Reading your posts, you seem to have no clue about how programmers work at a professional level, especial senior ones.
Whilst programming, mentally the programming language is but a layer on top of a logic structure for the program and you don’t structure a program from the language up but rather down from what you want to achieve breaking rhe problem into parts and eventually writti g it down into whatever language you’re working in.
It is stupidly easy to learn a programming language (I know at least 20) because the structuring of program blocks (loops,variable assignments, operations, method calls) is the usually the same, plus even the syntaxes of the languages themselves are often quite similar because they’re driven by by similar needs, and even the being intimatelly familiar with the language itself takes at most 2 years.
What takes longer is to be intimiatelly familiar with programming frameworks (bundled libraries, tools and pre-existing high level program structures) rather that the actual languages.
As for your example, those still working as programmers (rather than, say, technical architects) making high 6 figures are normally working in big companies with some obscure frameworks that are at end of life - hence it’s hard to find coders that know them - but are essential for the business (there used to be a time whe people programming in the old version of SAP could make tons of money exactly for that reason) or they’re doing high value obscure stuff that goes way beyond programming, such as being a Quant for a Hedge Fund, were the big bucks are for the business domain knowledge (i.e. understanding complex financial instruments such as derivatives) not the programming stuff.
People with these type of salaries are usually managers and don’t really code that much anymore. I don’t really get your point there.
Also could you explain what an expert for you really is?
I also know devs who make that kind of money, but they are the exception not the norm.
I have already watched that video and 10k hours is not that much. That’s just 5h a day for 5.5 years.
I also can immediately recognize undefined behavior in C++, and I have at most 2 years of experience.
Let me tell you for someone who has been programming for more than a decade, all the languages are the same. It’s not hard to become an expert in a different langauge once you have the basics down.
The 10k hours claim (popularized by Gladwell) is also an absurd overreach on what the research actually was or claimed to be. Read Peak by K Anders Ericsson instead of Gladwell’s outliers and you get a very different presentation of what the research says from one of the researchers.
They were studying a very specific type of rote learning with a specific type of training (because being classically trained in violin is that standardized). The number of hours trained to reach expert status was not identical between practitioners. He made absolutely zero claims about the amount of time needed to learn different skills that fit the same pattern, and more importantly, really didn’t make such claims about entirely different and unrelated types of learning like code that aren’t formalized.
Gladwell’s book was straight anecdote with no rigor.
Malcolm Gladwell does this thing where he starts with a kernel of truth and gets way too excited about it and goes way beyond what’s actually there. I don’t think it’s malicious, and I don’t hate him as a writer, but he’s much better at making things engaging than making them correct. If you read him like those business books where leaders break down their core philosophies and you see what ideas you can take for yourself, they’re not bad. He finds some interesting ideas to bring to light. But if you take them as an academic source, you’re going to get in trouble.
The core concept that learning takes a substantial amount of work is solid. The premise that you can just do something for X hours (ignoring the number he chose because it’s flashy) and be an expert isn’t. The methodology used for violin training involves a very structured, mindful approach to practice where you’re constantly making corrections and constantly working right past the limit of your ability in order to continually develop.
I absolutely do recommend Peak, and also Range by David Epstein, for contrasting views on different ways we learn and solve problems. They’re not the simplistic pop-sci Gladwell does, but they’re still pretty accessible and don’t assume a lot of prior knowledge, and they both take more care to be based in evidence (though the nature of range means there’s still anecdotes).
Well now put in 10h a day and you are an expert in half the time. Now also consider that languages are quite similar to each other and you could become an expert in less than 10k hours. So she being an expert in more than 2 languages doesn’t sound so unreasonable anymore, right?
I’ve had to use at least 5 different languages at work. Its not uncommon when you have a large, diverse, OLD codebase. We had scripts in Perl and python, my area of expertise was in Java, and most of the codebase was in C and C++.
You haven’t proven shit. Just because those two aren’t on her stackoverflow doesn’t mean she doesn’t know them. You really have no concept of how evidence and proof work.
You are just moving the goalpost… Before you said “So yeah, “hello world” and loops it’s.” Claiming she was basically a beginner or hobbyist. Now you are arguing she isn’t an “expert” and define expert at the absolute far right side of the bell curve. Why does it matter to you so much that she not get recognition for her work?
