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Half of my income is from training people in JS and Python. I have 50% of those missions that are requested to be "advanced" courses. The vast majority of the

Half of my income is from training people in JS and Python. I have 50% of those missions that are requested to be "advanced" courses. The vast majority of the participants are not up to the task. They are paid professionnals, but they consistently overestimate they level, skills and needs. They often are not very good, and of course, they don't know what they don't know. So I always check for that first, and rewrite my course on the fly to include the untold pre-requisites I identify. I don't tell them I do this to avoid making them feel bad. Nobody wants to hear "dude, you wanna learn react and you never used an arrow function, wtf ?" even if being comfy with JS is a listed requirement on the site. Bottom line: most devs are not experts, and don't have the ability to assess that. But more importantly, it's enough for them to be productive and most industries don't need more.

afarrell 7y ago
One thing I miss about university is exams. I miss being able to focus for just 2 hours on a task that would then give me a clear view on how well I knew the important mental models of a topic.
Already__Taken 7y ago
If I've learnt anything from teaching kids it's the ones really good at it when we start are completely dwarfed by the kids who sucked at it. You can get kinda far without really understanding what's going on, but if you stop and have to learn something really fundamental the "good" kids just seems to manage. Once things pick up they can excel because the have truly moved on. the previously "good" ones are still copy/pasting from past work or tutorials and get brackets wrong whereas the "slow" ones are now perfectly happy writing from scratch and thinking for themselves.
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  It's not just the people, some topics leads to that. E.g you can get far with just a few git commands, but one day, you will encounter a situation that is like a brick wall because you have no idea what's going on inside. Today, most JS devs don't know how "this" works, most python devs never used pdb, most git users picture a branch like a diverging chain of commits and not a moving label, etc. Again it's not the people's fault: they are required to be productive very quickly. There is competitive pressure. So they aim for what's good enough to make things that looks right. Can you blame them ? Few jobs pay devs to update their skill on company time, and not everyone will spend an hour a day learning new things instead of playing with the kids, doing exercice or going out with friends.
  - Chyzwar 7y ago
    That ok, but these people need to stop labelling themself as experts. It makes difficult for true experts to stand out.
    - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
      Oh one can identify experts very easily: they are the ones that understand nuances, see and explain things as cost/ratio instead of good/bad and have an up to date view of their ecosystem of choice but are ok with other techs. The problem is that they are easy to spot only for somebody with experience in the field. This is why companies sometime pay good freelancers to help with hiring: they can assess what the company can't. And once they do, they realize quickly that: - there are few experts - most resumes are bs - experts are expensive - they probably don't need them for most tasks and the bs resume dev may be ok, given the price and skill constraints - they had one expert internally all along, doing half the job of the rest of the entire team and they should make sure this expert stays
    - irrational 7y ago
      Maybe experts don't call them selves experts. I have a friend that had some home remodeling work done, poorly. The friend said to me, "But, they were professionals!" I responded, "Well, that's the problem. A professional is someone who will do the least amount of work in the least amount of time for the most amount of money. If you want someone who actually cares about the work, hire a craftsman instead of a professional."
      - jermaustin1 7y ago
        Yeah, this expert prefers Guru. /s
      - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
        Well, it is said that a wise man never calls himself a sage. Others do.
  - elwell 7y ago
OceanSunfish 7y ago
> you wanna learn react and you never used an arrow function, wtf At least in the early days, using React was the first time most people would be exposed to webpack/babel, so it was also their first exposure to the newer JS features.
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  But you didn't need arrow functions at the time because createClass autobind this and you used methods. Now with extends and hooks, it would be a pain. Besides, it's alright to learn es6 and 7 with react if you have time, but if your company pays a $10k react training in a 3 days session, you better have the pre-requisites right. And at the very least, don't pretend to be "an expert" in 2019 if you don't know es6. Every tutorials for beginers include them now. Every docs of every libs use them. You don't have to be an expert. It's legitimate. I don't advertise myself as a JS expert despite being pretty good at it. But it looks better on the resume, and once you are hired on that assumption, you can't go back. Next time the company asks, you say expert again.
- tripzilch 7y ago
  But they've been part of the ES standard for nearly 5 years now.
adamsea 7y ago
If you don't mind my asking how did you get into training people in JS and Python, and, how do you like it?
- BiteCode_dev 7y ago
  When I was at the university I was enraged by the grades the other students were getting: it was not because it was complicated, it was because the topic was poorly explained. So I asked the uni to borrow a classroom and hold my own courses, a summary once before every exam. The grades went up and I felt useful for the first time in my life. I kept explaining things to friends and colleagues after that, while being a full time dev. That's the only thing I was consistently better at than most people. There were better devs, but I could explain python decorators to a junior like if it was the most obvious thing in the world, and I felt proud of it. I also still was regularly irritated by the terrible state of teaching. Why do people explain react by first installing webpack + babel while you can just drop a script tag and start playing? Why do nobody tells you what a bloody env var is, like you are supposed to be born knowing that? Why no beginner course ever include an intro to a debugger, do you enjoy having your students suffer? Why do they keep using the confusing reverse arrow in git history schemas, as if technically correct where the best kind of correct? One day, I decided to do charity work in West Africa. I ended up stayed there for 2 years, eventually created my own company. Things where good. Then the war started. My company went down, my bank account was frozen and I was forced back home, in debt. Fun times. I looked for missions to quickly make cash, but in France dev doesn't pay that much. So I dug, and noticed that training professionals was incredibly well paid, thousands of dollars for a few days of work, which for the country is insane. It felt like stealing. It still does sometimes. But I needed the money, and I though I was good at it, so I spammed dozens of entities. After a few courses, in which everybody was surprised there were no slide and the program kept changing, the phone started ringing. Apparently most professional trainers suck too, and companies were astonished that not only the trainees could enjoy the session, but that they gained productivity afterward. Why did they paid so much money before, then? It's a mystery to me. But I kept at it every since. I usually do training once a month: JS, Python, Git, lot of web, a little bit of data analysis, best practice or design patterns. But I still dev the rest of the time, otherwise I would always go from planes to hotels and that's no life. Besides, a trainer who doesn't code becomes obsolete very quickly. Yet I try to get remote gigs for American clients: french customers never pay as much and they are very risk adverse so the projects are less interesting. I do have a few, because we know each others very well and working together is a blast: we can have drinks, say offensive jokes and still get the stuff done. Money is not everything. All in all, I like training people. It's frustrating, infuriating even sometimes. And exhausting. But when I'm fed up with computers, I get to see people. And when I'm fed up with people, I go back to my computer.
ma2rten 7y ago
This is the Dunning-Kruger effect.

