5 Comments

Your point about composers and conductors summarised it brilliantly! What a travesty it would be if a conductor could only remember playing their favourite instrument!

Expand full comment

Sorry to see you're a Go fan. I'm C# myself, and along with Postgres and AWS I have a nice current gig. I've been coding professionally for 23 years and hope to do 20 more.

Expand full comment

https://adventofcode.com/ is on the way, jump on board!

Expand full comment

Here's a 2 min audio version of "Senior engineers who don’t code" from Wednesday Wisdom converted using recast app.

https://app.letsrecast.ai/r/550b0aa6-7d1b-4de7-9aaf-cfe935113766

Expand full comment

Well, I'll play Devil's Advocate here. There's a world of difference between mastering "coding" and mastering "algorithm and framework trivia contests." As a senior developer I've encountered many company cultures that use coding interviews as an intentional obstacle course to effectively weed out, yes, incompetent developers, but also developers who haven't steeped themselves in algorithms you never see outside of CS courses or deep arcana of every flavor-of-the-week software framework.

Part of being "senior" and, therefore, seasoned, is knowing that obscure algorithms may be cool but breed equally obscure bugs and maintenance headaches (i.e. introduce tech debt). Likewise, today's hot framework is not only likely reinventing the wheel (for the Nth time) but will itself be old and tired by next week.

Absolutely, senior developers should code and love to code but subjecting them to technical pissing contests is not just thinly veiled ageism but a glaring indicator of short-sighted and toxic "tech bro" culture gone wrong. Just don't.

Expand full comment