No, sorry, prove you are an “expert in programming”. You won’t read her stackoverflow page or make the effort to read and judge any of the evidence you have been sent on the matter, so I will extend no courtesy to you as far as trusting your qualifications. Prove it.
As far as I’m concerned you are a know-nothing troll trying to sound smart and put people down. Prove otherwise.
Sorry, how do you know she hasn’t been coding since childhood? All the top coders I know have been coding since childhood. They also know more than one language in my experience despite your claim. I have two close relatives, one I know for a fact earns seven figures. He was constantly learning to code new languages when he was younger. He’s slowed down now that he’s middle aged, but I remember when he was learning BASIC and Assembler on his Apple ][. And later Pascal. And then C. And then C++ and then Java. And so on.
Also, plenty of people learn second or even third spoken languages as adults and become fluent in them. My childhood best friend’s father fled Ceascescu’s Romania after being conscripted, came to America, learned English, and then wrote academic works. In English.
Again- best friend’s dad wrote academic literature in English after learning it as an adult. That sounds like you can get fluent in a language as an adult to me.
And please do show the data that “those kinds of people” are introverts. I would like to see it.
What are your qualifications? Why are you claiming you have the necessary knowledge to speak on this topic? Do you have any evidence of your expertise? And real hard proof, because talk is easy.
Honestly you are either a child, an idiot, or a troll at this point. No one else would be so determined to miss the point.
I want to crack another joke but you seem frustrated so I’ll be direct
You are the one making broad sweeping claims based on assumptions and anecdotal experience. You should either find something more substantial to back it up than “real programmers are loners because they don’t have time to make friends”, or reevaluate your stance on this. Maybe consider there are people in cs that are different than any you have personally met.
You just want permission to put other people down without being questioned on it. Stop making excuses and say something substantiative on the matter or get over yourself.
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Reading your posts, you seem to have no clue about how programmers work at a professional level, especial senior ones.
Whilst programming, mentally the programming language is but a layer on top of a logic structure for the program and you don’t structure a program from the language up but rather down from what you want to achieve breaking rhe problem into parts and eventually writti g it down into whatever language you’re working in.
It is stupidly easy to learn a programming language (I know at least 20) because the structuring of program blocks (loops,variable assignments, operations, method calls) is the usually the same, plus even the syntaxes of the languages themselves are often quite similar because they’re driven by by similar needs, and even the being intimatelly familiar with the language itself takes at most 2 years.
What takes longer is to be intimiatelly familiar with programming frameworks (bundled libraries, tools and pre-existing high level program structures) rather that the actual languages.
As for your example, those still working as programmers (rather than, say, technical architects) making high 6 figures are normally working in big companies with some obscure frameworks that are at end of life - hence it’s hard to find coders that know them - but are essential for the business (there used to be a time whe people programming in the old version of SAP could make tons of money exactly for that reason) or they’re doing high value obscure stuff that goes way beyond programming, such as being a Quant for a Hedge Fund, were the big bucks are for the business domain knowledge (i.e. understanding complex financial instruments such as derivatives) not the programming stuff.
People with these type of salaries are usually managers and don’t really code that much anymore. I don’t really get your point there. Also could you explain what an expert for you really is?
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I also know devs who make that kind of money, but they are the exception not the norm.
I have already watched that video and 10k hours is not that much. That’s just 5h a day for 5.5 years. I also can immediately recognize undefined behavior in C++, and I have at most 2 years of experience. Let me tell you for someone who has been programming for more than a decade, all the languages are the same. It’s not hard to become an expert in a different langauge once you have the basics down.
The 10k hours claim (popularized by Gladwell) is also an absurd overreach on what the research actually was or claimed to be. Read Peak by K Anders Ericsson instead of Gladwell’s outliers and you get a very different presentation of what the research says from one of the researchers.
They were studying a very specific type of rote learning with a specific type of training (because being classically trained in violin is that standardized). The number of hours trained to reach expert status was not identical between practitioners. He made absolutely zero claims about the amount of time needed to learn different skills that fit the same pattern, and more importantly, really didn’t make such claims about entirely different and unrelated types of learning like code that aren’t formalized.
Gladwell’s book was straight anecdote with no rigor.
