After reading this, I feel like I've imposter syndrome as well. I know about 80% of those topics pretty well, but I don't think I could ever get a job as a junior dev. Maybe I focus too much on learning things that interest me, and not enough on things that land you that software engineer title.
Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
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Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#42Sometimes there’s an unrealistic expectation that engineers know everything, but senior engineers I’ve worked with and hired knew most of that list... at least somewhat. Yes, comfort with bash and a knowledge of how networking actually works is something I expect someone working on computer software for 10+ years to have gotten familiar with at some point . I also expect people who build libraries inspired by prior w…
It would be great if we all met each others' expectations. And yet it doesn't work that way. A step up from where you're at is to realize that tech, ANY tech, is easy. If brute-forced by rote it can be even be learnt by those without the aptitude.
What IS difficult to master, is people.
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#43Why is this kind of “confessional” necessary? This strikes me as very American - this need to think you’re “the greatest” at everything and then beat yourself up when you realise you can’t be. Look... do we say Beethoven was a lousy composer because he never conceived the 12-tone system or mastered extended techniques or knew anything about Indonesian music? How absurd! Those were all things for later composers to di…
Dan Abramov is a Russian living in the UK.
What's your point?
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#44Is that guy really an experienced developer? He's obviously talented but experience and talent are different things. It sounds like he has less than 10 years under his belt.
Is 10 years the bar for what counts as an experienced developer? Why is 10 the magic number?
I would say someone with 5 years experience could be senior to someone with 10 years under their belt, granted the former worked on the right projects that gave them valuable experience, with some combination of design, understanding trade offs, implementation, and social/management skills managing delivery of their features or taking complexity and simplifying it (both technically and from a requirements perspective). You could work 10 years and not hit those points.
I expect someone with 10 years is hands down more experienced than someone with just one year under their belt, but otherwise, looking at how long you’ve been in the industry is kind of meaningless without understanding what it is that you did.
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#45This is an awesome article! I like the idea of being more forthcoming with what we don't know.
> Containers. I have no idea about how to use Docker or Kubernetes. (Are those related?) I have a vague idea that they let me spin up a separate VM in a predictable way. Sounds cool but I haven’t tried it.
> Deployment and devops. I can manage to send some files over FTP or kill some processes but that’s the limit of my devops skills.
I'm working hard on trying to tease out a method to educate developers about DevOps / Kubernetes... It's hard to explain to people who have not been on-call or walked into a company on their first day as a devops, but I am strongly in the camp of "Kubernetes is live-saving, game-changing, etc". I tend to fail to explain to most product-focused developers successfully - Either too low level, too high level and hand-wavey, or they walk away with a sense of "man one day, that might be cool", rather than "We could get going on this _today_!". The most success I've had is in demonstrations (I have a raspberry Pi Kube cluster with 4 pies, with which I can physically unplug power, network, disk, etc and show off Kube's self-healing and auto-discovery powers), but at companies with day to day stresses, not so much. Plus the demo only scratches the service of cool features of even the Deployment API object.
Shameless self promo, but I'm working on a project with a friend that hopefully helps. I want product-focused developers to have a "Heroku" moment about kube and understand the immense benefits they get from designing their applications with a "cloud-native" mindset. That the small cost is _vastly_ worth the benefit. The project is here: https://kubesail.com/.
My "thing I dont know as of 2018", just for good measure: How to build complex front-end applications without making a complete mess of things!
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#46Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#47I was really surprised to see algorithms on this list. I would have presumed everyone at Facebook would be a cover-to-cover expert at the sorts of algorithms you'd see in coding interviews.
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#48You can make a living as a frontend dev without having to touch those topics much.
Other devs: desktop app devs, mobile devs, backend devs, devops devs, network devs, data scientists, game devs get exposed to those a little bit more.
If you are interested in learning a lot of those at the same time, write a server in C.
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#49This is an awesome article! I like the idea of being more forthcoming with what we don't know. > Containers. I have no idea about how to use Docker or Kubernetes. (Are those related?) I have a vague idea that they let me spin up a separate VM in a predictable way. Sounds cool but I haven’t tried it. > Deployment and devops. I can manage to send some files over FTP or kill some processes but that’s the limit of my dev…
This is remarkable!
Re: Things I Don’t Know as of 2018
#50To be honest, knowing your limitations that well is a ver good thing.
Probably many people would say "yes, I know" knowing not much more than what he summarized for some of the items of the list with just a few words.
Didn't know him, but I like him now.