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| | Ask HN: Are top developers just guessing? | |
39 points by sneakpeek on June 7, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 66 comments
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| | Ask HN: I graduated with my undergraduate CS degree about a year ago and landed a job with a mid-sized company that provides engineering services. While attending school I came to believe that top developers are people interested in learning everything they can about development - and I liked the idea of working with such people. However, the reality that I've experienced is that the developers most willing to guess about how code works, copy and paste googled code, and push others to feed them answers instead of doing research on their own are considered to be the top developers because they 'get things done'. Has anyone else experienced this? If I want to succeed, do I need to stop caring about solving problems and start caring about getting as many lines of code out the door as I can? Is it like this everywhere? I've hit some real lows during the last year because of this attitude so any feedback is be appreciated. |
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I'm not sure whom you've seen that you're referring to, but the top devs that I know are nothing like what you describe. To me, the defining characteristic of a top dev (though I will not go off on a tirade here, and so I will keep this short and sweet) is that they understand the systems they are building on and the problems that they are trying to solve.
Being a developer is NOT about the code, it's about how you come up with what you come up with and the strategy and approach you take to solve a problem. Computer Science is about algorithms, but software development is about coming up with solutions to the problems presented. You can't solve a problem - no matter how well you can "code" - if you don't understand the problem. And the better you understand the problem, the better of a solution you'll be able to come up with.
I've seen top devs that copy and paste code from StackOverflow and they get the accolades and the resounding praise. And they earned every bit of it. Why? Because it's not about the code snippet they copied from SO to convert a byte array to hex representation or to neatly serialize an object and transmit it, encrypted, over the wire to a remote server. It's about knowing what the code should do in the first place.
It's not about lines of code, it's about what that code does. A CS degree does not teach you to engineer software, it teaches you to write algorithms.