How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2012)

Re:How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner... by blahbhthrow3748 on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @09:25AM (#23769626)

You're kidding yourself if you think SF is a magical land where knowing to reverse a B Tree gets you promoted. Realistically managers promote people based on tenure, who they get along with, and what they ship. Being able to communicate and understand the problem space is way more valuable than some arbitrary technical "skill"

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Re:How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner... by scarface74 on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @09:29AM (#23769667)

Or you get promoted because you spearheaded yet another chat app that gets abandoned two years later in the case of Google.

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Re:How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner... by beefalo on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @11:57AM (#23771127)

To be fair, if you are the engineer leading that project and it ships on time and on budget then you are still worthy of promotion. The product leaders who thought another chat app was a good idea are the ones who need a reckoning

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Re:How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner... by allenu on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @11:15AM (#23770703)

Or spinning up yet another framework at any large software company.

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Re:How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner... by pydry on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @09:54AM (#23769874)

My experience was with diffing London and Singapore. It wasn't like London was in any way magical, but there was a night and day difference in the quality of technical interviews.

In Singapore if you previously worked at Google you were golden even if you were a goddamn moron and technical tests were done incredibly badly or not at all. I could see why people didn't improve their technical skills and why expert beginners were omnipresent. Nobody was going to reward them for it.

In London that sort of thing exists too but companies that interview on merit rather than pedigree did at least exist and weren't extremely uncommon.

I have limited experience of SF but I expect it is more like London than Singapore.

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Re:How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner... by devalgo on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @11:28AM (#23770848)

Ironically, Daedtech is highly highly critical of the typical tech interview patterns you seem enamored by.

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Re:How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner... by pydry on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @11:32AM (#23770888)

I have been a persistent critic of leetcode since before it even had a name. My favored interview style has always been "give realistic tasks within reason".

Leetcode was common in Singapore, because if you google programmer questions that's what comes up.

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Re:How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner... by devalgo on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @11:53AM (#23771083)

Well I made a bad assumption, guess it wasn't clear from your post.

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Re:How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner... by pydry on Wednesday July 08, 2020 @01:07PM (#23771852)

It's fair enough. Leetcode does bizarrely seem to be more popular in SF than it should be.

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