Re:Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
by mattmanser on Tuesday June 04, 2019 @05:55PM
(#20099643)
Nah, even that is extremely kind, unless you never see how your program is doing a few years later.
Usually you get feedback within 1/2 a year. That complicated search system with your own fantastic DSL an absolute nightmare to modify? Kind feedback. Your system works fine with 100 users but falls over with 10,000? Kind feedback. You used a trendy new js framework that disappeared 2 years later? Kind feedback.
And better still our industry has tons of people who write lots of books or do podcasts or do conferences where they talk about how their projects went wrong, and how they fixed them. Whether it was the GoF design patterns, or Code Complete or one of the many others.
To me, all of that is clearly kind feedback.
Coding is something you can learn on your own with a tool, some books or manuals, and time. The compiler provides a lot of feedback, debuggers and manuals give you a lot of information to develop your skillset. A few books on algorithms and data structures and specific domains (like graphics or network) will get you to a solid point as a programmer.
But developing systems that are high quality, multi-component, interacting with other complex systems, and sustainable is another thing altogether. It is costly, tradeoffs are sometimes non-intuitive, and you probably need to have a mentor or a good work environment to really get skilled at it, or the right kind of analytical mind. But you'll still have a lot of failures along the way and need to develop a lot of different skills.