understanding that the problem they are facing (or a variation of it) has been solved before in 6 different ways with varying tradeoffs.

“Master all prior art before naively trying to do anything on your own” - also, very much does way more harm than good in a learning context. (it narrows the top of the funnel for no good reason)

The gripe seems to be the negative effect on the team, business/project outcome etc, sure work doesn’t pay you to write your own compiler.

But again, its such a disservice to learning to dictate a shape, largely academic, largely top down (vs bottoms up failing & flailing).

No one said anything about learning everything before doing anything, and nobody suggested they were told to do it or how they did it.

And, bad engineers can become good ones. All the good ones were terrible at some point....

Yes, the main issue I had was regarding how anyone can get good without first being bad. Your comment highlighted a very particular worst engineer persona, as if there was an obvious way they could have avoided it preemptively.

Since we’re talking about learning in particular, my callout is it’s in no way helpful to shame people that aren’t good at something. It’s counterproductive.

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