OT: Where does it count?

[Boaz Rymland]

That's a bit off topic cause indeed you refer to greatness in one's 
profession/occupation/hobby but in any case, i remember the article you 
mentioned and the whole thesis it talks about. There was at least one 
Israeli weekend newspapers article, probably about the relevant 
translated book that talked about this.

The name is Malcolm Gladwell and the following link is about the book 
that talks about that idea:
(hebrew) http://simania.co.il/bookdetails.php?item_id=688839
his web site:
http://www.gladwell.com/index.html

Boaz.


Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:
>>
>> My question is simple: When does the "developer" experience starts 
>> ticking? (I'm not talking about any specific language here). Do the 
>> years of writing those small programs/scripts count as a "developer 
>> years"? or does the clock starts ticking when I'm a full time programmer?
>>
> Partiality of occupation is hardly a factor, but experience is. I 
> don't have the link, (I think it was on slashdot a while back), but 
> someone once claimed that the difference between a programmer with 
> greatness potential and actual great programmers is X hours of 
> experience (I don't remember what X was, but it translated to about 3 
> or 5 years of full time job experience). The article claimed that the 
> same X applies to other areas too (the article used the Beatles as a 
> primary example).
>
> My point is that in order to realize your potential in any field, you 
> need to invest a huge amount of time practicing it. This is almost 
> impossible to do unless you make it your full time occupation. From 
> personal experience, I think the article's quoted X may even be a 
> little on the low side.
>
> So, if you did mostly system tasks, but did about 10% development, you 
> will see how, for practical reasons, that leaves very little of your 
> actual development experience.
>
> I should point out that the article talks about greatness. Assuming 
> you have the potential to become a great programmer, this is a 
> requirement for becoming great actually happening. Personally, I pride 
> myself on seeing programmers, in certain cases total novices, and 
> saying to myself "he has the potential". They are not great 
> programmers, but you can see that with enough experience, they will 
> be. That said, even those that do not possess the potential for 
> "greatness" advance significantly with experience. At a guesstimate, 
> about 60% of the population can become acceptable quality programmers 
> given enough experience (of course, initially they will suck) and a 
> supporting environment ("supporting" includes not accepting mediocre). 
> Of course, most of those will quit, because programming is a horrid 
> job to do if you don't like it, but this is just to point you as to why
>
> Shachar
> -- 
> Shachar Shemesh
> Lingnu Open Source Consulting Ltd.
> http://www.lingnu.com
>   
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-il mailing list
> Linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il
> http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
>   
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/pipermail/linux-il/attachments/20091024/6d4dc426/attachment.html>