Dev: Local max vs global max | Happiness

[wallymathieu]

https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner/

I'm kind of unsure about this. In some way an expert C developer would have very different instincts compared to an expert frontend web developer. At the same time, some things are known to be important. Sometimes, we as developers get a bit religious and obsessive about minor things instead of focusing on the more important bits.

Once you become familiar with something you see more of the complexities. Being only somewhat in an area (say as a person knowing enough JS to be able to code frontend, but having never done so), it is easy to dismiss it as being simple compared to what you are doing (grass is greener or Dunning-Kruger Effect).

As in 10x coders. In many cases, real reason why people are productive is because they have a productive environment. If two coders are not productive in the same nominal "environment", there might be "skills issue", "not enough permissions to do their job", "domain knowledge missing or obscured" or "that they do not have same knowledge about code base". Going into an existing system means that you will probably never be really productive in short to medium term. Maintaining software someone else wrote is generally harder than maintaining your own software. You could maybe see microservices as a hack to allow people to churn out code in their own smaller services? Could be that due to the fact that maintaining someone else system is harder and requires more effort you can explain the 80% unhappiness? We see an old survey around productivity and unhappiness.

Do developers need to be productive or need to learn more? In some sense, I remember people telling me that you should always code so that an expert junior developer (sometimes called "A Microsoft Developer") can come in and maintain your code. You could then have a natural cap or goal for what skills you need to learn/apply.

Centralization versus decentralization? Heterogeneous vs homogeneous? In order to have a centralized and homogenous solution, then trying to restrict complexity makes sense.