I’ve dealt with a lot of developers in the past ~4 years and I’ve noticed a lot of them didn’t have the “basic” theoretical concepts that I considered widespread and universal about Software Engineering and Computer Science. For example, engineers putting a lot of logic in their unit tests, or choosing the wrong data structures, etc.
Maybe it’s because of the advent of self taught engineers? Or maybe these concepts are just “too boring”? I’d like to know if I’m biased or not.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
As someone who’s completely self taught over the last 10 years in this industry, I constantly feel like I don’t know about these universal principles. I try to make up for this by searching for the best ways to do new things but I often find myself falling back to the lens of my first language. It sucks even though I really love what I do. I can feel the frustration working with formally educated devs and it doesn’t feel like there’s anything I can do about it. I wish there was a “catch up” class I could take somewhere to learn the most important concepts and review some of these fundamentals.