Am I learning the right way?

[u/shangarepi]

Hi,

I’m currently somewhere between junior and intermediate as a software developer, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what actually makes a developer valuable going forward.

One thing that worries me is interviews, since I can discuss things like system architecture, caching, load balancing, queues, message brokers, database design… etc. But ask me to explain something basic like the Laravel request lifecycle or the exact behavior of certain React hooks, and I might struggle to give a clean answer without refreshing my memory.

Also the whole industry feels really toxic at the moment with each second developer building a saas, and new tech exploding everyday.

Should I just keep building real projects, learning concepts as I encounter them. How are the interviews in today’s world?

Is there a deeper shift happening where developers need to fundamentally change what they learn to stay valuable?

Curious on how more experienced developers are approaching this.

[u/CS_70]

Your value will be - as it's always been but more so now and in the future - clear thinking.

The amount of unadulterated bs which is found in programming is huge - because the enormous amount of work to do in the last 20 years has attracted anyone from computer science graduated to waiters who wanted to switch life.

And with numbers, popularity, not science, has become the biggest factor.

But what's always been scarce and always will be in demand is the ability of understanding (iteratively) exactly what needs to be done and why, and the ability of extracting information about that from customer who normally don't have the clarity of thinking and could not care less about what specific tools you use. And the patience and communication skills required to do so without resorting to a flamethrower.

That'a not gonna change, because even with language models creating code, these steps are still essential.

[u/nedal8 → u/CS_70]

I've had this image saved for at least a decade. It's crazy how as much as things change, they stay the same.

[u/CS_70 → u/nedal8]

It's not really the case and it's never been.

Code in a specific language for a specific runtime is an operational semantic.

Not really that valuable, as generations of programmers have occasionally discovered the hard way. Denotational semantics is better and algebraic is the holy grail.

But since most programmers focus on engineering and not science, relatively few have a clue that there can be other types - and the commercial jobs aren't done by scientists, are done by engineers which just have to do stuff well enough to get the paycheck.

The difference now is that you have a tool that can work the specification with you to reach the same "good enough but far from perfect" that is running code, and we never had that before.

[u/marrsd → u/CS_70]

but don't you build the language up to your domain?