There's an art to learning. I work on that too. The better I get, the quicker it takes me to integrate new ideas.
> Learning the art of software development is similar, you need to get a solid foundation in your domain of knowledge before you can build anything both well and quickly or before you start to find things easier to figure out.
If you look at all the other skilled professions you'd find similar dynamics. You spend a lot of time paying your dues. Once you've paid them, then you have to learn how to turn them into a career. What's unfortunate about development is that there's never that moment where you call yourself done with the skill-building part and start on the career-building part. Other professions have that, but development does not and probably never will. It's too big, and changes too much for an examination to be worthwhile.
> If by wizards you mean everything they do seems like magic to everyone who has never written any code and themselves and their methods are often misunderstood I would say that is true, and I think that may be part of the problem.
That sense of magic is what keeps salaries relatively high compared to other individual contributors. It also means that we can cloister ourselves into priesthoods where those with the arcane knowledge can band together against the uneducated masses. I used to think coders needed a union, until I realized we've already pretty-well self-organized into one.
> Learning the art of software development is similar, you need to get a solid foundation in your domain of knowledge before you can build anything both well and quickly or before you start to find things easier to figure out.
If you look at all the other skilled professions you'd find similar dynamics. You spend a lot of time paying your dues. Once you've paid them, then you have to learn how to turn them into a career. What's unfortunate about development is that there's never that moment where you call yourself done with the skill-building part and start on the career-building part. Other professions have that, but development does not and probably never will. It's too big, and changes too much for an examination to be worthwhile.
> If by wizards you mean everything they do seems like magic to everyone who has never written any code and themselves and their methods are often misunderstood I would say that is true, and I think that may be part of the problem.
That sense of magic is what keeps salaries relatively high compared to other individual contributors. It also means that we can cloister ourselves into priesthoods where those with the arcane knowledge can band together against the uneducated masses. I used to think coders needed a union, until I realized we've already pretty-well self-organized into one.