
In over my head. How can I work with more advanced programmers? - chinmoy
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/in-over-my-head-how-can-i-work-with-more-advanced-programmers/
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unwind
_This Q &A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions
encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange [...] _

In other words, this is some content from a different web site, which we're
re-publishing here because we can. I don't get it, what would be the idea of
this, except for "content is good"? That people who might be interested in
questions like this don't read the relevant SE sites, so they "need" Ars to
step in and re-publish it? It's weirding me out.

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joe_the_user
Uh,

Stack Exchange gets people to post on there by letting its content out on the
creative commons license (or whatever equivalent). IE, the posts don't belong
to Stack Exchange any more than they belong to Arstechnica. They are doing
what the license was intended to let them do. It is simply a matter of which
presentation of the material do we like best.

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jiggy2011
This is actually a problem I wish I had. I'd love to work with an uber
programmer who was better than me as long as they had some patience , not too
much ego and were happy to help me learn.

What I find is more common though is working with very sub-par developers who
have no interest in advancing their skills.

~~~
rhizome
The last time I worked in a shop with "uber programmers," it was more like a
CS circle-jerk oriented around who can come up with the more useless
abstraction of working code. At any rate, your "as long as" qualification
means you're probably looking for a company with older coders.

~~~
andrewcooke
that doesn't really make sense, does it?

being a good programmer includes _not_ creating useless abstractions, so what
you're actually saying is "when i last worked with poor programmers they
weren't very good". and, in response to that: well, duh.

~~~
rhizome
Well, these poor programmers who weren't very good sure knew a lot about how
to make code worse! You're right though, it's a struggle to characterize
people who know too much.

~~~
jiggy2011
You could argue they "Knew too much" but equally they could know too little.
In other words they know enough about X to understand _how_ to implement X but
not enough but not enough about _why_ to implement X.

~~~
rhizome
You can quibble with what side of the fence I'm describing, but the facts (and
my sense of them) remain. Yes, they didn't write good, maintainable code AIUI,
and whether that's due to inexperience in writing maintainable code or to
shoehorning CS training and metaprogramming into a web developer role is
fairly irrelevant to me. As it happens, I think the latter is the bigger
problem.

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codemac
Show you'll put in the time, and I've found pretty much anyone will help you
out with areas you are less confident in.

Also, I've found the Benjamin Franklin method of "ask someone to do something
for you as a form of flattery" works amazingly well to get people to
befriend/like you.

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nnq
For anyone thinking/saying things like this: "they all use the most modern
aspects of C++ (C++11, template, lambda, etc, etc)":

Take a swim in the ocean of Lisp (Clojure/Scheme, whatever...) and you'll
never feel overwhelmed by things like these again. You'll realize that you're
all kinder-garden children and the only difference is that the rest had been
playing with shinier toys... THE TRUTH IS BEYOND SYNTAX AND LANGUAGE FEATURES
:)

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dchichkov
I'd suggest: try to understand the code, the problem and re-factor it to get
rid of these extra abstractions and templates.

You will either be able to a) get rid of these unnecessary constructs b)
understand why these were necessary in the first place.

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pjscott
In general, if you need to know something but you don't know it yet, a decent
strategy would be to learn it. This is usually one of the more practical and
pleasant options.

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ExpiredLink
> Lo and behold, my new job is filled with programmers with 5-10 years
> experience of pure coding and they all use the most modern aspects of C++
> (C++11, template, lambda, etc, etc).

Those are noobs. Look e.g. at V8 to see real, advanced C++ code:
<http://code.google.com/p/v8/source/browse/trunk/src/>

