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Discussion on: Don’t Let Anyone Tell You that You’re Not a ‘Real’ Programmer

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conw_y profile image
Jonathan

To play a friendly devil's advocate...

Sometimes it's good to have a bit of a 'wake up call' part-way through your career and realise that you had a really big blind-spot for a long time.

People won't necessarily tell you what you're missing. They may not be aware or they may not want to demotivate you or put you on the spot.

A big blind-spot for me was time-efficiency. It simply never occurred to me that an algorithm could get exponentially slower if its time-complexity increased disproportionately to its inputs. This actually stung me once, when writing a selector that mapped from a Redux store. So no, this isn't just theory, it can actually affect real-life development!

Still, great post, thanks for sharing!

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daedtech profile image
Erik Dietrich

Thanks for the kind words!

And, I wouldn't dispute anything about what you're saying here. But I feel like it'd be just as effective, or moreso, for someone to come to you and say "hey, computing Fibonacci via recursion is pretty slow -- you should read up on this O-notation thing" as opposed to "real programmers don't use recursion."

I think that latter message has little, if any benefit. It would put most people in a defensive posture, it's an oversimplification, and it's kind of a non sequitur for just about any context in which it arises. In other words, I think you can have that epiphany/wake-up call without the baggage that comes with internalizing someone's judgement.

Personally, I often have such wake-up calls stumbling through things all on my own, absent any external stimulus.