| Hard disagree. The points about not working hard enough and checking out before 5pm sounds like you were just trolling or being cheeky. If you were then you can ignore my response. The response sounds like it’s coming from someone who’s never thought deeply about problem solving and it’s relationship with mathematical complexity. When one is given a task that they have no idea on how to proceed, to them, the number of solutions could be infinite. At that moment, even knowing what to Google could be overwhelming. Imagine the junior developer being given a traveling salesman problem as their first task but neither the manager nor the junior developer recognize that the problem is a TSP problem. The Junior Developer can spend years and years rediscovering all the heuristics and algorithms related to TSP without knowing they’re actually doing that. You can’t google for it very well because the task doesn’t explicitly say TSP. What you need is a Senior Developer to step in, hopefully they recognize it’s a TSP problem based on their experience, and then give context and an explanation on how to recognize such problems in the future and finally tell Junior Developer “Just Google traveling salesman problem”. No working beyond 5pm needed. Junior dev is happy they solved the problem that was pushed to production, Senior dev is happy they don’t have deal with a pile of technical debt and Manager is happy that the task got delivered on time. |
With respect to the rest of what you wrote, I’d just say that the possibilities are always infinite and my point is that being able to discern and limit the possibilities to something reasonable is a skill that has nothing to do with seniority and everything to do with general (read: fixed) aptitude.