The best programmers I know

The latter are the ones that get promoted to senior staff+, or more likely become directors/VPs.

There is a very low cap on career growth if you are purely focused on programming.

So yes, if you want to climb the corporate ladder or run your own business, programming is a fraction of the skills required.

I think though it's okay to just focus on coding. It's fun and why many of us got into the industry. Not everyone likes the business side of things and that's okay.

> Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written

This was a problem _before_ LLMs were so widely used, but they have compounded it 100 fold.

In the end, I think it always comes back to RTFM. But that's the hard path and users have been conditioned to think of the Internet as a tool that allows them to jump to the end of that path, immediately heading to Stackoverflow, Reddit, Quora, etc. Admittedly, it is almost always easier to just have someone tell you how to solve a problem than it is to take the time to understand what the problem is, apply what you know and troubleshoot. But it will leave you stagnant, hardly able to grow as a developer, exercising no creativity and demonstrate a lack of understanding.

I'm a terrible programmer. I know I am. But every time I slog through a problem in my weird little projects, solving it in a way that makes my coding buddies go "uh, huh...well, it _does_ work..." I learn something, not just about solving that specific problem, but about how the system I'm working in functions.

RTFM culture had it right back in the day, though it annoyed me younger self to no end. As a wee lad, I'd jump on those local BBSs and just start pushing questions about computers to the greybeards, rarely getting straight answers and typically being pointed to the manual, which I clearly hadn't read. Started listening to them after awhile. Glad I did. The value of reading the docs prior to asking my questions extends well beyond code and even computing. Do it with your car, your home appliances, business models, heck, do it with your legal system and government. The point is, RTFM is the foundation on which the House of Understanding is built. It promotes self-sufficiency, greater familiarity with the system in which you are working and the intimacy required for more complex and creative problem-solving later one. Most importantly, it promotes growth.

Now, that's all assuming the documentation is good...which is a different conversation altogether.

Absolutely. LLMs offer you compressed documentation at your fingertips. Instead of scrolling through man pages and function references to find that specific flag or parameter you are interested in for the problem at hand, you can directly formulate such a question to the LLM, and it will give you a pretty good result.

> should you invest a given hour into understanding the lowest code layer of framework X, or talk to people in the business domain?

I think talking to people in business domain is the most important thing you can do in SWE or IT in general. The business is the entire reason you write every line of code, the more you understand, the better you will be at your job.

I do find drilling down into lower layers of your software stack helpful, and can make you a better programmer, but in a much more specific way.

> Pick up yet another tech stack or simply get faster at the one you have that is "good enough"?

Both of these are programming skills and less important, IMO. Trends and technologies come and go; if they're useful/sticky enough, you'll end up having to learn them in the course of your job anyway. Tech that's so good/sticky it sticks around (e.g. react) you'll naturally end up working with a lot and will learn it as you go.

It's definitely good to have a solid understanding of the core of things though. So for react, really make sure you understand how useState, useEffect work inside and out. For Java it'll be other things.

> Note that this says "best programmers" not "people best at having business impact by making software".

We can look at a software developer as a craftsperson, and appreciate their skill and their craft, and we can look at them as a business asset, and those are two different things.

Both of which have their merits, but this article is clearly focused on the craftsperson side and that's enough. We don't need to make everything about business and money, and we definitely don't need to reduce the beauty and craft of writing code to Jira tickets.