What did you when you got stuck on some small thing that wasn't obvious from the docs? Say some interaction between two concepts?
Nowadays I've always discovered that I'm not the first person to ask.
Nowadays I've always discovered that I'm not the first person to ask.
Just a small example, I imagine there are a lot of JS developers who know that they need to create a new function using “=>” or “.bind(this)” if they need access to “this” within the function… and if they don’t, things break, without really knowing why (even though they know the solution).
TLDR: the best developers I’ve worked with go beyond “knowing the solution” to “knowing why the solution is the solution”. Understanding “why” something is the way it is becomes difficult when something like Copilot autocompletes the correct answer.
Sometimes pulling an all nighter and beating your head on the wall is less productive than just stopping to take a break and coming back at it with a fresh mind. FAANG PMs don't get this and probably think less of you because your Zen like approach is anathema to their fast paced do or die approach now. You can't be productive if your butt isn't in the chair.
Literally went to the library to read books on IR and make sure I understood what the doc was saying. Asked around to find people who worked on these kind of sequencing. Went to a small repair shop and bribed the tech to give me hints on how remotes work.
It was fun in retrospect, maddening and incredibly taxing at the time.
I don't think we did anything fundamentally wrong, short of underestimating the problem space. It's also not as if I was left in my corner for weeks, I got pretty good advices (like go finding more help and returning to basics). Getting info before the internet, before makers got into habits of published maintenance manuals etc. life was just way harder.