Well yes. It all sounds all so easy when you put it like that.
The problem is that, in my experience at least, you can’t just teach junior engineers how to go straight to phase 3. You have to go through phase 1 and 2 to really develop a sense for what makes a solid, streamlined design.
Some never get there - either because they become set in their ways early, or because they work in organizations where the wrong kind of thing is encouraged. Some get there faster - because they’ve worked with mentors or in codebases that accelerated their learning.
But like with any craft, you have to put in the hours and the mistakes.
(Yes, there are John Carmacks in the world who go through all those steps within 18 months when they are 12, but they are 0.0001% of the programming population)
I think the state of CS education is actually responsible for a lot of overabstraction; students are taught early to worship abstraction (because of all the buzzwordy benefits it allegedly brings) and apply it liberally, and not taught when not to do it. A good way to counter that might be to get them to read early opensource code (e.g. first few versions of UNIX, some BSD stuff, etc.), which I think is mostly an example of "abstraction done right".
Yes, curricula tend to focus on writing code over reading code, which is a shame. Looking at existing code, extending it, refactoring it, etc would ideally be something that students do as much as writing things from scratch.
Carmack is actually a good example of professional development. A lot of what he talks about is how his style is evolving and the pros and cons of different approaches.
The problem is that, in my experience at least, you can’t just teach junior engineers how to go straight to phase 3. You have to go through phase 1 and 2 to really develop a sense for what makes a solid, streamlined design.
Some never get there - either because they become set in their ways early, or because they work in organizations where the wrong kind of thing is encouraged. Some get there faster - because they’ve worked with mentors or in codebases that accelerated their learning.
But like with any craft, you have to put in the hours and the mistakes.
(Yes, there are John Carmacks in the world who go through all those steps within 18 months when they are 12, but they are 0.0001% of the programming population)