- don’t read opinions from a list and take it as gospel. Adapt to the jobs you’re in, and you’ll develop your own opinions, but now with experience to explain why. Opinions are formed by getting repeatedly hit with the consequences of your (and other’s) decisions, and everyone just has to take enough hits till the pattern seeking area of your brain takes over.

There are roles I've been in where it's only been years later that the true impact of decisions made was actually apparent. I'm glad I hung around long enough to experience that.

I was quite proud of some decisions, but realized the negative long term impact of others. Trying to share that experience and whatever 'wisdom' or 'lessons learned' with others has been its own challenge in some situations, because you can easily come across as "the old person" who doesn't "get it" wrt to current trends. Some issues are evergreen and fundamental, but it's difficult for less experienced people to understand why some of these things are really core. I'm not sure there's much substitute for experience in many cases.

I have a terrible programmer friend.

He is better at creating actual products than most people I met because his livelihood is on the line: he makes money only from websites.

So he is not living in the abstract idea of best practices, he had to make it profitable for the last two decades, with little resources to go by on top of that.

And he does.

After 10 years, he is still asking me how to write git commands. And I'm still learning from him to shed a lot of BS from my practices.

For example, if you can’t decide between two data structures or tech, pick one and add a comment:

// I’m not sure

> - There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding.

I was quoting out of similar things years ago at the start of my career, “it should be done this way because X said it” didn’t help me at all.

It feels like insulation against being called too junior, since, you can just wholesale adopt someone else’s list of ideas and you’re good. But making mistakes because you’re new to the career is precisely what forms the base of those opinions in the first place.

The sad fact is this encapsulates features (ease of development, a framework probably does help you ship faster), adaptability (clean abstractions that are easy to work with), and performance.

Finding that balance is always going to be hard but they’re all important!

But it doesn't matter. They were designed well, they were fun to play, and millions of people enjoyed them.

Also this was just an analogy I know, but doctors definitely don’t hurt people for years while trying to save them, very different profession from ours, if anything doctors earlier in their career have been shown to have better results.

E.g. this tip:

- There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding.

is directly addressing a common mistake for absolute beginners. Many beginners will read (or worse yet, watch) loads of coding tutorials while doing little themsves. It is an issue a complete beginner encounters and understands.

Your tip on the other hand:

> If you (or your team) are shooting yourselves in the foot constantly, fix the gun

is addressing people working on medium to large projects with internal tooling. That is not a situation a complete beginner finds themselves in; it's a situation someone who already works in programming for a while finds themselves in.

I wouldn't necessarily say your tips are too abstract; they are simply too high level for a complete beginner.

That is not necessarily a bad thing; perhaps the you of 15 years ago already had the basic understanding necessary to be able to comprehend and make use of your tips.

Typing skills are severely underrated in order to professions and roles adject to our professions like PM.

My experience with doctors, of which there has unfortunately been plenty, is that the older doctors are much better. If I need something delicate done I want a doctor who's 50-65ish. They know what they're doing, they don't screw around, and they've seen enough to know that yes, your case is the common thing they've seen 500 times before, and that this treatment works and that one doesn't.

Most adults are kids in big meat suits, they fake it a lot.

I started to live like I was not completely worthless at 35.

Not saying that to be proud of it, just stating that if you think humanity should do better, the first person you'll judge is you.

It will be glaringly obvious you are not meeting your own standards.

The higher your standard, the longer it will take for you to reach them.

And the way to get there faster is to ignore the shame, and do it anyway. Because if you don't, your growth will be slower, and you will do more damage for longer.

Real life means real consequences.

It will make you more tolerant of others as well. Way more tolerant.

This may be good advice for yourself in the past, and for many people at lots of times, but I'd hesitate to give it as general advice. Reading code others have written should not be understated as way to learn valuable things from fundamental patterns and algorithms to language features and idioms. If you have a job in a team, this may happen anyway, but it's possible to write lots of code without realizing there's a better way.

I completely agree with the claim "There is no substitute for doing", and I might even say that code you read without running and tweaking it doesn't count.

To learn how to implement computer programs, read books about it.

Also, "To learn how to implement computer programs, read books about it." contradicts the original comment's "There is no substitute for doing" more than I'm happy with.

