Comment by radicalbyte
13 years ago
What the OP wrote is the same kind of thing I'd have said at 22, before I knew any better. Now 32 (and, at least for another four months, childless) I turn a little red reading it.
The older you get, the more experienced you become, the better decisions you make, the more valuable you become.
At 22, I was a great tactician. I could code faster than anyone else.
At 32, I'm a moderate strategist. I code slow than when I was at 22; but my productivity is far higher.
At 52, I hope to be a great strategist. The potential is frightening.
I concur. I'm 34, been programming "properly" (think C, C#, JavaScript, Python, Objective C etc) for over 20 years now, and I've noticed that in the last couple of years most of my productive coding time is just thinking.
3 hours of sitting thinking about a problem, then 30 minutes of coding. I would never have done that at 20, I'd have opened an editor and started typing because I was still learning the intricacies of the platform.
..and now I can think of several good ways to implement something, weight up the pros and cons, discuss them with another experienced colleague, and then pick the best one..
In my late teens/early twenties, I just implemented the first thing that I could think of.
Back then it was much easier.
Actually, I have noticed that other developers around my age still think like I did when I was in my twenties. Maybe it's because I've been coding since I was 10 (22 years!) and full time since I was 17, and most came in after university?
Totally agree, I'm the same. I have a real feeling that the years spent between 10/11 and 15 when I was mucking around doing a really bad job in C have given me a foundation to build on which many developers have to build in their twenties.
Then there is the argument about blindly learning to code from BAD code on the internet, whereas we had to learn from books! :)