Comment by alephxyz

I think both sides of the argument have reasonable points. There are advantages to having deep experience with a tool, but I have also solved bugs in languages I didn’t know.

What I think is missing is there are serious diminishing returns with more experience in a specific language or framework. 10 years of experience split 3 in Java and 7 in C# is very similar to 7 in Java and 3 in C#.

This sounds like my dream job, actually.

It's what I do at work for fun, in between my "real" development / support tasks. I profile and optimize our internal application, its loading time, user interactions, etc.

Sometimes when it's a long term I make a proof of concept and ask for permissions later, so for a while optimization becomes my actual job. Just finished a couple of months of performance tuning, actually, which I did in parallel to other tasks.

TBH there are plenty of easy, low hanging fruits since the team who wrote it wouldn't recognize a performant code if it smacked them in the face. Or they concentrated on very minor optimizations in rarely executed parts of the code and tended to bikeshed them for hours instead of actually checking what the real problems were.

I actually almost never use an actual profiler when starting, I just run under the debugger and pause the application at random instances when it appears to be stuck.

In almost all cases I find it's executing some unnecessary batch of queries, or reading from a table using an unindexed column, or redrawing parts of the screen which shouldn't be updated, or throwing and catching exceptions that were used instead of if statements, or blocked when it could run in parallel to some other computation, or doing some other unnecessary O(n^2) loops instead of using a hash table. A combination of such improvements will sometimes gain up to 20%-40% speed or even more.

When I'm done with these simple cases I start using a profiler for the that extra optimizations for those extra percentages.

my gosh this was my first real developer job back in the day, just like this. we were a so called "hit squad" and brought in to fix longstanding issues (this was a Fortune 100 company, where they had more internal software than developers to manage it, some of which was actually mission critical for the departments it served)

I learned so much in that job, and probably would have kept it had they not relocated it to Santa Clara.

If you can work in an environment like this for a few years you definitely should, that's my advice to everyone. You'll learn so many things that will be useful over the rest of your career.

If you are doing optimizations I would say you need at least a few years experience in the language. You often see people say they switched from language A to language B due to performance, then some guy optimizes the same lib/functions in language A and it gets 10x faster then the optimized version in language B... and people say: Yeh, but that guy has several years of experience. Once you know the layout of the minefield almost all languages are usable and performant.

Anything can be learned in a reasonable amount of time, but I already have a job. Good luck in finding your candidate though, sounds like a great environment to work in :)

I hear you. I'd also ask what seniority you're asking. My relatively young friend group routinely scoffs at Java and C# shops for making a big deal out of experience in one language, while the two languages are slowly converging to be nearly identical in most places that matter. But I definitely see this attitude more around the 10+ YoE crowd.

>> "anything can be learned in a reasonable amount of time"

I routinely say something to this affect in jobs for which I a interviewing. I tell them I am not an expert in anything, but I feel I can learn anything given enough time. The caveat is in some businesses time is the limiting factor and the business doesn't have the time for me to learn.

But I'd love to work for your company or one like it.

Anything can be learned, but not necessarily in a reasonable amount of time. Some things are easier to pick up, some are just impossible. Example, I was doing PHP for 11 years then jumped to Go 9 years ago (wow it has already been 9 years), Go was good for me because it lifted a lot of mental burden of the OOP craze and wrong concepts applied back then. On the downside, it didn't have an ecosystem. But it was easy to pick up.

k8s surfaced and I tried to learn about it, but it's just too complicated. After I had spent 2 weeks of intensive mind bashing at it, I still wasn't able to manually set up a 3 node initial control cluster. I gave up on it, never looked back.

Spring boot time and again, medium difficulty picking up, mostly because of the exclusive Java community, if something like that even exists. Very arrogant bunch that speaks in implicit ways and assumes you just magically know stuff.

Android is similar, always in flux, despite the many resources offered by Google you don't know what to pick. New Jetpack compose or old, ancient seeming xml layouts and configuration and navigation configuration. It's a hot mess. I tried to use AppAuth OIDC client, has a few questions, asked, the response was "We assume some prior Java and Android knowledge". Well, ok thanks for nothing.

Angular, aside from rxjs, which was royal pain in the ass to learn, straightforward, albeit a bit overly complicated and typescript gets in the way more than it should.

Jumped to Vue. Oh dear god, it's so nice and easy. None of the rxjs stupidity, no forced typescript and a large ecosystem. I can be super productive with it and create SPA, PWA, SSR, Electron apps, browser plugins, even hybrid mobile apps with it.

Rust, my arch enemy. I tried to get into it, I was drawn by hype and the promise of more performance. But knowing Go, which is just good enough for the backend, and where things make sense, Rust doesn't make sense for me. For someone coming from C++ it must seem like the 2nd coming of Jesus, for me - the Go guy - it's an abomination. Yeah I get the basics, but imports don't make any sense, structure doesn't make any sense, erorrs don't make any sense. I feel like a freaking transporter always worrying about crates and boxes and who they belong to. Not fun at all. Handle with care, careful breakable. UGH.

Yeah anything can be picked up but it depends on me being interested in what's to be picked up, the willingness of others to teach and the justification of why I need this added complexity.

I write monoliths and I'm happy with that. Now all jobs postings require Microservices and EDA. I'm unhappy with that because I don't see the need for it in most cases. Now I have to learn expensive cloud on my own, which I have ZERO motivation for. I have to make everything extra complicated, it's hard enough as is getting a project done start to finish, client and server, the monolith way. If I'd have to go Microservices I'd never finish anything and even if, when launching until people actually use my service, 3 years later I'd be bancrupt. So where am I supposed to learn about this unless employed by those people who want Microservice EDA? But they won't employ me because I have no experience with that.

> please stop frigging saying it's the garbage collector and look at your crap for real lol

Because if the garbage collector is the bottleneck you need to fix your code to not produce so much garbage.

I work at a non-Google FAANG - from what I've seen in my org, "CS fundamentals" (which I assume is some proxy statement of sorts for leetcode-style interviews with emphasis on data structure/algo questions & knowledge) isn't as important for the work or to get hired for us. Our view is hard technical skills can be taught/picked up on the jobs, but behavioral aspects are not so easy to develop.

We routinely have & hire interns from top programs and many lesser known ones, or even non-CS degree holders.

> can guess in which one Google and FAANG or whatever the acronym is now

Small aside. It describes Google and Facebook and the others several years ago. Speaking anecdotally, the impressive people at those firms are fewer and farther in between.

They typically also require 1000-2000 hours (over the course of the entire degree) of instruction time in things relating to software development. Part of that is homework and the practice of the craft of software development.

One of the key things that self taught developers miss is the instruction and review of the code. You write code differently if you're going to be graded or if its a throw away script.

In theory, job code that is going to last for more than a run should be written closer to the rigor of the graded code while people who have self taught have never had their code reviewed in their instructional period and tend to (not always, but tend to) write code that wouldn't stand up as well to review.

There are plenty of graduates who don't write code that stands up to review either... but there is a "you have spent a few hundred hours writing code and had it graded, and changed how you write code to get a better grade."

For a person who comes into a CS degree program without experience at coding, and they do their homework, I tend to believe that they will have code that stands up better to review and fewer bad habits than someone who followed a self taught progression.

Computer Science degrees aren't intended to produce people who can code. The CS field is literally the science of computation, a branch of applied mathematics. Complaining about lack of coding skills in CS graduates is sort of like complaining that Chemistry graduates aren't good at washing test tubes.