Comment by jdbernard

> I think "problem space" conflates too many different aspects of real world work which can all require significant time to comprehend as a new member of a team.

I agree. I apologise because I don't have the time to give you a proper response. Most of the things you are talking about that are things that transcend specific problem domains and can be learned over the course of many years in a career. The point I'm driving at is this: a "senior developer" should have already learned most of this and be and to apply it quickly to new environments. Very few things, and very few situations are truly unique. The same patterns surface in most of these teams/products/problems.

I don't expect a senior developer to necessarily be able to become a SME within a year (though for many domains that is well within the range of possibly). But I do expect a senior developer to be able to able to successfully design software systems alongside a SME within a year.

I am not so arrogant to claim to have seen every possible situation, but I have been around a fair amount and every time I've seen companies with "unique problems" that "take years to understand," it's been the fault of unnecessary complexity, regular miscommunication, or too narrow of a view. One company, for example, had spent so long staring at their own version of the problem that they were unaware of how similar it was to other problems that had already been solved.

One of the main skills of a good developer is the ability to decompose problems and create abstractions. It's one of the main benefits of some of the algorithmic courses you'd take in a CS degree: a survey of what is computable and the broad lay of the land that computational problems fall into. Of course, it can take several years to learn how to apply that knowledge, as well as all of the not-technical skills you mention above. But based on my experience I would guess that the majority of companies that think they need years to train people up in their domain either don't really have an understanding of software or don't actually have a firm understanding of what they are doing. Things are hard to teach because they're fundamentally not well understood by the instructors, not because they are fundamentally hard to understand or learn.