You need to start by reading somewhere, or you'll probably not get anywhere, as evidenced by pretty much zero office grunts using web browsers every day having figured out the JS console and application development on their own without reading about it. I recommend books over tutorial texts.

But yeah, as I alluded to, you need to build stuff and learn from other builders.

I read about them and tried to apply them.

That's backward and didn't produce anything good.

I started to understand them by doing it the other way around:

- Coding, solving problems.

- Reading other people's sources.

- Then reinventing half a terrible design pattern.

- Later on, looking at a book: "ohhh, that's what I tried to do" or "ohhh, hence the snippet in that source".

- Now I can discuss with people about the pattern and name my code entities according to that.

Design patterns are a communication tool.

You'll reach the level you want to avoid doing all this.

What if future you has reached that level and people on your team are shipping spaghetti?

Or it's not an obsession.

It's caring.

Very few people can pull off a Steve Job level of nitpicking and actually finish a project.

I certainly couldn't, and that advice is for young me.

I feel like just emulating what you see in your first few jobs is ideal. (As in, ask coworkers who know the thing you’re working on) It could be great code to be inspired from, or mediocre. Either way you get some input about what decisions result in what outcomes, and what the outcome “feels” like.

And if it comes time to change one or many of those decisions later on in this codebase, the person doing it gets a uniform codebase to work from! Unique abstractions and fixes in random places makes refactoring harder.

What in the medical malpractice?

The Hippocratic oath is not ‘first, do some harm, as long as you’re learning’.

It is ok to be an imposter.

But even without this, the thing is, when you don't know, you will make mistakes.

And when your job is to take care of people, mistakes hurt them.

It's the nature of things.

Last year I had 3 medical errors, one that almost got me killed, by very well-meaning professionals.

Closing your eyes and pretending it doesn't happen is naive at best.

But people have to start somewhere. They can't stay in theory forever. And no amount of preparation will save you from making terrible mistakes.

Since we can't put an experienced doctor behind every intern 24/7, there is no real solution to this for now.

Same for programming.

Rather than it being the place where a practitioner works? ("someone whose regular work has involved a lot of training")

Individuals can be new to a practice and feel like imposters but we shouldn't be pointing to statistics like this as an example of why it's ok.

I can't believe people think like this.

Even then, the Boeing scandal shows it's not bulletproof.

It's not the same for medicine. There are way more doctors than you can put safety nets. Also, when a plane crashes, it's on the news, it costs money and PR. Much less so with doctors.

The plane industry is not inherently more moral, just more liable. Responsibility in the health industry is way more diluted.

It's not that we WANT to pay the price of people learning. I wish I would not have had the wrong meds given to me last year.

It's just that the system is not currently set up to do it otherwise.

So you can feel guilty and stop moving, and you will not learn. You will not grow. And you will actually hurt people for a longer period because you will still make mistakes.

Or you can own it and accept the inevitable: doing things means having actual consequences on the world.

If you want, you can dedicate your life to change the whole system and make it better. But I don't think anybody in this thread is doing that right now.

I did see a lot of people on their high horses, but doing nothing though, paralyzed because they were looking for a way to never break anything.

Me, for example. For years.

However, normalizing the loss of human life as part of the learning algorithm is psychopathic. There's a time and a place to make mistakes... In mission critical situations that's in training and everywhere else we should aspire for safeguards that prevent the loss of life due to mistakes.

In medicine a lot of these deaths can be prevented through greater care. It's not different than engineering in that respect. The greater problem is decision makers putting profits over life. And this kind of mentality in this thread is just fuel for that kind of behavior. It's gross.

The initial phrase was > doctors hurt people for years while learning to save them

It's then a separate reply from someone else about deaths from errors/malpractice.

So, nobody seems to be expressing the mentality you are, correctly, lambasting (at least so far as I've read in the comments). But, as it is relevant to the lessons we'd all want to pass back to ourselves (in my opinion, it's because we wish to hold ourselves accountable to said lessons for the future), let's address the elephant in the comment.

Normalising deaths, especially the preventable ones, is absolutely not something that anybody here is suggesting (so far as my read of the situation is).

