New Grad vs. Senior Dev
ericlippert.com
New Grad vs. Senior Dev
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Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev
#2This is a great story. I feel like talented CS students are particularly prone to this sort of myopic thinking; their professors introduce them to functional programming, or the philosophy of UNIX, and they carry that approach everywhere, in a very blunt way. They also carry this little-examined conviction that the world consists of mediocrities and mediocre code and sometimes aren't charitable with the work of others.
Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev
#3With the world of developers becoming "senior" at faster and faster rates, we're asymptomatically approaching the demise of these questions, no?
Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev
#4This is a great story. I feel like talented CS students are particularly prone to this sort of myopic thinking; their professors introduce them to functional programming, or the philosophy of UNIX, and they carry that approach everywhere, in a very blunt way. They also carry this little-examined conviction that the world consists of mediocrities and mediocre code and sometimes aren't charitable with the work of other…
Putting it another way, knowledge with the bare minimum experience required to be effective is very sharp, and that sharpness is sometimes what’s required to cut through old, retrospectively “wrong” ways of doing things. I don’t disagree with what you’ve said, I think we all have met plenty of people fitting your description, I just mean to say there’s another side of the coin. As food for thought, much (not all) of the open source software we herald as brilliant today was initially written by people still in or just barely out of grad school.
Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev
#5> NO! YOU CAN’T JUST USE BRUTE FORCE HERE! WE NEED TO USE SEGMENT TREES TO GET UPDATE TIME COMPLEXITY DOWN TO O(LOG N)! BREAK THE DATA INTO CHUNKS AT LEAST! OH THE INEFFICIENCY!!!
I'm the opposite of this stereotype, and I think there are more like me. Two reasons as to why:
(1) Psychological:
I never had this. As a junior dev, I don't like to optimize because I feel a bit of pain when I need to moderately focus. I can do it, and I've done it quite a lot. In that sense, I've experienced quite a bit of pain in my life. It's something I've learned to live with. And when I have to focus, I prefer to focus all the way, because whether I focus on 50% or 100%, the pain is roughly similar. This leaves me in a state of either being lazy(ish) and wanting to program in a simple and understandable way versus being willing to go as deep into a topic as I would need to and focus on all the details step by step.
When I'm intense, I also am still sympathetic towards simple code because I know that I understand that in both states. I only understand complicated code when I'm focused.
(2) There are enough CS grads that know better:
Also, on another note. Efficiency analysis is simply not taught at university. Parts of it are taught, but they're never connected to real world cases.
For efficiency analysis (note I haven't done any but I've read a thing or two and talk with a friend who is a performance engineer quite regurlarly about it) I think there need to be a few perspectives in check:
1. What is the user's actual behavior.
2. What is the behavior for malicious attackers (if applicable, Intel should do this more, to my knowledge they are doing it more now).
3. How does the compiler translate it to assembly?
4. How does it theoretically look? Specifically: worst-case, best-case, average-case in both theoretical and empirical sense.
Concluding:
I only have one year of experience in software development, where no one cared about performance yet I know better than to look only at the theoretical speed. So I guess I'm a counter example to the stereotype. I'm not alone. Any CS student who reads HN has a high chance of stumbling upon articles like this and will know that performance analysis is not only about calculating the space-time complexity.
Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev
#6Sure. But most senior devs are not Tim Patterson.
Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev
#7I find that the biggest misunderstanding happens because "new grads" (and I happen to be one) confuse _asymptotic complexity_ with actual complexity.
I'm not sure sure why, but CS courses and interview questions mostly focus on _asymptotic complexity_ and usually forget to take into consideration the complexity for "little values of n". And funnily enough, in real life n never goes to infinity!
In a strict sense big O notation only cares about what happens when n goes to infinity. The algorithm could behave in any way up to numbers unimaginable (like TREE(3)) but still, its big O wouldn't change.
Maybe what is missing to those "new grad" is a felling of real world data, and how a computer behave in the real world (with caches, latencies, optimised instructions etc...) not just having an ideal computer model in their mind when they design algorithms.
Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev
#8This is a great story. I feel like talented CS students are particularly prone to this sort of myopic thinking; their professors introduce them to functional programming, or the philosophy of UNIX, and they carry that approach everywhere, in a very blunt way. They also carry this little-examined conviction that the world consists of mediocrities and mediocre code and sometimes aren't charitable with the work of other…
Putting it another way, knowledge with the bare minimum experience required to be effective is very sharp, and that sharpness is sometimes what’s required to cut through old, retrospectively “wrong” ways of doing things. I don’t disagree with what you’ve said, I think we all have met plenty of people fitting your description, I just mean to say there’s another side of the coin. As food for thought, much (not all) of…
The New Grad had knowledge. The Senior Dev had Understanding.
Understanding > Knowledge
It's that simple.
Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev
#9I dislike the mentality that one must "struggle" to be patient with new devs and that it's "more than they deserve."
Is it really so hard to help other people learn, and to accept that the only advantage you have on them is starting earlier?
Re: New Grad vs. Senior Dev
#10Can someone explain the bugs in the code samples? The author says they're there but I honestly can't find them.