“Lots of CS undergrad folks imagine their careers are going to be sort of a rockstar/ninja/superhero experience. ‘Just wait ’till the world can see what I can do!’. It has to be this way because, well, ‘I’m above average’, right? You expect long hours of designing and implementing complex algorithms (at least I did). Then you get your first job and WHAM! You get ‘schlonged’ with 20 years old code that appears to be the result of experimenting with hard drugs.”

—Krzysztof Szatan, “Why would you learn C++ in 2016?”, retrieved from http://itscompiling.eu/2016/03/...

My 2nd rant was something like this

The rockstar dev is largely a myth, there’s only so much productivity within the constraints of a programming language, hardware and biology.

The difference is in the knowledge and execution.

The flip side are the super crazy ivory tower ones that come from the land of pure mathematics and the sciences, they might not be any more productive per se, they might not even be that great at coding, but the algorithmic knowledge they possess gives them a leg up in many ways.

I learned to stop beating myself up for not being that person, and just focusing on being a decent developer.

Give me someone with zero knowledge of red/black trees or graph theory, but with knowledge of REST, the language, the deploy environment over a pure “rockstar” any day.

@Brolls I’m with ya. Having worked with a couple of those folks, I also find that they tend to be too quixotic and always want to rewrite everything from scratch in [insert functional programming language here].