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by nthacker 2256 days ago
I've been pondering and working on this exact problem for over 4 months. I agree with you. The amount of time that engineers spend at work to teach themselves, test or experiment with frameworks, libraries, architectures is really high. Personally I've spent hours of unproductive work before a breakthrough and certainly there's a component of the difficulty in searching, piecing together ideas that are not basic.

You mention video walkthroughs and that you would pay for something like this. I'd love to do a video call and chat to learn more: nirmalthacker@gmail.com

1 comments

Sadly the tech industry seems to encourage lots of shallow learning rather than deep mastery these days. 90% of stuff could be built using classic MVC, server side rendered with a bit of JQuery and would work just as well. Instead we have a shambles of microservices on Kubernetes and constantly changing front end frameworks.
I partly agree. I do think that the amount of choices and decision paths that an individual senior engineer needs to make are increasing, since we keep piling abstractions above abstractions.

There's only so far one can get by looking at Quickstarts and tutorials. If you do find a tutorial online, a big struggle is replicating and getting it to run. There's quite a lot of Open source software now, thanks to Github, but getting to a point where you can run the code, understand what it does and replicate parts of that are super time consuming. If companies knew how many man hours are dedicated towards this, they'd be shocked at the loss of productivity.

My main thesis is that intermediate stage learning is self-driven, and there needs to be an ecosystem of tooling that can provide & enable replication, remixing of software with sufficient walkthrough of what the code does