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From my experience, it is usually the expert beginner developer that takes up religious ‘best practices’ discipline. This is roughly around the time they are ab

From my experience, it is usually the expert beginner developer that takes up religious ‘best practices’ discipline. This is roughly around the time they are about to get over the plateau and hit 6-7 years of experience. The identity begins to attach to things that fit that timeline, as in, ‘I am roughly here and therefore based on how I see myself, I should be aligned to what I perceive my identity to be’. This realignment means they eat up any and all bullshit they see at a developer conference or resort to appealing to authority (‘this is how Google does it’). And why wouldn’t they, they are in their eyes almost there, almost like the best. Ultimately, this is still sincere, just leads to dumb results at times (eh, more like often). It is a form of establishing your own authority by associating yourself with authority, a coopting of something undeserved, but emotionally fulfilling. You feel like 6-7 years is enough, but it just ain’t. In it’s worst form, this is what it is and it’s pretty annoying to deal with. /end Saturday morning psycho babble

tarkin2 6y ago
That's my experience. At the start I followed design patterns religiously. I was proud that I'd use those patterns. I wrote about them. I told employers. They employers were impressed. The code was an over-engineered mess. But it ticked the best practices box. It still happens now. But this is mainly because management and other developers are enthusiastic about various techniques that have the label "best practice". I last left a codebase in an international firm where everything was a dependency and everything was injected and everything was orchestrated. Everyone was enthusiastic that they finally had a codebase with dependency injection everywhere. I hope to never see that codebase again.
ratww 6y ago
That's my experience as well. The problem is not so much the individual rules, but the "black and white thinking": believing that everything in programming (or life) can be distilled to very simple rules, without nuance or prior thinking before applying them. It's a very comfortable position to be in, but it severely hampers your professional development.
gilbetron 6y ago
I call them "Medium Developers" - they have a medium amount of experience, and get a lot of their knowledge and dogma from Medium articles :)
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ipaddr 6y ago
I noticed this as well with myself and others. At 5 years you become an expert in whatever stack you choose. Whatever best practice you've adopted becomes religion. It isn't until year 6 or 7 or 8 when you start realizing you know less than you thought. By 20 years realize you know nothing and you have reached developer enlightment. Coming to terms with the business side is the first step. Having your best practises or framework mocked by the next generation of zealots is part of the process. Patterns you know and love become anti-patterns only to return in a distance future in some limited formed with great fanfaire. Letting go and a realizing your project / patterns will get hijacked by the business side, other developers and often enough pms is freeing.

tarkin2 6y ago

That's my experience. At the start I followed design patterns religiously. I was proud that I'd use those patterns. I wrote about them. I told employers. They employers were impressed. The code was an over-engineered mess. But it ticked the best practices box. It still happens now. But this is mainly because management and other developers are enthusiastic about various techniques that have the label "best practice". I last left a codebase in an international firm where everything was a dependency and everything was injected and everything was orchestrated. Everyone was enthusiastic that they finally had a codebase with dependency injection everywhere. I hope to never see that codebase again.

ratww 6y ago

That's my experience as well. The problem is not so much the individual rules, but the "black and white thinking": believing that everything in programming (or life) can be distilled to very simple rules, without nuance or prior thinking before applying them. It's a very comfortable position to be in, but it severely hampers your professional development.

gilbetron 6y ago

I call them "Medium Developers" - they have a medium amount of experience, and get a lot of their knowledge and dogma from Medium articles :)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ipaddr 6y ago

I noticed this as well with myself and others. At 5 years you become an expert in whatever stack you choose. Whatever best practice you've adopted becomes religion. It isn't until year 6 or 7 or 8 when you start realizing you know less than you thought. By 20 years realize you know nothing and you have reached developer enlightment. Coming to terms with the business side is the first step. Having your best practises or framework mocked by the next generation of zealots is part of the process. Patterns you know and love become anti-patterns only to return in a distance future in some limited formed with great fanfaire. Letting go and a realizing your project / patterns will get hijacked by the business side, other developers and often enough pms is freeing.