Normalising responsibility, by recognising that we can cause harm and so do something about it, that seems far more in-line with the above comments.

As you say it yourself, there's a time and a place, which is undoubtedly what we hope to foster for those who are younger or at the start of learning any discipline, beyond programming, medicine, or engineering.

Nobody is saying that the death and loss is acceptable and normalised, but rather that in the real world we need a certain presence around the knowledge that they will occur, to a certain degree, regardless. So, we accept responsibility for what we can prevent, and strive to push the frontier of our capacity further with this in mind. For some, that comes from experience, unfortunately. For others, they can start to grapple with the notion in lieu of it through considering the consequences, and the scale of consequence; as the above comments would be evidence of, at least by implication.

These are not the only ways to develop a mindset of responsibility, fortunately, but that is what they can be, even if you find the literal wording to suggest otherwise. I cannot, of course, attest to the "true" feelings of others, but neither can anyone else... But in the spirit of the matter, consider: Your sense of responsibility, in turn, seems receptive to finding the areas by which such thinking can become justification for the very thing it would otherwise prevent, either as a shield purpose-built for the role or co-opted out of convenience. That too becomes integral, as we will always need to avoid complacency, and so must also promote this vigilance to become a healthy part of the whole for a responsible mindset -- lest we become that which we seek to prevent, and all that.

Exactly as you say, there's a greater problem, but this thinking is not necessarily justification for it, and can indeed become another tool to counter it. More responsibility, more mindfulness about our intents, actions, and consequences? That will prove indispensable for us to actually solve the greater problem, so we must appreciate that different paths will be needed to achieve it, after all, there are many different justifications for that problem which will all need to be robustly refuted and shown for what they are. Doing so won't solve the problem, but is rather one of many steps we will need to take.

Regardless, this mindfulness and vigilance about ourselves, as much as about each other, will be self-promoting through the mutual reinforcement of these qualities. If someone must attempt to visualise the staggering scale of consequence as part of developing this, then so be it. In turn, they will eventually grapple with this vigilance as well, as the responsibility behoves them to, else they may end up taking actions and having consequences that are equivalent to the exact mentality you fear, even if they do/did not actually "intend" to do so. The learning never ends, and the mistakes never will, so we must have awareness of the totality of this truth; even if only as best we can manage within our limited abilities.

Is what I was originally replying to, which, at least to me does seem to imply preventative deaths are some kind of training tax during ones 'imposter stage'. Perhaps not the intention of the poster.

Thanks for your thoughtful reply.

I think you're likely to reach that level a lot faster by trying and failing than by not trying at all.

Is it because we start adding abstractions before we understand the problems?

Like, there's a certain threshold where keep things too simple makes them too complex, so people start introducing abstractions to reduce complexity. But often it's the wrong abstractions and then we accidentally end up with worse complexity that's harder to unravel.

There must be a term for this waves hand thing?

Edit: gosh typical on phones is hard

From another perspective, this is a form of entropy: There are many more ways to increase complexity than to reduce it. This is also the reason why biological life has been getting more complex over time, the only criterion being if it’s fit to survive and reproduce.

Modern medical education doesn't work this way.

It totally does.

They make grave mistakes all the time. And they hide them. They lie about them.

They have their ego and career on the line.

And they don't have enough resources at their disposal, not enough hours, too many patients, and they are exhausted.

In short, they are humans in a human system.

In fact you are. You're speaking to one.

Your original statement completely ignores the massive amount of barriers put up during your training. From my own experience I can tell you that students are usually quite self aware that they are learning and on a short leash. The most egregious mistakes I've seen were almost always a result of understaffing and gaps stemming from leadership issues coming from the top down. The small mistakes and cut corners are from tired overworked people.

Nobody accepts "hurting people" as a component of training. It's an absurd statement.

Seriously, you might be inexperienced or not know everything, but you should clearly not be an imposter and you should be confident in your ability to improve and understand what you don't understand yet.

Take responsabilities and ownership in what you do, don't get behind the easy excuse that it's too complicated. You are the professional and you are getting paid for this.

> - There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding.

I'd rephrase that as "just write something!"

Many times I find myself being the classic example of 'perfect is the enemy of good' - I'll think about the perfect solution, rather than write something *now*, that works, and refactor towards perfect. TDD and all that.

