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Comment by lordleft | Hacker News Reader

This is a great story. I feel like talented CS students are particularly prone to this sort of myopic thinking; their professors introduce them to functional programming, or the philosophy of UNIX, and they carry that approach everywhere, in a very blunt way. They also carry this little-examined conviction that the world consists of mediocrities and mediocre code and sometimes aren't charitable with the work of others.

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Putting it another way, knowledge with the bare minimum experience required to be effective is very sharp, and that sharpness is sometimes what’s required to cut through old, retrospectively “wrong” ways of doing things. I don’t disagree with what you’ve said, I think we all have met plenty of people fitting your description, I just mean to say there’s another side of the coin. As food for thought, much (not all) of the open source software we herald as brilliant today was initially written by people still in or just barely out of grad school.

The New Grad had knowledge. The Senior Dev had Understanding.

Understanding > Knowledge

It's that simple.

I agree with the thrust, but I think this has two sides as well.

Having an intricate understanding how things are connected, doesn't necessarily mean that one feels compelled to make it better.

Sometimes, "understanding" actually begets a cynical form of apathy. The whole world is chaotic and full of holes and injustices, so why bother trying to do the right thing, if it won't make a difference in the "big picture"?

Sometimes, knowledge (of your corner of the graph) with a hefty dose of misunderstanding (of the nodes and edges you're about to be traipsing down) is what's needed to most successfully face the challenges at hand. One name for this is "idealism", but without the negative connotation it is sometimes shipped in.

This is more what I was getting at with the whole knowledge + inexperience bit, if this makes sense.

The senior probably had both Knowledge and Understanding, and decided (correctly) in a split second which solution was good enough in all applicable dimensions, including the temporal (is it easy to change this if we have to?)

Being pedantic here, but knowledge is equivalent to understanding (information being knowledge without understanding). Wisdom is the word you were looking for (knowledge being wisdom without experience):

The New Grad had knowledge. The Senior Dev had Wisdom.

Wisdom > Knowledge.

I see it differently. Knowledge =/= understanding. There are plenty of ppl who know a lot but have little understanding.

Put another way, knowledge is the nodes. Understanding is grasping the connections. Understanding is the higher power. Understanding is where the magic happens.

Wisdom? Wisdom is next level understanding. It's the maturity of developing connection within the connections.

Not always.

More like, The New Grad has Ideals. The Senior Dev had Deadlines.

Deadlines > Ideals.

Not if you read the article. It's pretty clean the New Grad didn't understand the details, the scope of the problem. He was theoretically correct at 50k ft. In reality, the details made his theoretical irrelevant.

Not sure where it originated but I love this saying:

> In theory, theory and reality are the same.

> In reality, they're different.

> They also carry this little-examined conviction that the world consists of mediocrities and mediocre code and sometimes aren't charitable with the work of others.

Hear hear. CS students fresh out of school seems to carry the notion that they are superior to people who haven't studied CS, even though those people been in the industry for many years. Once the ex-students are now working in a professional environment with deadlines and stakeholders, it takes them a couple of months before they realize they have to actually learn how to work as a software engineer now, and that has nothing to do with CS.

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