Unrelated image from pexels.com to make this post look nicer in social media shares.

I was poking around in /r/javahelp, saw a question about something I haven’t personally done, and found what I strongly suspect was the answer right away.  I try to explain how I found the answer when I answer questions like that because “oh it’s _____” isn’t really that helpful in the long term. I mean, what is the question asker supposed to do next time if I’m busy or sick or on vacation?

But how do you explain “well obviously that’s a_____ problem”? I can explain that I googled a thing and didn’t get very helpful results so I googled another thing and found what I needed, but not how I knew what to search for in the first place.

The closest I can come to explaining how I recognize problems is a term I recently learned from Katrina Owen‘s talk Cultivating Instinct. That term is perceptual learning, which according to Wikipedia is:

learning better perception skills such as differentiating two musical tones from one another or categorizations of spatial and temporal patterns relevant to real-world expertise as in reading, seeing relations among chess pieces, knowing whether or not an X-ray image shows a tumor.

After you’ve worked with enough code and seen enough different kinds of problems, you just kind of know what the answer is (or at least a few things it could be) when you see a new problem. And that, finally, is what being an experienced programmer really means. It’s not about some magical level of skill or about instantly knowing the perfect solution for every problem or even finally feeling like you know what you’re doing, it’s just about having seen enough problems that you end up with a library of them in your head.

I can’t tell you how long that will take but on the upside I can tell you it will definitely happen if you just keep coding. Okay, there are people with “ten years of experience” who really just have one year ten times, but if you care enough about programming to bother reading my blog, you’re not one of them.

Another part of being an experienced programmer is that once you feel confident about getting your code to do what you wanted, you sort of move up a level and start worrying about whether it’s a good idea to do it that way. That’s where people with one year of experience ten times really fall down, they can make things work but can’t make them maintainable. Getting to the point where you worry about the right way to do things takes a little more deliberate effort, but the most important step is just to care about whether it’s possible to change your code.

Once you’re past struggling to get your for loops to work and once you’re past feeling totally overwhelmed by starting a new project, it’s really tempting to think that you’re done, you’re a “real” programmer now and there’s nothing else you need to learn. But if you stop there, not only will you never be a very good programmer, but more importantly you’ll miss out on one of my favourite parts of programming, which is figuring out how to design things so you won’t curse your name in six months when you need to change them. For me that’s way more fun than Strings and Arrays.

All this is to say that if you’re a beginner programmer and you see a job posting looking for developers with x years of experience, all they really want is someone who can reliably get things to work (not necessarily immediately) and who knows a bad idea when they see one. If you can do that, go ahead and apply. It’s not unusual for job postings to be more of a wishlist than a list of what the job actually requires, anyway :)