Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?

Tons of great stuff and I'll add what I can from 15 years as a full-timer preceded by 10 years as an amateur. I've in settings ranging from a startup I founded to a large insurance corporation. I'll just keep it to bullet points:

- Relationships are key to your career. Align with good people and maintain those relationships.

- The product is more important than the code.

- Keep up with the latest tech, but don't necessarily use it.

- When starting a new job, learn the business first. Understanding what the product does and why is crucial and doesn't take long to learn.

- Avoid an adversarial relationship with other departments like marketing and accounting. Work together with them (back to point 1).

- Share your wisdom, don't hoard it.

- When you are no longer curious, something is wrong.

- Writing code is simply that. Enjoy it, don't glamorize it, and try not to obsess over it.

“A reminder that the goal of a given computer program is first of all to meet some business requirement may come across as a platitude. In practice, the excitement of technological challenges often slowly causes attention to drift from the end to the means…”

—Stephane Faroult, “The Art of SQL”

I imagine that there are things you know about that you don't fully understand or haven't put into practice yet. So focus on understanding them, and especially understanding them by doing them.

And if by some miracle you don't have enough of those things, spend more time on HN ;)

Edit: Getting a mentor can be tremendously helpful. If you work at a company see if there's anyone you can get paired with. Someone more experienced is great, but even someone at your level is likely to know some tricks you haven't learned yet.

Alternatively, ask a friend, go to meetups, or you can even hire people online to teach you how to code (on freelance sites etc).

What industries are they in, and what do they do?

The thing is that no matter how good NLP becomes, natural language is inherently fuzzy, just like humans are inherently fuzzy. Human languages do not provide the precision that a computer must have. It is possible that the computer can learn to guess correctly in some percentage of cases, perhaps even a very high percentage of cases, but it can never be more than a guess because that information is simply not expressed in conversational English (and I'm monolingual, but I assume it is pretty much the same in other human languages).

Perhaps we are moving to a day when all programming will occur verbally, and each programmer will be paired with an Echo which he verbally instructs as it writes a program. But we will still need a person who is assigned with converting natural language to machine language, including reading in the contexts and assumptions necessary to make assumptions that are almost always correct.

That's the part that I don't see how computers are ever going to be able to beat humans on. You can't squeeze blood from a stone, and if the data isn't there and isn't in any of the spied-on data collected by all the listening bugs all over the house and all the location bugs carried in a person's car and pocket and all the network bugs on the person's computer and ISP, and so forth, the computer won't have the data necessary to furnish the desired response.

Conversational language will not have the necessary precision without special effort being dedicated to expressing ideas in a logical, mathematically-valid way. The people who expend that special effort are called "programmers".

IMO the only hope of a programmerless future is one where the language has meshed to the point that every conversational statement is a valid program after the NLP's macros have been expanded or whatever, and the computers understand this with a 0% error rate. A world where a master programmer reprogrammed human language to be computer-native. I don't see us getting there.