Good developers learn to program. Most courses teach a language
Key takeaways
- A bootcamp can teach you the syntax of a language in six weeks.
- A few years back I was looking over a junior's pull request in a language I had never written professionally.
- The data went out, came back, got reshaped, came back again, and finally landed where it had started, lightly bruised.
A bootcamp can teach you the syntax of a language in six weeks. The part that takes a decade is everything else: where the seams go, where the data flows, which decisions you are stuck with for the life of the codebase. This is a senior developer's argument for what learners should actually be looking for, after thirty years of watching the difference.
A few years back I was looking over a junior's pull request in a language I had never written professionally. I could not have told you the standard library off the top of my head. I had to look up the syntax for a lambda. And I knew, without running the code, that the function was wrong.
It was five lines that should have been one. The shape was wrong. The data went out, came back, got reshaped, came back again, and finally landed where it had started, lightly bruised. The variable names were fine. The syntax was fine. The function did what it claimed to do. It was still wrong, because the thing it was doing was not the thing that should have been done at that point in the program.