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Experts have it easy (2024)

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Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#41

Post by lawn »

markus_zhang wrote: post #40

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 ex…

Especially if it's integrated with a large legacy app or codebase. You'll get so many valuable lessons.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#42

Post by foobarian »

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…

> niche systems-level kinda of bugs that simply can not be debugged with simple printf's

Funny, printfs are the only thing that works for me for debugging niche systems-level bugs :-)

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#43

Post by lawn »

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.

I'd say this is an example of over-fitting, where the expert is too focused on their particular domain.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#44

Post by nyanpasu64 »

elcritch wrote: post #10
elcritch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? No, those free form unguided interactions are very useful for most novices. They're not a replacement for more structured knowledge teansfer, but an important compliment. Sure some novices are just natural talents that can pick up complex material from structured content alone. They're few though. > The expert’s intuition is often formidable, but rarely comprehensible. This inability to clearly explain their de…

Chicken "sexing" is a fun example of how expert knowledge can be transferred without either expert or novice being able to explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7OgZdxRnog&t=174

I've read that birds used to have penises (and paleognaths and waterfowl still have them today), but the Galliformes (including chickens) developed atrophied penises which are difficult to see (hence chick sexing and feeding males to the meat grinder), and the Neoaves lost them entirely. Though https://prumlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/brennan_etal_20... suggests the exact nature is more variable between birds in lineages that "have" them

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#45

Post by nyanpasu64 »

xlii wrote: post #14
MichaelRo wrote: post #8

As a "senior" (expert) software developer you got a slight edge over a junior as long as you work in the same domain of expertise. As soon as you change project, you're at loss. General intelligence helps but can't make up for domain-specific expertise. Example: move from accounting software to map navigation software. Clueless. Move from map navigation software to financial software. Within financial software move f…

I disagree, because in high specialty domains you even cannot reuse knowledge as it might be proprietary. On the other hand patterns are universal. You sit in a meeting where someone raises problem of „database slow, we have 50M of log entries, we need to delete them” and all the familiarity bells already ring. The open domain knowledge IMO is something that can be extracted from LLMs. Ask LLM for disk-based data cac…

What's the problem with 50M log entries and deletion, and a disk-based cache?

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#46

Post by kortilla »

nottorp wrote: post #19
edelbitter wrote: post #5

> unguided “water-cooler” interaction This meme needs to stop. Knowledge transfer from experts to novices is way too important to be left to chance. And thanks to pre-pivot StackOverflow we even have considerable data on how much better it can be done, at least for white collar industries. Reducing the effort of experts to give advice, and enlarging the audience benefiting from a singular effort to write it down is o…

If you only do structured knowledge transfer you get to transfer whatever the expert thinks they should pass on and at best also what the novice thinks they should learn. Which may or may not be the full expertise.

Stack overflow is questions asked by novices. That’s the point

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#47

Post by joenot443 »

This is a really good article.

There's a quality in strong developers which is difficult to select for in an interview but wildly valuable once they're up and running; maybe the best word is "scrappiness".

When I interview juniors or interns, one of the questions I like to ask is something like this-

"You've got two computer, one Linux one Windows. There's 50gb of files on the Windows machine which need to be moved to the Linux one, but you've only got 1h to do so. What's your strategy?"

Anyone with some experience knows it's a bit of a silly question - there are a tonne of unknowns and countless "correct" answers, but that's just the rub - it's not about the academically optimal answer, but about coming up with an answer that would probably work, given the constraints I'd be arbitrarily throwing at them. It's about realizing that the vast majority of decisions we make in software engineering have costs and tradeoffs, and being able to discuss them with a colleague is 10x more valuable than graph traversal.

More than anything, I try to select for people that I know spent a good chunk of their formative years behind the computer, just like many of us did. The maze-traversal skills you learn as a child installing Ubuntu on your parents' computer stay with you forever. Given the option, I'd take the self-taught-indie-dev-state-college-grad over the honor-roll-ivy-league-leetcoder any day.

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#48

Post by nottorp »

kortilla wrote: post #46
nottorp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you only do structured knowledge transfer you get to transfer whatever the expert thinks they should pass on and at best also what the novice thinks they should learn. Which may or may not be the full expertise.

Stack overflow is questions asked by novices. That’s the point

Stack overflow is "closed due to being a duplicate" and "closed due to not containing ready to copy paste code".

Re: Experts have it easy (2024)

#49

Post by gitremote »

> This explains the difficulty of training new employees when all your experts are working remotely, as remote work practically eliminates any sort of casual unguided “water-cooler” interaction.

In software development remote work, the novice can learn from the expert by screen sharing how they're working on a problem, sometimes called a working session. The expert can point out more efficient ways of working, like installing a tool, or whether they are using the wrong approach altogether.

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