afarrell 7y ago

One thing I miss about university is exams. I miss being able to focus for just 2 hours on a task that would then give me a clear view on how well I knew the important mental models of a topic.

Already__Taken 7y ago

If I've learnt anything from teaching kids it's the ones really good at it when we start are completely dwarfed by the kids who sucked at it. You can get kinda far without really understanding what's going on, but if you stop and have to learn something really fundamental the "good" kids just seems to manage. Once things pick up they can excel because the have truly moved on. the previously "good" ones are still copy/pasting from past work or tutorials and get brackets wrong whereas the "slow" ones are now perfectly happy writing from scratch and thinking for themselves.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago
It's not just the people, some topics leads to that. E.g you can get far with just a few git commands, but one day, you will encounter a situation that is like a brick wall because you have no idea what's going on inside. Today, most JS devs don't know how "this" works, most python devs never used pdb, most git users picture a branch like a diverging chain of commits and not a moving label, etc. Again it's not the people's fault: they are required to be productive very quickly. There is competitive pressure. So they aim for what's good enough to make things that looks right. Can you blame them ? Few jobs pay devs to update their skill on company time, and not everyone will spend an hour a day learning new things instead of playing with the kids, doing exercice or going out with friends.
- Chyzwar 7y ago
  That ok, but these people need to stop labelling themself as experts. It makes difficult for true experts to stand out.
  - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
    Oh one can identify experts very easily: they are the ones that understand nuances, see and explain things as cost/ratio instead of good/bad and have an up to date view of their ecosystem of choice but are ok with other techs. The problem is that they are easy to spot only for somebody with experience in the field. This is why companies sometime pay good freelancers to help with hiring: they can assess what the company can't. And once they do, they realize quickly that: - there are few experts - most resumes are bs - experts are expensive - they probably don't need them for most tasks and the bs resume dev may be ok, given the price and skill constraints - they had one expert internally all along, doing half the job of the rest of the entire team and they should make sure this expert stays
  - irrational 7y ago
    Maybe experts don't call them selves experts. I have a friend that had some home remodeling work done, poorly. The friend said to me, "But, they were professionals!" I responded, "Well, that's the problem. A professional is someone who will do the least amount of work in the least amount of time for the most amount of money. If you want someone who actually cares about the work, hire a craftsman instead of a professional."
    - jermaustin1 7y ago
      Yeah, this expert prefers Guru. /s
    - BiteCode_dev 7y ago
      Well, it is said that a wise man never calls himself a sage. Others do.
- elwell 7y ago

