It’s enough to do well, but certain we all grow for quite a while after that. The improvement typically springs from discipline at that point rather than calculative ability however.

I'm not entirely convinced.

I've seen interns that are better than some of my 15+ year colleagues.

I'm better than most of them myself, but I've also seen interns better than me -- better problem solving skills and attention to detail I suppose. Very inconsistent correlation in terms of time spent outside of filtering people. Of course, you used to have a knowledge advantage that would hold for a bit, but intelligent usage of GPT-4 removes even that.

I'm pretty sure the whole enterprise is a combination of being gifted intellectually, with maybe a sprinkle of actual effort and abilify to sustain your attention on supremely boring tasks -- but mostly just your innate gifts at work.

When I say "better than"... well, here's my opinion: In programming, someone more talented can be up to 10x more productive at each tier of competence, shall we say. My least productive (senior and junior) colleagues are 10-100x less productive than me. My most productive colleagues (senior and junior) are probably 10x more productive than me.

This is an interesting discussion to me because I used to believe the whole tiered conception of programming knowledge until I learned that this wasn't the case through experience.

It's all just problem solving, and you're either smarter or less smart and you can't change this with even 1000 years of study.

You’re comparing with others, however I meant compared with yourself. I look at my Uni code and see a quantum leap from that to now. Some of it is better tooling but a significant part is discipline and experience.

Knowing what rabbit holes not to go down is the true 10x. Not the faster typing part.

In the job market, it's all about how you stack up to other people.

That kid that blows you away will likely stagnate like all of us, he might pick up a few tricks, though.

I’ve never met a kid that blew me away, but would like to. Presumably they are shuttled off to an underground bunker somewhere.

Also, if one hasn’t read the historical literature such as Petzold’s Code, Mythical Man Month, High Output Management, McConnell *, etc they have a long way to go. No amount of bit-twiddling proficiency can make up for that. Unless you’re in the twiddling business. :-D

I don't really think reading books is the way to go generally to improve at the job of making things, at least, not any of those books.

Making things seems to do the trick there.

Hah, I let a few silly things slide as youthful exuberance but this one will be laughable even to you in not too many years. Zuck learned that one in public, so you’re in good company.