Other things:

- Beware the beta and the boss. If it works, it will invariably get shipped if your manager sees it. Many managers cannot put a value on the future cost of maintaining something that's barely good enough.

- Classic Confucius: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." If you're interested enough to read about some tech/language/framework, write something (again!).

- Learn at least one other language and ecosystem in addition to your main one. Even if it is syntactically similar (C++, Java, C#, for example).

This is a great use for new, standalone open source modules: feel free to experiment with styles or techniques or goals that you wouldn't want to justify. (Or for experiments that you start and then abandon without ever showing anyone.)

For example, when I was making lots of packages to help build out the Racket ecosystem, I'd already made an HTML-writing package, but I felt a craving to do one that used syntax extension at compile time, rather than dynamic s-expressions. So I just did it, as a separate package: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/html-template/

I don't recall anyone saying they saw value in it, but I like it, and I scratched that itch, and added another skill to my programming mental bag of tricks.

Consider this just a rant from an older programmer who hasn't fully recognized that 'programming' is now largely a social endeavor with online info for everything, language and library ecosystems, etc. I wonder how much of this information I would have internalized if it were all available in my time. Seems like the kind of thing I might read and nod in agreement and forget to apply when relevant without some hard earned run-ins (which is how I'd picked them up).

As for actual programming advice, the thing I'd highlight is to look at the data first and foremost. It goes from initial conditions to post conditions. The differences are what your program/function does, but both the pre/post conditions should be able to be fully described as a valid static state. Once you understand that, the problem, the code is largely plumbing with a small part that applies the functional transformation. There's so much focus on the form and style of "the code" that seems to consider it the main thing rather than an artifact of getting the main thing done: think any time there seems to be fancy abstractions that don't provide value to offset its complexity. To relate it to a point in the post, if you can't connect the difficulty you're having with the logical transformation that needs to be done (e.g. from database state to state), it's likely self-inflicted (or it could be due to a poor choice of database schema). Similarly for poor choices of request/response formats--basically bad plumbing between systems (and not intrinsically hard because of the information being handled).

I have come to the conclusion that the use of these sorts of posts is not that the reader, young or otherwise, will instantly and correctly apply all the lessons to their lives.

It's more about sensitizing people to problems they may not currently see, and solutions they may not currently be aware of. It's about shortening the learning curve, rather than eliminating it.

A 1-year programmer is not going to read themselves into a 20-year programmer, no matter what they read. But at the 5 year level I think you'll see a lot of difference between someone who never considers their craft and never pushes themselves, just keeps their heads down and doing the next bug, and the person who has even just occasionally read this sort of post, pondered how it may apply to their current situation, and taken out of it what they can... which may be something completely different than what they take out if they read the exact same post two years later.

Seasoned, grownup engineers and tech business leaders are forgetting this, even today. Users don't care that your product is made with AI, but techies just will not shut up about Generative AI, LLMs, Transformers and all this shit that should be implementation details. Users don't care about any of what goes into the sausage.

You learn by doing x time. There's also a place for study, reading, etc. to supplement this.

This is true in software development. It's true in martial arts. It's true in chess. (the 3 things I've invested some effort in progressing in). I've taught martial arts but there's no magic advice I can give people that will instantly take them to the next level, they need to experience and work through things to progress. Having a teacher helps (a lot).

Motivation, productivity go out the window. You don't give a sh*t about the work, team, code quality, made up deadlines or real issues.

Real maturity comes now. You learn to appreciate your limits, see what really matters despite what's being said and observe who make the calls and what their agenda is.

And finally, when you've picked a path and it seems like it works, you'll find equilibrium, somewhere between an idealistic comment on a PR and your next interview.

Till something else like health or kids rock the boat.

Take it easy, you matter more to you than your work. 15 years on, only ones who will remember the weekends you spent at work are your family and kids. Get out more, find solace in the varied arts. Enjoy you painless body till it lasts. Make the weekdays show up between weekends not the other way. Laugh more. Eat well. Feel your surroundings. Make friends, keep friends. Make memories. Don't throw your life away chasing menial pursuits. If a piece of work is really that substantial and meaningful, it will show itself as such. Don't go looking for it.