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Experts have it easy (2024)

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Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#31

Post by flysand7 »

eterm wrote: post #23
coderintherye wrote: post #6

>Don’t study the “common” things, but go all-in on the niche pockets. The common things are common enough that you’ll learn them through osmosis regardless of what your main activity is. But the niche things require active study, and ignoring the niches is how you remain a novice. I'd add, work on the niche things that no one else wants to work on but need to be done. That's how I quickly advanced in my career, becom…

I very much agree to get to work tackling the things no-one else enjoys, especially if you find you enjoy it. I learned fairly early on that I enjoy debugging and fixing bugs far more than I enjoy greenfield development. This seems to be less common than yearning for fresh projects to work on, but it also makes me valuable to have on a team. Debugging is an absolute joy, it's like a two-layer puzzle. There's the imme…

100%, debugging is an absolute joy, especially with niche systems-level kinda of bugs that simply can not be debugged with simple printf's.

I had a friend once asking me to help debug a weird issue over discord. We went through some obvious things like are there any other threads running or is there something obviously wrong with the code. We didn't find anything so we went on to the best part -- trying to figure out the root cause from the panic. Checked the pointer values, wrote them down, checked where the TLS is, wrote that down to. At that point I forgot how Windows had TLS arranged, so I pulled up some docs, while the other guy fiddled around with the debugger. I found the TLS layout, and the debugger we used didn't have any kind of TLS debugging enabled, so we had to pull up PE spec to do some calculations on where the addresses could end up and sure enough the answer came -- we had a TLS corruption. Turns out he used a C bindings library that had a typo that overwrote the TLS and was messing with his variables.

Debugging is such a joy when it feels like Sherlock Holmes movies.

(*) For anyone who thinks might be misreading this, TLS means thread-local storage, not transport layer security. I'm sure I've had my share of wrong search results because of this too.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#32

Post by hindsightRegret »

One counterpoint I have to this article.

Considering expert vs. novice problem-solving: Within their domain, experts leverage highly efficient models. Outside? Rigidity often impedes adaptation. Their ingrained patterns, assets in familiar territory, become cognitive liabilities in the unfamiliar. The novice's counter-intuitive strength lies in a lack of assumptions, fostering the openness to explore without ego.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#33

Post by hindsightRegret »

hindsightRegret wrote: post #32

One counterpoint I have to this article. Considering expert vs. novice problem-solving: Within their domain, experts leverage highly efficient models. Outside? Rigidity often impedes adaptation. Their ingrained patterns, assets in familiar territory, become cognitive liabilities in the unfamiliar. The novice's counter-intuitive strength lies in a lack of assumptions, fostering the openness to explore without ego.

If the expert has good T skill shape and beginner's mindset for new scenarios - this does not applly.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#34

Post by thinkingemote »

flysand7 wrote: post #31
eterm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much agree to get to work tackling the things no-one else enjoys, especially if you find you enjoy it. I learned fairly early on that I enjoy debugging and fixing bugs far more than I enjoy greenfield development. This seems to be less common than yearning for fresh projects to work on, but it also makes me valuable to have on a team. Debugging is an absolute joy, it's like a two-layer puzzle. There's the imme…

100%, debugging is an absolute joy, especially with niche systems-level kinda of bugs that simply can not be debugged with simple printf's. I had a friend once asking me to help debug a weird issue over discord. We went through some obvious things like are there any other threads running or is there something obviously wrong with the code. We didn't find anything so we went on to the best part -- trying to figure out…

Also love debugging, it's puzzle, pattern matching, evidence gathering, poking around, experimenting, it's using tools, diving into documentation, learning more than whats required to write it and learning about humans and machines and why and how we make mistakes and forgiving these mistakes and fixing the errors. That feeling when spending lots of time to write just one line of code to close that one pesky bug.

Are all developers like this? Is there something I should look for when looking for a job that can help me get more of a career with more of this joy in it?

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#36

Post by giorgioz »

This is why for young people is useful to pick a new field where there are no experts yet. I was very lucky to graduate Computer Science just when the iPhone/Android came out. I had two years experience in Android programming where literally no-one could have more than 2 years experience. If I had tried to make it work in C++/Java I would have find myself competing with people with 10 or 30 years of experience.

Right now I would recommend young people to go deep into LLM. Do stuff that have never being done before and everyone is a novice!

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#37

Post by pards »

> sometimes you [novice] just need to be able to show them [expert] what you’re doing without any specific question in mind

> the vast majority of learning comes from a novice watching how the expert plies their skills, and not from direct questions and answers

This succinctly describes why pair programming can be valuable when used judiciously.

I've seen large institutions hold long, boring "knowledge transfer" sessions where the expert explains the codebase to a group of novices but these are largely ineffective without practical experience.

Pair programming for a few weeks during the transition period (novice drives, expert advises) can be a more effective method to bring a novice up to speed. It works in remote environments, too, but does require synchronous time.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#38

Post by tough »

giorgioz wrote: post #36

This is why for young people is useful to pick a new field where there are no experts yet. I was very lucky to graduate Computer Science just when the iPhone/Android came out. I had two years experience in Android programming where literally no-one could have more than 2 years experience. If I had tried to make it work in C++/Java I would have find myself competing with people with 10 or 30 years of experience. Right…

I mean most of the papers already come from pretty young folks!

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#39

Post by marcusb »

greazy wrote: post #7
pixl97 wrote: post #4

Taking mechanical stuff apart and fixing it is one of these areas. One of the more recent ones I watched is taking apart large wenches on a bulldozer. There is a metal plate with two bolts on it you have to take off. If you don't know what you're doing you take both bolts out and it flies apart losing stuff because there is a spring behind the mechanism. If you know what you're doing you take out one bolt then put in…

Would that not be documented by the manufacturer somewhere?

Yes, but service technicians that are paid by the job often find ways to do a job in far less time using a different approach than the manufacturer suggests.

An example: I used to own a Saturn S-series. The manufacturer estimate for replacing the alternator was something like 4 hours of labor, and involved removing the power steering pump (which was above the alternator.)

It was possible to replace the alternator in about 30 minutes by removing the front passenger wheel and mud shield, and then accessing the alternator directly.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#40

Post by markus_zhang »

A quick track from juniors to experts is to convince someone to let you build something big from scratch.

It is going to be messy and likely difficult to maintain. But you gain immense experience from that project, so much that you can be a semi expert (and an expert in that specific domain) in just a couple of years.

That was how tons of young people who trampolined to senior in just a few years, bagging a lot of experience in the CVs.

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