Beginners and experts (Batchelder blog post)

[Chris Angelico]

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. 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