alt Hacker NewsI am team academia more than hands-on experience. And I have 5 years of experience. To me, it felt like most SWE things could eventually be solved by what I learned at school.
Not everything I did I learned at school, such as navigating codebases with more than a million lines of code. But most things? Yea.
With that said, I am curious how people say that they learned much more through experience, what did you specifically learn?
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Could you tell us what you learned at school that is useful for your SWE career? Im sure there is a lot of us that learned 0 at school and learned everything ourselves as kids on the internet
I find that many people can learn a lot by doing but then at some point hit a wall and really struggle to recognize that another kind of learning needs to take place to understand a deeper concept.
A lot of technical skills sure. Algorithmic analysis sure (although in practice it’s a lot less formal and more intuition + rote knowledge.
But taste about the best ways to structure a codebase? How to balance speed vs quality and when to do that? What does good vs bad observability look like? How to handle services going down in production and run post mortems? How to handle ambiguity both at a leadership and technical level to chart a path forward for a team? Even reading about these things from blog posts and things is nothing like actually experiencing these things first hand and certainly not taught. It requires accurate and constant self reflection and retrospective to guide an exploration process and if that self reflection tool is askew you can end up learning weird lessons and habits that are difficult to correct (and we all have them somewhere).
I’m team learning and was team academia early on, but the real value in academia is in teaching you how to think and to give you some minimal useful knowledge to about that capability. But it often struggles to even that because it’s still following an assembly line model of teaching whereas learning is relational.
Source: nearly 20 years as a SWE from a well regarded university.