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If you step back for a moment it will be obvious that the idea that experience is worthless is just plain wrong. Many times I have had to deal with the work of
by guelo 9y ago
If you step back for a moment it will be obvious that the idea that experience is worthless is just plain wrong. Many times I have had to deal with the work of supposedly genius coders that is either a complete reinvention of some standard way of doing things for no benefit or overly complicated because they weren't aware of known simpler solutions.
A humble strong programmer who stands on the shoulders of the aquired knowledge of their whole industry and has learned from his failures and successes will always beat the arrogant but naive 10x super abstracting genius.
- Bucephalus355 9y agoYeah what I got from this post is “discrimination against older Americans”.
- lhorie 9y agoAren't ability to abstract and experience sort of similar? I don't really consider the ability to write a generic function (instead of copy-paste) to be the same as the ability to abstract. To write a good abstraction you need to understand both the underlying system and the consumption pattern to avoid abstraction leaks, boilerplate, hiding of useful features, etc. You can't really be sure that you're writing a good abstraction without at least having some idea of what are alternative approaches and what are their strengths and weaknesses.
- IncRnd 9y ago> Aren't ability to abstract and experience sort of similar? No. They are distinguishable from each other. One may feed the other, but they are separate. > I don't really consider the ability to write a generic function (instead of copy-paste) to be the same as the ability to abstract. To write a good abstraction you need to understand both the underlying system and the consumption pattern to avoid abstraction leaks, boilerplate, hiding of useful features, etc. You are confusing abstraction with data and function hiding. In the article abstraction means the ability to meta program, translate one problem into a simpler generic problem, etc. This is a skill most of the industry lacks _in practice_. It is a skill that all 1% coders have, but it also doesn't make experience go out the window.
- watwut 9y agoYou get better at abstraction by practicing it and by seeing other people's abstractions.
- IncRnd 9y ago> You get better at abstraction by practicing it and by seeing other people's abstractions. That can absolutely be true. Though, seeing other's abstractions is not always helpful, if what they created was poorly done or ill-thought through.
- watwut 9y agoThen it serves as example of what not to do. That helps a lot too, mostly because your own abstraction is always super clear the moment you figured it out and understand it. It is when you are forced to read it after few years or when someone else invented it you realize how complicated and difficult it in reality is.
- IncRnd 9y agoIt seems we are talking about entirely different types of abstraction. Most code contains no abstractions (not talking about language abstractions which are something else entirely and can be incredibly deleterious to maintenance of the system).
- simula67 9y agoDoes every discussion on hiring need to turn into discussion about 'ageism' ? "I want to say that I can’t stress enough that hiring based on your current technology stack or domain is extremely wrong" "This is especially useful when you are hiring junior developers. You are not looking for hard practical skills, instead you are looking for the potential." Clearly he is talking about keyword based hiring
- potta_coffee 9y agoExperience is not worthless but it doesn't necessarily correlate to skill. I've worked with developers who have been at it for 25 years who were mentally inflexible and wrote awful, un-maintainable spaghetti code. I've also worked with experienced older devs with astonishing skill levels.