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Discussion on: Are we "developers" gatekeeping "knowledge" from our juniors and peers? 🤦

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Matthieu Cneude

Thanks a lot for this article. You summarized what I think for a long time now. The way we pass our knowledge to the next generation of developer is really important to me, because these developers will shape the world of tomorrow. I'm convinced of that.

First, I would like to come back to this statement:

"As a result, the technology we learn seems to be constantly changing, with little in the way of a stable (think 12+ years) long term standard for anything."

I think this is a common conception and not totally true: the "first principle" of our craft doesn't change that much. We think it does because we constantly rediscover things, since we have a poor knowledge of the history of our industry.

When I say first principles, I speak about general logic and problem solving skills, programming paradigms, everything which help you adapt to new problems, high level languages and frameworks. I believe that learning these first principles for a developer with some experience is essential. For the beginner, it might be boring and discouraging.

In short, the capacity of somebody to adapt and learn should be more rewarded than his raw knowledge.

That said, I agree with the article in general. I wrote something similar some time ago, for those interested: thevaluable.dev/development-easy-j...

How many time after an interview I heard some stuff like: "This guy don't know how a promise work in JavaScript, he's not a senior developer". The same developer could be insanely good to many other things, nobody will know it. This is wrong.