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I find posts like this simultaneously heartening and disheartening. Heartening because it means a lot of behaviors that are billed as "genius" or "high IQ" or w

I find posts like this simultaneously heartening and disheartening. Heartening because it means a lot of behaviors that are billed as "genius" or "high IQ" or what have you, might just be an individual unconsciously drawing upon years, maybe even decades, of experience that is layered on top of each other. The most obvious example of this, for our community, are actually codebases. The more you work on it, the easier it becomes to debug and figure out issues, sometimes without even looking at the code. When I was first starting out as a junior software engineer, I was shocked at how quickly some of the seniors could figure out bugs. I was upset because I thought that they might just be smarter than me, from a raw intelligence perspective. But now, some years later, I've become that person, at least in my current company. I can debug issues pretty quickly, and my brain has a store of literally thousands of bugs and snags that have come up over the years, to the point where if someone says, "This feature isn't returning the right variables", I can usually point them to the fix without even looking up from my laptop. It sounds like magic, but really it's just localized expertise. That's the heartening part--that all it takes is years to do it. The expertise is available to everyone, perhaps. The disheartening part is the other side of the coin--what if you've started late? Does this mean that software engineers who start late, in their 40's or 50's, for example, might never reach the heights of software engineers who started early? That isn't true--there are examples to the contrary, I hope--but maybe they have a much steeper hill to climb. Or they have to figure out a different approach to getting up the hill, maybe combining years of experience from a different field. I love essays about these topics: expertise, pattern-matching, your brain being shaped by what you do, etc. If anyone has any others, I'd love to see them. EDIT: Some grammar mistakes.

d1zzy 7y ago
As someone that started "programming" very early on (when I was 9 years old) and noticed over the years the huge advantage I had over my peers in terms of "thinking as a computer" I can definitely say that experience matters. But it's most definitely not all that matters, not even the most important thing after a certain point: * other people may be faster learner and may forget less * other people's interest in the subject matter may decrease at a slower pace than mine's * other people are simply younger and their body can be "fully awake" for more time, have more energy available to learn (instead of dealing with family issues), their brain is healthier/younger There's also a unintuitive negative effect of having expertise: you easily miss out the simple explanations/solutions. This makes total sense, the more things you about a subject matter the more your brain will attempt to explain behavior through those means. As you become an expert in a subject matter you deal with more specialized/detailed aspects which results in your brain trying to think about those to explain situations or find solutions when a "newcomer" will very easily figure out that it's a simple problem/solution that can be done. So don't feel disheartened, there are pros and cons to being at every level of expertise, it's a tradeoff.
- BigHatLogan 7y ago
  You brought up some really good points. Your second point about interest--that's a great point. I think interest--and, subsequently, focus and attention--are force multipliers, especially in a field like programming, where experience and expertise don't just help you lay more bricks, but actually increase how many bricks you can lay in the same unit of time as before. The negative effect is interesting. I've heard it said before that non-experts often come up with novel solutions in some fields. That might because of what you pointed out, that the experts are too focused on a certain range of solutions, so they might be missing out on a range that a "layman" can easily identify.

d1zzy 7y ago

As someone that started "programming" very early on (when I was 9 years old) and noticed over the years the huge advantage I had over my peers in terms of "thinking as a computer" I can definitely say that experience matters. But it's most definitely not all that matters, not even the most important thing after a certain point: * other people may be faster learner and may forget less * other people's interest in the subject matter may decrease at a slower pace than mine's * other people are simply younger and their body can be "fully awake" for more time, have more energy available to learn (instead of dealing with family issues), their brain is healthier/younger There's also a unintuitive negative effect of having expertise: you easily miss out the simple explanations/solutions. This makes total sense, the more things you about a subject matter the more your brain will attempt to explain behavior through those means. As you become an expert in a subject matter you deal with more specialized/detailed aspects which results in your brain trying to think about those to explain situations or find solutions when a "newcomer" will very easily figure out that it's a simple problem/solution that can be done. So don't feel disheartened, there are pros and cons to being at every level of expertise, it's a tradeoff.

BigHatLogan 7y ago
You brought up some really good points. Your second point about interest--that's a great point. I think interest--and, subsequently, focus and attention--are force multipliers, especially in a field like programming, where experience and expertise don't just help you lay more bricks, but actually increase how many bricks you can lay in the same unit of time as before. The negative effect is interesting. I've heard it said before that non-experts often come up with novel solutions in some fields. That might because of what you pointed out, that the experts are too focused on a certain range of solutions, so they might be missing out on a range that a "layman" can easily identify.