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by mattmanser
2965 days ago
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A lot of non-programmers simply can't discern the difference in output of a senior dev and a junior one. Like I recently realized, junior devs can appear massively productive because they can copy another part of the system and simply modify it. The output looks the same, but without that code made by someone with much more experience, they'd be lost. If I'm brutally honest with myself, I used to think I was a lot better than I was. I could fix any bug, I could add loads of new functionality. I was great. What I wasn't appreciating was that the senior devs had set up an architecture for me to succeed. They'd laid out the code and made the loads of small decisions born of experience that meant I was basically coding with training wheels. I could simply look at how they'd done it and use the same technique. I didn't have to make any decisions, nor was I aware of the decisions they'd made. What I've seen since is where someone's employed graduates to build something from scratch, those systems are a real mess. They literally code themselves into corners. Adding new functionality becomes harder and harder until they quit and the client has to call in the big boys. I remember chatting to a senior contract game dev a year or two ago at a meetup, he was complaining that he never got to make a game. He always got called in at the end to optimise the game and do the best he could to fix the stupid architecture decisions the cheap, disposable, inexperienced game devs they'd used to make the game had made. |
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