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Stefan Wuthrich
Stefan Wuthrich

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Smart is not always smart

Today I was checking a more or less old profile I have on ex-codementor page, now arc().

I saw then that I have my experiences listed like this:
Alt Text

Ok... correct, but not all of them I would like to list here, as I'm more looking into Go and JS Projects, not anymore .NET/C#

Ok, so I dug to Edit Profile Section and Skill Settings and found out, that I can not define this 5 listed Experience Skills.

But they have a very SMART solution, which list's the skill's, where the profile owner has the most extended experience.

Does this make sense?
Well. I have 4+ years of Go experience. Go exists for more or less 7 years (v1+). But I started with HTML and then .NET 20 and 12 years ago...

So this smart solution may be working correctly, what Dev or PO thought it should work. But it's probably not what I as the oooold guy want to see here. Imagine I would have 20y of Cobol, 25 years of Pascal etc listed, none of my "new" languages I know and want to work with would ever list here.

This is NOT a blaming of arc()'s solution.
They tried to do something smart, which may work for profiles of younger guys, but are not that smart for older (in that case).

Sometimes we try to make things to smart as developers or PO's.
So when we do a smart thing, we really must check it to be smart in all possible situations.

Now... Personally, I also think in frameworks out there, which are trying to be very smart for everything. This mostly works, but it can be dangerous, or at coming to be a problem, as soon you must handle something with it, which is for that then specific case not more so smart.

Cheers
Stefan

Top comments (3)

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_cameronbrown profile image
Cameron Brown

Go is great, but isn't long-term experience with dev in-general more important?
It seems it'd be better to hire somebody with an extensive grasp on the fundamentals. The algorithms, patterns, etc.. are generic, Golang is just an implementation detail ;)

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golangch profile image
Stefan Wuthrich

I see your point, but have strong impression, that people (recruiters, contractors) look mostly on skills/stack they are actually looking for. What I try to say. Smart can work, but not for all situations. Sometimes less smart, but e.g. configurable for specific need can be better

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tttfifo profile image
Todor Todorov

Hi Stefan,

I agree with your opinion about the wanna-be smart frameworks :)

And sorry for the off-topic: I feel like you described whenever I try to switch on my "smart" air conditioning appliance at home :)