OceanSunfish 7y ago

> you wanna learn react and you never used an arrow function, wtf At least in the early days, using React was the first time most people would be exposed to webpack/babel, so it was also their first exposure to the newer JS features.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago
But you didn't need arrow functions at the time because createClass autobind this and you used methods. Now with extends and hooks, it would be a pain. Besides, it's alright to learn es6 and 7 with react if you have time, but if your company pays a $10k react training in a 3 days session, you better have the pre-requisites right. And at the very least, don't pretend to be "an expert" in 2019 if you don't know es6. Every tutorials for beginers include them now. Every docs of every libs use them. You don't have to be an expert. It's legitimate. I don't advertise myself as a JS expert despite being pretty good at it. But it looks better on the resume, and once you are hired on that assumption, you can't go back. Next time the company asks, you say expert again.
tripzilch 7y ago
But they've been part of the ES standard for nearly 5 years now.

adamsea 7y ago

If you don't mind my asking how did you get into training people in JS and Python, and, how do you like it?

BiteCode_dev 7y ago
When I was at the university I was enraged by the grades the other students were getting: it was not because it was complicated, it was because the topic was poorly explained. So I asked the uni to borrow a classroom and hold my own courses, a summary once before every exam. The grades went up and I felt useful for the first time in my life. I kept explaining things to friends and colleagues after that, while being a full time dev. That's the only thing I was consistently better at than most people. There were better devs, but I could explain python decorators to a junior like if it was the most obvious thing in the world, and I felt proud of it. I also still was regularly irritated by the terrible state of teaching. Why do people explain react by first installing webpack + babel while you can just drop a script tag and start playing? Why do nobody tells you what a bloody env var is, like you are supposed to be born knowing that? Why no beginner course ever include an intro to a debugger, do you enjoy having your students suffer? Why do they keep using the confusing reverse arrow in git history schemas, as if technically correct where the best kind of correct? One day, I decided to do charity work in West Africa. I ended up stayed there for 2 years, eventually created my own company. Things where good. Then the war started. My company went down, my bank account was frozen and I was forced back home, in debt. Fun times. I looked for missions to quickly make cash, but in France dev doesn't pay that much. So I dug, and noticed that training professionals was incredibly well paid, thousands of dollars for a few days of work, which for the country is insane. It felt like stealing. It still does sometimes. But I needed the money, and I though I was good at it, so I spammed dozens of entities. After a few courses, in which everybody was surprised there were no slide and the program kept changing, the phone started ringing. Apparently most professional trainers suck too, and companies were astonished that not only the trainees could enjoy the session, but that they gained productivity afterward. Why did they paid so much money before, then? It's a mystery to me. But I kept at it every since. I usually do training once a month: JS, Python, Git, lot of web, a little bit of data analysis, best practice or design patterns. But I still dev the rest of the time, otherwise I would always go from planes to hotels and that's no life. Besides, a trainer who doesn't code becomes obsolete very quickly. Yet I try to get remote gigs for American clients: french customers never pay as much and they are very risk adverse so the projects are less interesting. I do have a few, because we know each others very well and working together is a blast: we can have drinks, say offensive jokes and still get the stuff done. Money is not everything. All in all, I like training people. It's frustrating, infuriating even sometimes. And exhausting. But when I'm fed up with computers, I get to see people. And when I'm fed up with people, I go back to my computer.

ma2rten 7y ago

This is the Dunning-Kruger effect.