Comments on: Programmers Should Trust Their Instincts

By: sic_people

sic_people — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:17:45 +0000

Hum the art of programming could be as the sport. You can practice for years any sport, but there are people that simple are cut out to be good at that sport, they got a natural talent. So when you got that natural talent to program, but you also need to develop that instinc through practice.

By: anon

anon — Mon, 26 May 2008 12:41:07 +0000

If the instinct turns out to be wrong and things get delayed, the Project Manager gleefully rubs his/her hands and gets ready to .. well, use your imagination

By: Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi — Sun, 25 May 2008 21:40:21 +0000

That’s not my opinion, but rather one shared by people far wiser and more experienced than myself.

By: Diogo

Diogo — Sun, 25 May 2008 20:10:33 +0000

“People are either cut out to be programmers or they’re not.”
Must feel great to live in a world _that_ simple eh?

By: Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:13:04 +0000

Thanks for the link, Daniel – it’s one Jeff’s few that I hadn’t had the pleasure of reading before.

Level 1: Beginner

* Little or no previous experience
* Doesn’t want to learn: wants to accomplish a goal
* No discretionary judgement
* Rigid adherence to rules

….

Level 5: Expert

* No longer relies on rules, guidelines, or maxims
* Works primarily from intuition
* Analytic approaches only used in novel situations or when problems occur
* When forced to follow set rules, performance is degraded

If you read the article with these concepts in a sort of “reverse” psychological manner (the kind of people that become “Level 5″ verses the kind of people that remain stuck at “Level 1″), then the two points converge into one.

I guess it would have been more prudent to phrase it differently, i.e. if these instincts haven’t been developed after much effort, then one may not be cut out to be a true programmer…

As for the genes – it could be argued that the instinct comes as an accumulative result of both the genes and the experience; especially if you assume that the “traits” of a good programmer are coded in one’s genes and that only good programmers will – in good time, as you so kindly pointed out – experience these instincts.

By: Daniel Tenner

Daniel Tenner — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:36:38 +0000

While the idea that programmers should trust their instincts is correct, your assumption that a programmer either has good instincts or not is deeply flawed.

These instincts are not in your genes – they’re the result of a lot of experience of doing things “the slow way”, internalising the processes that you are applying analytically, and then letting your subconscious do that work for you once it is familiar enough with it.

I think you will find a quick read of the basics of the Dreyfus learning model of interest. Here’s a link:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000203.html

Enjoy!

Daniel