HACKER Q&A
📣 pizzaparty2

Does being a coder professionally ever inhibit you from improving?


For example, say you code the same type of C# every day. Or worse, say you've found your way onto a team with developers who don't know the language and certainly don't know how to do anything but write in that very basic C++ style that you learn in programming 101. At that point there's no point for you to improve because it doesn't matter what you know.

Another example is how you often times have to spend all day working. After sitting still in a chair being torture forced to figure out someone elses astonishing code for 8 hours I don't want to go home and sit in a chair and code. I want to join the local fight club.

Another example is it's incredibly aggravating to me when I know all about a subject for some reason (perhaps learning about it off work or at a previous job). By chance this subject comes up at work and I try to steer the team the right way but quickly discover how little my expertise matters in a room full of ignorant decision makers.

Have you ever noticed that being employed as a programmer actually caused you to become a worse programmer? Do you have examples of your own?

  👤 altacc Accepted Answer ✓
Yes in regards to the first two examples. The third seems to confirm that you're really not enjoying where you're working!

I've definitely experienced a slowdown in my continued learning of development by working in a company dealing with niche languages & legacy systems. That knowledge is useless to me now. However there was learning & development in other areas, so whilst my coding skills suffered, other skills improved and I became a decision-maker, team lead and useful enough to a client that I was hired by them for a significant pay rise. But I definitely should have left earlier than I did and spent more of my free time practising the coding skills I was neglecting.

But as you say, after a full day of coding it can be hard to find the motivation and mental energy for more coding & learning. We do benefit from variety in our lives, so usually there is less time than we'd like for everything in our lives. Now that I almost never code during the workday I really enjoy the times that I do code at work, or on side projects in the evening.

Your last point, about being ignored, is a mix of having the soft skills to steer people to your view and working in a company where that's a normal process. If decision-makers don't want to listen then no amount of persuasion will get them there. For other situations, it tends to be about framing or finding a path for people to come to their own conclusion, such as proof of concepts, pair research, etc... Assumptions of expertise and ignorance tend not to be helpful. I've learnt a lot in my time from working to understand why people think a solution isn't right.