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I've only got 7 years in at one FAANG maxed out at L7, so you've got both years and diversity on me in terms of experience. With that said I profoundly disagre

I've only got 7 years in at one FAANG maxed out at L7, so you've got both years and diversity on me in terms of experience. With that said I profoundly disagree about the plateau in effectiveness as an absolute thing. I started programming professionally when I was around 20 and got a lot better quickly. By about 24 or 25 I was pretty deep into the asymptote of what I was learning at various startup jobs. I went into a marquee shop at 28 and my ability exploded for several years, before kind of sloping off again for maybe the last 2-3 of those 7 years. I left and did more entrepreneurial stuff in completely new (to me) domains, and have seen another crazy surge in what I can accomplish that's still running right now. I currently run circles around myself from a year or two ago. There were definitely incredibly capable up-and-comers doing amazing shit at 23 when I was playing pro ball, but the truly heavy hitters skewed (again not exlusively) 40, 50 and up. It takes time to master a craft. Even the galaxy-brained 20-somethings were intellectually brute-forcing past some deficiencies in experience. You go through Coders at Work which I hope most would agree is a pretty good sampling of real legends (it unfortunately doesn't include many women, I think just Allen, it's a product of its time in that sense and people like Liskov are no-brainers to have been included), and these folks weren't 25 then, and many are still kicking ass today. Brad Fitzpatrick I think was the youngest one when it was released in 2009 and he's kicking more ass now than ever. Maybe in some group explore/exploit banditing the color of a button in the GMail compose window 20 years of experience makes little difference (recent meme from /r/ProgrammerHumor), but I think that meme is a caricature.

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
Right but you sound very talented, just need one of you to watch the code of ten junior engineers. Youre ability to achieve L7 with only 7 years of experience proves my point almost exactly. Your yoe didnt matter that much. You didnt need fifteen years to start accumulating real knowledge. Regardless of the leaps and bounds you are making, the corporate world doesnt see it that way, and the reliance on leetcode for interviews proves this.
- benreesman 4y ago
  I don't know about "very talented": I take my job/craft seriously and as a result I'm good at it, but I've been programming in one form or another for 30 years, I got a hand-me-down original IBM PC when I was eight, and a hand-me-down 386 / copy of K&R a few years later. I still haven't decided if the ubiquity of access to a JS programming environment (good thing) outweighs high barriers to entry of figuring out how to write native code on e.g. a kid's iPhone (bad thing). I think it remains to be seen where the corporate world lands on all of this. It's still fairly early days on 22-year-olds being able to raise VC and hire a bunch of other 22-year-olds to go "disrupt" some market. The results so far are mixed. Too soon to tell. As for leetcode interviews: no one likes them, as I've said elsewhere I didn't like being interviewed that way and didn't like interviewing others that way (I could go a little off script to try to dial down the false negatives a bit, but there were in general pretty clear non-discretionary standards). But every high-prestige admissions system has some standardized or semi-standardized test. For undergratuate in the US that's SAT. LSAT/MCAT/GMAT you name it. Companies don't want to be using extremely unpopular tests with lousy recall. Interviewers don't like it, interviewees hate it, and it has all kinds of structural biases against people who didn't just finish a CMU undergraduate. I personally might flunk a leetcode interview at a company I contributed absurd amounts of good code to. But no one has thought of something better yet. It's a real opportunity.

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago

Right but you sound very talented, just need one of you to watch the code of ten junior engineers. Youre ability to achieve L7 with only 7 years of experience proves my point almost exactly. Your yoe didnt matter that much. You didnt need fifteen years to start accumulating real knowledge. Regardless of the leaps and bounds you are making, the corporate world doesnt see it that way, and the reliance on leetcode for interviews proves this.

benreesman 4y ago
I don't know about "very talented": I take my job/craft seriously and as a result I'm good at it, but I've been programming in one form or another for 30 years, I got a hand-me-down original IBM PC when I was eight, and a hand-me-down 386 / copy of K&R a few years later. I still haven't decided if the ubiquity of access to a JS programming environment (good thing) outweighs high barriers to entry of figuring out how to write native code on e.g. a kid's iPhone (bad thing). I think it remains to be seen where the corporate world lands on all of this. It's still fairly early days on 22-year-olds being able to raise VC and hire a bunch of other 22-year-olds to go "disrupt" some market. The results so far are mixed. Too soon to tell. As for leetcode interviews: no one likes them, as I've said elsewhere I didn't like being interviewed that way and didn't like interviewing others that way (I could go a little off script to try to dial down the false negatives a bit, but there were in general pretty clear non-discretionary standards). But every high-prestige admissions system has some standardized or semi-standardized test. For undergratuate in the US that's SAT. LSAT/MCAT/GMAT you name it. Companies don't want to be using extremely unpopular tests with lousy recall. Interviewers don't like it, interviewees hate it, and it has all kinds of structural biases against people who didn't just finish a CMU undergraduate. I personally might flunk a leetcode interview at a company I contributed absurd amounts of good code to. But no one has thought of something better yet. It's a real opportunity.