Software Engineering Isn’t Magic
The other day I was chatting with a friend who is both very competent and early in their software engineering career. They had noticed it sometimes took others less time to solve problems than it took them, and when they’d ask for help, these folks knew the answer or could often point them in the right direction right away. It felt like magic.
Thinking this is normal, but it’s not magic. When people come back with an answer quickly it’s because they’re aware of the problem, already understand how a system works, or because they’re pattern matching against previous experiences and happened to guess the issue. But if you’ve ever handed off a difficult bug only to have a peer come back the next day with what seems like a simple fix, it can trigger negative feelings.
A couple of years ago I was trying to understand a strange bug in my company’s app that broke the theming system with a new...