Thanks for pointing this out. I didn’t question the 10k hours at all.
Malcolm Gladwell does this thing where he starts with a kernel of truth and gets way too excited about it and goes way beyond what’s actually there. I don’t think it’s malicious, and I don’t hate him as a writer, but he’s much better at making things engaging than making them correct. If you read him like those business books where leaders break down their core philosophies and you see what ideas you can take for yourself, they’re not bad. He finds some interesting ideas to bring to light. But if you take them as an academic source, you’re going to get in trouble.
The core concept that learning takes a substantial amount of work is solid. The premise that you can just do something for X hours (ignoring the number he chose because it’s flashy) and be an expert isn’t. The methodology used for violin training involves a very structured, mindful approach to practice where you’re constantly making corrections and constantly working right past the limit of your ability in order to continually develop.
I absolutely do recommend Peak, and also Range by David Epstein, for contrasting views on different ways we learn and solve problems. They’re not the simplistic pop-sci Gladwell does, but they’re still pretty accessible and don’t assume a lot of prior knowledge, and they both take more care to be based in evidence (though the nature of range means there’s still anecdotes).
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Well now put in 10h a day and you are an expert in half the time. Now also consider that languages are quite similar to each other and you could become an expert in less than 10k hours. So she being an expert in more than 2 languages doesn’t sound so unreasonable anymore, right?
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Can I ask you what your background is in programming/computer science?
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I’ve had to use at least 5 different languages at work. Its not uncommon when you have a large, diverse, OLD codebase. We had scripts in Perl and python, my area of expertise was in Java, and most of the codebase was in C and C++.
But when people showed you she has been programming since she was 12 and absolutely has had the time to put in, you just don’t believe it.
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You haven’t proven shit. Just because those two aren’t on her stackoverflow doesn’t mean she doesn’t know them. You really have no concept of how evidence and proof work.
deleted by creator
You are just moving the goalpost… Before you said “So yeah, “hello world” and loops it’s.” Claiming she was basically a beginner or hobbyist. Now you are arguing she isn’t an “expert” and define expert at the absolute far right side of the bell curve. Why does it matter to you so much that she not get recognition for her work?
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No, sorry, prove you are an “expert in programming”. You won’t read her stackoverflow page or make the effort to read and judge any of the evidence you have been sent on the matter, so I will extend no courtesy to you as far as trusting your qualifications. Prove it.
As far as I’m concerned you are a know-nothing troll trying to sound smart and put people down. Prove otherwise.
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Prove you have been in this field, for even 5 minutes. Where is your stackoverflow page?
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Would you say the same thing about bilingual people? They’re language amateurs because they don’t specialize in one language?
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Sorry, how do you know she hasn’t been coding since childhood? All the top coders I know have been coding since childhood. They also know more than one language in my experience despite your claim. I have two close relatives, one I know for a fact earns seven figures. He was constantly learning to code new languages when he was younger. He’s slowed down now that he’s middle aged, but I remember when he was learning BASIC and Assembler on his Apple ][. And later Pascal. And then C. And then C++ and then Java. And so on.
Also, plenty of people learn second or even third spoken languages as adults and become fluent in them. My childhood best friend’s father fled Ceascescu’s Romania after being conscripted, came to America, learned English, and then wrote academic works. In English.
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Again- best friend’s dad wrote academic literature in English after learning it as an adult. That sounds like you can get fluent in a language as an adult to me.
And please do show the data that “those kinds of people” are introverts. I would like to see it.
Well on Wikipedia it states that she has been programming since 12.
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What are your qualifications? Why are you claiming you have the necessary knowledge to speak on this topic? Do you have any evidence of your expertise? And real hard proof, because talk is easy.
Honestly you are either a child, an idiot, or a troll at this point. No one else would be so determined to miss the point.
I want to crack another joke but you seem frustrated so I’ll be direct
You are the one making broad sweeping claims based on assumptions and anecdotal experience. You should either find something more substantial to back it up than “real programmers are loners because they don’t have time to make friends”, or reevaluate your stance on this. Maybe consider there are people in cs that are different than any you have personally met.
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I’ve seen the video, and as I said elsewhere, this is moving the goalpost.
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You just want permission to put other people down without being questioned on it. Stop making excuses and say something substantiative on the matter or get over yourself.
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