Beginners and experts (Batchelder blog post)

[Bill]

Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 5:45 AM, Bill <BILL_NOSPAM at whoknows.net> wrote:
>> Paul Moore wrote:
>>> On 27 September 2017 at 17:41, leam hall <leamhall at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Hehe...I've been trying to figure out how to phrase a question. Knowing
>>>> I'm
>>>> not the only one who gets frustrated really helps.
>>>>
>>>> I'm trying to learn to be a programmer. I can look at a book and read
>>>> basic
>>>> code in a few languages but it would be unfair to hire myself out as a
>>>> programmer. I'm just not yet worth what it costs to pay my bills.
>>> You're already ahead of the game in wanting to be useful, rather than
>>> just knowing the jargon :-) However, I've always found that the
>>> biggest asset a programmer can have is the simple willingness to
>>> learn.
>>
>> I basically agree with what has been posted. I just wanted to mention a
>> couple things that separates beginners and non-beginners. One is "how long
>> it takes to identify and fix an error"--even a syntax error. And that is a
>> skill which is acquired with some practice, maybe more "some" than anyone
>> likes.
> Be careful with this one. For anything other than trivial errors (and
> even for some trivial errors), finding the bug is basically searching
> through a problem space of all things that could potentially cause
> this symptom. A novice could accidentally stumble onto the right
> solution to a tricky bug, or an expert could search a thousand other
> things and only get to the true cause after a long time.

  some "expert"!   ; )



> So while
> you're partly correct in saying "how long", you can't just put someone
> on the clock and say "if you find the bug in less than five minutes,
> you're hired". Ultimately, the only person who can truly evaluate a
> programmer's skill is another programmer, usually by watching the
> candidate go through this sort of debugging work. But yeah, broadly
> speaking, an experienced programmer can usually debug something more
> quickly than a novice can. On average.
>
> ChrisA