This is all on a continuum, so I think these labels overcomplicate this. All of us started at the "bang on things until they work" stage, whether it was in 198

This is all on a continuum, so I think these labels overcomplicate this. All of us started at the "bang on things until they work" stage, whether it was in 1985 with a C64 or 2013 a web tutorial. A person can be in multiple stages at once (expert in backend design, clueless about Cocoa, whatever), but all software shares many core concepts and so experience helps with understanding new systems. But nothing has really changed, becoming a really good software hacker/dev/engineer/whatever just takes a lot of time, a lot of _doing_ (sorry, reading books doesn't count IMHO). Some people top out at some point, but there's no shortcuts, you're still looking at 10K hours, like anything else. Norvig had it right: http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html