[stephen_cagle]

You know, this is kind of a funny take at some level. Like, for any surgery, you want the doctor who has done the same operation 10 times, not the one who has 10 years of "many hat doctoring" experience.

I'm not really arguing anything here, but it is interesting that we value breadth over (hopefully) depth/mastery of a specific thing in regards to what we view as "Senior" in software.

[lokar]

You want the Dr who has done the operation 10 times, and learned something each time, and incorporated that into their future efforts. You probably don’t want a Dr who will do their 11th surgery on you exactly the way they did the first.

This is what that saying is about

[stephen_cagle]

Fair enough. I guess I am making a bit of a straw-man in that I feel I just don't buy the idea that doing the same thing 10 times over the course of 10 years is somehow worse than doing different things over the course of 10 years. They are signals, and depending on what we are attempting, they just mean different expected outcomes. One isn't necessarily worse than another, but in this case it seems to be implying it is the distinction between Midlevel and Senior.

[KronisLV]

> I just don't buy the idea that doing the same thing 10 times over the course of 10 years is somehow worse than doing different things over the course of 10 years.

I always read it as making the same mistakes as you initially did and either failing to learn from them or not even trying to improve. Maybe you haven’t even explored enough approaches to see what actually works and what doesn’t and most importantly, in which circumstances.

For example, someone might do CI/CD with manually created pipelines in Jenkins (the web UI variety) with stuff like JDK configured directly on the runner nodes. They might never have written a Jenkinsfile, or tried out Docker for builds and therefore are slow and have to deal with brittle plugins and environment configuration. They might also be unaware of how GitHub Actions could benefit them, or the more focused approach of GitLab CI or even how nice Woodpecker CI can be, especially for simpler setups.

[coldtea]

>Fair enough. I guess I am making a bit of a straw-man in that I feel I just don't buy the idea that doing the same thing 10 times over the course of 10 years is somehow worse than doing different things over the course of 10 years.

Different things doesn't need to mean "different domains" which is how you read it.

It can be "things revealing different aspect/failure cases of the same domain" too.

If someone has done the same narrow kind of CRUD app 10 times, they're not CRUD-app experts - they never seen lots of different aspects of CRUD apps.

[NDizzle]

I want the doctor who has performed the operation and was still with the hospital in 6m, 12m, 18m, 24m to see the results of the operations that they performed.

Not the one who does a few operations and is never around to see the results of their decisions and actions.

[3acctforcom]

Ops vs Dev

Situational Leadership gets into this. You want a really efficient McDonalds worker who follows the established procedure to make a Big Mac. You also want a really creative designer to build your Big Mac marketing campaign. Your job as a manager is figuring out which you need, and fitting the right person into the right job.

[abustamam]

Agreed. Meanwhile, many job postings out there looking for 10x full-stack developers who have deep experience in database, server, front end, devops, etc.

I think the concept of Full-stack dev is fine, but expecting them to know each part of the stack deeply isn't feasible imo.

[theshrike79]

Expert Generalists are a thing: https://martinfowler.com/articles/expert-generalist.html

BUT they're completely wasted if you just use them to turn JIRA tickets into end to end features =)

[abustamam]

Haha agreed. Thanks for the link, will give it a read. I feel like expert generalists should be founders or CTOS, and they are probably not applying for the positions that claim to be wanting expert generalists.

[gopher_space]

“This person is incurious” would be more apt but also more likely to apply to everyone else in the room too.

Didn’t Bruce Lee famously say he fears the man who’s authored one API in ten thousand different contexts?

[xarope]

for context, he was referring to a physical methodology, which requires a lot of training and knowledge of usage application.

As analogy, I don't think you'd treat "using API XYZ 10,000 times" the same as "serving an ace in tennis, 10,000" times.

[WalterBright]

I once asked an obstetrician how she could tell the sex of a fetus with those ultrasound blobs. She laughed and said she'd seen 50,000 of those scans.

[theshrike79]

If we extrapolate the Dr example:

There is the one doctor who learned one way to do the operation at school, with specific instruments, sutures etc. and uses that for 1000 surgeries.

And then there's the curious one who actively goes to conferences, reads publications and learns new better ways to do the same operation with invisible sutures that don't leave a scar or tools that are allow for more efficient operations, cutting down the time required for the patient to be under anaesthesia.

Which one would you hire for your hospital for the next 25 years?

[akho]

The one with the smaller cemetery.

[gpderetta]

This is not really a doctor that has done the same operation 10 times. This is a doctor that jumped form hospital to hospital 10 times and probably never actually stayed long enough to be entrusted to do an operation in any hospital.