Novices are inexperienced, journeyman and masters are more skilled and experienced.
A novice can have a ton of knowledge (from books), but be too inexperienced to apply it.
A novice can be a professional, this is what internships and entry-level jobs are supposed to be for. Paired with mentorship and structured work assignments (structured in the sense of increasing complexity, scope, and responsibility) they're brought up to journeyman and, later, master level.
They can also be amateurs. Given forums, books, manuals, mentors (real-life or online), they can be brought up to journeyman and master level as well.
Besides I think everybody who e.g. makes some side-projects, or is active in open source is in fact amateur in the sense of "a person who does something (such as a sport or hobby) for pleasure and not as a job" :)
Professional means you teach (notice the word root in "profess" as in "professor"). It really means you know enough that you can teach others how to do it right, not about get paid for it per se.
Of course. You can't learn that sort of judgement (when to use vs when not to use) from a book.
But our profession's training material, at least in my experience reading, drills it in your head to use all these abstracting devices.
It's certainly true that you can get some "book knowledge" that tells you that you can over abstract. I mean, this blog post is one example. But I only hear this sort of stuff from things like blog post from experienced devs, it seems to me. (Or maybe I just read the wrong kind of books?)
Sounds like the books actually teach poor practise, divorced from context. The harms of abstraction is nothing that can't be printed - this isn't qualia
Jtsummers|10 years ago
Amateurs aren't paid, professionals are.
Novices are inexperienced, journeyman and masters are more skilled and experienced.
A novice can have a ton of knowledge (from books), but be too inexperienced to apply it.
A novice can be a professional, this is what internships and entry-level jobs are supposed to be for. Paired with mentorship and structured work assignments (structured in the sense of increasing complexity, scope, and responsibility) they're brought up to journeyman and, later, master level.
They can also be amateurs. Given forums, books, manuals, mentors (real-life or online), they can be brought up to journeyman and master level as well.
hex13|10 years ago
dakotasmith|10 years ago
nickbauman|10 years ago
MrRage|10 years ago
But our profession's training material, at least in my experience reading, drills it in your head to use all these abstracting devices.
It's certainly true that you can get some "book knowledge" that tells you that you can over abstract. I mean, this blog post is one example. But I only hear this sort of stuff from things like blog post from experienced devs, it seems to me. (Or maybe I just read the wrong kind of books?)
Chris2048|10 years ago