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Comment by didymospl | Hacker News Reader

Well, it really depends what do you mean by "something more complex". I remember when the author of rather non-trivial tool used by many of HN users went on Twitter rant because he could not invert a binary tree and failed a whiteboard interview https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695102 To me, and possibly most CS freshmen, this task would be a piece of cake, yet I think Max is a better programmer than most of us - a.k.a. rockstar developer.

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Something more complex is like audio/video codecs, image compression, etc. When they are developed, existing algorithms and libraries cover, at best, half of the needs. That's what I'm talking about. There almost isn't exist areas where you can use only existing code base and feel good with it.

I assume you're absolutely right about the areas you mentioned but it's not something that an average developer works on nowadays. In the same way as the majority of professional drivers are not race drivers.

Fraud detection, billing systems, infosec, banking, HFT, image/video processing and pattern recognition, games development, firmware, highload tools and services, tools for programmers (IDEs, linters, etc.), programming languages design, browsers, search systems, data processing and storage systems, electronic document management, cryptosystems, operating systems, frameworks, etc. It seems to me that this is a large part of the software being developed right now. And the development of all this requires rather non-trivial knowledge and skills. So your comparison with the race drivers is quite far from the truth.

I'm assuming you're in one of these fields and conveniently count yourself among the 'non-trivial' developers?

Yes, I am in one of this fields and no, I am "mediocre developer".

all the more baffling that you feel a need to go out of your way bucket your work into 'mediocrity'.

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