Comment by systematical | Hacker News Reader

Comment by systematical | Hacker News Reader

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10,000 hour rule is a bit strange. I've been programming for 8 years doing so at work and at home. Working full time there are roughly 2,080 work hours in a year. 2,080 * 8 = 16,640 hours of programming. Now there is also all of that time spent programming in classes, on homework, on hobbies, and doing freelance work. That easily brings the amount of hours spent programming to 18,000. To account for all the time spent on hacker news, reddit, etc... instead of actually programming I'll drop that number to 16,000 total hours programming.

By all accounts I should be an expert. I'd imaging there are many on here with a similar hours, many with more. I don't feel like an expert though. Do you?

The 10,000 hour rule is often taken out of context. In Outliers, it is made clear that Gladwell means 10,000 hours of focused practice with the intent to improve. A small percentage of day-to-day programming fits that criteria (unless you're a researcher, or something along those lines). So you may have 16,000 hours of programming, but still be significantly short of the 10,000 hour rule.

If you're a CS researcher who actually codes as part of their research, much of the time you'll be banging out barely functional proof of concept code to get some results you can take to conference.

I'm not sure there's any group that actually does focused practice coding for a significant number of hours on a regular basis.

The 10 000 hour commitment only makes you an expert when you spend all those hours deliberately practicing and focusing on improving your performance.

Just engaging in an activity for 10 000 hours does not guarantee expert performance, you need to spend those hours constantly looking for the rough edges in your performance and finding strategies to polish them off.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...

Two things:

- not feeling like an expert is a good sign - unless you were pushing yourself for 10k hours the rule doesn't apply. depends if you were doing stuff you're already familiar with?

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