3 ms·

That hasn't been the experience for me. I have much fewer questions now than I had when I started to program 30 years ago. Not to say that there aren't a lot of

by d1zzy 6y ago

That hasn't been the experience for me. I have much fewer questions now than I had when I started to program 30 years ago. Not to say that there aren't a lot of new things I don't know about that are coming up every day but that doesn't impact in any meaningful way my ability to solve real problems with software. What previously was an issue of "I have no idea how to even approach this problem, not to mention write code that solves it" it is now a question of "I have at least 5 ideas how to solve this problem, I need to analyze which one is best solution for this particular context". It's much less about learning the tools and a lot more about how to correctly apply those tools for the right situation. I feel that this latter part could take my entire life but I can definitely tell I'm getting better at it every year, even if I significantly change the problem domain I work in. As a matter of fact, every time I change the problem domain now I noticed less and less time necessary to become proficient in the new domain as I am able to pull from the experience I gathered previously. Computer science seems like an "infinite" problem domain but actually what I found in practice is that the more problem domains I move through the more I notice similarities and solving the same problem over and over again (albeit, with some small differences which may matter if you work in a performance or resource constrained environment).

qes 6y ago
> That hasn't been the experience for me. I have much fewer questions now than I had when I started to program 30 years ago. I would guess poster above doesn't yet have 30 years experience. Perhaps 10 or less. My experience echoes both yours and the above poster's - following a sort of bell curve - after initial ramp up, there was a significant period where every question led to several more. At some point that peaked, and by the time I'd been writing code for 20 years the rate of questions was dropping quickly. Also the character of problems changed a lot. There's a point where QA sites like StackOverflow become largely useless for your problems, as they're too broad, complex, and dependent on specifics to fit the QA format. Even relevant blogs and academic papers become thin after 20 years.

by d1zzy 6y ago

qes 6y ago

> That hasn't been the experience for me. I have much fewer questions now than I had when I started to program 30 years ago. I would guess poster above doesn't yet have 30 years experience. Perhaps 10 or less. My experience echoes both yours and the above poster's - following a sort of bell curve - after initial ramp up, there was a significant period where every question led to several more. At some point that peaked, and by the time I'd been writing code for 20 years the rate of questions was dropping quickly. Also the character of problems changed a lot. There's a point where QA sites like StackOverflow become largely useless for your problems, as they're too broad, complex, and dependent on specifics to fit the QA format. Even relevant blogs and academic papers become thin after 20 years.