SWE Stop Learning - The Rise Of Expert Beginners

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### Article
By: Erik Dietrich

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Hey I am sponsored by Turso, an edge database. I think they are pretty neet. Give them a try for free and if you want you can get a decent amount off (the free tier is the best (better than planetscale or any other))

[sploders]

This is also something I see a lot. People compare their abilities to mine all the time, and assume they aren’t good, which is totally not the case; I’ve just had more experience. Usually, if I can get them to believe they can do it, they solve the problem just fine; they just need more time, but they don’t even attempt it because they think it’s too complicated.

When I look at a problem, I see the obstacles, but I always start with the mindset that it is solvable. The question isn’t “can I solve this, ” it’s “is the solution worth the repercussions?”

[Fomoerectus-wuxefom]

A no-code software architect enters the chat

[juice]

"You're going to get way worse before you get better" - I went through this when I was learning blind typing. It feels bad, but it is necessary to evolve.

[ManualMaestro]

One of the most terrifying things that happened to me during my career was the rockstar stagnation phase. I was so good at my niche on my supportive team that I completely stopped learning and just cranked out things that were essentially the same for 3 years. I'm working to make up for that wasted time and videos like these keep me on that path.

[krisellis]

"Expert beginner" is similar to the 100 hr pilot in aviation. It's the point where confidence begins to outstrip experience and ability. You don't notice the bad habits that have set in, and don't realize the extent to which luck has gotten you through; and haven't experienced the system(s) failing. Interesting to note that "co-pilot" is the name given to our IDE AI assistants...let's not be the overconfident 100 hr pilot.

[bobbycrosby]

Follow your curiosity. So many people seem afraid of this. If you don't know how something works, find out. I've been doing this for 20 years and have hundreds of side "projects" whose whole aim was to simply be more knowledgeable in some subject, library, or framework.

[lxyacht]

"we inherited the Brit's problems"

See!? More trouble with inheritance!

[dv_xl]

This is a real thing, it's the smash player showing up to the local thinking he's the best, because he beats all his friends and 4 stocked by the worst regular

[stroiman.development]

There's a saying, "if you're the smartest person in the room, you should move to a different room". I think that this post really nails it that one of the problems of being the smartest person in the room is that you mistakenly think that you're the expert. I've made that mistake myself, and my biggest progressions as a developer was when new team members joined that taught me a completely new perspective. One guy in particular who stands out in that regard. I often meet the "expert beginners" when I join a project that practice "TDD", where they are so focused on writing "unit" tests that the test suite resists any significant refactoring of the code base. These people are often treated as experts in the organisation, and their views have become the "baseline truth". I've made the same mistakes as them in the past, but I learned from them. When joining a team practicing TDD, convincing these "experts", and the organisation, that they are on the wrong path is virtually impossible.

[minnesotasteve]

I read this article years ago after attending a session at a local developers conference. It is by far the most influential thing I have ever read, and really explained not just the problems I was encountering but even some of the problems I was creating.

[mikekeathley]

"Maintenance of a large program can be very very detrimental to skill growth." I agree that it can be, however I cut my teeth on maintaining large legacy systems. Not only did I learn more about the language and different techniques, but I also learned how to persevere in the face of frustration. I also learned what works and what doesn't. If you only do maintenance, it will hamper your skillset, but legacy maintenance can be a specialization that is highly sought after. I was bad at my first greenfield implementation, but I still brought something to the table. For example, I was on a project building a brand new product from scratch. I had trouble with getting started, but I was able to point out our tech debt before it happened that everyone else missed because I had that prior experience. Now I am very good at both.

[Karurosagu]

Reinventing the wheel and showing it off to everyone like "this is what I'm capable of" is godlike

[Xemptuous]

That bowling manager advice is 100% true. It happened to me in music: before learning proper form and theory, my composition and improv peaked. Then I got super shitty for a while when learning proper fundamentals. Then I came out years later much better than I was before. It's like cacooning to become something better. I always assume the same process is needed for any skill, atleast to reach mastery.

[blatantdeleter]

An incredibly common occurence unfortunately- many people I know who are into CS aren't in it because they love it, they're in it for the money, - they're essentially soon-to-be managers who only look upon CS as "work to be done" to earn money and have a good CV.

[jonasnamonteiro]

The best part of this video was hearing you pronouncing my name (João), and making an effort to pronounce it correctly. You got pretty close! <3
I’m not the person who was live, just a random follower. :)

[Soulful_Oatmilk]

Trying to transfer from Mechanical Engineering into Software Engineering and seeing my peers borderline rely on AI for their apps always rubbed me the wrong way. Don't get me wrong, I like using chat, especially for SQL queries, but the way my friend stated they were a "Frontend Engineer", from being UI Design while writing everything with CoPilot, and React, while knowing nothing about Javascript and Optimization blew my mind

[JustinDejong]

37 year old here. 100% yes mainstream media and teachers were all saying Google was going to cause people to not have to learn anything. It still exists to this day! Except now it's a saying of "Back then you needed to memorize facts with rout memorization. Now true skill is knowing how to find the information on the internet". It's quite literally the exact same thing but with better P.R.

[cjbtantay]

"I'm the humblest, number 1 at the top of the humble list"
That's a bar.

[brnto]

25:53 that is such a good explanation… nothing is hard when you have the foundations… it’s just time consuming.

[gevcrln]

I have a coworker who clearly uses GPT and Copilot and it is incredibly frustrating to work with them.
They are not incompetent but are very close to. Their soft skills are worthless and they essentially "yes-man" me about everything I tell them.

My biggest complaints is the high volume of code they churn out (or copilot churns out, really). It's very difficult to review PRs that are over 1K loc and the author does not answer questions as if they don't even know what they wrote (because they don't). Copilot also writes code that is not in our in-house style (we use eslint as much as possible to prevent this) but its really frustrating to see ugly blocky crap code ALL over. This reminds me that using copilot and writing nice code IS a skill, you have to prompt copilot to use the right language construct for the right job and not just wing it.