this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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The difference between a junior and senior developer is that a senior developer actually understands what he's copy pasting
Pretty much. I try to tell juniors that the things I'm teaching you is things I made a mistake on. I have a decade of failure and I'm trying to help you shortcut it.
But as soon as someone gets to an intermediate level and start thinking for themself and make those exact same mistakes.
"We've been doing things wrong this whole time! I figured out a better way!" Then spend a lot of time implementing the "better" way only to find out it performs like shit and actually takes more work to implement and maintain anything.
Everyone has to do that at least once.
That approach never sinks in with anyone I train. They seem to remember that I told them something about something so they do that not remembering I said not to do that.
I'm a senior developer and I rarely copy and paste... I'll sometimes look at some other code to get ideas, but I retype it. It helps me understand the code, and I can refractor it or write it differently as I go.
Back in the olden days, our copy and pasting was retyping from manuals or magazines.
But who's the guy that originally wrote the code that everyone else is copy pasting? I think Nathan Kellert desires THAT level of expertise.
I've only been programming seriously (for work) in the last two years and honestly don't get the copy pasting memes. I get copy pasting a 1-3 line terminal snippet sometimes, but idk how people are getting away without actually writing their own code.
I program professionally, and I copy paste all the time. The difference is when I copy paste, its 10-20 lines of code, not a line or two— and I’m not fishing for a solution to the problem. I already have the optimal solution in my head, and I am just searching for the solution I already know. It’s just faster than typing it by hand 🤷🏻
I do this often. Not because I can't do it myself or understand what I'm doing, but why would I write the exact same code when it has been done and pasted online a million times?
Believe me, some people will find a way and they often copy and paste the same thing over and over because they don't know how to create reuseable code.
I only program non-seriously for work on occasions and I've rarely used copy/pasted code. Except maybe some of my own code because of using lazy logic trees to deal with variation in the data being processed. Doesn't need to be pretty or efficient. Just needs to work well enough so I do a less manual work.