Most software is complicated. Ask anyone who’s fallen in love with Rails doing rinky-dink tutorials over a weekend, only to be frustrated on Monday when applying the same technology to real-business problems.
Louis Brandy posted a double-peaked graph illustrating the confidence level of C++ programmers, Basically, early on you learn a little and think you’re hot stuff. After a while, you start to realize that you don’t know anything, and that there’s WAY more to the problem space than you realized.
Then it’s a long climb back to your initial confidence level.
Louis distinguishes between pre- and post-valley programmers. Assuming this chart applies to other languages (I think it does, with maybe some different amplitude), do you ever want pre-valley people? Does their confidence or bright-eyed optimism do any good, or does it just create false hope?
Never trust a programmer who says he knows C++ [lbrandy.com]
via The Endeavour
